IN SLAVIC MYHTOLOGY there is a shape-shifting spirit of the forest called the Leshy (Леший). He protects the wild animals and birds and the woods, and can change his size from as tall as the tallest tree to smaller than a blade of grass. He is sometimes described as shadowless, with blue skin, glowing eyes, a long beard of vegetation, and he wears his shoes on the wrong feet. Leshys are known to be friendly but mischievous tricksters, leading people astray in the woods, hiding woodcutters' axes, and tickling people to death. Peasant folk would often make pacts with them in order to keep their cattle safe, or attempt to disentangle themselves from a Leshy's tricks by turning their clothes inside out and swapping their own shoes to the opposite feet.
This pair of pencil drawings I made recently depicts a forest lurking with Leshys of varying sizes. One even has his feet on back to front. These were all done with a 0.5mm HB propelling pencil and were drawn at slightly smaller than A4 size.
They were made for a wonderful new publication - Tiny Pencil-a journal dedicated solely to the art of the pencil. I was honoured to be asked to be part of this project, curated by artists Katriona Chapman and Amber Hsu, who have put together a really beautifully produced collection of amazing artwork, printed on lovely paper. And this is just the first issue - all based around the theme of forests. Here below are a few of the pages. You can buy a copy here, and read an interview I did with the folks at Tiny Pencil here. You can find out more about all the artists whose work is featured in this issue of Tiny Pencil here. If you'd like to buy prints of my drawings you can find them propped in the branches of my emporium here.
Into the Woods We Go...
Rima Staines - In The Leshy Forest - Tiny Pencil Issue 1 - Forests
WESHIMULO the Gypsies call her - Ghost of the Woods - hoohoo could she be?... Owls have fared badly in folklore in general, being portents of death and ill omen:
Men beoþ of þe wel [owl] sore aferd. þu singst par sum man shal be ded: euer þu bodest sumne qued [evil]. ~c. 1250 Owl and Nightingale - ed. J W H Atkins
The oule ek, that of deth the bode bryngeth. ~c.1374 Parliament of Fowls - Chaucer
Whil'st the scritch-owle, scritching loud, Puts the wretch that lies in woe, In remembrance of a shrowd. ~ c.1595 A Midsommer Night's Dreame v. i. - Shakespeare
In 1934, an old country-man told of the death of a common acquaintance. "And .. it weren't no more nor I expected. I come past his house one night, and there was a scret owl on his roof, scretting something horrible. I always reckon to take notice of them things." ~1936 The Gods Had Wings - W J Brown
In medieval bestiaries owls were described as an allegory for the Jews, since they "shunned the light". And indeed superstitions of bad owl-omens are found across the world: many Native American tribes held beliefs that owls were harbingers of death, some even describing death itself as "crossing the owl's bridge". A Mayan religious text describes owls as messengers of Xibalba (the Mayan "Place of Fright"). And in Cameroon the owl has no name at all, it is simply referred to as "the bird that makes you afraid". But not all mythology tells terrible owl-tales, some cultures think of owls as spirits of their dear departed, and others consider them lucky talismans. In Russia, hunters used to carry owl claws to help them climb to heaven when they died. In India owl-eye broth was believed to cure seizures in children and cause one to be able to see in the dark. And in England the practice of nailing an owl to the door to ward off evil continued into the 19th Century.
But of course, probably the most oft thought of owl-quality is that of wisdom. Indeed, I have painted the owl before as animal-symbol of the sixth chakra, associated with far-seeing and psychic perception. Owls are often depicted as bespectacled librarians, keepers of knowledge. From Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom to Blodeuwedd, the flower-faced goddess of Welsh myth, owl goddesses were powerful shape-shifting women. Marija Gimbutas in The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe traces veneration of the owl as a goddess, among other birds, to the culture of Old Europe, long pre-dating Indo-European cultures.
I present here three owl works of mine painted in recent weeks. The first, a new Once Upon O'Clock, commissioned by Nicholas as a gift for his mother. He told me she loved owls and books and trees. So a wise owl hides in a tree hole with his book, as time turns around him in these dusk woods.
please click to enlarge
But what is he reading? Words about himself I think... the owl-eyed linguists amongst you will spot words for owl in many languages*, painted tiny underneath the clock hands.
