'For paths run through people as surely as they run through places'
I've been reading Robert Macfarlane's 'The Old Ways' where he travels along ancient paths and wild walks in Britain. He writes really eloquently about how we forge paths through our time on earth, and by doing so stay connected to our ancient ancestry, keeping alive the memories and shared experience between us.
He writes:
"The imagination cannot help but pursue a line in the land - onwards in space, but also backwards in time to the histories of a route and its previous followers. As I walk paths I often wonder about their origins, the impulses that have led to their creation, the records they yield of customary journeys, and the secrets they keep of adventures, meetings and departures".
I've been thinking about this not just in a literal or physical sense, but also in a psychological sense. We must tread carefully along old fragile paths on the earth just as we should tread carefully along fractures in our own psyche, taking care where we step, but also not denying ourselves a journey towards connection and solace.
It makes me think of the walks I do every day that can feel monotonous and limited, but I know these daily journeys will one day be imprinted as memories, or already are.
I wonder if ancient communities had shared this? Were returned visits to places just for practical purposes or did they hold a higher significance?
With these thoughts in mind I wanted to try some paintings that explored this idea - of paths trodden carefully and the imprints of the past pressed into them.
Ink bloches in a rough circular shape with pencil lines tracing between them, trying to give a feeling of meandering.
I felt the pencil wasn't quite enough and tried some different marks to indicated footsteps that step and walk around the forms.
I like the composition of this one. Possible lacking people makes it less...something.
I was trying to tap into the idea of earth energy reaching out and under us, and how we seek a feeling of grounding through connecting or holding onto it. I need to add more to this one to see where it takes itself.
I started this piece a week or so ago but wanted to re visit it to see if I could indicate some paths somewhere. Thinking about Klint's work with geometric forms, and the combination of using quite angular geometric shapes alongside circles informed this. I quite like the diagonals and feel they give a sense of place - but today I couldn't help but look at what I'd done and think it all looks a bit desolate!
I don't know whether is in part due to mood, the colour choices or the lack of figures?
In 'The Old Ways' Macfarlance makes reference to an ancient emblem on a small stone necklace that depicted the bottom of a foot. Feet and hands printed onto rocks...it's like old cave painting. The sending of messages to those to come after us. A signal of consciousness of self emerging in humankind.
I thought perhaps following this idea may bring some human warmth to my experiments...
I decided to try small at first. Increasingly I feel working small is more in line with me. Perhaps this is why I find working bigger challenging. That said, stepping outside a comfort zone is still important.
May 20th
I had more of a go on the rock images (above) yesterday.
I decided I wasn't that happy with that foot print! It looked too obvious and perhaps out of scale. I covered it up with more paint and instead went down a different route as I'd just got some brusho and was trying out a few things. I thought more about energy lines and the way tendrils of something we (I!) can sense from still, quiet things or places.
The footprint now gone, I worked around the stone and also within, making marks to show the idea of paths and history within and around something. Initially it seemed to work ok but then I decided it looked a bit...strange, or just not quite right (sometimes I don't really know what the issue is but it's just a feeling I get!).
I blurred out the lines and blended things together a bit. I like how the tone of the stone comes through the blue, and I still like the idea of these small stone depictions in isolation, but somehow being connected. Perhaps there's scope for them to be a series?
May 26th:
Robert Macfarlane's book 'The Old Ways' is so full of amazing quotes and I admire how he writes so eloquently about the ideas surrounding ancient paths and tracks.
Some key passages I'm using at the moment:
"To the Tchho people of north-western Canada, walking and knowing are barely divisible activities: their term for 'knowledge' and their term for 'footprint' can be used interchangeably. A Tibetan Buddhist text from around 600 years ago uses the word shul to mean 'a mark that remains after that which has made it passed by': footprints are shul, a path is shul, and such impressions draw one backwards into awareness of past events".
