Dark Mountain

THERE'S A SOUND that comes from the hedgerows in July: a green sound, a great cacophony of young birds with new wings, shouting their proud freedoms over the million wonderful brown rustlings underneath; it's a warm song of summer beginning in earnest, and it sings to our hearts of adventure under the long-eveninged skies. Hedgerows and waysides have always sung to me like this, in their beautiful chords of the season. As a tiny child I keenly peered into the holes made by Who-Knows-Whats and thrilled at the knotwork sorcery of roots. On the verges grew a wild library for me: weeds and truant grasses thrived unnoticed and yet held in their pages stories I was sure were important and ancient and wise. I have never stopped loving those roadsides that flash by beyond car windows, those mighty green kingdoms of undergrowth bordering our highways and byways. And I have always suspected that the feeling conjured in me by an old old hedgerow, gripping the centuries-old earth banks as I walk alongside it, is somehow a key: a heart-sign, deep beneath words in me, calling me to follow.

The congregations of the waysides have always drawn me too: those outcasts and travellers, peddlers, hobbledehoys, lunatics and vagabonds who make their art in the ditches and say their truths to all who pass by. I've long felt this edge-territory home: I make camp behind the road signs, draw faces in the dust where the sparrows bathe, and I watch. And I wonder about them all travelling so fast past... Where are they going? Who are they travelling with? What would we talk about if they stopped for a pee?
Have you ever had your head turned by the wonderful incongruous sight of a Gypsy wagon parked up on a roundabout as you drove by, a horse grazing on verge grass, and a man lighting a fire in the middle of this green island-in-the-tarmac as the unceasing slick of traffic roars on? That's the feeling I'm talking about - the leap in your chest, the feeling of being eye-witness to a still-possible dream, the joy of knowing it.

These are strange times: many many people have stopped really believing in dreams, or at best have packaged them up in a sickly little dollshouse called whimsy. We have been told a fairly grim tale: a grey snake of a tale that eats its own tail to form the 9-to-5 hamster wheel of progress. There's always a but just after a wild thought, a rote-learned reason for not being able to live the life you really wanted, and civilisation put it there.
Yet still there's a truth within us that yearns and hammers at the insides of our chests when we spy something from that other place, that other time and it recognises us in turn. And the ones who paint the poems which cause our inner truths to hammer like this are the artists, the wild ones, the glorious nutters - we all recognise them. Fondest of all perhaps, we recognise Earth's own green poem ringing in tune with our heart-harp-strings.

And these, these are the tunes I hear coming from the pipe of that colourful-coated traveller there in my painting. The tune he plays is in the key of hedgerow and yearning, it is the colour of love and oak leaves, and its words are older and more familiar than the cries we ourselves made as babies.

I'm not a joiner of groups or a follower of isms. I don't like ideologies or the fences they put up. But I was utterly taken recently by a manifesto written by the excellent steersmen of something called the Dark Mountain Project. And not long after I found myself nodding in utter agreement with their words, they asked me to paint the front cover of their second book!




I've struggled somewhat to describe succinctly what exactly the Dark Mountain Project is when people have asked, but I hope that what I've written above conjures something of the spark in me that it feels akin to.
Their flag flies for something they call Uncivilisation (what better thing to fly your flag for?!) - a kind of steep brambly path towards some sort of wild and old truth which we are invited to head for as the citadels of civilisation crumble around us. The thing is, they say, in removing ourselves from nature (as if we were not part of  it), we have forgotten the importance of stories, though they are being woven around us second by second in the advertisement-saturated fast-paced life of now. We are all constantly telling ourselves stories about How Things Are; these stories are tweaked and upheld and strive to keep us feeling safe. But their threads are coming loose and we're beginning to see the face of the Storyteller beyond the woodsmoke. He's reminding us of the old stories, the ones that thrummed in us and in the earth, the ones that were true, and not just sleeping pills to keep the economy "growing".
 


The Dark Mountain fellows cheer the outsiders too, of course - they call for them in fact - to come and climb this mountain, and to bring their stories, their paintings, their poetry to the fireside - so that we can find the old paths again. What I really like about Dark Mountain is that it's not a Way to be prescribed, it's perhaps something more like a language: mutable with time and tongue, adaptable to the speaker. And I like too that they uphold beauty as something important. Their books are an attempt to gather writing that speaks to this realness in us, the truth that recognises that things these days are not quite as we are being told, the truth that offers something different and beautiful.
Their books contain poetry, thought, essays, interviews, recipes, art, stories, histories, futures, all beautifully written. I was honoured to be asked to paint the skin of this endeavour. It's an important and resonant thing, and I urge you to buy a copy for yourself. It also coincides with and celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Luddite rebellion. Throughout the book, there's a focus on an honest acceptance of death, and a hopeful forward-looking, there's earthiness and lyricism. And who could not cheer on a project that promises to write with dirt under its fingernails?

