Becoming Blue XVI - Forget-me-nots GRIEF

To be read to Agnes Obel's 'Parliament of Owls' in B Minor

My screen is smashed, like the walls of my heart. Both were smashed this late August. Dropped. Both the phone and I were dropped in unison and yet peculiarly, like the phone, the pieces stayed together, like a kintsugi bowl, nothing was lost. My body was still whole. Broken things can be mended. I tapped the screen together with sellotape and got to work on healing the cracks on myself. I am trying to be as graceful as a swan. Faithful, loyal, mute and pure. I saw in my vision swans coming out of the orange antlers I had been dreaming about since last year and sketched out this piece as a trial run. Eight swans for eternity and the looped nature of time. Mute swans for my silence. Antlers for Leda's fecundity and Forget Me Nots for remembrance and the passing of time on Swan Lake.

Swan Song, (2020),Watercolour on paper, 100 cm x 50cm, J R Shepherd
Work in Progress

To feel betrayed is a terrible feeling. Loyalty seems to be a thing of the past these days. Now, it's a rare thing to see a human not out for himself, but I guess you have to love them anyway, we're all fallible. As 2020 rolls on, I have downed brushes. I find my energy is needed elsewhere. I used to paint pictures for people to look at, but now I feel that people just want someone to listen to them during this exceptional time, so I am talking to a lot of people. 

The phone can't be replaced until March, and even then it's a push. With new borders springing up from nowhere and I am feeling cut off. I feel like the universe is pulling me away from the mothership. The cords are still there, I am still tied, but only just. Once a month something else happens and another apron string is yanked out of my navel. It's a terribly painful process for me, because it is not out of choice, but necessity and survival. This wasn't my choice. It's something higher and out of my control. For the past six years, I have been learning the art of letting go. Now, I feel I am inside a lighthouse, all at sea. Flashing my light, in a raging storm, letting everyone I know that it is going to be ok. It's perilous out there. Some are winning, some are losing and many have been lost. But the light must continue to flash, even if my window is smashed.

Swan Song, (2020), Watercolour on paper, 100 cm x 50cm, J R Shepherd
Work in Progress

This has been the hardest year of my life. Not from a stressful point of view, but more just the level of soul searching and coming to terms with myself. It was necessary. More transformations, transitions and shifting through the silt. 

'A summer of a hundred visions and revisions, the almond's armour is finally starting to split' - J R Shepherd Facebook Update

There is nothing more destabilising than finding out that you really don't know someone you thought you knew and the sense of betrayal that comes with that. As the almond husks cleaved apart mid-July I intuitively knew what was happening. Summer was waning and there was nothing I could do. Someone was going to cleave away and disappear and they did, in the most deceptive and painful way. My painter's block started mid-July and is still very much present, reaching an all-round halt on September 4th with confirmation of the cleft. My block is all tied up in this. What I thought I knew I did not, and yet I did instinctively. But I did not want to see it. I saw what I wanted to see and not what was there. I feel fooled as a person and as a painter. As a painter, you should always be able to see through the illusion. So now I don't trust myself.

Swan Song, (2020), Watercolour on paper, 100 cm x 50cm, J R Shepherd
Work in Progress

As I painfully chip away at my swans, there is an outstandingly beautiful Autumn unfolding outside here in Granada. I missed the Spanish autumn last year - the first autumn in my new home - as I was in England folding newspapers for a month. Seems so strange looking back on that time and not knowing what was coming. I have since forgotten all my pin numbers it's been so long since she used my cards. I occasionally fumble an English note with Her Majesty's head on it. It feels strange. I have forgotten the stations on the London underground, and I've forgotten that you can't get a pick-a-mix from Woolworths anymore as I also loose track of timelines and I feel like I don't know anything anymore.

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still

Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed

By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,

He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push

The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?

And how can body, laid in that white rush,

But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower

And Agamemnon dead.

Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air,

Did she put on his knowledge with his power

Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Yeats

Swan Song, (2020),Watercolour on paper, 100 cm x 50cm, J R Shepherd
Work in Progress

As the painting block ticks on I am doing all I can to remain hopeful and ready, remaining as faithful and devoted as a swan in a cloud of Prussian Blue. 

When I hold you, I hold everything that is–swans, volcanoes, river rocks, maple trees drinking the fragrance of the moon, bread that the fire adores. In your life I see everything that lives." 

Pablo Neruda

There is the Romantic medieval tale of the Le Chevalier au Cigne or Swan Knight, which is a story of a mysterious rescuer who comes in a swan-drawn boat to defend a damsel, his only condition being that he must never be asked his name. The earliest versions (preserved in Dolopathos) do not provide a specific identity to this knight, but the Old French Crusade cycle of chansons de geste adopted it to make the Swan Knight (first version around 1192). At a later time, the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach incorporated the swan knight Loherangrin into his Arthurian epic Parzival in the first quarter of the 13th Century and a German text, written by Konrad von Würzburg in 1257, also featured a Swan Knight without a name.

