Finding light where you least expect it

It’s been a sluggish couple of weeks. The rain has beaten down, followed by wet snow, then sleet, then a fast thaw and more rain. The dankishness and murk has got into my bones.

Add to this the lack of daylight, with sunrise still just after 9am and sunset around 3.30pm, my recent big push to finish new paintings for a December deadline, immediately followed by the holiday season, and I have found the temptation to sloth has been strong.

I haven’t fought it.

I’m easing back into the working year as gently as I can. I hope you are too.

But this afternoon, in defiance of another wet forecast, the rain has stopped and the wind dropped. We are blessed with a few hours of fragile, pink-tinged light, as delicate and fleeting in its beauty as an early blossom. It’s impossible to stay indoors.

All around us the sodden fields are flooded with wide sheets of water, yet to drain away. The roads shimmer with shallow streams running off the land. There is water music all around, a surround-sound of trickling, seeping, rushing, falling, flowing, from the distant boom and hiss of waves breaking on the headland to the tiny nearby sounds of lapping and tinkling in the roadside ditches.

And everywhere the water dances with unexpected glints of light. The pale sun, low in the sky even at noon, sparks up out of the hoof-pocked pastures. From the cold, muddy fields wide blue skies erupt. Tall, billowing palaces of apricot-tinged clouds reach down, as if deep underground.

Small wonder, then, that in the mythologies of these Northern latitudes the journey to the other world is often downwards through water.

In Icelandic traditional stories the world of the elves or fairies is reached by jumping into ponds, rivers or the sea. Sometimes the way down is through a whirlpool. When Beowulf, having slain the monster Grendel also seeks to kill its mother he dives into a deep marsh to find her.

Throughout the British Isles precious offerings of gold and other metals have been found where they were dropped into bogs and marshlands many generations ago. The Vikings buried their most honoured dead in boats or boat-shaped tombs, and the journey to ‘the other side’ where the dead reside is often thought of in terms of a crossing or voyage over water.

In the tales of the Saami a boy reaches the fairy world by sailing through a fog. There he sees fishing lines hanging down from the sky as though a ceiling of cloud, from the humans fishing above, but from his fairy-world view the fish are in fact sheep grazing dry land.

The underworld reached through water is sometimes seen as if it’s a reflection of our world as seen in water, with the sun moving in the opposite direction, and in some stories from Saami land and Nenets in Northwest Russia the Otherworlders walk with their feet against ours.

It’s as if this Otherworld is a reflection in a still loch or puddle and might be reached by jumping in, down and through. Down through water, swamp, or sometimes down through a cleft in the Earth.

On a shining day like today it’s easy to imagine that there might be another shining world just beneath our own, one that’s reached through water but dry like ours when you get there, that’s maybe back-to-front and upside down like the world we see reflected, where the dead and unborn have their being, unreachable but always with us somehow, their feet touching ours as we walk. Their boats, perhaps, kiss the hulls of our own as we sail.

Reflections are in water as graves are in the ground, after all.

Perhaps this is why winter, in many Northern cultures, is considered a time when this world and the ‘other’ world are closest. The wet ground and the low-slung sunlight show us that light can be found where we least expect it.

From a distance, the clouds slide through the muddy puddles on the track, the blue between them seeming to open downwards into a deep, deep space. But when I reach the edge I find myself staring into a few inches of muddy water. The door to the otherworld, it seems, slams shut as I get close. It’s not so easy to pass through.

It’s a bit eerie, but suddenly vivid, this feeling that there’s another world just below the puddles or the thin surface of the grassy path, so close and yet always unreachable, like our beloved dead.

Unless, like Beowulf, I dive right into the mud and come out on the other side.

The Life Raft Creative Co-Working is one year old!

Our little Life Raft launched this time last year and since then it has evolved into a warm and supportive online space where regular and occasional ‘Life Rafters’ can work on our creative projects together. If you’d like some support and gentle accountability to help you focus your creative work, do come and join us. We meet at 3pm UK time every Wednesday. It’s free. We start with a quick hello chat and share what we’ll be working on, then leave our cameras on and work quietly together for an hour or so. A recording of the previous week’s session shared each Monday on the paid subscriber chat.

In Orcadia exhibition, Royal Scottish Academy

Here they are, awaiting collection. These are the last four paintings to head off to Edinburgh for the exhibtion In Orcadia that opens on January 24th and runs through to March 2nd. These big paintings on aluminium took some wrestling to pack - they are taller than I am and weigh a ton!

After a whole year of work on this body of work it’s hard to belive that the next time I see these pieces they will be gracing the hallowed walls of the RSA’s Gallery VII alongside works by Victoria Crowe, Barbara Rae, Frances Walker, Frances Pelly and Anne Bevan! I hope you can come along. If not, don’t worry, I’ll be sharing plenty of pictures in due course.

That’s all for this week!

-Sam

PS. Keep an eye on my website for smaller-scale work available directly from my studio, as I will be launching some more small paintings soon.