Waterside, acrylic on canvas board, 40 x 40 cm, 2021
It’s STILL cold here in Berlin this week, not at all like last Spring which started in March with warm sunshine that lasted right into October. So my painting has been mostly about reminding myself of that thing called summer.
This image is a painting of a lovely place I visited at the end of last summer about an hour or so north east of Berlin in a region called Uckermark. I stayed in a guest house there with three other artist friends and we were all inspired by the place. At the bottom of the garden was this stream and lush green path. I’d walk there every evening when the bats were flitting and the light was like melting vanilla ice cream. We all hope to go back there again this year, it was a place that really touched us.
In other news I had my second lockdown birthday earlier in the week. What passes for excitement these days is rather different from pre-Covid times but I had a lovely day nonetheless.
We had a walk round Victoria Park, Berlin’s highest spot, at a dizzying 66 metres! If anything remotely resembles a hill here they call it a Berg, or mountain, bless!
I had lots of lovely birthday messages, and I got this amazing cast iron tea pot from Jan, I’m totally in love with it. I played about with it photographing it before I eventually got round to making some tea.
And finally, the cherry on the top of a thoroughly exciting week was getting my first jab – woo hoo!
October – Elhampark Woods, acrylic on canvas board, 30 x 60 cm, 2021
Last autumn I was staying with friends in the UK just as the second lockdown was introduced. The weather was lovely so we decided to have a day out before the new restrictions started.
Our first port of call was Elhampark Woods. In the low, slanting light of late autumn the trees were glowing and the leaves aflame; it was a quite unremarkable stretch of woodland but everything was looking magical in that sunlight. It was very still, and the sky reflected in the water of a woodland pool looked like a mirror; endless and bottomless, like Cocteau’s mirror-portal to the underworld in Orpheus.
The landscape in winter can be great to draw and paint; bare branches and stems create all kinds of interesting shapes and patterns – but I am ready for the froth of spring again and everything becoming softer.
I wrote recently about how much I enjoyed Tolkien’s copious and varied use of the word ‘queer’ in The Lord of the Rings.
‘But the forest is queer’, said Merry Brandybuck in Chapter 5. He was talking about The Old Forest, just over the border of The Shire to the East. ‘Everything in it is very much more alive, more aware of what is going on, so to speak’. The forest is different to the ordinary world, a mysterious place.
Whilst Tolkien’s use of the word queer is clearly more about describing strangeness or uncanniness than anything else, it’s difficult to read it as a gay man and not muse on the contemporary meanings as well. For me, there’s common ground between both readings of the word; queer can be both curious and, well, queer. The chapter about the Old Forest is a good example. It is magical, and there are forces both good and bad at work in its ancient tangle of roots and branches. And it is also a place I project all kinds of fantasies onto, fantasies of escape, of finding likeminded spirits, of difference and of feeling more at home than in the mundane world.
Whilst gay men have historically coalesced into communities in the big cities (that may well be changing with the arrival of the internet and social media) there is something in wild spaces that also draws them, and all other creates who might not feel they quite fit into mainstream society. It brings to mind Derek Jarman’s writing in his book Modern Nature, where he recalls summer nights up on Hampstead Health, walking through the woodland and finding men gathered in a timeless tableaux round a fire. As well as the bars and clubs of central London, men also went up to the woods, to meet, to not be alone, to make friends, flirt, have sex, fall in love, have a laugh and a drink together or just to enjoy the trees in the moonlight.
Another example is Luke Tuner’s book Out of the Woods. Throughout the book he explores his relationship to Epping Forest during the turbulent time when he was coming to terms with his sexuality. The forest is neither particularly welcoming nor malign, it is a place that is other, unworldly, a place to get lost in and find oneself, a queer sort of place.
Personally, I never really felt at home on the ‘scene’ as it’s known, where I felt just as much a fish out of water as anywhere else, but I DID feel at home out in the woods, or up in the hills, the wild spaces where the skewed values of human civilisation held no sway. These are places where the things that the ignorant and bigoted might use to separate and divide people have no currency at all – no wonder so many feel a sense of peace when then spend time in a wood.
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I painted this glade which I photographed last summer. I liked that late afternoon light falling across the grasses and lighting up the trees in the distance, beckoning one to go further and explore. Now the weather is turning lovely once more, it’s high time to get out into the woods and experience that otherness again. I love how, when you step over the threshold of a wood or even just a small copse, things feel difference instantaneously. Sounds are muffled, the world outside the trees feels cut off, the air feels changed and your senses sharpened. It’s queer, how different it is, but in a good way.
The Green Fuse, acrylic on paper, 14 x 22 cm, 2021
What a perfect phrase to express the life force that pours through the veins of all living things. The title of this post was conjured by Dylan Thomas, of course, in his poem The Force that Through the Green FuseDrives the Flower. His words were on my mind today as I cycled up to the studio with sparkling spring sunshine bouncing around the streets and glowing on the tips of plants and trees growing by the roadside.