Dark Mountain pages...

And so to my painting... here on a piece of scrap wood found in a skip I have painted a kind of Pied Piper - a figure and a story which have long lured me - but which also felt apt, as he too, boundary walker and soul-stirrer-music-maker, was heading for the mountains.... He plays an aulos - or diaulos - a double-piped flute from ancient Greece, often depicted being played by the god Pan, or other satyrs. It is a reeded instrument said to sound similar to the bagpipes (as one of the pipes would have played the drone, the other the tune). I gave my traveller a split pipe to hint at the dual nature of things, the alpha/omega, yin/yang wheel, without being too specific. He pipes up a tune for a gathering crowd of misfits who appear to be preparing for a journey. As always in my paintings, these folk are the odd ones. Amongst them are old and young, happy and weary, there's a cockerel, a handcart, conjoined twins of different races, and a certain hound. And the keen eyed will spot the one who was left behind in the original Pied Piper tale, who for me stands for something important too, here he's a misfit amongst misfits...

Their gold coloured road takes them past trees and wooden huts to unknown mountains under a skyful of three pale green wild birds. I was inspired partly in the design of this by Russian lacquer work painting, where warm-coloured figures and scenes are scattered on a black background.
There's debate as to where the children went after they disappeared into the mountain, but for me the Pied Piper is not such a malevolent character as he's painted. His multi-coloured outfit hints at his membership of the motley band of trickster-fools who have danced across boundaries throughout the ages poking at entropy and stagnation with their wit and word-sticks. Perhaps the children and the rats got to see beyond the next bend in the road, and to learn by heart the map-song that the Piper played to them.
 


If you'd like to come and hear a little of the Dark Mountain tune, they are holding an Uncivilisation Festival in August at the Sustainability Centre in Hampshire. There'll be talks by many of the Dark Mountain writers - Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine (the co-founders of the project) as well as wonderful poets/thinkers/writers/doers from the five corners of the map. I'm particularly looking forward to hearing Jay Griffiths (author of the incredible Wild, who has an extract from her forthcoming novel of Frida Kahlo's life in this Dark Mountain book.) Also... my Tom will be doing a most wonderful telling of an Old Russian Folk Tale on the Friday night of the festival - Ivashko Medvedko - Little Ivan, Bear-Child, (he's written a beautiful introduction to this here) and apparently I'm going to be there too, in a mask, illuminating his words with my accordion.... I'm proud and excited and a bit nervous.
We'll be selling our wares for the weekend from our canvas emporium and I'll bring this painting to show; I don't think it's for sale at the moment, though soon there'll be proper nice prints of it available.

But I shall leave you now under the green leaf of your day with this parting gift - a piece of genius poem-music that is for me the most eloquent description of the kind of feeling I find in the hedgerows of this land. It is my Piper's melody and, I think, something like the Dark Mountaineers' battle-cry; in it hums the echo of that oldest tune of all that stirs the bold...

It is an epic poem by bard musician Robin Williamson - Five Denials on Merlin's Grave - set to music in an intoxicating fourteen minute paean to this island of ours, to the magic and story woven through it and under it and by it, and it thrills my heart in a powerful and unique way. I found a second hand copy of the annotated printed poem published in the year I was born. Please, please sit for a while, and listen to this on headphones, or good speakers - it will send tears of remembering down your cheeks, and loose an impossible beauty in your heart.

Dark Mountain Book 2

The Dark Mountain Project

The Dark Mountain Manifesto

Uncivilisation Festival

* italicized words in the last two paragraphs are Robin Williamson's.

A Brush in the Blue Paintwater Jar of June

WE ARE FROGS crouching disgruntled at the water's edge of a doubtful Summer. So far, this June feels like Mr Jeremy Fisher's slippy-sloppy larder; the air hangs damp and grey; we nip out between downpours to do late things in the garden, and nip in again to light the woodburner in a most unsummerly fashion, and to work at our desks in the warm. There were predictions of parched earth and hosepipe bans here in the South West, but standing under huge wet trees, their barks black with rain, we listen to the the drip-drip from the points of the green glistening leaves, and shake out our webbed feet, and disbelieve the weather forecast.

Here are a few painterly-printerly goings-on, some new, some past, some blue...

 

This old man in a wooden boat on a green garden sea is the Ancient Mariner, painted for an exhibition at the Imagine Gallery based around Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem. I chose to paint the old man himself rather than any scenes of ghostly stormy torment. And for canvas I found a piece of Sequoia redwood amongst the offcuts from the chainsaw carving at the wood fair, which had the heart of a branch-knot like a spear running through it. How perfect, I thought, to make this into the arrow with which the Mariner shoots the Albatross; and the slice of wood was boat-shaped too. So I fitted him into the shape of it, the albatross hung around his neck, so that the redwood arrow ran through both the bird and the Mariner's own heart. 