The Word Owl Clock is painted on a piece of apple wood which I show you here in my hand to give you an idea of the size of these clocks.
It was good to be clockmaking again, and another (with Gypsy flavour) will follow soon.
The wisdom or wordiness of owls is interesting, specifically in relation to a particularly curious play on words that I noticed some years ago between two Russian words. In Russian, owl is сова (pronouncedsova) and word is слово (pronounced slova).. and it struck me that this word play would make an intriguing basis for a painting.
It's interesting how ideas germinate and gestate. When I thought of painting this сова-слово idea, I vaguely imagined some sort of rich Slavic-flavoured design, like a lubok, perhaps, with Cyrillic lettering and folk imagery. But how far from this the final work ended up! I sit down at the drawing board in a certain state of mind, and let my pencil take the lead, and it still surprises me how surprised I can be at how my own work turns out! In fact this one has been rather a wrestle. The usual arc of creation-beginning-elation to looming-failure-depression followed the first few pencil strokes. And I suppose I didn't help myself (or the work) by deciding that I needed to step away from my comfort of tried and tested tools and media.
in progress
This is painted in gouache mostly - a paint I know little about, and am not used to using (the only other time I have used it was to paint that Hermitage blog header image up there!). I seem to use paints entirely not as one is supposed to. Oils I paint thin and watered down with a tickle of a paintbrush so minuscule it could have been a flea's toothbrush. Watercolour I use in tight small areas, and layers, paying no heed to the masters' techniques of washes over wide vistas of pale sky, and unworried flicks to denote figures. So I suppose it follows that gouache has foxed me a little; I understand it is best used for tight, opaque, detailed painting, which explains my difficulties covering large areas with it successfully. I was painting on paper too, and when the whole thing began to get the better of me, I left the paper there on the drawing board which is also in our living room and let her watch me for some days.... During which time, Tom and I walked with Macha out in the evening woods, and we heard hoo-hooing, and saw a shape flap onto a branch in the nearly dark just by us. There a Barn Owl preened. As we watched, we hooted hand-hoots and she hoo-hooed back.
The "her" that emerged was an owl-woman - a woman becoming a bird. She looks wistfully out of her owl-eyes at who knows what. She writes, with a feather from her almost-wing; she writes on the sky and on the tree: words of words and words of owls. Owl-word, Word-owl, Owl, Owl, Word... Owl...
Behind her broods a dark turquoise sky. I looked at the painting for some days when the sky was still plain, feeling that the "something" that was still not quite right must be the emptiness of the sky, and so I sat down with another unfamiliar medium: pastels! Almost never have I used them before, but in the spirit of boundary pushing and desperation to salvage a possibly disastrous work, I carried on. Over the sky I drew pale stars, surrounded by dotted Van Gogh lines, and in amongst: more owl words, written by her. I added pastel to her feathers too, and her hair.
please click to enlarge
But still it wasn't right. She crouched there for more days in our living room, looking woefully at me, while I felt unable to resolve her. In the end I sat down to work more on the painting and realised it was finished, even though I was unhappy with it. Knowing when you are done with something is an art and a half. So often for us perfectionists, the finish can only be reached with excellence, with a sense that you have done good and achieved. But of course much of the time we don't do good: In my own opinion I sometimes make utter failures, mostly I make sort of adequate mediocrities, and very occasionally: a really wonderful piece of true good work. But whether something is finished or not isn't really related to this sense of achievement. And after all, what, or who is the work for? A piece I may consider disastrous, someone else may love. Something might just perhaps speak through my arrangement of lines and colours to someone else in a language I am quite unfamiliar with. And it is for this reason that I am showing you this painting here, even though I feel the awkward shame of "exposure" in failure. Perhaps one of you might love this?
So I rolled this painting up and thought on it for a few days... what ever happened to the original flavour of an idea? Could I make a little drawing closer to what I'd originally intended? There followed this...
A small pencil drawing in my sketchbook, begun without definite direction in mind, but finished with some sort of pleased feeling, as if this had worked. Not in a brilliant masterpiece kind of way, but it reached its completion in a different place from our owl woman on her branch. I cannot really explain it.
