thick mist & hellebores
I’ve been inspired by my new Paul Klee book which I snapped up, secondhand, from a window in town. The plates in the book are all so different; in some you have paintings like palette swatches, the brighter the colours the more central on the canvas (I want to do a weather diary like this though more thoughts on that later) and, in others, naively sketched stars poke through alongside cone shapes, cylinders, inky loosely-drawn structures. Klee seems free to alter, regularly changing his way of painting, which I love. His eye for colour has had me frenzied, my view now a world as a patchwork quilt with real-time colour ways.
Pushing aside the usual harsh January to-dos there’s plenty, when I think about it, that’s been catching me lately. Line sketches by Van Gogh, busy but simple, almost moving on the page. I’ve been listening to The Telepathy Tapes. Visceral dreams about the sea and old friends I haven’t seen for years. I’m new to playing the guitar and learning with absolute delight how to finger-pick. A Long Winter by Colm Tobin is my perfect size of novel. There are seeds that need sowing from Alma Proust with an intention to have a flower-cloud in my garden this summer. I’m cutting and making subjects of hellebores, the only things flowering in the garden; their dark rusty petals visible through thick mist. They seem to be surviving for a long while out of water in my freezing studio. Paint is mapping its way onto larger canvases. Whispers to march up steep hills along to playlists sent by friends. Hours of this perma-mist brings mystery from a blanket grey, reddish trees and lichen barely visible but close up they emerge from dark edges to illuminate the centre of my view.
Jubilance, dark edges,
OPEN.
hop.
Awake
dark edges
SLACK
Deep purple, bright violet
rush under
Mist and mist
Linen