Friday November 14

just as a start
a glimpse

Chalet no.2

It is seperated here
in november, the people seem more freindly, relaxed.
Sit and watch the grey light try and lift to pink at twilight.
But only small glimmers.
The hope is stretched, yet I am quite content. No longer anxious for the moment.
I am to work
with myself
and towards my ideas that have been brewing these last couple of years. Coming here there is so much on such a small place. Yet they all point in one direction - it seems.
So now I am going to play, with all earnestness and seriousness.

Down at New Grimsby I sit for a while and view the hills, or more like hillocs of Bryher. There is a lovely gap through / over green bay, where you can just see a glimpse of an eternal space ( so it seems ), or the western rocks. The horizon is kept from me, yet with a sense of a bigger space beyond the nearness of Bryher.
That is Scilly all over for me. It is small intimate yet my soul yearns to escape out into its peripheries, but once there Scilly is lost, hidden in the vast lip of the ocean. In Scilly you do not feel the edge as you do on the mainland, you feel enclosed, held, sheltered, covetted, contained, safe - yet underneath this is the knowledge of the outstretching vast cold sea.
So small on the edge of a bigness - within fear of the infinite. It is like once inside you are in denial of the bigger world - they are as a maze. And one so inviting to get lost in.

Walking back through the dark woods, there is a peace and balance in the dim recesses, not a gloom, just an age old space I feel agreed at entering. I have always felt this about woods/forests. There is something (mysterious) primevil and ambiguous about these spaces.
They can hide as well as envelop - what lurks.
They are a place I feel amongst the veins and lungs of nature.
As if visceral.
The Totemic shapes and shards, in this dark, these woods of Tresco are a broken place, the wind has got amongst them and trampled about like an impetuous child. Their darkness ripped open as a wound to air.They seem a seperate part of an island so ladled with beauty, guilded as lilies. The woods seem to speak of a subconcious yearning for a place to return to its natural self. the rocks can wither and erode yet the trees have the arrogance to try and stand against the relentles forces of the Atlantic.
They are nearly beautiful, more proud- as a matter of fact.They don’t belong here, they are interlopers.
Their tall stature, they are cut down in ther age of wisdom - a savage wind.
Storm damaged trees
They keep the light out and nurture the shadows.

A rat runs past my feet

Back in the Chalet

I am not here yet
I am dislocated
and in flux
in between

Staring east
into the westerly gaze

Contra
Collision
meeting

Everytime I come here, I am struck by a notion. Each time it is different, it evolves,,. I no longer yearn to be here forever in some idyl. i wish to come here to reconect with a thread.

Technical note: gouache is better on gesso, or diferent. On brown paper it dies, sinks i. On white gesso the goache becomes translucent - though I have to deal with the darks. Ilike they way it stains and also how it sits on top of the surface - contrary.

Quiet evening down the pub.I continue reading DH Lawrence in Italy, Second book he is in Palermo and heading for Sardinia - he mentions the windmills of trapini and Marsala, it conjours up a wonderful image of sails turning on the horizon -

“And away on the south, on the sea- level, numerous short windmills are turning their sails briskly, windmill after windmill, rather stumpy, spinning gaily in the blue silent afternoon, among the salt lagoons stretching away to marsala. But there is a whole legion of windmills, and Don Quixote would have gone off his head. There they spin, hither and thither, perhap sone catches a glitter of white salt - heap. For these are the great salt - laggons which make Trapini rich”

I like the way he writes, though the second book seems less intense than the first, it seems he has found Italy and the tension has gone, now he is basking in the hot easy south of it.

Tension is a good thing- just the right amount.

- working on white is clear, (I brought that back from Sicily)
towards a bright light
from light to dark
extremes
or rather opposites.

Wanting to get back to to that subtle colour complimentory oscilation . ( John Hacker )
Some of my colours are far too rich, allways relating to that red ground.
Back to the begining - each time.

The colour scheme in the chalet is cosy, I like this place, it is tucked away from the world amongst the wind and trees.

November grey
thinning light
years evaporation
the energy recedes back into the land
retraction - recoil
inbetween fragments of colour of seperate paling leaves.
Like richness in this delicious light
as the more they fall, the richer in its sparcity autumn comes
and winter a subdued shroud on the land
though as water is to a dry pebble
sunlight to the thin air
incandescent - shining
from a within

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

the sky its pale golden mantle
to within inside this cool light

a tapestry from the wood floor

of sleeped seeds

‘ what the trees tell me ’