 

 

The original painting, in oils, is for sale through the gallery now should anyone like to own it. The Mariner's right hand holds an anchor rope which winds around his boots... echoing a sad and true story in my ancestry: My great grandmother Elsie had a sweetheart when she was young whom she called "Blue" ... but she lost him away at sea - he was drowned when his foot got caught in the anchor rope, and she never really forgot him. I still have a tiny elephant made of ivory which belonged to her, into its flank she scratched his name.

And talking of the Imagine Gallery, I'm mighty pleased to announce that there's a limited edition (of 33!) of fine quality giclée prints of a few of my works available for sale there now too... they're hanging handsomely framed on the gallery walls, and the paper and print quality is so good, even I could hardly tell they weren't originals!

 

 

At the moment prints have been made of Baba Yaga, Snowflight Under the Seasky, Anja in the Horse Chestnut, A Girl Mad As Birds, Father Christmas and The Goods & Chattels Man, and they've all been hand embellished (i.e. signed, titled and numbered) by me. This edition of fine prints is all roughly at the size the originals were painted, which in the case of Anja in the Horse Chestnut means almost A1.

I also intend to start selling smaller giclée prints through my etsy shop soon for folks who would like a posher and more knobbly paper quality. Any recommendations of companies who offer this print service with good results would be most welcome - I've been sending off for sample packs from various places, and can't decide.

There've been quite a number of interesting jobs over the past months... some of which I've waited for apter times to tell you about. This is one of them. Tess Giles Marshall, (a hearty cheerer for my work who has commissioned a clock from me before) asked me to paint a banner for her superb new site Pilgrim's Moon - a celebration of cronehood and all that that enfolds. It is a "countercultural path for women, ageing on their own terms" and it's gathering crones and crones-in-waiting left right and centre: Women who rage against the madness of trying to look younger as they age, women who are interested in the wisdom-knots and fascinations that greater numbers of years bring them, and best of all, women who have chosen to take back demeaning old-women words - crone, hag, harridan, witch - and reclaim them for the power-words they are.

These are pictures of the painting in progress - from pencil beginnings to watercolour end. A small band of motley pilgrims make their way from one village to the next under the blue of a wide wild white moon and the strains of a fiddle tune along the way. Do go and sit round the fire that Tess is building...

  

And the last painting in today's gallery was another commemoration of a loss... this one was commissioned by Janey to celebrate the life and mourn the loss of a cat she loved for many years.

As with all commissions involving people, it isn't a portrait of either Janey or her cat, but rather a painting of her sadness and of a girl and a cat that might be Janey or someone else. I rather liked it in its blue circular simplicity. The original hangs on her wall in Australia now, but you can buy prints from my shop here.

Koshka in a Blue Dress

And whilst I painted a tiny ragged moth came to rest on my thumb, and then flew off again.

I don't know whether the sun will come back again, I hope it does - we are planting vegetables, and thinking of warm evenings of summer adventure and bare feet and songs under the stars and golden picnics in August.
Even frogs like to bask from time to time don't they?

The Wide Skies

GOODNESS! It's June! Somehow we have leapt over Spring and a wet May, and stand barefoot and blinking on the other side in the tall dry grass. The green is no longer just emerging: it is wild and abundant! The hedgerows quiver and the leaves are warm. I'm sitting writing this looking out on trees and plants alive with industrious bees and sparrows, and scuffled-under by our three resident chickens. Since last I wrote, we've moved to our wonderful new house on the hill and spent time nesting in under the thatch. House moves are rather momentous and exhausting apparently, and it's taken me some time to gather my wits from amongst the fluff and old twopences at the bottoms of all the cardboard boxes as we've unpacked. We're hallooing at the wonder of our happily-found home and I shall tell you tales of this new and idyllic residence in due course, but there's rather a lot of other news to report too, not least an adventure to the other side of England (during which we visited both our families, Tom sat a Chinese Medicine exam and I completed two oil paintings!!) to tout our wares at my favourite fair: Weird and Wonderful Wood. So for today, I'll show you the wonders of that wonder, and hope over the next weeks to bring you a few more regular updates on things painterly, homely, masked and summerly...

This year's Weird and Wonderful Wood fair welcomed us in its own friendly arboreal way on the Friday evening to set up camp in good time for the weekend's impending festivities. This year I'd chosen to be outdoors again: I like it better on grass, and under the sky, and I am coming to a conclusion that the outdoors is my favourite gallery too. 

