Drawings in four dimensions

Funny how Cornwall now seems a million miles away.

I was listening to a Radio 4 programme about Neuroscience, and how we may be ‘nudged’ into thinking a certain way because, apparently, it’s not our conscious minds, but our ‘automatic brain’ that does most of the decision-making!

Seems like the Emperor’s new clothes again.

After spending a week on my own, and being able to filter out all the everyday stuff that we’re constantly bombarded with, I think there’s a lot to be said for listening to the conscious mind.

In opposition to the ‘automatic brain’, ‘Mindfulness’ is the term used to describe paying attention to one’s resting physical state – for some reason they wanted to avoid the term ‘meditation’ as it sounded a bit ‘weird‘?!*

Well I’ve come back down to earth now. The last days have been grey, wet and misty, like being at the bottom of a pond – what a contrast to last week!

I’m sorting through my photos, and now and again give myself a quick fix by looking at my videos.

Now trying to figure out how to upload video…

Final notes extracted from journal:

17 Nov, later
I walked to Porth Ledden (round the corner) where there are mine ruins at the beach.

It’s a rough sea and I hoped for good pictures. A small river, fuelled by yesterday’s downpour, rushed along the valley with me, and, after dithering about I finally found a way across so that I could walk home across the cove. It was harder than I imagined – the cove was piled with rocks of all kinds and the sea

(which was supposed to be going out) was at times menacingly near. The scramble took me an hour,

and when I finally gained the flatter beach and felt safe again, I took more photos, and watched a lone seal, who watched me with a curious eye. He was in his element, he knew what the underneath was like when the waves curled and crashed – I envied him so much! Not for the first time I wished

I’d learned to dive.

Today was a unique experience for me – it will settle like sediment into my store of memories to inform my work.

I downloaded all my videos onto my laptop, and all my SLR pics. I took 180 today.

18 Nov – Here I am, a week later. A week that has been more than interesting: hypnotic, at times, scary, stimulating, relaxing. I have loved being alone. I have only spoken to two shop assistants, the lovely receptionist in the Tate, and a couple of people in coffee shops. That’s fine – I can’t small talk anyway, and it’s good to be silent. I have enjoyed this time.

I wonder why the sea is so important to me. Why do I dream it often, and in different forms?

Today I walked to Cot Valley, for my last day of shooting. I’ve looked through the 100’s I’ve taken and can find only 2 or 3 that excite me, that I ‘want’ (what do I want though?)

Cot Valley has a river, similar to Porth Ledden, but its steeply banked sides are covered in brown bracken, and the river is pretty, shallow, and runs across a gravelly bed. It’s very peacefull, no sound of the sea until you are nearly there and once more hear the roar of the waves, which are very high today. (I’m mindful that I don’t know this coastline, and the sea probably gets a lot higher and rougher than I’m seeing it now).

I take 400 pictures, many continuous shots – for the last few days I know I’ve been obsessed with the feeling that the ‘perfect shot’ escapes me, so I keep trying, nearer and nearer the edge, but I know it’s not near enough, that my equipment is inadequate to my aspirations. I climb up out of harm’s way onto a rock to capture more inadequate video. In the end I run out of memory and card space and have to retreat, beaten. (They don’t have this problem on Frozen Planet!) I finally drag myself away, feeling that after all this I haven’t succeeded in capturing the perfect wave, and why did I hope to?

The walk back is easy – I stop briefly to fix a view in my mind, if that is possible, to feed on over the coming winter months.

19 Nov – I pack up. Sorry to leave. I feel that I was just beginning to get into my stride, just getting used to being alone, to being able to think only of my work.

As I eat breakfast I savour this last silence. There are only the little sounds, pouring coffee, stirring it round the thick white mug. The scraping of honey onto toast. My pen tapping across my notebook, my hand brushing its pages. It is as if I hold my breath to hear something more – the rocks being pulled across the ocean floor, the dark empty spaces cut out by miners, under our feet, under the sea. Spaces echoing with the movement of tides, dripping water, while up here the sea foams into an ice-blue mass and rushes to the shore, into the cove.

The waves are huge today, just a few more pictures should do it.

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15 Nov – Woke later this morning – regretted briefly that I’d missed precious time. The house is so peaceful, the sea slow, flat, gentle, the waves the colour of old green glass. I was awake in the night, thinking about what kind of work would come out of this time.

Went to Tate to see The Indiscipline of Painting: abstraction and contemporary abstraction. Interesting to see the commonalities and the differences – the same experimentation with contemporary painting media ; industrial paints, aluminium, expanded foam, but an added awareness of the complex, layered nature of our daily perception, borrowings from the street, the everyday.

I unashamably love beautiful work, and find most abstract work reductive – it doesn’t engage me long enough . I hadn’t seen Andy Warhol’s eggs before, and liked the tiny rough edges where the print met the flat paint. Tiny little points of interest.

Later – saw a Chough outside, on the wall. It croaks (if that is the word to describe it) in a squeaking, indignant way, as if begging attention. They were common all across Britain; Canterbury has three choughs on its coat of arms, we don’t see them in Kent any more. There are plenty of Ravens along the cliffs, too.

16 Nov – time is getting shorter – I’m reluctant to go home to the mess of daily life, to other people’s problems which are by extension, my own.

It rained all day, quietly and steadily, reminding me of when I was little, on the rare occasions when I was at home with just my mother, in the warm – maybe drawing or painting, watching the rain run down the windows. Feeling safe.

It was a good day to work, and to think about time, and dreams, and Henri Bergson, or at least, his ideas.

If our memories are stored in Time, a kind of ‘soup’, everything we’ve experienced of equal weight until we conjure it into the moment, what are dreams? And if the ‘Real’ is duration, a ‘continually-becoming’, what happens when we dream? Are dreams more similar to ‘intuition’? And what, for that matter is intuition? It’s not the sum of our remembered experience, so where does it come from?

I set up an experiment: what if I tried to make a series of sketches by simply making one mark in response to a previous one? Is it even possible? – I found my attention wandering, calculating the next mark, judging the last one…Resigned myself to an imperfect process.

In the evening the wind buffeted the house – the rain poured down.

17 Nov – two more days left.

The sea has returned to its powerful self, waves crashing in, covering the cove in skeins of white foam, smashing against the rocks in huge sprays. I shall miss its rhythm, which has slowed my heartbeat** and fills me with intense excitement when I try to get The Ultimate Shot, nearer and nearer, without getting soaked through. I never do, of course, it constantly eludes me.

Today I can see across to Sennen Cove again, and the lighthouse shows very clear in the dawn light.



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