Amaryllis Calendar

   Some days I feel as though I have swallowed the sun. The gulls laugh and caper just beyond. Two magpies in a tree sit chattering in their wooden voices, surrounded by the fat buds of arrested spring. There is a funny sort of unattached optimism blowing about on these days of gales and hissing rain. Ravens and hooded crows rush by carrying sticks in their mouths.

It is cold by the window today. My copper plate, the fifth and last plate, is warming itself by the halogen lamp as I type this. The radiator hums, the washing machine clicks away in the other room, and outside men in fluorescent coats are cutting the grass beyond the stone walls for the first time this year and roaring about with their leaf-blowing machines as bare branches sway in the big winds high above them.

Only the gull calls cut through everything.

Comme deux gouttes d'eau

   A few days ago when I pulled this print and tucked it away under weights to flatten it, I thought I would wait for a sunny day to photograph it before making a post.  But now the weather forecast is saying to expect maybe a month more of leaden skies and snowflakes.  The heating is broken and I am shut in at the kitchen table where the room is oven-warmed as cookies have been baked and tea has been brewed.  So hello, it has been a while!

   Continuing with the series of prints on the theme of 'double', this newest print is 20 x 30cm, and once again is made in a technique that involves building up tones by scratching many dashes, dots, and lines into various coats of hard ground.

   In the central area of the image are two women, dressed almost alike, and locked into the process of dressing themselves, transforming themselves.  Women sit in the gloom watching the construction of elaborate and ridiculous fashions. A doubling is taking place and the air is thick with measuring gazes.

   While I don't like to saddle an image with interpretation, and though I often feel like the more I write about something I've made the farther away I get from what I really want to say, I know people often like to have some starting point for looking at a print or a painting.  So, I'll give you one of mine. When I started drawing out the early sketches for this print, one thought was of the sort of claustrophobic femininity that encourages women, especially but not exclusively younger women, to imitate one another directly or bow to pressure to follow larger, societal patterns of behaviour.  I thought about bizarre and stressful close friendships.

   I am sure that many people can relate to this sort of oppressive cultural experience.  Beyond the feminine articulations of this matter, I often wonder to just what extent we are all doubles of the culture that we are formed by.

   The title of this print comes from the French idiom "se ressembler comme deux gouttes d'eau".  In English this would literally translate as "to resemble one another like two drops of water", a way of expressing a likeness, usually a physical one, but possibly more than that.

   Anyway, hopefully I'll have another plate to share with you soon.  Sorry for being a bit absent from online life recently, I've been staying at home a lot and throwing every spare moment into the copperplates, only looking in (but not commenting) on others' posts when I'm taking breaks, feeling like the world is passing me by a little.  I hope your March has been, and continues to be wonderful!

Trapped Light

 
So many days of windowsill living, bent-double-over-a-desk living.  There are moments when even the indoor world of wall papers, doorknobs, empty cups and saucers is afflicted with longing.  There is a palpable, though inert, stress in these rooms, an inanimate longing to press up against the windowpane.  It happens sometimes as the sunset rushes heedlessly through the house, trailing a pink glow in its wake, dripping crimson across the table and the floor.  Other times the feeling comes as the harsh light of morning pushes outlines of flowers up against the curtain, a slow film projected to the dim and cloistered room.  A plant suffering a terrible thirst is finally watered, and it throws its leafy stalks upwards hastily, forgetting for a short while the visibility of motion.

Pas de deux

   Last week, after much dotting and dashing, came a magic moment.  After the strain of turning the press wheels, the pleasure of lifting the heavy felt printing blankets, and the peeling back of the thick, damp cotton paper from the copper plate, there appeared a finished print.  Etching, unlike painting or drawing, contains a singular moment of wonder in its process: after weeks of building line on line, and gazing past the glare of the copperplate to search for signs of progress, one moment at a press delivers a finished piece, only hinted at before.  (Of course, this does not often happen the first time a plate goes through the press; usually, there are tests and revisions to be made.)

In this etching, which is the second in what will be a series of five etchings on a theme of "double" (the first in the series is here), a twosome passes heedlessly over a sleeping landscape wearing clothes stitched with roses.

The title, Pas de deux (literally steps of two), of course refers to dance and works well with the movement implied, but I had originally passed this over and thought to call this "Le couple".  I thought it was important to have a title which clearly suggested making one thing from two; a word for 1+1=1.  But it was a boring title.  And as I thought about it the obvious hit me, and I realized that "pas de deux" could also translate to "not of two".

Perhaps I shouldn't mention it, but the germ for this idea came from a conversation with my husband in a pub a long time ago.  He or I said something about not really enjoying "being in a bar alone", forgetting that by being together, we were quite evidently not alone.  But of course, there we were, ostensibly no different from a couple getting to know each other a little ways away.  Perhaps because of the long time we've known each other, perhaps because of moving to places where we've known no one, or because we just talk too much, sometimes, sometimes, I feel like a four-armed, four-footed thing.

This print took a lot longer than I'd expected, but happily it is because I started working on the other prints before completing it.  So hopefully there will not be such a big gap between the second, third, fourth, and fifth prints as there was between the first and second!