Here two children hoo-hoo through their hands, but they too are the hoot. This owl sings her owl words through children hooting in the woods at dusk, just as we did on that other evening when the other painting wasn't working.
I sometimes wonder if I am the hooted child, and my work the hooted word. But who is doing the hooting? Who is the owl?
SOME POST SCRIPTS:
The recording of owl calls are from Owl Pages, where much owlish information, mythology and hootery can be found.
And should you wish to buy a print of either of these owl-works, they are perched now in the evening tree of my etsy shop.
Just the other day I found evidence that I was not the first to note the Slavic sova-slova word play. Here's a linocut by Solomea Loboda (found in an owl menagerie on the ever excellent Animalarium blog) of a Ukrainian folk rhyme about the owl which rhymes these two words, and also vindicates my use of an а at the end of слово!
CROSSING PLACES and boundaries are the habitation of fascination for me. The not-quite-one-nor-the-other is a chancy and magical place, where in-between sorts of people wander, outcasts and wisdom keepers, and left over thoughts blow past. Here on these thresholds between times and spaces: the water's edge, the way into the forest, the twilight hour or the dawning, doorways, openings, turning points in years and lives, you'll find the something that you sometimes remember you were looking for, and then forget again.
A grey February stage curtain lifted to reveal the Theatre of Spring, or at least a Master of Ceremonies to announce the programme. But the smell of things has certainly changed, there's whispering in the wings: cast members in costume, and ready to perform. Even on cold days there's promise on the wind, and the days are lengthening again noticeably, like cats stretching after a long winter's nap.
We walked the other day in a nearby deer park where the wind nipped our ears and ran off, followed closely by Macha, hard on its blustery tail. Here we found the crossing places between many things. A tree and a rock were swallowing each other, like that rock-paper-scissors hand game, but I don't know who begun it and I don't know who'll win it. For in the slowest of slow motions, they are grasping each other, describing the edge of things, not one, not the other. In-between.
The woods were beautiful. Green and Grey, like that old New Model Army song I loved as a youngster. Wood and stone all knitted with moss, and knotted together the rocks and the trees made caves. So I went in.
And I looked out through a triangle of tree and rock
At the green-and-grey tapestry across the February sky.
And in the filtered morning light, of a sky of not-quite-any-colour, we examined the moss that covered the granite. It seemed to me a map of another place, spring-green moss lands and grey-blue stone sea.
This is Nature's piebald cipher, her message in green ink telling us Imbolc promises on the hard grey stone of Winter's End.
And in this photograph of Tom's, the stone is blue as a blue blue sea!
The dark branches, strong and knuckled as an old ferryman's arms, stood black against the white sky, and in the grey, I collected pictures.
And at the edge of a pool under a tree, we found a wondrous nest of life waiting: Frog spawn! (which when I was a child, I'm sure was all one word: Frogspawn!)
Such an incredible pudding of baby not-yet-frogs! Black specks suspended in springy jelly marbles, like an eye watching for the right time to leap, or the black dot of yin in yang. And aren't frogs little leaping exemplars of the liminal? Spending tadpole-time as they do, not quite one nor the other.
I'm always amazed that frog spawn in a pool know how much space there is and so only as many as will fit as frogs in the pool will hatch, the rest waiting til that lot leave home before emerging.
Macha has been looking for treasure at the water's edge too lately, but this was the river, not the frogs' birthing pool, thank goodness. She hasn't told us what she found there yet.
Wandering in the woods hasn't been our sole occupation! There's been industrious creating and planning of projects going on. And we've been having conversations about the borderlands of the creative mind too. Whilst making a painting, part of you inhabits this peripheral place, and must make unending this-way-that-way decisions to steer your artist's ship. Somehow you must balance along an internal tightrope whilst you make your work. On one side of this rope is a quick-sand of doubt and self-criticism, refracted through many different imagined lenses. On the other, a lava-pit of overdoing it, killing the work by pressing too hard with your metaphorical pencil. These two-sided danger pits have many names of course, but not tipping into them is a constant effort of balance and bravery. This innate navigational tool is, I believe, put to use in many areas of life, not just art, and it has an awful lot to do with trusting your gut and sifting wheat from chaff.
