Rising from the Ashes

One final image. It’s not my favourite “holiday snap”, but everyone else seems to like it.

Somewhere in the Preselly Hills – I can’t say where, as I didn’t have a map – is a rock painting that nobody will ever see.

I haven’t done many of these, I think this is number 5 over a period of 17 years, and this is the first one I’ve made any effort to document. But each time I’ve done one, the experience has been intense. If Picasso was right, and the mere production of a painting is a magical event that, in itself, has an impact on the world around, then these must be filled with magic.

Each one of these has been accompanied by – or rather, been part of – a sacred rite.

First, the procession to the site.

The site itself is important: High places are better than low. Why? I don’t know, it just feels right that way. Maybe it’s to do with the sense of one’s insignificance in the cosmos. Rocky places are good, too (see blog entry below).

Seclusion is important, as well. Not the big peaks such as Snowdon or Cader Idris, which attract sometimes hundreds of visitors a day. Rather the smaller, or subsidiary peaks, reached along barely-trodden paths, where people only go by accident. Seclusion allows for privacy, and lessens the chances of desecration.

The places mustn’t be too accessible. The process of getting there must be some kind of pilgrimage or ordeal. A long walk, a steep scramble, a scary climb. A process that makes one acutely aware of the surroundings, and the fragility of life.

Time of day is important: These things feel better at twilight – dawn or dusk, though dusk is better as retracing one’s steps in the evening dusk is much easier than finding one’s way in the pre-dawn gloom. It’s a magical principle – things, places and times that are neither quite one thing nor the other. Makes it difficult to get over-bound in extraneous conscious thought processes.

The painting must be hidden. To leave it revealed to all-comers is to put a stamp of ownership on the place, which risks destruction. See blog entries and comments for 7^th May and 9^th May below. These paintings are sacred, so destruction would be desecration.

Fire is important, as is smoke (cf. Abel’s sacrifice in Genesis). However, too much fire or smoke would attract the unwelcome attentions of national park rangers. Just enough to burn some aromatic herbs, and accomplish any symbolic burning required by the task in hand – usually, for me, the burning of a pictogram or object(s) relevant to my life at the time. Kind of miniature rites of passage.

Sound/music is important too, as is movement/dance. For the first time I carried my Sax on my back to the sacred place. On previous occasions the basic sounds of banging rocks together or stamping on the ground have sufficed, but this time some tonal music felt important.

The first of these was made somewhere in Snowdonia in 1995 – again, I didn’t have a map. I painted on a loose rock which I placed in a natural pit. Visible, but only if somebody looked very closely.

The second was in 2001 in Cumbria. I painted on one small facet of a large boulder near the ground, and then constructed a little archway of small rocks to conceal it. The arch was fairly jumbled and didn’t stand out as humanly constructed.

The third was in 2003, again in Cumbria. This time I didn’t paint, but built a rock “oven” and lit a large fire inside. The rocks were subsequently smoke-stained, but I left them with the stained faces turned in against each other, thus invisible and more likely to endure a while.

For the fourth back to Snowdonia in 2007, a painting on a small rock hidden behind some gorse and heather (yes, it was prickly making it!).

Apart from the smoke-staining, I’ve done all of them with acrylic paints. I don’t know how long they last (though acrylics I’ve put out on the nature reserve behind my home have lasted 12 years and still going strong), or if anyone has ever found one.

In writing this I’m reminded of an artist who made fibreglass “boulders”, indistinguishable from real ones unless you try picking them up, that he left in rocky places in the Arizona Desert. But I can’t remember his name, nor find any reference on Google. I remember he also made prints or paintings of petrol stations on fire.

Holidays!

A downside of a split family is negotiating childcare while the kids are off school. Two and a half working days each week: Either put the children into childcare while I work, which more or less annihilates my income for the day; Or just stuff the work and enjoy the children. Whichever way, it’s a time of low earning and high expenditure.

I took the kids away for the first week of the hols, which happened also to be the sunniest week. Yippee! Lots of beaches, a couple of theme parks, and some splashy rocky scrambling in the river Dart.

In return, I got a whole week without the children at all. The sensible thing to do with the time would have been to work and make up some of the financial shortfall. The decadent thing to do would have been to take another whole week holiday, this time with my new partner. I did the decadent thing, and it was brilliant.

It’s 18 years since I last had more than a day doing my own thing – hill walking, sketching, painting, swimming, surfing, playing music, camping, more sketching and painting, and then a bit more hill walking. Fantastic.

It’s also 18 years since I last went on holiday with another artist. I’ve only actually had 5 holidays before with one or more artists, and they’ve all been brilliant. This 6^th “holiday with an artist” was absoloutely as brilliant as the others.

Sketching and painting didn’t happen as much as hoped, mainly due to the wet weather. However, I’m pleased with what I did. I seemed to be drawn to the rocky places this time.

Piet Mondrian laboured to impart a sense of the spiritual. For him there was an underlying “invisible” fabric to the cosmos. As with many modernists, his was a vision that united science and religion, so the underlying fabric was Cartesian in nature – full of straight lines and right angles, squares and rectangles, predictable, rule-bound – but also filled with passionate colour. He found his vision reflected in the New Religion of Theosophy, to which he apparently devoted himself.

I have a similar vision of an underlying invisible fabric. However, for me it’s a lawless fabric, one of constant flow, often chaotic, and utterly unpredictable. It has no reason or explanation, and the very idea of a “Religion” runs counter to its nature. We’re all swept away by it, helpless, desperate to overlay a Mondrian-style gridlike explanation onto it, find a coherent set of ideas that can tame the spiritual wildness. However, for me, any such set of ideas is ultimately doomed as an inadequate and feeble grasping for a security which simply isn’t there.

I’m drawn to the rocks, as the gaps and cracks between them represent points of passage – gateways, thresholds – between the underworld and the overworld. Doorways between the invisible cosmic fabric and familiar waking “reality”. Sources of inspiration, places that the spirits come and go. Each rift and cleft a little sacred place. Each pile of rocks a natural temple in the wilderness.