The Scrimstone Circus Gospel illustration 1 - by Rima Staines
LISTEN TO ME.
I wasn't born for birthday parties and scented candles in the twilight bath or string quartets on the lawn. I wasn't made for clean handkerchiefs and your mother's approval at the dinner table. Oh no. I was born for rock’n’roll, sea shanties and the smell of diesel on the harbour walls at dawn. I was made for bear claws on bark, for fires in the wasteland where desperate men in greasy overcoats swig vodka in the sparse snow and cold so tight and empty you can barely see a flame in it or the shape of hope in the dark. I was born for broken glass and imperfect love and riding the rusty trains home when the last-ditch grail-quest has failed and all the knights have spent their blood and wine on wrong questions asked of nobody in the three-penny hours of darkness. I was born to live wild under the hill, in the belly of the alembic, in the sperm of the whale and the heart of the gold...
And so begins a strange and wonderful story written by Tom, and illustrated by me for a newly released collaborative book project published and curated by the Lazy Gramophone Press.
The book is called Time; it is a vast undertaking: three years in the making, and comprising the work of 55 different artists and writers.
The original idea, dreamed by Sam Rawlings, was to create an anthology of stories in which the passing of time was explored by intertwining narratives in an unusual and unique way. Tom was asked to write the central story which would span the life of a single protagonist - through childhood, adulthood and old age.
In each of the three life stages there was to be a crossing point, an event in the narrative which would become a common point in the anthology's "history". So, for example, if he'd written in a storm, this "crossing point" would get passed to all the other writers creating stories for that section of the book's timeline, and a storm would occur somehow at some stage in their tales too. The result was to be a weave of narratives which all gained a sense of truth and a "historical" pinpointing due to the shared event in all the stories. The same thing was done with each of the three life stages, with Tom's story serving as the central anchor to which all these other stories were tied.
The devilish-vagabond-world Tom has created in his wonderful tale - The Scrimstone Circus Gospel - is dark and funny and profound and colourful and lyrical and strange, and it was delicious to illustrate. These are my drawings for the story here - I'll not explain them further, but leave you to go and read the book. Suffice to say, that drawings of things like dice games with devils, opium-fueled reveries, drunken shootings, bearded ladies playing accordions, pickpocket-ballerinas, hideous corrupt priests, shipwrecks in the rain and celestial eagles and bulls should give you a certain aroma of the spice that awaits you in the tale! In fact I suspect the whole thing has a lilting gravelly sea shanty as a soundtrack.
The Scrimstone Circus Gospel illustration 2 - by Rima Staines (NB ~ the title on the creature's cage - a word-hybrid between the Russian words for circus - цирк, and church - церковь )
The Scrimstone Circus Gospel illustration 3 - by Rima Staines
I'm particularly excited by this publication, because it is the first time Tom and I have had work published in a book together - my art illustrating his words. We share such a wonderful and surreal imaginary landscape in our daily conversations and foolings, that it is an honour to be asked to put pencil to paper and make visual representation of Tom's story-world for others to see. This one is certainly replete with the dark oddness we like.
The book is full to brimming with other fantastic works, poems, art and stories by many other people, there's even a fold-out timeline-map. This little video gives you a further taste of the whole collection, which you can buy here, should you be tempted...
HOW DO YOU THANK a far-scattered myriad of people? A quite staggering many have each given individual, heartfelt, warm and honest pieces of themselves to me over these last weeks in the forms of words and poems, stories and help and love. And I am touched. Truly, I find it quite astounding how much good you stranger-friends have shown me though you have never met me. Saying thank you seems inadequate, but I mean it. Your thoughts and warmth have encouraged me and shown me chinks of many other lives, all being lived somewhere else, all as full of tribulation and inspiration as mine, I can see why this place is called the web. Some years ago I read a tale set in an Anglo-Saxon pagan England and it told of a shaman's apprentice and otherworldly visions of every single thing being held together by spidersilk. Every thing, animate and inanimate, tree and stone and book and person and crow, all linked by a thread, a thread the shamans could travel up, and a thread through which vibrations of others could be sensed. This ancient view of things is common amongst shamanic cultures worldwide I think; it somehow feels true. The book was The Way of Wyrd by Brian Bates and it is based on a thousand year old Lacnunga Manuscript held in the British Library.
And the warmth has not come only from far off; here in my new village I have experienced the kindness of true friendship, and the generosity of a community that is becoming very dear to me. People have helped with practical box-lugging and emotional box-lugging. And it has caused me to ruminate on the importance of neighbourhood. Though solitude is solace, spidersilks attached a little way out from your lair are good.
