Small Visitations from a Winter-Dusted Equinox

A BLUE BRIGHT COLD DAWN blew in the other day. It was a surprise amid these endless fogged and drenched grey days of unspring. Chicklets under our eaves, gambolling lambs and dogged primroses are chirping out the fact of spring, their joys flitting over the Equinox and on through white-blanketed March, whilst we huddle indoors, disbelieving the daffodils and wondering what happened to the sun. 

This blue bright morning was beautiful though, and all etched in frost. Macha and I climbed the hill behind our house where you can see all across the valley of villages and out beyond onto Dartmoor. A mist crept in, silent and low, hanging between the hills and whispering over the roofs of the just-waking houses.

Frozen mornings trap beauty in a certain thrilling way. The ochres and browns of winter's trees and hedges hummed in patchworks around the shadow blues of iced fields. 

As the morning rose, the light pinked the far-off moors before it reached us.

There's a magnificent old sentinel pine tree on the hill behind our house, a homing land mark for getting lost on long rambles over the fields, and a memory-keeper for all that happens in the valleys below.

Macha and I stepped quietly through the dawning, smelling new things from the night, and looking down into the day shining crisply at our feet.

Other days have brought snows, which have dusted the toes of birches, the roofs of shacks and weighed heavy on the confused petals of spring.

 

On the rare days we have sun, it plays a game of chase with the frost across the thatched roof of our cottage, until the colder of them wins at the end of the day anyway.

There have been beautiful visitations at unexpected moments too. I encountered the swoop of a tawny owl one night as I drove home along a dark lane. It landed on a branch overhanging the road, and so I stopped and turned off the engine to watch it. It crouched there with something in its claws looking me directly in the eye. Then it flew off into the night, dropping the whateveritwas onto the road. I peered and noticed it moving. So I got out of the van and went over to find a baby rabbit, screaming, but apparently unhurt. I picked it up and took it home in my lap, where it crouched, the terrible screaming subsiding eventually. Once home, it almost met its end again after leaping from my lap and running to the darkest corner of the room where Macha leapt after it. Deciding that I wasn't going to be able to raise this little one myself, I took it outside in the dark to find a rabbit hole. It was small, and probably too young to survive alone. I don't know whether rabbits adopt young, but this one had already been flown far from its home, so I had to try. It sat still on my open palm for a while, sniffing the air. Then - hop, hop, hop - it bounced down the rabbit hole I'd found for it, and out of my story.

Another night brought a flitting-flapping floor-bound moth to the corner of my eye. It also nearly ended up as a dog-snack, but I held it for a while, its wings so light green and papery, they were almost an entirely new colour. I had a chance to remember this one with my camera before I released it to a night time of moon and owl silence.

The letterbox has also brought wonders from other shores, whilst we stay in by the fire as the winter refuses to withdraw her talons.

These beautiful hand-spun, hand-knitted sock masterpieces were knitted by Teleri Gray in Germany in return for some of my prints. I am so delighted by their intricacy and perfect fit, I almost can't bear to wear them and prematurely destroy the heels with my chicken feet! 

photo © Sylvia Linsteadt

And last but most surely not least, a wonder-tale through the mail, written by my amazingly talented word-magician friend Sylvia Linsteadt. This is part one of the Gray Fox Epistles, a fairytale-by-post project that she has created, and which you can sign up for too, at her blog. This first story is a retelling of the Celtic tale, The Children of Lir, and my goodness is it an artful and beautifully-wrought thing! Sylvia makes the land speak across centuries, and conjures a world so familiar to me, that it is all the more strange for it. 

The envelope arrived, all wrapped in wonder and the footprints of deer, and tucked inside were wild clover leaves, redwood needles and a single wild jackrabbit hair. Sylvia has magic in her quill, and I urge you all, each and every one, to sign up for her next story which will be a unique retelling of the Russian tale, Tsarevna Frog. One fine and not too distant day, our arts will share pages, but for that you shall have to wait...