          

We came equipped with the most excellent tent: A ten man ex-army Arctic bell tent, which came in part-exchange for a painting still in progress for tipi-makers Ian and Merle of Hummingbird Tipis. It's brilliant to be able to stand up in your tent, we have space to wander about inside... in fact if you'd wanted to swing a cat you could've. And to add to the luxury-under-canvas, we had our new portable woodburner to keep us warm in the evenings and on which to cook all our meals and brew all our teas. This fold-up wonder, The Frontier Stove, originally designed for use in disaster situations, just works so well. The stove pipe comes apart and stows away inside the burner, the legs fold up and you can carry it away in one hand; it burns hot on just a handful of gathered wood, and can be closed down with the damper to burn quietly for hours. It even has enough space on top for a frying pan of bacon and eggs, a pot of coffee, a pan of milk and two small breakfast breads. And so we ate and lived like Wayside Royalty and sat out under the wide East Anglian skies with mugs in hand and thoughts of summer. 

In front of our tent (which sagged a bit round the edges due to the fact that the guy ropes are measured for horizonless Arctic wastes, not snug festival pitches – this will need to be further mulled upon for a solution, though it was fine inside) we constructed a canvas emporium with an ochre roof, alder supports and garden trellis for walls. Ropes tied to trees and ground pegs held it all up and the interior was a patchwork of assorted fabrics and old carpets. Pictures were hung inside, and bunting triangles (cut out gallantly by Tom's mum from her vintage fabric collection) were attached to guy ropes to prevent midnight accidents. The Mad Hatter grinned from a tree, and a witch perched atop an easel on which rested a brand new painting (about which more soon).

But the crowning glories of this year's display were Tom's Magnificent Masks! We hung them between tent and tree and all down the tent-mast where they watched passers by with mischievous interest. These beautiful Smickelgrim Masks are exquisitely handmade from oak-tanned leather, hand painted with leather dyes and polished with Tom's own-recipe beeswax polish made with the help of local Dartmoor bees. I'm dearly and immensely proud to see our creations displayed together like this, don't they match perfectly?

But this brilliant project of Tom's is only just beginning, and awaiting a website and all (which the multi-talented maskmaker will create once he's finished his end of year Acupuncture exams!), so I'll not tell you the whole masquerade here, I'll just whet your appetite with a few pictures and with a whispered hint that there are some masks appearing for sale in Tom's etsy shop now for early birds (or indeed discerning vagabonds, incognito Romantics and stylish revolutionaries) in need of a disguise. This is just a trial price too, so be quick to be the first canny owners of these harlequinned works of art!

The fair passed in a whirl of faces and fascinations, and I'm sorry to say my photo-documenting was a little thin on the ground. I got none of the cosy interior of our tent, so you'll have to wait until its next outing for those. But our shop was busy with old friends and new friends and everyone in between. I was delighted to meet the flesh-and-bone versions of a few folks from this online world, particularly Francois Latreille, who was travelling the UK for some months before heading home to Canada and the beginning of his studies, and whose path steered him through Suffolk for this fair and to give me a poem, and Julie Howe who gave us candles :)

 

Friends and families came too: here I am with young Taliesin, dear son of friends Poppy and Curt (and Macha who is looking more like some sort of heraldic weasel). And we were happily pitched by Ash and Sarah whose wagon was the scene of last year's idyllic firelit evening. 

This year they were selling vintage books and their own glass-etched brilliant signs. Their daughter Tilly was proffering wares too...

                 

 

 

In between us Candy Sheridan had her resplendent Roma caravan and old-time Gypsy-painted wares. On our other side were Jon and Amalia, makers of the artfully blacksmithed Windy Smithy woodburners.

And the rest of the fair? Well I hardly left my perch, but in brief dashes to buy lemonade or nip behind a bush, I spied many inspiring and industrious folks conducting a thrilling range of workshops for children and adults alike... all with wood in one form or another.

There was puppet making, paper making, withy weaving, spoon carving, and a myriad other distractions. That's our friend Jason Parr teaching folks to carve spoons – he gave us one each too; aren't they lovely?

There was impromptu music and wandering stilted tree-people, there were pole-lathers and artisans, timber framers and axe carvers, chainsaw carving using a fallen trunk of sequoia from which I squirrelled offcuts for future paintings, and drawers of old tools through which to rummage: we brought home a mallet of wood and a mallet of copper, and a handsome machete which now chops our kindling.

 

  

These fairs are always an exhilarating melee of inspiring and enjoyable and exhausting talk, earth and wooden tent pegs and woodsmoke and damp socks, money changing hands, faces familiar and new and half-remembered, children and animals and ice-creams, dirt under your fingernails, wandering performers and minstrels-in-the-distance, wonderful handmade artefacts and battered old bric-a-brac, ale and bunting, and the glowing tiredness of sun-browned cheekbones.

At the end of it all, wares and wherewithal packed small, we took Macha and a bottle with a mouthful of cider left in it and a small tray of halva for a walk in the wide green Suffolk fields under the wide blue Suffolk sky and we sat amongst the stems, jangling-eared and happy, and Macha swam like an otter through the barley.