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I found this piece of pottery in a stream a few weeks ago – it looks like an image of sun and soul to me, and of becoming whole, of striving to become so.
“To believe in the soul – to believe in it exactly as much and as hardily as one believes in a mountain, say, or a fingernail, which is ever in view – imagine the consequences! How far-reaching and thoroughly wonderful! For everything, by such a belief, would be charged, and changed. You wake in the morning, the soul exists, your mouth sings it, your mind accepts it. And the perceived, tactile world is, upon an instant, only half the world! How easily I travel, about halfway, through such a scenario. I believe in the soul – in mine, in yours, and the blue-jay’s, and the pilot whale’s. I believe each goldfinch flying away over the coarse ragweed has a soul, and the ragweed too, plant by plant, and the tiny stones in the earth below, and the grains of earth as well. Not romantically do I believe this, nor poetically, nor emotionally, nor metaphorically except as all reality is metaphor, but steadily, lumpishly, and absolutely.” Mary Oliver.
I went out today to collect materials for paintings – wood dust from the willow tree and soil from the valley, goose feathers, soil and leaves. The alder leaves are beginning to fall and so are the white poplar but they are not ready yet – perhaps in late September or October they will have dried enough to add to a painting, as a foundation or detail. I could hear woodpeckers all around me today, and see one or two through the trees. Then I went down through the scrub and hawthorn into the valley, and paused for a while in the stream at the bottom – looking for potsherd. For me, these are little treasures and messages that reflect the journey of the soul. Where was it then, in that moment, whilst looking by chance through the clay and water? The answer today seemed to be in the image of the yellow bird that drinks from the flower of truth.
‘lutron’
mixed media on canvas with earth and ash
23×23 inches
“Release me from sin, my angel of grace,
I’ll give my word to your body, mark the earth with your space;
My heart under hills in the hidden light,
Has set the birds to dream your unlived life.”
This painting is about wanting to be released from sin through the process of redemption. I had been working for over a year on this theme and originally the painting was part of a much larger, though less hopeful work. That was about six months ago when I felt I had to put it aside for a while until I felt the change in myself, could approach these ideas with the new energy that comes from self-forgiveness. Patrick Kavanagh refers to this need for transformation in his beautiful poem “canal bank walk”
For this soul needs to be honoured with a new dress woven
From green and blue things and arguments that cannot be proven.
There came a week or two recently when something registered inside, and the conclusion came quite quickly. It was only a momentary insight but was nevertheless a positive flow of energy. I felt it through the landscape, through the heart and the body. It collected the lost and fragmented into a sanctuary, a temenos, to continue the process of reconciliation.
I think this is where past and future meet but in a place quite unlike the present moment because it is out of time. Here the twin valleys of birth and death amount in the end to rebirth for all, and an agreement between two people and two modes of my thought. The painting is of my body, both what was left of it after a tragedy (and the trace that was left behind in the landscape), but it’s future promise too – the point of view of the redemptive living thought as opposed to its mortal remains, its echo and its shell.
Perhaps the land registered the dance I made through the hills and valleys – a dance of survival, moving through grief and sin, and this is its memory of me, re-charged with a new outlook. It is, too, the rhythm of an angel that came into being from my experience and is now all that I can say for certain is profound and inviolate, true and unassailable. I take hope from it. There is a music to be found after pain, and this is what I see – my answer to grief and sin, and that fragment of it that was heard by the universe.
There was once an epigraph on the painting, now hidden behind the layers, which I put together quickly and unconsciously from the few words I had available at the time. It is still relevant, I think:
“across the body, around these points – arm, neck, shoulder – gathering the land you leave open, casing all markings / together along symbols on this circle remaining / turn under here, take back old pieces and body gathering, to ease and comfort the circle opening / to lengthen the man broken, the pattern corresponding / traced above hills, 21 pieces given, king leave open, solid, fullest, natural, good / off here – bring rain / on this – draw new lines, add casing, turn under him, gather this edge for opening / leave free together through the white centre, the margin falls away, pattern and material for casing, for this.”
Some closeups of the painting:
