willing into being
I LOVE THE IDEA OF WISHFUL THINKING. Willing things into being, hopeful imagining and manifesting.
To conjure, I think, can be as simple as creating list of hopes and wondering what life would look like if they materialised. Positive thinking? And whether or not the hopes happen, they form a focus, draw out patterns, awaken the senses. Divert thoughts from gloom.
Not sure who of you is watching Small Prophets - possibly the most heartwarming telly there is - but there’s a quietness and care and sweet longing about the protagonist’s phrophesising that makes you want to believe good things can come true if you think hard enough about them (and that it’s not just your instagram listening).
In November I wrote in my notebook (a little pink leatherbound one dedicated to writing down lists of small good things to boost mood) a promise to spend more time by the sea, picturing whimsical painting from a wind-beaten hut where all I could see was coast, sleeping deeply, collecting fossils, following the tides.
As my beloved island family sent photos of home, other creative lures for sea whistled at me. I’d read about the winter residency at Northumberland’s The Old School Gallery looking over Alnmouth Bay in a shoreside cabin, and watched as friend Kristin Perers sewed together a patchwork quilt with tones of the Suffolk seaside pallette. I pined to sign up to the Molly Martin x Kindred House Turner and Dreamlands drawing retreat (next month) but leafed through my Turner’s Skies Sketchbookinstead, painting secret coves and moody sky from memory, dreaming of dark indigo sea against black rusty rocks.
It’s not hard to imagine how eagerly I leapt at the chance to help on my friend Naomi’s yoga retreat at Tresillian House in Cornwall in January. Cooked, sketched, stretched, breathed in some salty air. Conversations returned to the love of the sea with those who love it too, some content to shell-seek while others bravely dive into the wintry waves.
A message came through while I was there (sadly not via a bottle on the beach) from 500 miles further up the coast from my coveted The Old School Gallery, with an invitation to include some larger landscapes in their programme this year. The exact subject of my first line of manifest scribbled in my notebook. Within minutes I replied ‘I’ve never wanted to say yes to a request more! Yes please’.
I like to believe it’s magic connection at play, but whatever it is, it’s a delicious excuse to make art for a project with the knowledge that I’d be flung a little closer to the North Sea, exactly as I’d dreamt. Coming soon.
Tides – Mary Oliver
Every day the sea
blue gray green lavender
pulls away leaving the harbor's
dark-cobbled undercoat
slick and rutted and worm-riddled, the gulls
walk there among old whalebones, the white
spines of fish blink from the strandy stew
as the hours tick over; and then
far out the faint, sheer
line turns, rustling over the slack,
the outer bars, over the green-furled flats, over
the clam beds, slippery logs,
barnacle-studded stones, dragging
the shining sheets forward, deepening,
pushing, wreathing together
wave and seaweed, their piled curvatures
spilling over themselves, lapping
blue gray green lavender, never
resting, not ever but fashioning shore,
continent, everything.
And here you may find me
on almost any morning
walking along the shore so
light-footed so casual.
Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Penguin Press, NY: 2017. (pg. 52)