Author: dominiquefcameron

I step onto the moor, into that other world where one me stops and another I begins. I greet the lone rowan, press my cheek to its bark. First feet then face, now hand as I get out my concertina drawing book. I quickly touch the outline of hills, trees, loch, mark making this place, speaking it is this and this, and yet this and this, varying the length, weight of line and smudge, fingers pushing the dissolving crayon, moulding a sky. A language of marks emerge, sitting here, eating the sweet bilberries, smelling the eons of peat beneath, looking at the violet of the mountains, the quivering harebells against the mustards, olives, rusts and dun coloured moor. All this is noted, archived, to be later retrieved for a painting of colour, light, form and purpose. But not yet, not now. Here, now, is enough. It always is.

Kincardine. Kelpies. Half buried traffic cones puncture the pleated river mud. Waterlogged rotting wharves where cargo once sailed downstream. The boatyard finds a french man in a caravan brought here by work and love, he says. A lone lorry driver cooks a meal on a camping stove in his wagon. A lapwing’s cry pierces the dumb silver horses.

Opening bars of percussive rain on reed, a bellowing bruise of an indigo sky. Bell pulling ropes of the bullrush ring a change of key, leaves the whispers of willows to lament the fading song now that the swifts are gone. Sounds of late summer on the marsh.

The end of the pier. Caught between tides, held breath of slack water. Rib cage carcasses of skeleton boats, neither rising or falling, but sinking like everything else here. Ancient oyster shells scatter the shore, the ears of old men listening for the pull of the moon.