Indoor Flowers

   This place is heavy with hyacinth scent; the days are stretching; sometimes the sun even shines a little.  On Saturday it was Chandeleur and so we held our coins and flipped our crêpes, to see if we could win ourselves a bit of fortune by following the odd old customs that coax magic from the calendar.  But the extra light and smell of spring flowers that are scattered about the windowsills and tables here are maybe magic enough. This time of year feels so alive.
  

   The other day I was quite surprised, though perhaps wrongly so, when I came across the above image, a manuscript illumination, from Splendor Solis.  It is a depiction of the alchemical symbol of the hermaphrodite, which stands for the union of opposites.  Here it brings forth a disk symbolizing the four elements, and an egg, which contains the fifth element of aether or quintessence.  In it I recognized quite a lot of similarities to the armoured, haloed and winged maquette that I made last year for Clive Hicks-Jenkins' delightful maquette show.

   My fascination with this striking old alchemical depiction, so strange and familiar at the same time, was then tempered somewhat by another discovery that also verged on this old idea as well.  I coincidentally began to read about the poignant art and personal history of Forrest Bess who pursued the ideal of the hermaphrodite in his life and art to quite an extreme and rather heartbreaking end.  Why these strange intersections of art and alchemy should appear to me at once is difficult to imagine.  It will seem even stranger, I am sure, in a short while when the print that I have been working on, that has been forever underway it seems, finally comes to light.    

Put Time Into It

   Outside snowflakes are whirling and the wind is rattling the window panes.  Inside, bent low, I am watching other flurries.  Dashes on a copperplate, days of lines creeping forward with the hands of the clock.  From time to time, looking over my shoulder on days like this and seeing how much remains to be done, my husband asks "why do you do this to yourself?".  Something to think about... and there is time to think about it.  There is time also to think of nothing, monk-like, in my little cell.

   But, let me consider it here.
   It's true that I could add in tonal values in other, faster and smoother ways, and sometimes, in other etchings I do that.  But tones built with line have a special charm.  The whole, finished artwork stands as much on display as the individual particles and mechanics of its construction.  In the best old engravings and etchings, plain and simple line is alchemized into the softness of silk or velvet, the rough and gnarled bark of a tree, the smoothness of a leaf, softness of a child's face, or the hard edge of a table.  It can even become the sky.  I have always been especially fond of etchings and engravings for this very reason.

   And, when I finally sit up with sore ribs and spine, more than I feel that discomfort, I feel satisfaction.  Rendering these seconds into a glowing coppery light (which photographs can't do justice to) is sometimes tedious, but often it is almost hypnotic.  I have read that incense is or was used by Buddhist monks in Asia as a sort of hourglass during periods of prayer and meditation.  These dashes and dots do something of the same, I suppose, and at the end, the seconds of creation are written out for the future "readers" of this strange Morse code I write in.

   Not that I claim the greatness of priests or master engravers for myself, of course.  Anyway, there is something still greater that compels me to spend my time in this way: it is necessary.  Building the image in this way is the only possible method to bring the image I hold in me into the world.

Lines and Space

   The early days of January have a lovely sort of stillness: candle-lit breakfasts of bread swirled-through with thick lines of poppy seed and candied citrus fruit before work on dark mornings; star-gazing in empty back lanes on the walk home from a friend's house; grey mornings curled up in heavy woolen blankets; misty baths where the hottest boiled water meets cold air from an open window; the sky delicately painting a lilac afternoon sunset over the graves beside work.  Everything seems calm and open, and as if any time now, with a bit of concentration, it might be possible to line up all the variables here into some sort of balanced equation.

Is that maybe just the way of things in January?

 

   On the darkest days of the old year, in hurricane winds and lashing rains we took a little train trip, not far away.  From the photos taken there, you'd hardly know we left the river's edge.  We came back with a camera full of raindrop-blurred photos of ropes and rigging, boats and bridges.  

   The other night I was thinking back on a man who I met once, who for a few weeks was a neighbour of sorts, staying in a tent not far from where I had pitched my own tent.  One night, by a fireside, he was ranting angrily about someone.  Finally with great spite he uttered the last, worst condemnation he could think of: "she just wants to be comfortable".  I think about those words from time to time, because it seems that more often they would be said in a softer, more excusing way, as an invitation to understanding even.

   And of course, everything is a question of degree.  What is being sacrificed for the sake of comfort?  How great is the discomfort? But generally, when I consider the two sides of things, I think his position the better one.

   It is not that I am after some sort of noble suffering, but that I am afraid of what comes from having too much of a good thing.  I worry about life turning into a pleasant suffocation, about opportunities passed over in favour of sleeping late.

   And so we wandered below the deck of the handsome ship that carried Scott and Shackleton to Antarctica, peeked into the tiny wooden cabins of officers, stood around in the lonesome cargo holds.  We looked up at the crow's nest and thought of the man who lost his life by falling from it as his ship sailed away from New Zealand.

   And then we rode home, past flooded towns, to dream of adventures.  These calm, still days and long, clear nights have a way of nurturing a feeling of longing for travel and vagabonding.