Mixed media on paper – 76 x 56 cm
The quiet of rain.
Mixed media on paper 170 x 60 cm.
Monday. North wind. Bright, cold. The buzzard ushers me into the wood, sharp crack of twigs under foot. I decide to cross the burn but half way across realise its too deep so turn back and clamber my way up the bank where I am met by a man and his dog. This is my first encounter with someone in the wood. He asks if I am ok and I feel embarrassed by my clumsiness. I introduce my self as an artist as if that might explain things and he asks if I am famous to which I laugh and apologise and say no. He tells me about Japanese artists he was watching work and dragons and his new home he is building. He has a giant sequoia on his plot where his garage will be. It has to go, it shouldn’t be here anyway. I paint the fragile day. It starts to rain, the drops settle on the paper. I stop, not wanting the rain to obliterate my marks, carefully roll up the paper and quietly take my leave.
Crow black tree.
Mixed media on paper – 38 x 28 cm.
Walk with me.
Finished version. Mixed media and text on paper.
(details)
Falling tree.
Charcoal and acrylic on paper – 155 x 60 cm
(detail)
Songs from the wood.
It is quiet, dim, still down here. High above the tallest trees dance with the wind, touching each other. The days are cooling now, the numbing of fingertips. A buzzard skreeks through. Antlers of wood rest on the forest floor, broken and birdsong rings in the air, bells peeling, joining, falling rising together, inviting the day.
Mixed media on paper 150 x 52 cm
(Detail)
Rattlebag.
A library. Of things found. In the woods where I walk and draw. Objects that offer clues. Evidence of home. A pigeons skull, lichen, beech nuts and peoples things, their cups and saucers lie broken amongst stones. I am searching for finds. I carry them home in a Fair Isle tammy, a nest of vulnerables making sense of a place. Breakable, overlookable. An archive, catalogued, photographed, stored for now in a small cardboard box that once housed five rolls of half inch wide masking tape.
In the woods I hear the geese fly south.
Mixed media on paper. 160 x 60 cm
After dusk
Oil on panel.
The gentlest of days.
I can smell it. Autumn. It is there in the cut fields of barley, in the damp sticky earth. But the light is returning to the woods, an opposite face to the shortening days out there. Here the leaves are falling and the sky is beginning to appear piece by piece. Soon the light will spill onto the beech littered floor. I am trying to capture a sense of the light this morning, a most gentle of days . Under the cedars the light hardly penetrates, but a little way beyond in a clearing the sun bounces off the shiny rhododendrun leaves. The burn squabbles and giggles behind me as I paint and then a squirrel comes to the edge of the paper and I stand still. So does it. We stare at each other, the squirrel senses something is not quite right and bolts up the nearest tree. Fungi are emerging all over the wood, on rotting branches – delicate ruffs of bracket fungi and tiny pale stalks of some mushroom that look like baby’s fingers. All around, the woods are yawning and I can feel the slowing of its breathing. It will not sleep for a while but its getting its pyjamas on.
Acrylic and charcoal on paper 150 cm x 60 cm.
dominique cameron RSW 