There’s a lake in the southwest of Berlin, just on the outskirts of the city called the Teufelssee, or the Devil’s Lake. I don’t know why it’s called that, it’s a lovely spot in the Grunewald forest, surrounded by grassy slopes and trees. The lake itself is quite deep, and popular for swimming. My favourite time to go is early evening, when the light is rich and golden and there are fewer people; swimming then can be quite magical.
I was there a couple of days ago and although it was bright sunshine when I arrived, about an hour later a sudden thunderstorm blew across and it started to rain. I sheltered under the alder trees the grow around the edge of the lake and sat out the shower in the company of this heron. The air was very warm and the rain was soft and warm too, there were even people who kept swimming during the shower, which was probably a very nice thing to do.
It’s a delightful place to be, whatever the weather 🙂
The Undiscovered, acrylic on panel, 50 x 50 cm, 2020
Life has become a whole lot smaller over the last few months so I’m really looking forward to being able to travel further afield again later this year. Even though we’ve been fortunate in Berlin, where the lockdown has been fairly relaxed, I miss the stimulation of exploring new places and making new discoveries.
But I have lots of memories and lots of photos for source material to work on at the moment. This painting is based on a  walk I took a couple of years ago when I was living in Whitstable. You can walk out of the town and follow the path of an old railway line through wooded hills, all the way to Canterbury.
It was late summer and I remember one particular path was overhung with long trails of climbing plants that gave it a strange atmosphere. The world is feeling very fractured and strained at the moment, which might explain the ambiguous nature of the painting. I notice I’ve obscured any kind of view to the distance, so you don’t know where you’d end up if you pushed past that old tree; it could be somewhere sunny and delightful, or it could be a witch’s cottage!
I suppose i’ve always been quite a narrative artist; I do like a story! So last week, when I was thinking about my response to a regular online creative challenge that i’m involved with, I ended up writing and recording a story using my voice rather than depicting the narrative visually. This is the great thing about the lockdown challenges that have emerged over recent months; there’s no pressure to do anything in particular and you can use them as a vehicle to try things out, things that don’t necessarily fit into your usual oeuvre.
I’ve never recorded my voice, I don’t think. So with this recording, I kept things informal, quite chatty; it’s not a polished audiobook type recording! But I enjoyed the process. Writing, then trying a recording, then realising the writing needed to be quite different if it was a designed to be spoken, refining and re-recording. In the end, the piece was recorded in one take, using my iPad and a voice recorder app.
It’s a bit strange hearing my recorded voice, it sounds different to how my voice sounds in my head when I speak. But it’s been an interesting exercise, and now, with the story down on paper, I can respond to the words with images, and so that might prompt more stories, and so on.
So I thought about this particular story after the last prompt for the Kick About challenge appeared (follow the link to the final post collating all the responses here). The Kick About is hosted by Phil Gomm on his wonderful blog, Red’s Kingdom . It was a painting by Alice Neel, called Symbols (Doll And Apples). The painting had a strange, sad quality to it, with references to childhood and parenthood. It prompted me to think about my own childhood, and a story sprung to mind. It’s a story that happens when I was 9 or ten, when we lived in a rather dreary village in Lincolnshire, very much like the one in the photo at the top of this post….
Hedgecrows 