The sky, the sky
A post where I write the word sky about 100 times.
My mind was a bag of broken glass and rusty keys. That’s what people mean when they say they’re shattered, right? They mean they tried so hard they cracked into a thousand shards which they’ve swept up into a hessian sack they pretend is a human? It jangles, it rattles, and if I try and get a hold on it, I get cut; things are not going the way I anticipated, so I walk.
I’ve often thought if I had one good day I’d get all caught up on everything, cleaning and gardening and work and hobbies, but if the truth be told, I could work 24 hours a day and wouldn’t even come close to finishing all the things I want to do. I’d settle on getting work done, so I cleared out a big day, alone from 7 till 10, but nothing did work. I might’ve well taken the morning off, as I usually do. Mornings bring nothing but frustration, and now my head has exploded.
I like the art other people are doing, lino cuts where they arrange nature on the page, an owl, a little mouse, the corn a satisfying pattern, arranged like a children’s picture book, which is no insult as I was, and still am, terribly fond of picture books. I like that style, but it doesn’t seem to work for me now, as if I’m not allowed to do it anymore, as if I’m being pulled away, or maybe pulled apart.
So I walk, to remind myself that what I want to show is my connection to nature, which is deep and fulfilling, and to show others that they have that same connection, that we too, are a part of these rich and tangled woods, that we smell of the musk of deep earth, rooted in a nutritious humus of leaf fall, the cycles of the year. I say the grand things, but when I look at it, it’s just a picture I’ve produced. It’s not fulfilling this noble manifesto, and it doesn’t even look like pictures of artists I like. Maybe I would’ve liked it, if someone else made it, if I hadn’t spent so long staring at it.
Once I was walking and I saw flocks of different birds, at varying distances stacked in the sky wheeling about. Now I am walking again, because that’s not what this print is about at all, and I feel frustrated. There’s no point in creating a complex reduction print of the sky and then confusing it with a melee of birds. It didn’t work at all, which I knew that quite early on but ignored. I like to know where I’m going, a map, a plan, I don’t like to work it out as I go along. Rick Rubin, in his book The Creative Act, wrote (I paraphrase) that knowing where you are going is craft, and not knowing is art. ‘Demanding control of a work of art would be just a foolish as demanding that an oak tree grow according to your will’ I knew that from the start, I knew that before I read it, but I’m still cross. I wanted to print big winter skies, and I wanted to print flocks of birds, but you can’t do both. It seemed like you could at the outset, of course. You make a big winter sky, and you put birds in it; but if you do that, then the skies crowded, and it’s not big anymore.
I walk to reconnect, and I notice her, the fox, the colour of autumn leaves. Sometimes, when I see an animal on a human path, I think there must be some hidden meaning, as if I should follow it. Once there was a hare on the path in front of me, and as I caught up he would lope forward a few more paces. It’s impossible not to feel like Alice and follow him to Wonderland, but as I’ve said before, animals carry on with their lives with little regard to mine. The fox goes about her business, off in the fields, and after a brief moment, I must go back to mine.
Foxes, alive ones, always make me catch my breath. The one in the garden successfully raised her cubs this year. I saw them at dusk as adolescents in summer, out hunting rabbits full of bravado, before they learnt to be adults and stay hidden. Country foxes are not like city ones; the farm is a poultry farm after all, and the farmer is not kind to foxes. This fox, this scene, the lane, is so transcendently picturesque, enough to take you out of this world, or maybe to connect you more fully to this world, which is what I meant to do all along. The encounter has nothing to do with the picture I’m printing, yet it still brings me home.
It seemed that if you have that much sky, you should have something else to look at, as if sky is not enough. You don’t often see paintings that are just sky, it’s a lovely backdrop to the thing you’re meant to be looking at, I learnt that subconsciously in art galleries. The important part of the world is the earth, or rather, the top of the earth. The small bit we live on, not the underneath.
A sky full of meaning and portent, darkening, bringing winter and storms that blow away the last of the autumn, leaving the landscape haunted with the skeletons of trees, so big, the winter skies compared with everything beneath it. It should be enough. Isn’t it enough? Maybe it’s enough.
I return home, and manage to fit in one lone bird and two flocks where they belong, at the bottom of the picture, in a small earth, dominated by the firmament*.
It is done now, and drying, and whether it is good or bad is not my business. Next week I will list it in my shop and I might, if I’m lucky, sell one, and then I will have the money to make another, because, being mad, and possibly stupid, I will make another. All I have are unknowns. I just keep trying.
*I’m still annoyed that firmament means sky, not earth. The earth is much more firm, and firmament is a solid, heavy, earthy word. It doesn’t make sense.