Impressions
Impressions of nature:
Southsea Rose Garden was quiet; people speckled Southsea Common like dandelions in a meadow, springing up everywhere. Plumes of smoke rose from disposable barbeques, flimsy flutterings, the city’s version of pheasants scattering from fields. It was the warmest it had been all year, and people sunned themselves like buttercups. I went to the Garden to avoid the crowds and sat under a tree of blossoms, that sprouted like new born kisses, on a bench dedicated to Nick. Cars passed, booming loud music that echoed along the flat grass plains of the common, like skimming stones on the sea. The blue sky against the dusky pink petals and sun-bleached branches was something I wanted to remember more than just in my hazed wishy-washy memory. The camera lens snapped.
Small, tiny, speckled with dust.
Opiate flowers forming from mud.
Pure and white and breathless to touch.
Diadems and jewels of nature’s crust.
They make nothing but air,
inaudible to man.
A noiseless noise
from the very breath
that silences breaths.
I made my way back home from the Garden, the clouds filtering the sun in a darker hue to the blue of just an hour before, like the brief moments before a photograph is fully developed. I looked around. It had been a sunny day, and people had littered the common like daisies in a meadow. But what they had left behind was no spring flower. Litter sprinkled the grass, like rain on a sunny day, but this type of rain doesn’t bring a rainbow. Instead, this type of rain gets swallowed by fish and bird, and gets tied taught around necks of turtle and flippers.
a fish swims
a miracle in each splash of fin
passing plastic moulds of himself
here
there
everywhere
even the voice of God
won’t rid the earth
from this plastic fog
man has made what it has made
we live in the freedom of our tongue
we speak
be gone
but plas –
– tic
can’t just disappear
it doesn’t rot
it doesn’t
care
it grows around fish
lives in the stomachs of turtles
breeding
waiting
thriving
islands of bottles
lifelines of death
each one
here
there
everywhere
Impressions of art:
Sometimes art makes the world seem perfect, its very impression of what the world is makes perfect the imperfection. Plastic vanishes, the sun becomes idolised, and the sea takes on a new meaning.
Sir William Nicholson, Cliffs at Rottingdean, 1910, Southampton City Gallery:
Dark, like a shadow. Blink, and it’s almost gone. So still, a whisper would be heard as a shout. But this is what I feel outside. If I were inside the ink, in the dark on the cliff, I would hear the lapping of the sea, crinkling over the rocks like beads. Sand oozes into a grey sea and fields of green melt into sand. The sky is grey, cloudless and starless. Whether it is night or day or dusk or starlight or dawn, I do not know. This place is not a part of time, nor night, nor day, nor dusk, nor starlight, nor dawn. Nor belonging to any other name.
There is something calming, neonatal, about the lapping of the ocean, it gives you perspective, the peace to think clearly. It puts your mountains in their proper place and into their proper size. There are greater things than me, and the things I face I can use to set me free.
Spencer Gore, Panshanger Park 1908, Southampton City Gallery:
Lined with criss-cross and scored with dashes, a movement beyond oil and canvas. Sparks of light dash the grey, drifting across the page, like the feathers of our minds. Burnt orange and bursts of pink seep the bottom corner, like a biscuit dipped in tea. Grouping shades into two colours is an injustice; I’m condemning it to a world drained of life.
The bark of the tree is purple in the darkening light, and is creased with age, of both cracking oil and the disintegration of time.
The leaves are a canopy of harsher, livelier strokes, the wind tossing them into waves; movements circular and flicking of wrist, careful carelessness that makes life. The river runs with land, air, and water. Where it starts and where it ends, the answer isn’t in the frame.
The greens of the fields undulate with more power than the river. And above the water, branches reach out, like fingers crawling across a page. Donned in moss and sprinkled with leaves, it becomes the sky, till the tree is no more.
It is a painting of all things in all things. The bridge and fence are the clearest lines, like boundaries are important to this piece, with no marks delineating between land and sky and water. But not just that, he gives us a bridge to cross. He wants us to cross. Cross the boundaries of life, art, and writing. To freedom, maybe.
I take in the painting.
Then I sit in it:
Sitting amongst the bluebells,
in the triangular crook of the tree.
Umbrella in hand, and blanket under knee.
The wind goads and shrugs,
but no leaves fall.
Only flowers spring up,
filling the gaps in my toes.
I like it here,
it’s my favourite place to be,
here in the nook of the tree.
See the larks can’t catch me here,
and neither will he.
In the arms of the One who made me.
See I am mostly water, dirt, and air,
I came to be from the same life
as this tree.
We’re practically the same,
you and me.
A bit of breath,
and alive we’ll be.
I like to run through these fields,
like the wind has no name
compared to my liberty.
The lands sway and roll,
but here in this place
I feel still and warm.
Nothing can fail me.
See we don’t imagine life this way,
but this was how it originally lay.
Full of colour
and bursting with life,
that extends beyond the seams of might.
I want to live here,
just you and me.
By the stream,
and in the nook of the tree.
Life cannot contain,
and my eye will never know,
what beauties can lie below,
unless you take me.
My hand in yours,
and yours in mine.
I know my place,
and where I will be.
But until then,
I will fight for this life,
just you and me,
until it becomes we.
*
Art has always been something close to my heart. It has imprinted the pictures behind my sockets when I close my eyes. It has laced the memories of my childhood, of making and painting and drawing. It has even been something I dream about: meeting Monet in the backstreets of France and following him back to his villa to paint together. I never remember what he said, but I like to think it was:
“Here, take a look at this one. This one I painted for you…”
London Gallery:
Quick, soft strokes, like flicking water off your hand, like something from a dream, hazy impressions of life. Even the squared wooden frame can’t still it, can’t suffocate it, can’t squeeze the life from it, and can’t contain it. It lives beyond.
