Time is a thickening mist, an intricate web
ask a spider
Hello Friends
I think it’s finished.
‘Haar’, that is, the painting that’s enveloped me for the last few weeks.
At least I think it’s finished. I’d planned for another layer, but after a conversation with a trusted friend a few days ago we both agreed it doesn’t need it. So it’s finished much sooner than I thought (Thanks, Mark!) I’ve left it where I can see it daily, on my studio wall for now, so I can come to the final decision slowly, while I work on other things.
‘Haar’ is and isn’t a painting of the chill fog that rolls in from the sea, flattening all light, obscuring distance and damping sound. Maybe the painting’s title is also a blurring and softening of something that goes deeper. A smokescreen.
Because ‘Haar’ is and isn’t also a visual contemplation of the three-dimensional web of connections in which we live our lives. Four-dimensional, if we include time.
Which, of course, we must.
Because ‘Haar’ is a material record of extended periods of repetitive action, and so a record of time. Each line is a heartbeat, a passing moment that’s left a trace behind. It’s a meditation on impermanence made (semi) permanent.
‘Haar’ is a mist of time.
I mentioned in last week’s post that living in Orkney is a daily reminder that we exist in deeper timespans than we can easily hold in our awareness. The sea stacks and cliffs of the West Mainland offer up fine sedimentary layers that peel away in winter storms, like the pages of a book, to reveal the trace of a tide that ebbed 400 million years ago.
The Neolithic lies all around us, just under the turf or poking up through it. The lichened stones of our Pictish, Norse, Mediaeval, Renaissance and Victorian ancestors lie alongside the stubborn concrete of 20th Century wars, scattered among the reed-tufted cattle pastures and the mowed lawns of UNESCO World Heritage sites.
Our own home is enmeshed in this web of time too. It was once a small farm and its name is an old one. Local historian Hugh Marwick wrote, in the Place Names of Birsay, that the name’s roots are in the Norse language once spoken here. Other research suggests the name, with its unusual ‘o’ ending, might be older and could be Pictish.
The From our Archives page in The Orcadian newspaper recently featured a photograph of a newly married couple, taken just after the Second World War. The bride’s address is given as ours. The handsome groom is described as a newly released prisoner of war. They both stand trim and erect as they gaze firmly into the camera, the wartime years of hardship and separation behind them. One autumn day seventy years ago Isobel stepped out of our own front door on her wedding morning, out of the shadow of war and into the rest of her life.
I wonder what traces she left about the place, what mark on the old woodwork tracked her height as she grew, what clump of rhubarb in the garden did she plant? Did she use the rusted iron I dug out of the tattle patch to smooth her father’s collar on a Sunday morning? Did her hands grasp the wood-wormed handles of the old scythe that’s still propped in the shed, its fine blade now rusted to a thin spike? Her serious but hopeful face peering out of the newspaper reminds me that I am only moving through this place like she once did, just another brief life passing among the old stones.
To remember there were others who came before us is to remember there will be others who come after. To remember our lives are webbed through other lives, past present and future, is to remember that we are just a small part of the story and that we won’t get to find out how this all turns out. To remember this is to resist the temptation for apocalyptic, all-or-nothing thinking.
Here on this island, my life is doubly moated, once by water, once by privilege. On the news, the bombs keep falling. The rain keeps falling, as heavy as bombs. Buildings collapse. Human lives are destroyed. Ecosystems are flattened. What doesn’t burn is swept away in a brown swirl of broken timber and bobbing cars. It feels apocalyptic, like the end times.
Time seems to pass like things fall down, like entropy, like something that we can’t get back, like ageing, like the death of someone we love, like the upwards trajectory of global temperatures that we can’t seem to slow.
But really, time is not some separate quality that impassively flows around us. Time is, in physicist Carlo Rovelli’s words, “part of a complicated geometry woven together with the geometry of space”. Time is a layered, multidimensional web unfolding in space. Time unfolds at different speeds in different places, the past and the future differ less than we think, and our notion of the ‘present’ as some discrete moment called ‘now’ is throughly confounded.
We have our existence within this web. All we can do is tend to our connections, link by link, in the short time that we have. Line by line, heartbeat by heartbeat.
I want my paintings to slow time down and show it back to me so I know it has happened. I want to make the invisible visible, and so communicable. I want to see the beauty, depth and complexity of that moment we call ‘now’ and hold it just long enough to share it so I can then let it go and still know it has been, because it has left some trace behind, in the connections made, the other lives touched, however fleetingly.
“Haar” will be part of an exhibition of new work in Edinburgh at the start of next year and I’ll be sharing more details of that soon.
In the meantime, here’s a few minutes of studio time from last week, the final layer going in.
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until next week
- Sam
I'm relatively new to your substack but I've enjoyed absolutely everything I've seen and read very much so far. Very much hope the exhibition is on long enough for me to maybe make it up to Edinburgh (I'm in Liverpool) to see :-)
Beautiful piece of writing, Sam.