The phone screen might have smashed, but maybe there will be a renewal in March 2021 in not only the phone contract but also the bond with the invisible Swan man. The man who visits me in dreams with antlers on his head and box of Swan Vestas in his back pocket.

Becoming Blue X: Blue Rose - SORROW

"The fear of being abandoned. The terror of being lonely forever. The anxiety of being utterly dependent upon another. The panic of unbearable vulnerability and exposure. The dread of the looming death of yourself and everyone around you. These are the great fears that come as you wake, as you fall asleep, and as you dream through this life. 

But perhaps the greatest fear of all is the fear of being loved. We don’t really see it this way, though. For when you are really loved, when you are entirely seen, when you are fully held, it is the end of your world as you know it. You will never be the same. You will never again be able to pretend that you are other than perfect and precious as you are. And that is terrifying. 

Life is always seeing you in this way. 

You long to be loved, to be seen, but please know that the implications are immense; they are cosmic. To allow yourself to be loved in this way a part of you must die. Everything you thought you weren’t must be surrendered. You must let go of the stories of the unlovable one, the awakened one, the special one, the imperfect one, and the despairing one. Love wishes to reveal your nakedness, to remove your clothing, and to burn away all that is false and less than whole within you. What you are is a raging firestorm of creativity, sensuality, openness, warmth, and kindness. 

In this way, love is a destructive process, for it comes to re-order everything you thought you knew."

Matt Licata in Many Voices

Christmas Day, Watercolour on paper, 30 x 21 cm, J R Shepherd (2019) ©

The Blue Rose paintings - there are three so far. It is a muse I keep returning to. There's just something about its artificialness. A Rose that has been deliberately altered by mankind using synthetic dyes is for me representative of our unwavering quest for perfection and wholeness and the sorrow this obsession can bring. The first Rose 'Supernova' (bottom of the post) was completed in the summer of 2018, then, after an incredibly painful Christmas in Australia, I completed 'Christmas Day' (above). I thought that would be it, but no... this summer, in the chaos of eclipses and Brexit I returned to the roses again and produced 'Instar', where the blue rose is a mere speck in the throng of insanity. 

"No longer seek happiness—wanting it only separates you from realizing the profound sense of wellbeing that is only present in the absence of desire. "

Desire is full of endless distances. As I continued to paint the texture of longing I put the finishig touches onto 'Christmas Day' after a 7 month break. It was a painting that I had originally begun whilst recuperating alone in a house in Melbourne on December 25th. It's about heartbreak, there's no way around it. I was broken when I did this. It is the sorrow and bitter disappointment of blue. 

 "Heartbreak is unpreventable; the natural outcome of caring for people and things over which we have no control… Heartbreak begins the moment we are asked to let go but cannot, in other words, it colors and inhabits and magnifies each and every day; heartbreak is not a visitation, but a path that human beings follow through even the most average life. Heartbreak is an indication of our sincerity: in a love relationship, in a life’s work, in trying to learn a musical instrument, in the attempt to shape a better more generous self. Heartbreak has its own way of inhabiting time and its own beautiful and trying patience in coming and going". 

David Whyte

'Instar', Blue Rose, Watercolour and charcoal on paper,
56 x 76 cm, WORK  IN PROGRESS

Above and below is 'Instar'. It was painted eight months after 'Christmas Day' and is just as much about longing as all the other works. This piece for me is about being smothered and longing to break free. About being stuck, trapped and hidden. Similar themes to Leafscape and my previous post on 'The Lady of Shallot'. It's about chaotic politics, bureaucracy, a broken English Rose, an Albion with no plan and the dream, the contradictory utopian dream to be free and yet smothered. The dream (blue flower) is almost out of view. You have to squint to find it, but it's still there. A fragment of hope. Alongside all the politics, the painting is also about the responsibility I feel in having to make certain decisions and how we are all the living consequence of our decisions. 

