About a river - Apropos d'un fleuve

This 'painting' began as a response to a request to participate for a third time in the 'Reveillez vos Talents' in the village hall during the last weekend in April. This 'expo' consisted of amateur painting groups - this time three separate and different ones, patchwork, mosaics, knitting, horn carving and the school also organised a plant sale and a 'vide-grenier' (boot sale).

I don't exhibit as part of a group and I don't try to sell and anyway mostly village people are bemused by my 'art'.

I do however, try to engage somehow with people who come to look at the expo. Last year I tried to get kids - or people to draw - but failed. People have very conventional ideas about what art 'should' be. Anyhow this is the local environment in which I try and make my experiments in art.

The idea of painting a river is something I have played with before. I will illustrate my other ideas in a future blog. This was a mix of ideas from a previous painting called 'Dance' about balancing good and evil which like this had 'moving' parts and played with the way colour works.
At its heart is a simple and very complex philosophical idea from Heraclitus that you 'can't step into the same river twice' because both you and the river are always changing. I wanted to challenge the static capture that a representation of a river is in a 2D painting and I wanted to make something that demanded that the viewer engage with the painting differently by giving it time.

Monsanto 1998

The earth was all of a piece this afternoon in

the tender caresses of early November sunlight.

Green winter glowed like velvet peach fuzz on

the softly curving slopes all the way up to

Harston and all the way down to Grantchester.

The first flinching frosts had cleaned the

undergrowth from the upright trees.

The fences that chop and saw at the fields made

no divisive stand against the spilling of light into

the hollows that the river knows as home.

The earth was all one,

all joined,

all belonging to itself,

all alight,

all green,

all of a piece,

all at peace.

The contesting bitter traffic fumes

and transgenic pollen dust that is Trumpington

were set aside this afternoon.

I almost liked Cambridge.

November 6^th 1998

The start of this blog is false and untrue. I doubt it will improve.
I am not the will o' whisp - the Ignis fatuus - that is John  -or us as we roamed around Europe.
I am noname and sought to start my own blog but days of struggling to set up my own blog has driven me back to this site where I sit alongside Epicblogue.
I want to use this site for discussion about the process of making art and stories and coming to terms with the endings of stories and the closing of librairies and the shutting of book covers and the picking up of pens and brushes - so starting over - again -  

I have become late autumn.

Detaching leaves steal the residue of golden days.

A cold mist of heavy grey dew soaks me to the core.

Its common the doctor says - spring time is the cure,

The sun may caress me next year and again

but autumn is my season and leaves never return.