Of change and stillness, freeze and thaw

watching the cold dance of water

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One day last week, just as the light was fading, I stepped outside my studio after a long stint of drawing to get some fresh air. It wasn’t really the most inviting day for a stroll. A strong southeasterly gale had pushed in, bringing sudden squalls of cold, hard rain and spreading a flat, blue light over everything. The sharp frost that had frozen the loch into stillness and made our track into an ice rink for the past few days had turned to a slow and rather reluctant thaw.

When I got to the loch-side I saw that the wind had smashed the ice into big slabs about a half-inch thick and shoved them all up towards our end of the loch, where they were heaped along the shore like broken shop windows after a riot. The mouth of the burn was jammed with smashed up chunks of ice.

The eeriest thing about the scene was that the painting I’d stepped away from moments before looked like this…before I’d seen the loch.

Life imitates art?

As I explored in my post last week about colour, water’s essential quality is its unsettledness. Water will not behave as a thing among other things. In fact, the clear liquid we think of as water’s normal state is just one of its many incarnations. Water is solid ice too, of course, and also fog, breath, mud, leaf, blood.

I make images of water because I want to observe it and think about it.

And despite the chance resemblance between my painting and the broken slabs of ice, whatever it is that’s the fascination of this cold dance of water, I know I can’t catch it and that’s the point. The point is to see that this water is beautiful and that it is falling away, will always keep falling away. It won’t hold still for me. It is not mine and can never be. It refuses. It is itself and I cannot have it, and this is right and necessary.

But water is also in me and of me, and I am of it, in body, breath, bone and blood. How can this be reconciled? Perhaps it can’t.

And maybe that’s the point too.

Water’s everyday presence around us can make it seem ordinary. But when we pay more careful attention, this apparent ordinariness soon falls away. There’s something about water’s way of being in the world that helps us to reach towards other hard-to-grasp realities: the porosity of boundaries, the illusion of separateness, the power of softness, the contingency of our seeing and its dance with light.

But of these, the most unsettling is surely the way water’s flow seems to show us the remorseless passing of time. As Heraclitus famously put it, we can’t step into the same river twice. Everything we know and love will pass from this world, including ourselves. But every fibre of our being wants to hold on. It’s a ferocious truth we find hard to face.

The philosopher Henri Bergson said “There are changes but underneath the changes, no things which change: change does not require support.”

There is only this imperfect, whirling world.

To know this, not just as theory, but to practice seeing it, feeling it, to try and tune into it, is, Bergson thought, to come alive and experience even the most mundane moment with a startling vividness. To feel the precariousness, the thrilling whirl of it all, just being alive and in the world with the sky overhead and the light shifting. To even get a glimpse of that. It must be worth a try, surely? Then there’s really no need to go off seeking and questing or creating dramas. It’s all here already.

Every day we go through day the same movements; reach for the kettle, turn the tap, flip the switch, fetch the mugs, pour the tea, brush our teeth. Stale repetition can make us feel like we are barely alive, just automata trudging the daily circle.

But to see all of this as a whirl of process with no ground, nothing fixed, no points of attachment, blows away the staleness and sense of repetition, pulls the very ground out from under our feet. Nothing ever repeats in just exactly the same way. Our encounter with the kettle and the toothbrush is every morning different.

Then, Bergson says:

“Reality no longer appears as essentially static…What was immobile and frozen in our perception is warmed and set in motion. Everything comes to life around us, everything is revitalised within us. A great impulse sweeps forward beings and things. We feel ourselves uplifted, borne along, carried away. We are more fully alive.”

More fully alive, even as we undergo the quiet, inexorable organic changes of ageing, as entropy does its dark work and unspools us towards death.

I mark the passing of time in the words that gather here, slowly accreting sentences, paragraphs, like the layers and lines in my drawings. Thoughts and fleeting perceptions, moments of delight, longeurs of bored afternoons or the passages of flow when I’m deeply involved with something and then look up and, well now, the sun is going down already and my body tells me time has passed and I need to eat or stretch or pee, but here, look, there are now these words, there are now these drawings, these lines gathering here. Something has happened. Something has thickened and dropped out of time and laid itself down like a sediment, like a memory.

People often remark that it must take a lot of patience to make the drawings I do. But it doesn’t feel that way. The duration is only visible afterwards, when I see what has accumulated. These drawings are receptacles of time that I fill up slowly, mark by mark, layer by layer. Maybe what I’m drawing isn’t water at all, but time. Duration.

Today, of course, the ice is all gone. The water is flowing again.

But my painting? It’s is still here, waiting for me to finish it.

work in progress detail