The cold nights are still woodstove firelit and damp window-paned, and our days have been filled with the little plans of coming months. I have painted and drawn and begun preparing a new studio space which must be reached through a trapdoor (of that more anon), and Tom is deep in the gruelling last months of acupuncture studies. The truck awaits our dreams and hammers and nails still, as it crouches under its tarpaulin blanket until clearer skies come this way. Mythic midsummer exhibitions are in the cauldron. My ideas, as ever, tramp and stamp like a herd of snorting wild horses held at the end of a bunch of long tethers in my hand as the year marches on happily and strangely.

The Battle Between Frost and Light

IN THE MORNING of winter shadow, 

a night time of ice quills quiver in shrouded anticipation 

of the bright armies of day to come rushing round the edges of things with their spears of sunlight into the battle. 

The gathered halberdiers of winter cast long needle-shadows across the green ice with their weapons,

and the lichen-frosts whisper the crystalline secrets of this very new day. 

Each crack and trill of the waking world asks:

Who will win the battle?

At this cold cusp of a certain point of early,

the blades of frost and light clash and shatter my vision into a million pieces of beautiful.

Paper November

AUTUMN-END frost has sprinkled down onto our hills these last few days and the evening sunlight of early November shines through the chimney smoke in the village as we go out sporting thermal undergarments to collect coal. The house is a pile of chaos with little bundles of saved cardboard and bubblewrap stuffed in corners in preparation for more wrappings. We have been packing up and throwing away, there are bin bags for charity shops stacked around the rooms and we had a bonfire of old bills. (the bits of paper asking you for money I mean, not a burning of police forces!) A good lot of books have been sent off and bits of furniture too.. and I think I might have accidentally thrown my wits into one of those bin bags as well because I am starting to go a little bit mad!

The wheeled home is nearly there... not yet full of our things but sporting a brilliant second hand hobbit-sized oven and lots more excellent Tui-cupboards. We still need to stop the icy wind creeping in a few gaps and add another window or two, but it is almost ready for its journey I think. We have even bought a brass galley pump tap to adorn our rustic little kitchen. It will pump water up a pipe from a tank below and round and out the spout, into the sink and down the newly piped-in plughole.

There are endless things to think of before we go.. we have to organise mobile internet, buy a small and quiet generator for power until we sort out a solar panel arrangement, rip the music from 100s of CDs so as to leave them behind, parcel up and send off an enormously heavy singer sewing machine table, sell my little car, work out what to do with all my old work, buy 7 new wheels for the truck, and ready it for MOT, sort through yet more stuff... and nip out when the sun shines to make a little money. And amongst all the upheaval, I have dropped the printer! Now it makes clankings that it shouldn't make and refuses to print at all. This is very annoying with a capital A and it is headed for the bin bag corner too. It's not entirely a disaster though because it'll mean we'll have to order all our prints from the printing place now, which, tho a bit more pricey, is easier, better quality, and saves both space and late night cursings when bits of blue ink spurt all over the place for no earthly reason other than to try you.

The book sale was a storming success for which I'd like to say a big thank you to you all.. it took me two whole days to wrap them all and the faces of the post office ladies were a picture when we trundled in with our armfuls of bundles this morning. I must say that I have made rather a silly underestimate with many of the postage costs overseas.. books are so heavy. So a few of you might be getting little garbled emails from me asking for a pound or two more! It is very nice I must say to know that the books are going to places where they'll be enjoyed.

In these remaining four weeks I am putting away paintbrushes.. so clocks and other such things will be put on hold (as if I take hold of some imaginary painted pendulum and stop it swinging). I also (rather insanely) have a stop frame animation to finish before we go. Only Rima would leave such a slow artform to the very last minute to complete. I think I can do it though, and it is looking lovely so far. It appears that something switches in me when a deadline approaches and a new kind of desperate creativity emerges. Here are a few snippets of the paper pieces I am inching about under a camera up in the animation attic. I am enjoying it, and listening to Tui's beautiful and intricate finished Orla Wren album while I do it. Both album and animation will be unfurled early next year if all goes to plan.