I arrived in the studio at the start of a new week with a feeling that I wanted to work in colour again, and in particular, green. Still very small scale monoprints, but adding some spring and summer colour to the mix now.
Looking at the weather forecast for the next ten days or so, I can see that the green fuse is about to go off with a bang, big time. It’s very welcome. Whilst Germany is mulling over tightening Covid restrictions, i’m glad that the growing things around us are getting on with it regardless, they cheer me up!
Lighthouse Keepers, mixed media on paper, collaged onto panel, 25 x 50 cm, 2021
I’ve not yet seen Robert Eggars’ film The Lighthouse but I’ve heard good things and it’s on my list. I think my image, here may be a bit more of a romantic vision of a couple of lighthouse keepers than than the one in the film, which, from what I gather, is pungent with shit and spunk and stink.
I feel a slight pang of wistfulness about the automation of these structures ( I think the last lighthouse keepers left in in the late 1990s) but at least people don’t have to live those lonely, tough and sometimes dangerous lives any more.
I think the lighthouse in my picture has probably been decommissioned and is now run as a boutique holiday retreat. The couple walking up the path are Harry and Theo, who work in IT, and have booked the lighthouse for a groovy getaway. Harry is just whipping out his phone to take a picture of that very Instagramable full moon. They’re going to have some locally sourced seafood for dinner tonight and then sit down to watch The Lighthouse…
‘But the Forest is queer’, or so said Merry Brandybuck in Chapter 6 of Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. He was telling Frodo and his friends about the strange and rather forbidding woodland that faced them as they passed out of The Shire on their journey east to Rivendell.
One of the many, many things I love about The Lord of the Rings is Tolkien’s use of the word queer. Firstly, he uses it SO often; 9 times in the first chapter alone! He finds endlessly different ways to apply the word, to people, places, feelings, situations – pretty much anything and everything can be queer in the LOTR universe. It is such a rich and varied use of a single word.
As a gay man, ‘queer’ is a word that I’ve had a particular connection to for most of my adult life, but it is Tolkien’s liberal sprinkling of it all over his great work that is probably my favourite use of it in literature. Again and again ‘queer’ is used to describe something out of the ordinary or not easily explained. The meaning of the word itself cannot be precisely pinned down and hence it remains beautifully nuanced throughout the book, no matter how many times it appears. For example, when Merry is describing the Old Forest to his friends he tells them how the paths through the wood seem to ‘shift and change from time to time in a queer fashion’. In another example, when Frodo first meets Strider at The Prancing Pony, he doesn’t take kindly to the Ranger at first. Strider doesn’t blame him; Well, I have a rather rascally look, have I not? said Strider with curl of lip and a queer gleam in his eye.’
Some uses of the word may make us smile today, if not snigger, as Farmer Maggot says goodbye to Frodo and friends and declares ‘it’s been a queer day and no mistake’. There is also writing to delight anybody who has ever felt a bit ‘other’, such as in Chapter 1, when the Gaffer is standing up for the Baggins’s during a discussion in the local pub; ‘If that’s being queer, then we could do with a bit more queerness in these parts’ – here here Mr. Gamgee! And one my favourite lines, when Merry tells the gang ‘We don’t want to go that way! The Withywindle valley is said to be the queerest part of the whole wood – the centre from which all the queerness comes, as it were’. It sounds like my kind of place.
LOTR was written between about 1937 and 1949 and ‘queer’ certainly had various meanings by then. It was already in use as a term to describe an aspect of gay subculture, namely gay men who self-identified as more conventionally ‘masculine’. But it became a much more pejorative word later in the 20th century until it was reclaimed in the 1980s by activists who sought to challenge homophobia and prejudice against people with HIV and AIDS. It was also used by the more radical end of the LGBT community spectrum to set themselves apart from the ‘gay’ movement which they felt was too cosied up to the liberal conservative mainstream.
Today, queer is everywhere, it’s meaning having broadened to include an ever-wider group of minority identities. Perhaps the meaning has evolved into something a little closer to the way Tolkien used it in his writing; unusual and hard to pin down.
I don’t describe myself as ‘queer’ mainly because I’ve never felt entirely comfortable being part of a group or a particular category. I’ve always hated those diversity questionnaires you fill in when you apply for a job where you have to tick a box to describe yourself. I prefer to be a bit more free-floating, on the margins with one foot in and one foot out as it were (it’s typically me that I choose to live life across two countries, Germany and the UK), but maybe that just makes me even more queer!
A Sudden Spring, mixed media collage on paper, 25 x 32 cm, 2021
It’s been no surprise to hear that so many people have taken up birdwatching during the lockdowns and the Covid restrictions. I guess we’re even more in awe of their ability to fly, and rather envious of it too, as we’re stuck in out little patch, with little prospect of flitting anywhere for a while.
