The Open Studio
Usually the journey by car flattens expectation, and there’s that all-preoccupying conversation, so one only takes in the view where there’s a halt at a traffic light or at the occasional junction. A pattern on a wall, a damaged sign, a curtained window. Waiting, one looks and sometimes remembers, and what one sees later reappears in dreams or moments of disordered contemplation. A train journey is another matter: you sit and look, and when it is a trip rarely made, you put the book away and gaze beyond the ***** windows to a living landscape that scrolls past the frame of view. When you arrive there’s inevitably a walk: today through a town’s industrial hinterland, its pastness where former mill buildings have tactfully changed their use to become creative places, peopled with aspiration and strange activity. Walking reveals the despair of forlorn roadside business falling back into alleys ending in neglected and empty buildings, so much *******, silences of waste and decay.
But here’s the space, there’s a sign on a board outside, OPEN STUDIO TODAY. Entering inside it is quiet and cold, the door remaining open to let in the December air and the hoped-for visitors. But it’s bright and light: a welcoming presence of work and people and coffee and cake. And here’s the studio, a narrow space between make-shift walls where the artist works, where the work awaits, laid out on the surfaces of desks and tables, on shelves and walls, specimens of making; ‘stuff’, the soon-to-be, the collected, the in-progress-perhaps, the experimental.
Good, a heater blows noisily onto cold fingers. In the turbulent air pieces tremble slightly from their hangings on the walls. They are placed at a good height, a ‘good to be close to examine the detail’ height, the constructed, the made, the woven, the stitched, the printed, all assembled by the actions of those quiet, intent, those steady hands. There, a poem on a wall next to the window. Here, photographs of places unlabelled, unrecognised, but undoubtedly significant as a guide to the memory. Look, a dead badger lying in a road.
Next to the studio, a gallery space. Two walls covered with framed prints, well lit, a body of work captured behind glass, in limbo, waiting patiently for the attentive eye to sort the detail, that touch of the object on paper, that mark found and brought out of time and place. Perhaps these ‘things’, some known, some mysteriously foreign adrift from their natural context, have been collected by that bent form on a windswept beach, by the hand reaching out for the gift in the gutter, struck by the foot on the track, unhidden in the grass by the riverside, what we might pass as without significance and beyond attention. This artist gives even the un-namable a new life, a collected-together form.
Moving closer let the eye enter the artist’s world of form and texture - and colour? There is a patina certainly, colour’s distant echo, what is seen on the edges, a left-behindness, more than any subtlety of language knows how to express, beyond comfortable descriptions, not excitable, where the spirit is damped down and is restful to the mind, a constancy of background, like a capturing of a cloud but bulging full of hints and suggestions, where texture is everywhere, nature’s rich patterns colliding with things once invented and made, used once, once used left and changed, thrown away, to be brought before the selecting eye and the possibility of form with meaning its patient partner.
J.M.W.Turner writes on poetry and painting
Poetry having a more extensive power
Than our poor art, exerts its influence
Over all our passions; anxiety for our future
Reckoned the most persistent disposition.
Poetry raises our curiosity,
Engages the mind by degrees
To take an interest in the event,
And keeping that event suspended,
Overturns all we might expect.
The painter’s art is more confined,
Has nothing to equate with the poet’s power.
What is done by painting must be done at once,
And at one blow our curiosity receives
All the satisfaction it can know.
The painter can be novel, various and contrast,
Such is our pleasure and delight when put in motion.
Art, therefore, administers only to those wants,
And only to desires that exercise the mind.
Twilight
A day aside and diaried into busy lives
So to a morning walk to Turner’s View
Above the River Wharfe and Farnley Hall
Where it is said the inspiration came
For his famous oil of Hannibal,
with elephants and storm-glad Alps.
On to lunch where six around a table
Souped with salad before we homed
Mid afternoon the day in decline
We were done with words so watched
The edge-timed light flow between our hands.
Inevitably we climbed the stairs to lie
In twilight’s path beneath the skylight’s
Square a sliver-moon we couldn’t see
Gracing the remaining daylight hour
Marbled with shadows our collected
Curves and planes lay as sculptures
In the approaching dimity and dark
Each experimental stroke of touch
Holding us dumb to speech and thought
As night’s soft blanket covered us entire
Northcliffe Woods
Oh nest in the sky, empty of leaves,
Those tangled branches
Reaching out from twisted trunks
Into the sullen clouds above, when
Suddenly a crow -
‘Corvidae’, she said -
And simultaneously pulled
a hank of ivy from a nearby tree.
Hedera Helix I thought
But did not say, instead
I whispered to myself
Those ancient names I knew.
Bindwood, Lovestone
(For the way it clings
To bricks but ravages walls),
A vine with a mind of its own. But
She, in a different frame that day,
Apart, adrift and far away
From our usual walk and talk,
Fixed her gaze on the woodland floor,
Whilst skyward I sought again that
Corvid high in the branches web
Black beyond black beyond black
Against the pale white canopy above.
Franco*
Blow She Still
Ed insieme bussarono
Sweet Soft Frain
Cloche Lem Small
Spiri About Sezioni
Portrait Eco Agar
Le ruisseau sur l’escalier
Etwas ruhiger im Ausdruck
Jeux pour deux
For Grilly Fili Argor
Atem L’ultima sera
Omar Flag Ave
The Heart’s Eye*
play joy touch
code panel macro
refraction process solo
quick-change constrained
hiatus sonority colour
energy post-serial scintillating
aleatoric reuse transformation
A lonely child who imagined music
on sunday walks, he would talk about
how one lives with music as someone
would talk about how one might live
with illness or a handicap. He said,
‘You cannot write your life story in
music because words express the self
best whereas music expresses something
quite beyond words’.
This is collection of new and previous verse and prose gathered together as a gift for Christmas 2014 and New Year 2015. Each poem was accompanied by a photograph or painting. Sadly the wonderful Hello Poetry has yet to allow such pairings. The poem constructed from the words of J.M.W.Turner makes a good case I think for bringing image and word together - at least occasionally.