I’m kept in a bubble of life just clinging on, but if I reach out beyond the direct eye of the painting, I can feel stillness. I’m in a cone of wind and life and colour. And if I step away I’ll lose what connects me to this frame of life. Pockets of energy contained in a blank white space. This is what a gallery is, does. Its vibrations, membranes of energy particles, colliding, crashing and amalgamating.
This space, the artful spiritual realm beyond, is the place where feeling comes from. It was there before ink touched paper, and will be there long after the final colour seeps and drips from its strokes. Paint is as alive today as it was yesterday. Tiny mounds of oil-based colour create a life that is breathing. Because it lives alive in you and in me. Life cannot contain life in silence, it lives and breathes vivacity. And when you stray beyond the edges, and colour in the white, you find that living does stem beyond the box of a small frame of life. Neatness isn’t ecology, ecology is beautiful and balanced chaos.
It hung there like time itself couldn’t move it, nor the spinning face of the earth could change it. That’s what paint does, if even for a moment – it stains things. My eyes seeped with colours; blue, green, pink, orange, greys, blacks. Shifting dashes and shapes that were thrown onto the canvas with flicks and lunges of brush. Until you step back and get an impression of nature through the eye of the writer, or painter, or poet. Each equally has the ability to paint colours and impressions of life.
Nature is poetry itself. The words that get hidden in the creased bud of a new leaf, or the howling whisper of the wind. We don’t just experience, we name it with words and labels, holding it hostage in our minds. We give it literature, a gift from man, as a way to comprehend the beauty of what we see.
It hung there, the dark twisting until the blue sky turned to grey. Night has a skill of turning beauty into invisibility. But just because you can’t see it doesn’t make it any less real. The aflame of the unspoken, unseen – I find – is the brightest light of them all.
The pink turned tangerine, seeping into the night sky casting dusk in a hue of pink, reverberating to life. The colours blended the opposites of night and day into one. It breathed me in, owning those few moments of me. And down at the bottom, singed in a scratch of black ink, said the word ‘Monet’. I was seeing a world that was starting to set me free.
Each stroke he paints, is like each word I write, trying to grasp a sense of the world around me, and failing, so I impress. An impression of the real, like taking a crayon to paper and rubbing. Then I try over and over. And over.
Room after room, his paintings filled the wall, hanging like human souls. Hands clicked on white faces, the only way I knew that time was still passing, and that I hadn’t been absorbed into lily-life. Some yawned, children shuffled restlessly on the white floor, painting it with black marks from their soles. But then others stopped for brief moments, and took in the rare spaces of life that shifted beyond canvas on walls. They stopped and stayed in the moment that was created. I spent hours trawling over every stroke, watching the play of every colour cemented in oil. When I got to the last room, I got lost in the circumference, round and round the lilies went. My eyes gleamed, blurring the already impressed depiction of lilies. A canvas so large it covered the entire bend of a wall. I blinked, over and over. Overwhelmed. I stopped, desperate to see for as long as I could before I had to leave, watching the lilies in front of me. Green, in a sea of blue, and lilac, and purple, and pink, and gold. But not just green, hazels and cobalts and maroons. And all the shades in between. He captures the paint pallet of the earth and everything it has to offer.
Impressions of writing:
‘A writer is one upon whom nothing is lost.’ – Henry James
Getting lost is one of my favourite things to do, because it means I’ve then found something. Found the bits I haven’t taken notice of before. But the more we take from the land, the less we see, and the more pieces we miss from what it was supposed to be. Berger has taught me to look, to Hold Everything Dear. That’s the key to discovery, centring yourself on the things around you, beyond yourself; and listening to the things that make you, you, holding them close to you, by snatching them into a photo or typing them into words on a screen.
Have you ever noticed the missingness of places?
How they seem to go missing?
Like they were never there
ever
Like a cloud in a blue sky
forgotten
They say absence makes the heart fonder
But what if you forget entirely?
And if you forget –
did I ever exist?
I was green once.
I’m grey now, but I’m still there
somewhere
somewhere I hope you can see
because you see my leaves
Once where they fell
I grew them for you
because I knew you needed me
and them
and then
Gone
Do I still exist?
Do you know my name?
I was old when you were young
But now I’m gone
I’m gone
and you…
I feel freedom in outside open spaces. Where air has no boundaries, impression runs free, and the light has unlimited access to spaces. A catchment of light is drawing straight lines across my vision, pointing at the pool of green in front of me, as if it’s waiting for Richard Long to come and sculpt his signature, with rock or straw, or plant or tree. Circle or line, this place is open. I wonder if I might, because of course it will only be noticed by me and tree. Maybe deer will catch their feet on it, and plants will grow through it. But it would have meant that once I said something, I did something once. And it made me feel free.
March 2020, Southsea, take a photo, one with a long shutter, this is what you’ll see:
The air was cold and with a harsh bitterness it swiped at my bare neck, like a lion lunging for its prey. My hair was up, this was my first mistake, leaving my neck exposed. My second was that I didn’t have enough layers. I grabbed the edge of my denim jacket, its rough texture rubbing against my cold hands in a way that reminded me of carpet burn. I tugged one side around me, then the other, folding my arms inside, like I was paper and making origami. It’s cold, I looked up, asking the sky why it can’t be warm.
I do the same at night too, like I’m looking for where time went, like the sky will tell me. But what I’m really looking for is the light. So, I search the sky for warmth, like the streaky splattered, rubber-white of cloud will wrap me in a blanket, huddling me close, shielding me from an oncoming winter. Nature’s natural protection. The lullaby of the sky as I get rocked to sleep, condensing then dissipating to rain till I land back on the earth and wake.
one of nature’s greatest heists
is to give and be gone
but in its absence
its impression leaves life