Speaking of lairs, mine has been getting to know me slowly .. this house has been here a long time longer than me, and there are stories in the walls I am sure. I feel like each day I have nested and arranged and unpacked and boiled the kettle and sat painting, I wafted metaphorical Rima into the house as others have done before me, and the walls are sniffing me to see what they think.
House magic is so interesting, and I love stirring that particular cauldron. Puppets and bells and paintings have been hung and rugs thrown, books stacked and arrangements arranged. But most of all postcards have been strewn. Everywhere I have lived there've been millions of postcards on the walls, dogeared and beautiful, some of them I remember being stuck to my bedroom wall as a youngster, generations of blutack knobbled at each corner. They are like little windows, inspirations, eye-feasts, mini-masterpieces.
It is vital for me to get a place to a certain point of comfort before I can sit down and work in it. So for a week or two I busied and busied and the nesting will continue, I am nowhere near done. It is cosy and peaceful. But it is strange. I have gone from a tiny truck space to a whole house, with stairs.
I used to have to walk just two paces from desk to kettle, now there is a whole hallway and two rooms between those two places. I miss the sound of the rain on the roof, the rain doesn't leak in these days in a downpour, but because the roof is so far above my head I don't even hear it. I lay in bed the other night expecting the house to sway when a log lorry went past. But it didn't.
The house is stuck to the ground good and proper. It feels heavy and permanent, and the world feels further away. But these granite walls are grown in a beautiful place, I just have to walk down the road a bit to find nature and so I did...
Half way up the stairs there is a window where you can just see past the village edge to fields beyond.
There have been February snow flurries and there are crocuses and snowdrops in the churchyard. Every so often a day with a hint of spring in its step comes along. I took one of these and headed off up a hill. From this hill you could see that winter had headed off too... round the corner of the world to the antipodes who will have their turn soon.
Up on those hills I clambered into fields and watched sheep who watched me. The view was delightful. And the air smelt of newness and damp clouds.
The sheep knew it was spring too..
While the sheep watched me I sat and looked over the fields below and thought the thoughts I always think at the beginning of a new season. The smells of a new spring remind me of last spring and many springs before that. Seasons turning make me nostalgic and forward-looking at the same time. I decided I loved the outdoors so much I was going to take some of it home with me so that it wouldn't be far off any more. There was a pile of tree trimmings, all wrapped in ivy wood, which had little flags of sheep wool tufted onto the twigs. I prized off a few branches and carried them off with me...
..wrapped in an old chain that I found buried in the ground. At first I thought it was some sort of giant worm cast.
I climbed along the hedgerows in the lowering sun...
In the next field I met some cows who walked over to where I sat. There is something eminently peaceful about cows. They approached me in their grass-stamping wet-nosed way, mothers going before their calves in case I was dangerous. And I sat with them all around me tall and steaming, cow hulks, brown-eyed, interested and indifferent.
I loved them and the dusk came and made them into snorting silhouettes.
And so I took my bundle of sticks and stumbled downhill again, this time taking a different route that wasn't really a path, and so it wrapped me up in brambles and sunk my boots in squelch. There were steep woods and yellow gorse. A few times I fell and got caught on fences, cursing the heavy chain-and-sticks that I was stubbornly lugging all the way.
At one point a whole flock of sheep followed me expectantly as I walked through their field. No doubt I had come at dinnertime. I walked on past their sheep-shelter, and somehow ended up alongside an overgrown woodland stream, ducking under hoops of growth, slightly lost, and thinking about a cup of tea.
At last I returned home triumphant and bramble-scarred, with that invigorated puff in my lungs that comes from clambering.
And with those far-hefted ivy twigs and some leafy handmade paper and a bit of wire and string, I made a woodland lampshade! There are bare lightbulbs all through the house, as you may have seen.. (I must say that having electricity is a luxury in itself, as is hot water straight from the tap!) ..but the bare bulbs needed dressing, and so here is how I brought the outdoors in:
It makes a lovely light, but I think its branches might need trimming a little, for the prevention of accidental blindings.
And what about painting? Well I have been busy, two clocks and a commission have been completed, and I will show you those soon. But for now a couple of pieces I have made for the sake of painting. First a strange stained glass design, depicting not church imagery, but Finnish saga. It is painted with oils on cardboard, a new experiment which I am not wholly sure about.. I like the way the paint dries quickly and enables you to make a scrubby translucent surface (which reminded me of coloured glass, hence the addition of black lead lines later).
This is Väinämöinen - old sage of the Finnish epic poem the Kalevala. A while back I heard an interesting programme on radio 4 about the Kalevala and it mentioned a point in the story where Väinämöinen sings a ship into existence. I found this such a lovely image that I decided I should paint it. Here is the stained glass Väinämöinen, I am not sure what I think of the final piece, but it was an interesting hexperiment.
