When blue January ignites creative play

Ink and imagination: finding new ways to embrace nature in midwinter

Greetings from the moss. Winter has returned, bringing cold but settled weather; a another named storm is promised at the end of the week.

Some of you may be in need of a mood lift, so I hope that this dose of light and colour will help you a little. Thank you for your comments on last week’s ice-fest of a letter; it was a truly magical spell.

I prefer to think of my brain as a butterfly rather than a monkey, but there’s no doubt it’s been flitting around a lot recently. To mono prints add pencil sketches, ink washes, plus the regular photographs. The files and piles of paper grow: perhaps I am nesting here in my room, but I am once again enjoying experimenting. I’ve never been a confident sketcher, but I’m beginning to free myself up to be more abstract. I periodically remind myself that the photography didn’t happen overnight, and my lines strengthen a little.

I spent most of the weekend trying and often failing to represent the birches in the garden in ink. At some point I picked up a white oil pastel, relied on imagination, and estimated branches and bark. Late on Saturday night before going to bed, I looked at the apparently blank page and brought out an old bottle of ink I made from blaeberries. It’s two years old now and a little more muted, but with the freedom of simply using the dropper to make marks I found something I am happier with, and wish to continue.

Birches in blaeberry

Outdoors, inspiration has come from the light. There’s something special about it in winter, a caress rather than an embrace. It has several guises: afternoon sunlight that enriches the colours of the landscape; the steely light that lingers on bare stems after the hills rise to embed the setting sun. And on Monday, after a hard frost, another variant: early sun mingling with thin clouds to mute the palette of fields and hills.

This week's letter is a mélange of threads drawn from these. I hope you enjoy reading and looking. And listening… yes, voiceovers are back.

1.

Nature has swept away the simplicity of white canvas, frayed as it was by the creatures of this place. Her prompt now, her challenge, is to simplify. I am still drawn to improvise, on the spur of the moment bending to pick up a twig and poke it into the soft red crush of sandstone on the track and see how it transfers to paper. The newly turned earth of a molehill offers a different tone and texture.

Water from a puddle to loosen graphite. Soft sediment swirled in the shallows over vestigial ice. After scooping and splashing I place an empty spread down: as I drop silty water onto it and angle the page the colour flees. Only when I disturb the gritty fringes with my paper do I find my sky. A few lines of graphite on the wet page—stems of foxglove or thistle—a twig to draw a line in the wash to hint at the horizon of hill, and I am done. The water has crept around the edges of my book and stained other pages. I walk back, an open page, waiting to dry.

Another deposition, of place on paper

2.

From the light of snow to the darkness in my own inky depositions. A mild afternoon pulls me to the top of the garden, above birch, amid long grass. Beneath the electricity pole. Mid-tone cloud, dark reaching branches, scratchy grasses and seed heads that escaped the snow. I search for an accommodation of marks; in reality I’m not sure this is anything other than a mess. My mind resembles the moss, a collection of ideas and beginnings, always added to, rarely fully resolved. Perhaps my marks more closely resemble my own neural networks as much as the dynamics of the landscape.

3.

Indoors I persist, repeatedly drawing hillsides, trees, clouds. Then on a walk, with graphite.

4.

Frost whitens the dark. Ice is back, the low sun slow to clear a heavy frost. Each shadow bleeds, drags pale bloom, a ghost of itself. Dark is, for once, light.

There’s no warmth in the afternoon; the temperature at most 2^oC. Sky blue, clear light. Each stem and branch is buffed and burnished, each melted drop of water a mirror. Despite the cold, colours sing.

By the time I return from my walk, the roe deer are back on the moss to graze the heather, and the eastern hills are wearing a two-tone quilt of cloud, fog risen from the Howe.

5.

Another cold morning. I’m out again. I collect fragments. Frost, white rime—overnight growth of ice. Coated stems and grasses.

Grey heron rising—roe deer on the moss.

Silvered birch. Cold pallor, muted tone. Exclamation marks of dead foxgloves, rusty iron rebar.

Early sunlight across the valley. Ploughed fields purpled—carved earth. Gold stems and seed heads adorn stock fences—the riches of decay.

Empty shells, lost homes: the hollow bones of past lives.

Across the burn. On up to thickly-iced puddles, earth compressed by giant wheel and machine weight. Icy arrangements cover the void.

Distant views and scratchy foregrounds of dried thistle—sharp punctuations, slash and backslash. Soft colours, beautiful light—a painter’s joy. More sketches in pencil and graphite. Drops of water.

A second abandoned home, a small croft with an expansive view. I always feel a sadness around them. The snow has flattened the exuberant growth of nettles and raspberries around the walls, and I walk up to the door and look in. I can’t resist tiptoeing in today.

The view from an old window; a place of echoes and sighs, a shell to put your ear against.

In another room deposits of lime and lath, a return to dust; infinite decay. The light cast from the doorway, that on the photo almost looks like a figure.

Excuse me if I ramble a little. The images and the sketches have run ahead of the words.

Thank you to all of you who visit the moss with me each week. If you’ve enjoyed it reading this, a like or a comment, a recommendation for FLOW, or a restack on the Substack app would each be greatly appreciated.

Until next time,

This week’s encore revels in observation and word play

All words and images are copyright © Michela Griffith except where otherwise noted