"The process of transformation consists mostly of decay and then of this crisis when emergence from what came before must be total and abrupt. The strange redundant word instar describes the stage between two successive molts. Instar implies something both celestial and ingrown, something heavenly and disastrous, and perhaps change is commonly like that, a buried star, oscillating between near and far." Solnit

"One way you know you're approaching core territory is that your experiences become indescribable. Let yourself stand in an inner confrontation with the unknown within you -- and what, in truth, can never be explained." Eric Francis

'Instar', Blue Rose, Watercolour and charcoal on paper,
56 x 76 cm, Jessica R Shepherd (2019) ©

As blue unfolds like Mandlebrot Set I sit here madly laughing to myself. You see, for months I have been thinking about 'longing' and how to possibly overcome it in order to see it for what 'it' is and I am finding it incredibly difficult to write a critique about because it is so ingrained in my existence and my ego. So I have to overcome that in order to see it, which, I guess, is what Zen is and no sooner had I considered this as an option, was I reminded of the text I wrote in the Introduction to Blue Flower:

"On a sunny September afternoon, as tired leaves rustled in the garden beyond her window pane, she opened her book 'An Inquiry into Blue' and took out a flatted, knotted mass of black and brown hair that she had collected from a bed at Kensal Green several weeks before. Then, with her other hand she opened her indigo bound copy of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and placed the hairs between pages 32 and 33. Once closed, she took the Antwerp blue scarf that was wrapped around her neck and tied it around the book before hiding it at the bottom of her wardrobe..."

There it was... staring me in the face, right at the start of my journey into blue petals. In excitement, I once again pace towards the bookshelf in the room of my childhood and my fingers rummage between Encyclopedias, French Dictionaries and Richard Scarry books until they uncover the crushed Antwerp blue scarf and the broken, worn binding it enshrouds. It was on the same shelf as the 2005 diary on longing. Circles, everything is a circle and there are clues everywhere. 

All states of mind are a delusion - transcend them all. 

Studio shot of Instar.

I have reading to do, but I wonder - will this actually help me as a painter? You see, there aren't many of us who live in the present, detached, with no sense of longing and my mission was always to reach out to souls and help them to see the beauty in flowers by making the flowers humanoid. I do this by incorporating the contradictions and complexities of being a human into my work. How we long for the things that don't really exist. If I were to paint something of no longing, would anyone actually want that on their wall? What even is that? Isn't that what botanical art WAS? A mere document devoid of all feeling; a scientific description of a plant? Surely we all want mirrors? That's why we buy smartphones and take selfies. That's why we fall in love. Surely that's why we buy art? It's a type of therapy. 

"Happiness and unhappiness are two aspects of the same thing, which is the false sense of self's search for inner stillness. Happiness always fades and disappears—just as every sort of appearance within awareness does—and in its place, unhappiness inevitably arises."

The cyclical nature of things brings me to the final Rose of my Blue Roses so far. One that I laid out last year... It feels like a long time ago now. The early days of blue, when things felt less convoluted. At the time I wanted to paint grief and the fading and changing of things and this was the outcome, and I called it 'Super Nova', the final stage of a decaying star. But like with all things, when a star dies, new ones are made and supernovae are vital in this, because when they explode, supernovae create shock waves that compress the star material in interstellar space which in turn causes large clouds of gas to form new stars. Such is the circle of things. 

Supernova, Blue Rose, Watercolour and charcoal on paper,
56 x76 cm, Jessica R. Shepherd (2018) ©

Becoming Blue IX: Hyacinth - OBSCURITY

Blue is longing. The colour of solitude and of desire.  

The colour of  'over there' as seen from 'over here'. 

The colour of where you are not,

and where you can never go. 

'The Breach', Hyacinth sp., 1m x 1m, Watercolour on paper, Jessica Rosemary Shepherd (2019)

"Let us go then, you and I, 

When the evening is spread out against the sky"
T. S. Eliot

The name of the Hyacinth flower has the most interesting meaning. In Greek mythology, Apollo the sun god and Zephyr the god of the west wind compete for a young boy’s affections. At one point Apollo is teaching Hyakinthos how to throw the discus and Zephyr gets so angry that he blows a gust of wind in Apollo’s direction, which sends the discus hurling back in the direction of Hyakinthos, striking and killing him. Apollo, brokenhearted, notices that a flower springs up from the blood that was spilled and names the flower Hyacinth in honor of the boy. This symbol of the hyacinth flower has remained pretty simple throughout history.

"Every love has a landscape"

Solnit

Therefore it seemed appropriate for me to finally decide to venture towards the Hyacinth during my summer of silence where things started to go so badly wrong in my head. The discipline I needed to adopt in order to keep in equilibrium was really hard to maintain. And so now, with everything sloshing about, no lunch hours, everything seems to now be about boundaries, my own and everyone else's. The myth of the Hyacinth is also about borders and the disaster that can unfold when things are pushed. A gust of wind, it's all it took. 

My Hyacinth painting is about a breach. It's a crack, a cleft, a penetration. It's a line drawn and a line crossed. Something mischievous has found a way to creep in, be it a feeling, a notion or a thing. It's possibly unwanted, I am not sure. Doesn't feel good if I am honest. It could be something that is much more dangerous than it seems, something that could chip away at structures like dry rot. This piece is deep. It comes from buried chronic feelings from a long, long time ago. Something that's resurfacing in me as I sit in silence.

