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Hello friends
Orkney is a thickly layered place, as anyone who has been here can tell you.
There are layers in the sedimentary rock of the West Mainland, its delicate strata revealed by the action of the sea all along the coast, where the frayed edges of cliffs teeter and slump like so many towering stacks of paper.
There are layers in the soil so carefully excavated to reveal the Neolithic stones of the UNESCO World Heritage Site, or still partly covering the many other ancient stones that poke up through the grassy pastureland of Orkney.
There are layers in our local placenames, evocative words that echo the Pictish, Norse and Scots, accented tongues that came long before us, their distinctive Orcadian cadences becoming blurred again by ‘sooth-moothers’ like me, as another wave of incomers bring their voices to the mix.
There are acoustic layers, too, in the local music, folk tunes that go back decades or even centuries, passed ear to ear, finger to finger, fiddle to fiddle, voice to voice, changed a little each time.
As I get older, I’m more drawn to layered things, recursive things, to art that bears revisiting time and again, showing another layer of itself with each iteration.
There are layers in the beautiful complexity of counterpoint in Bach, where each melodic line is as important as any other, rising to the surface then sinking back to support the next tune that enters, before remerging again. There are layers in the sampled and looped microtonal guitars of Angine de Poitrine that I’ve been listening to so much this week, the driving rhythms that push and pull against each other until your brain gives up trying to understand what the hell you’re hearing and your body just wants to dance.
There are layers in good writing too, as Grant Faulkner points out, beneath the narrative surface of a story where:
“Multiple things are true at the same time. Not sequentially but simultaneously—the way a chord is not three separate notes played in order but three notes sounding together, each one changed by the presence of the others.”
“This is what all art is doing. The most powerful works always say several things simultaneously, in several registers, and the experience of encountering them is the experience of receiving more than you can fully hold.”
To create by layering is, by its nature, an iterative practice, patient and cumulative. Meaning gathers quietly. No single mark, gesture, word, flavour or sound is ever the final and definitive statement. Everything is in conversation with what came before and what comes after.
As I begin this next big painting, it starts as one big, bold, simple, brassy statement, a single golden surface gleaming with reflections and small imperfections. But it’s deceptive. There are, in fact, already six layers over the aluminium substrate: glue, metal leaf, two layers of gloss varnish and two of clear acrylic primer.
To begin the next stage of painting feels daunting if I stop too long to think about it. I am setting out on a very long journey that can only be completed step by tiny step, with no map to follow, just a felt sense of where I want to get to, a very small paintbrush in my hand and a very large surface to cover.
But to think in terms of layering is a saving grace here too. There’s no need to be paralysed with worry about where or how to begin. You can begin anywhere, anyhow. Just begin. Keep moving. Nothing is final.
Come with me.
Let’s go.
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until next week!
Sam
Saving this to savour later...I love your thinking about layers 💙
A completely different idea of you from listening to Angine de Poitrine! But fantastic!