The solace of slowness
Hello friends
We’re at the unglamorous end of January, a drab, slow drag into February, with all the celebrations and holidays behind us and the New Year’s resolutions already ditched. The snow has melted into the mud. The news is grim.
January is a stripped back time here in Orkney. Hungry birds ate all the rosehips during the recent cold spell, taking the last bit of colour from the bare black branches. The garden has long since been flattened by winter storms. The fields are salt-soured, as yet unploughed, speckled with listless Greylag geese that waddle slowly off when I pass, not even bothering to take off. The cold wind flays everything.
The winter sky still holds some moments of glamour. Last night we were treated to a spectaular Aurora display. Undulating sheets of pale green and ruby red reached up towards the stars and spanned the whole northern sky in a vast arc. As I stood in the chill night air I thought of those who would be watching in Nuuk, Greenland, a little to the West of us on the same arc, and felt how small this round Earth is.
But this morning we are back to grey skies. Wind and rain is forecast for the rest of the week. It’s raw and muddy outside, and so dim indoors we need to turn on the lights.
But there’s a kind of clarity in the stripped back quality of these short January days. It makes me want to strip away what no longer serves, get back to the essentials of what I want to do with my painting this year, the qualities I want to lean into as I start a new body of work towards a solo exhibition. There’s something about getting older, too, that encourages this clarification. I have more Januaries behind me than ahead. Time is not infinite. I have to choose what to keep and what to leave behind.
This January, as I get back into the studio after a couple of months of hectic movement, travel, and expansiveness, I begin to make a list of what I want to keep:
Slowness, patience, silence, wonder.
Attentiveness. Listening. To the sky. To the movement of clouds. The movement of breath. The movement of light. The movement of the brush, the pen, the hand and eye together. The studio as a space of contemplation and quiet discipline.
Delight as practice and joy as resistance. Cultivating delight in how the light falls through the winter sky. How light dances with water, with the eye. How the mind reaches out to all this to make meaning. How all of this is always rising and falling away, moment by moment. Cultivating joy that’s tinged with loss and grief and foreboding but remains undiminished by these.
The ache of beauty. Its seriousness. The sweetness of delight, however small. The bright, surging energy of enthusiasm.
Devotion, care, craft. The solace of slow making, as prayer perhaps, though sometimes, admittedly, a trudge. Craft time as slow time that does not align with capitalism and can’t be ‘scaled’. The work of the hand and its careful passage across the painting’s surface, over and over and over again. And trust, that this devotion is embodied in the artwork once finished, that it will call a response from the viewer. That this response is something they will feel rather than think, and that it will lift them up, even just for a few moments.
This year, I commit to:
The real over the digital.
Embodied intelligence over artificial intelligence.
Daylight and moonlight over screenlight.
Deep, specific, relational learning over imitative, aggregated machine learning.
Local connections over online hand-wringing.
And long, quiet hours in the studio, painting.
This quote from the painter Winifred Nicolson reminds me of what painting can and should aspire to:
‘The picture…must be an anchor of security, must be a lamp for delight, must be a well of peace, and when it has attained all that – and we are asking much of it – we shall ask something more, we shall ask it to be a ladder – not one of those realistic ladders made of wood, that reach as far as the ceiling, but one of those upheld in places of stones, that have no limit, not even the sky; and upon which translucent thoughts may travel up and far away and also down and back to the home and hearth-fire. This is what I want from a picture...’
Me too, Winifred, me too.
The Life Raft Creative Co-Working
I’m delighted to invite you once again to join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. Our meetings are a little Life Raft of shared creativity in these stormy times. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us. If you can’t make it live I share a recording to the paid subscriber chat each week.
P.S. Reviews are in! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ THE SCOTSMAN
“Orkney-based Samantha Clark holds that tension [between spontaneity and control], in a meditative and meticulously detailed practice in which she lays down dense patterns of white lines over rich swathes of colour. She negotiates the pull of energy versus control, motion versus stillness, in impressively large-scale works like The Wave, Dark Sea at Evening and This Salted Light.”
Susan Mansfield, Review of ‘The Northern Isles’. At The Scottish Gallery, Dundas Street until January 31st
I have more Januaries behind me than ahead of me. Oh yes! I feel this too, not in sadness but in the realization that I must drink in these days ahead and make meaning with whatever days I have left.
So beautifully written! Almost made me miss winter in my home country of Norway. The short days can be lovely. Take a lot of pressure off always having to achieve.