"...it seemed that every month I had been walking the old ways, I had met or heard tell of someone else setting out on a walk whose purposes exceeded the purely transformational or the simply recreational, and whose destination was in some sense sacred....The hinterlands were filling with eccentrics, making their odd journeys in the belief that certain voyages out might become voyages in"
"At Avebury and Silbury, as at Minya Konka, an ease of relation is expressed between topography and belief. And paths, tracks and cursuses were intricately involved with this Neolithic landscape theatre. The archaeologist Christopher Tilley, in his pioneering work The Phenomenology of Landscapes, argues that to understand many of the scared landscapes of Neolithic Britain we need first to understand the importance of the ancient paths that both link and bypass them. Walking, both as approach and traverse, was crucial to the dramas of perception: what Tilley calls 'the strong paths' of this region were used to 'pattern' the relationship 'between sites and their settings'".
Thinking about paths as repeated patterns...
A process very much somatic, with a sense of calm and focus to weaving lines around each other in a repeated fashion.
I'm aware of a tension that exists between abstract and representation however. I'm quite attached to aesthetic and perhaps a traditional stance on skill, draughtsmanship and rendering. I feel like I just want to 'make shapes' on paper but there's always a niggling question of 'is this enough'? Does it show skill? To me it is important to show I can draw more than shapes but I'm also aware plenty of artists don't feel this. I don't want things to be too reduced down to abstract ideas that I'm imparting to an audience.
May 31st:
I was thinking about footprints and handprints today and how they evoke associations of movement (dance, walking, running, touch, experiencing places somatically etc).
I have also been reading about the mysterious patterns that are rendered on some standing stones and the speculation around these. I saw some of these in the Stonehenge exhibition last year:
I'd like to try exploring these marks myself. Spirals and circles...seeing where they go - marking out a route.
Adding some subtle hand prints to this earlier piece. I like how the swimming/bleeding paint has a mineral quality, hopefully capturing a sense of its geological past. The hands are a reference to anthropological history pressing into the stone and leaving its mark.
September 2023
Getting back into the swing of things after the summer and enjoying some simple warms ups. Picking up a few old experiments and allowing lines to meander around the forms. While doing this I contemplate places I enjoy walking and thus the feeling is solace I get from these places is in some way physically replicated and experienced on the page.
September 25th:
Here, I dug out another old art work and wanted to try with the contrast of black and white again. I'd seen some work at Courtauld Institute in London in the summer and really admired a very striking piece that used simple white over black across a collection of wall mounted panels.
As I traced the outline of the larger ink blot in the middle and engaged with the process of detaching from what I was drawing in a literal sense, I began to see a figure form with quite an interesting posture.
I added some facial features but then promptly got rid of them as I felt the lines were too scratchy and perhaps tentative. I wanted to make them as stark at the circular marks but as soon as I started 'projecting' I lost something in it. This seems to be an ongoing challenge for me! My plan is to do some more figure drawing soon as It's been a while since I've done this.
I do like how these smaller circular forms drift and drop off from the central form though, and how the white lines create a composition that leads the eye around the paper. If I could somehow incorporate the imagery I'm trying to find (or hold in my head but haven't been able to render yet!) I think I would feel a sense of completion over this process of automatism and projection.
The work I've been doing using masking fluid builds on this idea of tracks and paths.
November 10th:
Using old washes and semi discarded experiments to build up layers. Thinking about walking repeatedly over paths and the significance of narrative/mundane memories on the imprints of our lives. Conversely, thinking about the darker feelings felt when visiting somewhere that holds painful association.
These are not colours I often use but I really like the earthy tone of them. I also experimented with line thickness. I'm happy with no figures in this but wonder where they would sit if I did try and add them?
Also wondering how this would look on a larger scale. Do I do a large version and chop it up or do I make small pieces and work them into a bigger piece that way?
I arranged this on the wall with a couple of other similar experiments. I'm beginning to see how the idea can be executed. I have some choices to make in terms of whether I fold/concertina paper, or chop and re arrange like this - or both?
Would they need to be on a background? Should they be attached in some way? stitched? half torn but half still held together?
Thinking about colour schemes and representation and how this can illustrated the concept of memories that are implicit and narrative and how the implicit needs to be integrated within the over arching network of narrative in order for the brain to process it - for it to become 'every day'. How hard/easy is this? How can I show this on paper?