And we've been out in the world with projects too! I've had a good selection of my original work framed at long last, so the work is no longer languishing in the bottoms of drawers and the backs of folders, but hanging on the walls of a local wholefood cafe!
For all of February a selection of my original paintings and prints is on display at the wonderful Courtyard Cafe, at 76 The Square, Chagford. It's a warm and friendly gathering place this, where teas and cakes and delicious fare are cooked and served and sold.
Here it is by day and by night (and ten points to anyone who can spot Tom reading Science Fiction in the corner!)
My paintings jostle for space in the corner above customers' heads. And if you are passing through the West Country and fancy a cuppa, or a painting, please do stop by and look.
As for leatherworker Tom, his projects took us on a trip to the last remaining oak bark tannery in the UK: J & FJ Baker & Co, in Colyton, East Devon. He was after leather you see.. to make masks (about which more tales shall follow in due course). It was a wonderful place, all rickety wooden staircases, and hanging hides, and old machinery, and sheds of vats in the floor, and smells, and interesting old men. We came away with four "bellies" and another handsome hide.
We have even ventured in the last few weeks to the Capital City, to see my family. While we were there, we took a train "up to London" as they say when you live on the edge of it. And then we took a bus to the Victoria & Albert Museum to look at magnificent Chinese Robes from the Qing Dynasty. But my attention was particularly caught by this exquisite sculpture in the South-East Asian section of the museum, where we lingered long. She is Sitatara, made from painted, gilded and bejewelled copper in 14th Century Nepal.
This excellent photograph above was taken by Peter Rivera on Flickr, those below are my paltry attempts on a grey day through museum glass. But Oh! She was beautiful.
Tara is a Buddhist Goddess of compassion who is depicted in various forms. She, the White Tara, is said to have been born from the compassionate tears of Avalokiteshvara, the Lord of the World, as he gazed upon the suffering of humanity. She is peace and purity, she is the motivation that is compassion, and the undifferentiated Truth of the Dharma. Tara is often shown (as in this sculpture) with seven eyes - in addition to her two natural eyes, there are four on the palms of her hands and soles of her feet, and one in the middle of her forehead as "third eye". Tara of Seven Eyes is the most common form of the Goddess depicted in Mongolia, and her seven eyes are said to represent her vigilance in compassion and perception of suffering: in the every day (natural eyes), in activity (hands), in progress (feet) and in the spiritual (forehead). Tara is referred to as the Mother of all Buddhas, she is called upon in times of adversity, and for help in overcoming obstacles. The Sanskrit root of her name is tar- "to cross [over]", meaning that the deity serves as a bridge, helping one to cross the Ocean of Existence. Links have been made between her name and the word terra, and even an ancient Finnish Goddess Tar. The word can also mean "tree" or "star" and even "the pupil of the eye".
And what better gem to end with there than the Crossing-Place Eye of our dear hound? Have you ever seen such a strange and outlandish gaze? Through her left eye, Macha looks constantly across a boundary, seeing the light in the dark and the dark in the light. I imagine she sees chancy things in the corners of rooms too, which might account for her nervousness. I leave you with an earnest wish for light growing in the dark like a speck in frogspawn, as Spring awakens, and Tara's hand in the crossing over.
Rima Staines is an artist using paint, wood, word, music, animation, clock-making, puppetry & story to attempt to build a gate through the hedge that grows along the boundary between this world & that. Her gate-building has been a lifelong pursuit, & she hopes to have perhaps propped aside even one spiked loop of bramble (leaving a chink just big enough for a mud-kneeling, trusting eye to glimpse the beauty there beyond), before she goes through herself.
Always stubborn about living the things that make her heart sing, Rima has lived on wheels a few times in her life. She's currently rooted in mossy South Devon, halfway between moor and sea.
Rima’s inspirations include the world & language of folktale; faces of people who pass her on the street; folk music & art of Old Europe & beyond; peasant & nomadic living; magics of every feather; wilderness & plant-lore; the margins of thought, experience, community & spirituality; & the beauty in otherness.
Crumbs fall from Rima’s threadbare coat pockets as she travels, & can be found collected here, where you may join the caravan.
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