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The gentlest of days.

 

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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.

 

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Acrylic and charcoal on paper 150 cm x 60 cm.

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A view of the wood

 

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Detail from large drawing – 175 x 55 cm. Rolling out the paper in the long wet grass, drawing the sleepy lines of late summer. I look toward the wood.

 

 

 

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A journey.

 

‘It doesn’t look too promising’, says a woman on the bus. I think she means the day not her life. A woman shouts, ‘ ….tell Jim the weddin’s aff….’ and roars with laughter. Flocks of yellow cranes at the dockside in Methil. Paintwork bodyshops and hair salons. A girl on her phone says she’ll be late for her interview. She rolls another cigarette. A man in his allotment sits smoking a pipe. I think of my dad and the rolling of tobacco in the palms of his hands, the woody dark sweet smell of it. A husband patiently explains the rules of sudoku to the woman who thought the day none too bright. She asks ‘…..so why can’t I put a four there ?’ He explains again. ….’But why…..?’. She stops mid-sentence, loses interest and turns to look out of the window. She’s thinking she should have brought an umbrella.