So surrounded by big brown wrapping papers and little cut-out whispers of animation papers we approach our big and exciting journey. I shall try to keep news here, but forgive me if my visits to your blogs are less frequent and if my emails are spelled dreadfully or make little sense at all. I think it's time to light the fire now, Tui's just home from an afternoon of cupboard door makings and I'm back off up the attic ladder after removing from the carpet a nasty little cat present.

I leave you with a cold dusk tree shivering without its leaf coat growing up on the hill behind the village at the end of a stone wall.

View from the Sickbed

IF I LOOK towards my knees right now, this is what I can see: A cosy blanket, a kindly cat, and a very big book. Excellent things for colds. I have just returned from a secret surprise mission to London to visit my parents and have returned with leaden sinuses, croaking throat and drooping eyelids. I am quite annoyed as it is the first cold I've had for two whole years.
Still, I am greatly embroiled in the book which is the quite excellent 800 pages of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke. It is an incredible work which entwines scholarly fantasy and 19th century eccentricity beautifully, and can't really be compared to anything else. Susanna Clarke has imagined a whole magical history which is detailed in extraordinary footnotes that encompass humourous and strange tales and references. Since I am only on page 369, I am deliciously savouring the remaining chunk of pages in which I am sure there will be journeyings into the Other Lands, sad love stories and much more mastery of words. I find I am quite compelled to stay in this world.. which is a perfect place for wandering with a snotty nose, woolly ears and a bunged up head.
I leave you with some fine things others have had to say about this book, and hop over here if you'd like to learn more.

"It is a book for a favourite armchair, for readers in patched cardigans, with log fires and buttered muffins."

"It's funny, moving, scary, otherworldly, practical and magical, a journey through light and shadow... as tangled and twisting as old London streets or dark English woods."

"the book darkens as rapidly as the sky on a wintry English day, becoming an increasingly bleak meditation on professional envy, betrayal, revenge, madness and despair."

"A triumph of traditional imaginative storytelling, this is an energetic, engaging and inventive tale that simply kidnaps the lucky reader to participate in a rare experience."

"Many books are to be read, some are to be studied, and a few are meant to be lived in for weeks. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is of this last kind ..."

It is Spring

SCOTLAND-IN-SPRING ... this evening there are dripping birds singing evening songs in the dripping leaves as the sun blinks a few times before setting. The air is crisp and damp and dripping and further off above the village roofs round white hills sit still blanketed by an ever lingering winter.
Stepping outside through the wet door to scoop more coal from the bunker invites a dripping, shivering evening of a wind to scuttle down my neck, the lumps of coal roll dusty wet black into the puddles and I drip back into the house to sit back down on my low yellow chair to paint a slow yellow painting.

Our days are peppered with walks in snows and wet windscreen drives to the post office. I am busy with plans for a little tale to be made one day into a book of my own and with the third painting in a series of seven commissions. Today I sold the original of Telling Stories to the Trees which will make its way to a hook on an old wall in rural Argyll.
Tui is hatching a nest of most wonderful tracks for the new Orla Wren album ... six eggs are hatched and two more are pecking to come out of the shell. While he tends this nest, I sit and paint over there and listen to talking books which I love ... my very favourite at the moment is the most wonderful 1963 BBC Radio production, narrated delightfully by Richard Burton, of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood. I leave you with his wonderful wordsmitherly description of a sloeblack night in a Welsh village in Spring:

To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now. Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkard, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glow-worms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite statues of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.

Dylan Thomas ~ Under Milk Wood ~ 1954

Bees in a Blizzard & Dripping Pianos

TODAY I SIT at my desk looking out at a blizzard of wild sideways-swirling-snows and paint bees and gnarled trees for an album cover commission ...

