This island is not an island
the sea does not enclose but opens out
Hello friends
I’m home again, after a month in the city.
It’s Monday, and I am back in the studio, ready to get back to painting. I’ve walked familiar shores again, re-orienting myself. I don’t gather sketches. But still, I am gathering my materials, my tools.
I remember the feeling of standing on the clifftop path at the weekend, a pool of cold sunlight sweeping in over the broad sea and streaming right through me, all brightness, no warmth.
I remember the fulmars circling like skaters, nonchalant in the muscular wind. The flash of white underwings against a pewter grey sea as the birds bank and turn.
I remember the bright wind pulling the breath from my mouth as I walked along the shore yesterday. Wind and water drawings in the sand. The taste of salt in the air. The silence of the horizon. My thoughts stilled.
I remember the tiny body of an Orkney vole lying in my path. Newly dead, only a tiny nick at the nape of its neck. The grey-white ghost of a male hen harrier wheeled away across the field, his dropped meal still warm, limp in the palm of my hand. I lay the little body to rest behind a tussock.
I remember the slick, black rocks of Birsay Bay gleaming wetly at low tide. Heaps of rotting kelp at the high-water line giving a faint whiff of sulphur. The brown sludge of seaweed now collapsed over the rocks will rise and dance again with the incoming tide.
I remember the sere winter grass, its dull sheen like the bristling flank of a deer, catching the raking light. Shafts of sunlight pierce the muffling blanket of cloud. The land is dormant.
I remember the wind burrowing into my ears through the fibres of my hat, the bite of winter yet to ease. The chilled air I suck into my nose makes it drip and I sniff.
I remember the churn of unease, the fear that the world beyond this small place will break it open, that it will roar with engines of war as it has twice before. I remember the rusting warships that lie beneath the waters of Scapa Flow along with hundreds of drowned men, the solemn poppy wreaths set afloat each year. I remember our location in the North Atlantic seaways, as the wheel of geopolitics turns about us.
I remember that the sea horizon does not enclose but opens us out, beyond what can be seen or heard or touched, unfurling as the breath goes out, comes in, goes out.
I remember that ‘place’ is not a container any more than the permeable body.
That I am not an island. That this island is not an island.
All these things I fold into my hands, into my pockets. I take them with me into the studio. There, I bring them out again. See what I’ve got to work with.
My tools: Memory. Silence. Words. Time. A line, a mark, a gesture.
Gathering these up in the porous silence of the studio, my paintings take shape.
Studio news
Many thanks to those of you who have been in touch asking about new work, having seen my exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy. I am working on some new pieces and will let you know as soon as they are ready.
Life Raft Zoom Co-Working
And very many thanks to patient Life Rafters who have been left high and dry while I have been away. Our Zoom creative co-working session will resume at 3pm Wednesday, UK time (GMT not BST!) I hope to see you there! We’ll just say hello and introduce ourselves briefly at the start, then settle down to work together in companionable silence. I’ll share a recording to the paid subscriber chat.
That’s all for now!
Sam
Beautiful, Sam.
Hen harriers - we call them norther harriers here - are plentiful on our island. I see one occasionally from the deck, flying so low that I'm looking down on his back.
Really enjoyed this post 🙏