And would you like to hear how he sings? I have loved listening lately to the sound of a Finnish folk instrument the jouhikko - a horse hair bowed lyre. Here is Jouhiorkesteri playing Mina Mina Poiga Nuori. This is the sound I imagine coming from my painting.
~~~
And the second painting, inspired by words in a Dylan Thomas poem:
Love in the Asylum by Dylan Thomas
A stranger has come To share my room in the house not right in the head, A girl mad as birds
Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume. Strait in the mazed bed She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds
Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room, At large as the dead, Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.
She has come possessed Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall, Possessed by the skies
She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust Yet raves at her will On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.
And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last I may without fail Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.
Here she is this lunatic girl. The birds I have hidden beneath her skirt after a dream I had where I was harbouring injured animals of various sorts under my skirts. She is made with pencil and then watercolour, is only about 6 inches tall, and I think I rather like her.
My desk these days looks out onto the oldest building in the village, a Bishop's house. In the mornings I sit with my coffee watching the humourous strutting crows hopping about on the roof pecking at the thatch.
There are many interesting projects approaching and paintings and clocks to be made, so I will be painting my brushes bristleless as March wears on. I have had to write lists to keep all the stuff tethered in my flippety brain somehow.
And I will be here again before too long to show you more things. I hope this lengthy epistle makes up for the tumbleweed blowing past here of late. Meanwhile I will continue magpieing and feathering my nest. I will sit on mornings and evenings and think on the turning of things and the returning of springs. I hope I'll be able to see some blossom from a window when it comes.
In my living room there is a heavy dark old wooden door, with a latch, and either side of it stand two wooden upright beams. They are very beautiful. That door leads to the front door which leads to an even heavier old oak door. I wonder about all the people who have gone through it. Their comings and goings, their days and ruminations, and sorrows and mundanities. Lives cross in many different ways. Sharing an old old house with long dead people is interesting, and I'm not talking about ghosts. I mean the real people, their real lives, all our real lives. They all are connected by the spidersilk, because they have all been here at one time, or maybe at many times. Here, lifting latches, coughing, loving, sleeping, sweeping, chopping carrots, wondering, grieving, leaving, and coming home again, in out of the rain falling from the same sky. Is time linear or cyclical? When they stepped out of my front door, where did they go next? What story did that set in motion? and what was born of that which was born of that?
ALL ALONG THE LANES the brambles are fruiting. In between jagged stems burst little black juicy clusters, each day bearing another nearly ready berry. Our long walk to town is slowed by these waylaying roadside treats. Some blackberries are small and still too sour, others fall apart to a sauce in our fingers. Some are crunchy with seeds or beasts. For the perfect king berry, hardest to reach, we must compete with feasting wasps. Some say you shouldn't pick blackberries after Michelmas (29th September) for the devil comes down and wees upon them. Perhaps we should make a blackberry crumble soon.
And I have been painting, a tiny work, wrapped around with blackberries for an approaching autumn. This is a wedding pendant, commissioned by Anna and Justin who we met at a fair. They are to be married this month and wanted a tiny painting for her to wear on the day. It measures about 3 inches in height and will be worn with a forest green dress. On the back I painted their initials and the date of their happy day (All full of nines like my own date of birth!). There's a smoking rural cottage and hills, and in front of it a two handled lovers' cup. I hunted my books on folklore to find a nice image for a wedding, and found that two spoons on a saucer means a marriage approaches.
Blackberries are not the only fruits in my work of late. There are acorns in the album artwork for the second Telling The Bees album which I have been working away on busily with my 0.3mm pencil. Most of the main drawings are done, but I still have all the smaller work for the interior to do as well as knotting it all together with words and layout. For those of you who haven't seen it before, you can see my work for the band's debut album here. We were delighted to finally meet Bees' songwriter Andy and his missus Nomi last week as they travelled past our Dartmoor field with bagpipes and mandolin, and tea and biscuits and talk were enjoyed. This time the artwork includes a sort of wayfaring musician, coming out of the forest, who is at the same time some old oaky symbol of England. He carries a barrel organ / cabinet of curiosities, that displays an object for each song. I shall leave those discoveries until the day when you hear the songs. They are delightful. On the CD circle leap those three hares again.
I found this oak berry and leaf in the grass here the other day. Though the trees are still green, the morning airs feel different. We are remembering the time of year when we used to light fires before breakfast, and can smell the leaves thinking about browning. I always find the turn of this new season hits me like a memory of all past autumns in my life. Soon I will turn thirty which is a bizarre thing indeed...
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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