Meanwhile Tui has been sneaking into the village hall across the way where they keep an old piano in the men's toilets ... he hid his recording device inside the back of the piano whilst he played to the sound of cisterns refilling and dripping taps.

People of the Winterlands

IN KEEPING with the celebrations at this cold end of the year, for the next eight days I will be posting the text and imagery from a book I made entitled People of the Winterlands - a collection of folklore characters from wintry northern climates...

In ancient times the climates of the northern lands brought cold, hard winters and long, dark nights. In the midst of a frozen white landscape, the need to keep warm and find enough to eat was vital. It is therefore understandable that all cultures held winter celebrations to welcome back the warmth and light, in hopes that the frosts and snow would not last too long, and that spring would return the green once again to their lands. Nowadays, we celebrate Christmas at this time of year, but the date of the celebration of Christ’s birth was in fact altered by Pope Julius (AD 337–52) to December 25th deliberately to coincide with ancient popular pagan midwinter festivals. The Christian myth links in well with the theme, celebrating, as it does, the birth of the child of light and hope, conquering death.

In the days before central heating and electricity, the prospect of a harsh winter was frightening. To people who lived so close to the land and shaped their lives around its turning seasons, winter represented death – of root and field, and of livestock. It was recognised, though, that death and harsh frosts were necessary in order for life to spring up again once more, and for the wheel of the seasons and of life to continue turning. Indeed, the word Yule (the traditional name for this season, and specifically for December 21st – the midwinter solstice when the night is the longest of the year) probably derives from the Old Norse “iul” or the Anglo-Saxon “hweol” both meaning “wheel”.

Our Christmas derives from various traditions, including the raucous Roman “Saturnalia”, and Greek “Mithrasian” fire celebrations, but here in Northern Europe, it owes most to Yule – with its ritual fires, evergreen decorations and sparkling lights. Sacrifices were made to the old gods and goddesses to confirm the mystical moment of the sun’s rebirth. The church tactfully turned a blind eye to deeply enshrined pagan delights and long-established festivals and, in return, pagan joy in earthly pleasures came to warm the Church’s own austere feast. Christmas became merry, homely and appealing to simple humanity; a lovely child in human shape, welcomed and rocked in a cradle, whose birthday was celebrated in earthly style with feasting, lights, gifts and music, replaced the cool incarnate God of the early years. Many cheerful pagan aspects remain in our Christmas festivities, including the Christmas tree, Yule log, evergreens, candles, gifts and festive meals. These images mingle without much conflict with the more dominant Christian message, as after all, they have much in common – pleasure in family life and friendship, in hospitality and gift-giving, in warmth of heart and hearth, sparkling lights, greetings and goodwill.

Over recent years, however, Christmas has had all that was at its heart brutally commercialized. Plastic, neon and money seem to be all that Christmas is about nowadays, and the old pagan gods have been sanitised into the sickly-sweet American Santa Claus. We cannot appreciate the realities of a harsh and bitter winter, and the vital dark side of this ancient festival is therefore lost to us.

There are many folk figures and mythological pagan deities amongst the cultures of Northern Europe who are symbols of this winter season, or who protect the people from its severity. Winter spirits are the embodiment of the popular experience of winter in ancient days, and as such can be either benevolent or frightening. They can represent both the warmth of the hearth and the heart, and the bleak reality of death. These are the elements which have been removed from today’s commercial Christmas, and which I believe need to be honoured once more.

In this book are a just handful of the winter spirits, all gathered from Northern European folklore. You will find figures both male and female, both friendly and frightening. This small glimpse will, I hope, conjure for you an enchanting, icy winter landscape and a world of the “in-between” where animals speak, and where the spirit world is not far away, but where death is always just round the corner ...

Happy Christmas

AND WE RETURNED ON CHRISTMAS EVE with coffers full and tired as sleigh-pulling reindeer .. so here's a belated winter wish to you all for a very happy Christmastime and warm days with books and cosy...

Telling Stories to the Trees
Watercolour