Fringe Benefits
Exploring the Intersection of Observation, Writing and Making
Hello, and welcome.
For me, one of the unexpected delights of the Substack app is the way that it introduces me to other writers and artists. My path through Notes continues to offer new excursions beyond those people that I subscribe to. Last week I followed a link to a post by
about Writing as a Mindfulness Practice. I too find writing valuable - paying attention, thinking - and its overall effect is to ground me in place and time. I particularly liked the idea of 'small stones' that Sophie referred to so I proceeded on to to find out more about her creation. As a consequence, this week I’ve been writing my observations inspired by Satya’s Small Stones. It feels like another way to give regular exercise to the writing muscle; I doubtless have some polishing to do.Friday:
Frost still blooms late in the day. Drops of ice water decorate branch and blade, and glisten in the ever slipping sun. Beauty delays me at every step, chill cold nags me not to tarry. Gatherings of young birch bear a tideline of ice, marking the reach of the sun.
Saturday:
A line of hills muffled in cloud and again peppered by shotgun. Sometimes the blanket is rain falling, sometimes not. I walk the figure of eight. The colours of the day: grey sky, pine green, dusty plum birch, lichen green. Orange puddles sync with fallen beech leaves and cock pheasant.
Sunday:
Wet leaves, bleached pale, drape softly in fluid disarray. Asphodel has lost its sharp colours, yellow and green, but stems and seed heads still puncture the air. There is a strange but beguiling beauty to be found in decay.
Monday:
Mild and mizzle. Solo ballerinas have replaced the ensemble of falling leaves. Birds sing brightly. A red squirrel plays hide and seek. Soft steps squelch. A kind invitation arrives.
Tuesday:
Red sphagnum, scarlet and orange sedge. Irregular pools with floating leaves, saturated moss and fringing blades turn bluish as the sky slips towards evening. Linearity and fringing vegetation assert themselves as I head home.
Linearity and fringing vegetation assert themselves as I head home. I’m picking up on the thread of thought in last week’s Shedding Time.
As far as the mixed media goes, I need to do more. Have several pieces on the go at once, so no one is precious. I need to continue to experiment and - importantly - get things wrong. Risk and failure are better teachers than perfection or serendipitous success.
I'm collecting clues from my pools: linear, variable, fringed with detail and detritus. Grass, sedge, twig punctuated by leaf, lichen and the occasional dead insect. The water's softness central; the complexity in its envelope.
Colours from nature's palette shift with the season. Their simplicity offers room to breathe, to rest. I can add selective detail around the edge, top or bottom or both, hinting at context. It occurs to me that this is also the way that I’ve been looking at the landscape.
Marks beneath can be built up, but guide the flow of and around image. A colour palette from nature, this place. Things glimpsed below offer a flipside to the mirror reflecting from above.
Collected, made, drawn, collated over a period of time. I’m looking for something beyond Control + Print, and to blur the lines between photography and other media.
Local. Seasonal. Selective. Unique
Small works might major on complexity, an encouragement to look closely? Or be rich in colour - nature’s intensity in small things, treasured gemstones. Something precious from this place.
Larger works could offer space to breathe, to relax. Tranquil. Room to move around, to explore. Perhaps incorporating texture? Ambiguous. With hidden depths. That inadvertent pairing of words crops up again.
I think about the images I have been drawn to make this week, away from the water. Is place taking over? The x and y of it. Or are they my own yin and yang? I see the landscape through a lens of water. A re-corrected view?
Can I reference and grow this train of thought, this stream of neurons, drawing on photos from my two years here and work in progress? Below is a piece I’ve been developing over the last month. Short periods of activity with longer pauses. Too drawn out really, and just the one underway, but there hasn’t been opportunity for more. It’s been slowly added to. It layers monotype printing with photographic print, building up layers of paper, and is affixed to a cradled wood panel, waiting for its trim. The colour palette comes from damp Scots Pine and lichen; a small pool below the tree on a snowy day at the start of this year.
You can see the allusion (below) although it was an unconscious one:
I decided to take my mental puzzle out for a walk. A morning run through my Lightroom catalogue had found some evidence to support my theory but equally I could have gathered as many witnesses in support of the opposing position - detail in the middle, soft round the edges (aka the way we see).
I held myself up in the wood, squinting at sedges colouring brightly for the winter. By the time I reached the pools, I was less clear about my proposition. The pools had the peripheral detail but were too reflective of and busy with the trees above.
The clarity of thought came as I was walking back. Past the again stuttering line of pools. From the cut through onto the drive. Alongside the flowing ditch fringed with rushes and dead nettle stems. My way edged by grass and more rushes. Through the wood. Tracks, paths, deer runs. Not always straight but frequently linear. My eyes scanning the vegetation to each side, glancing over the surface of the route itself, familiar from being walked many times. I wrote in Hidden Depths about this linearity and the possibility of it feeding into output. I realise that my present path towards mixed media compositions comes from this act of walking, seeing and absorbing. The arrangement is as much in my perception of place and travelling through it as it is in my photographic interpretations of water.
I’m not there yet, but maybe I’m moving forward.
And as for Wednesday? A Winnie-the-Pooh blustery day, the leaves airborne again. Mild temperatures beget window cleaning and raking caked clusters of leaves off the lawn. FLOW writing.
Thank you for reading FLOW. If you’ve enjoyed this and it sparks something for you, please leave a comment, or pass it onto a friend. Your company and conversation is greatly valued.
If you’re new here and you’d like to catch up with recent publications on Substack you’ll find them on my home page.
My photography and mixed media art live here.
Until next week,
Love all you've shared here and am now subscribed to both Satya and Sophie <3
What BEAUTIFUL images and words. Worth lingering with. So happy that you were inspired by the concept of small stones. I found Sophie here because she mentioned me, and I have been very happy to have found her. And now I've found you too 😊