Rain Clearing, Moonrise, acrylic on paper, collaged onto panel, 40 x 50 cm, 2021
Even if you’re locked down in a city, living in a flat, like I do, you can still enjoy seeing these wonderful creatures. Flying, coming and going with the seasons, nesting, raising young, feeding, fighting, getting on with their lives, they help keep us in contact with the natural world we’re a part of, even if we’re not able to engage with it very much at the moment. But from my balcony, in the middle of the city, i’ve seen an amazing variety of birds flying by or in the trees outside our home; woodpeckers, nuthatches, jays, jackdaws, gyre falcons, herons, tits and finches.
Now I’m starting to hear more birdsong too, and I realise how much I’ve missed it and what a wonderful, evocative sound it is.
We’ve had a particularly cold winter here but it’s changed, almost overnight, into a particularly warm spring. This is probably not good news, climate-wise, but it does lift the spirits 🙂
Spellbound, acrylic on paper, collaged onto panel, 40 x 40 cm, 2021
After several days of snow and bitterly cold temperatures the sky cleared today and turned a deep, clear blue. Everything sparkled and the streets were looking like a Christmas card. So, to keep in tune with the seasons, I’m making more winter-themed work at the moment, including this scene with a barn owl flying over a frosty landscape.
The cold here in Berlin has been intense, but, thankfully, our flat is toasty and we’re cosy indoors. I wish we had an open fire though, that would make the snug feeling perfect, that and maybe listening to the shipping forecast whilst sipping a cup of hot chocolate – there’s nothing so cosy as being indoors under a blanket listening to news of a howling gale somewhere else.
I’ve made images with barn owls before, I find them so awe-inspiring, I never tire of trying to paint them. Whenever I return to Sleaford, the town where I grew up, I take a walk out of town along the river at sunset and I often see a barn owl flying along the river in exactly the same place each time. It always stops me in my tracks and I’m utterly spellbound. I don’t know anybody who reacts differently when they see one of these birds, they are such a magical sight.
I’m not surprised that so much folklore has grown up around barn owls, they are so arresting. Most of the associations are rather doom-laden though; foretelling a death etc, and it was a custom to nail a barn owl to a door to ward off lightening strikes and other evils. I’m glad they don’t do that any more; their habitats are under constant threat and they’ve been struggling in places so they need all the help they can get. Funnily enough, when i see one, they always make me think of my Dad, who passed away a few years ago, perhaps because he was the person who first took me birdwatching when I was a child. I always want to turn to him and say, ‘wow. Dad, did you see that?!’
There are few sights that make me catch my breath like seeing the ghostly shape of a barn owl flying at dusk, it’s just marvellous.
Winter can wear such dramatically different faces from one day to the next, with moods ranging from deepest gloom through to bright and cheerful; I know which I prefer!
As we’ve not been able to see groups of family and friends in the way we’re used to over Christmas, we’ve been out for a few walks by ourselves. Christmas day here in Berlin was utterly dreary; cold, grey and wet, the light itself seemed brown and grimy. We dragged ourselves out, to ward off a lethargy that seemed, in part, brought on by the grey skies. There was nothing remotely Christmassy about the dim, empty streets, everything seemed to be shut down completely. We ended up at a park in the north west of the city we hadn’t been to before called Jungfernheide, or the ‘Virgin’s Heath’. As we arrived, a smattering of sleet came down, cranking up the drear factor even further. The light, which had never really got going, went early and we found ourselves at the edge of a dark lake, fringed with pale, dead rushes, which hissed gently in the breeze. It was all very hushed and melancholy, it felt like absolute midwinter.
But today, the mood couldn’t have been more different as the sun came up in a crystalline clear blue sky and everything glowed in a myriad of rich colours. I grabbed the bike and got out into the Grunewald forest, on the southwest edge of the city.
The frost was hanging on in the sheltered spots and every blade of grass and seedhead was dusted with gleaming ice crystals. It was a magical winter wonderland, as far from the deep gloom of a few days ago as could be imagined. I don’t think the clear frosty weather will last long so i’m sure i’ll be taking dark, moody photos again soon!
Rivière de Sorède, acrylic on panel, 50 x 50cm, 2020
We’re having a heck of a heatwave here at the moment and our main relief is to get out to one of the lakes in and around Berlin and have a swim. So this week I’ve been painting images of cool woodland streams, bubbling over smooth stones in dappled shade; it’s what I’m craving right now!
This image is not local, though, but set in France; the river Sorède, that runs through a little valley with the wonderful name of Valley of the Tortoises, near the Spanish border. The water in these rivers runs off the foothills of the Pyranees and can be surprisingly fresh, but that would be very welcome right now! We’ve been on holiday to this region several times and it’s always delightful.
Oh, the other thing that brings relief in the heat of course is ice cream, and i’m eating gallons of it at the moment 🙂
Hedgecrows 