Hyacinth, work in  progress

Dutch Hycathins always look hideous to me and I have often found their smell just as overbearing. I never was a fan. My mother is allergic to the bulbs and I remember as a child associating some form of fear of them just from that alone. 

Diary Entry:

"This time I am reigning everything in. I must remain as silent as a nun. I must devote my energy to a higher power. Remain open, slightly lost and thus vulnerable. This is becoming increasingly difficult to do. Nothing feels balanced. Just painted in the giant leaves of the hyacinth, they look rude and suggestive. everything looks like something other than what it should be. The watercolours are disintegrating. Maybe by this time next year the shapes will take over and the petals and leaves will no longer be fully recognisable? The leaf looks like an antler I dreamt about only a few days ago. My dreams. Blue is increasingly becoming about my dreams. As I look at every painting, what is coming out are my dreams and how I see plants in them. "

Hyacinth, work in  progress

I am now high on blue Hyacinth. the smell of my childhood and of Abbott and Holder. However, unlike most, my Hyacinths are always mixed with the scent of Brasso and furniture polish. Hyacinths leave me with an image of a desperate 1950s housewife or of a house that's gone wrong. Dry marriage beds, dysfunctional families and that perfumed mask, the pretense - everything is ok on the outside. I knew when the time came for me to paint the Dutch Hyacinth, that I would play on not only it's hideousness in terms of its own real morphology, but also the associations I have in my head. All of the flowers of blue have associations -  I am not just painting a flower. Every painting is a deep exploration of my psyche, it's memories and projections. With the Hyacinth, I knew from day one I wanted something monstrous - the elephant in the room that no one is prepared to discuss. 

Hyacinth, work in  progress in the new studio

I started the piece back in June 2019 and during that time I had to leave it behind in my studio in Spain while I visited my old childhood home in Sussex. Seemed apt in a way, to return to that space of heady Hyacinths. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I was rummaging through my bookcase looking for a scrapbook because I wanted to make a Romantic Herbal for one of my disappearing men who'd I'd not seen in a while. As a consequence of not having seen him, I was also drafting out (and struggling with) a blog post about absence and how it makes the heart grow fonder. So, there I was rummaging in my childhood bookcase, and as I foraged between Encyclopedias and French dictionaries, an old diary of mine fell out and opened itself onto s specific page. A page I'd written in 2005 on my ideas surrounding 'longing', after my boyfriend at the time had disappeared to work off-grid in the jungles of Kenya. Oh, un coup de des! It seems enduring love is something I encounter a lot. Freud would have a hay day with me! 

Hyacinth, work in  progress, close up - needs more layers

In ancient civilisation, longing used to be about longing for otherness. Of what it was that put us on this planet. As ancients, we would watch the sun, moon and stars and wonder who or what put them there. What it was to be a human. The longing was for knowledge, for understanding. Nowadays, however, longing seems to have morphed into something else entirely. Now, equipped with so much knowledge, I find humans are having to place their longing onto other things - materialistic things, or for other human beings, animals, popularity, times lost, times yet to come, other places or for identities, religions and political notions. The Blue Flower is about longing, to long for the places we will never arrive in. In order to continue deciphering the illusionary nature of Blue, I am now considering what it is to long for something, and how I can generate that effect on the canvas. I am currently looking into peepholes, time-lapses and the miniature. Works I probably won't start until 2020.

Hyacinth, work in  progress, in the studio

"There father and son

Shall mingle in dust

As if life itself

Had been mostly illusion but partially real

And partially pain...

....As the world disappears"

A Song for Douglas, After He's Dead

Current 93

As you know, I like to turn things on their head. To understand longing maybe we also need to understand what it is to disappear and hide because when we disppear we can create longing in others? When we ourselves choose to disappear, I feel we are trying to center ourselves or to remove ourselves from something that we consider threatening to our existence. But the thing is, we still long for something, be it a resolution, safety, wholeness, control. So in this case, it seems that longing is an overarching theme and the act of hiding is just a spoke from it. So as usual for blue, turning things on their head hasn't helped me to find an answer. I am still lost.

"So many things to see in this old world 

But all I can see is you".

Together Alone 1970

So it seems our life's journey is driven by longing. It is perhaps the only overarching human emotion that connects all of us. Longing has to do with the divine because what we long for the most is a relationship with our destiny and origins. We may not be conscious of it, but we long to know 'why, how what', in whatever guise that might mean to the individual. This in turn brings us back to projection, to possibly thinking that the missing elements of who we think we are can be supplied by another person, or through the pursuit of esoteric knowledge, to make us feel whole. But really only a connection with the cosmos and an acceptance of the unknown can fill that hole.

Studio lights on, late night working in the new casa. August 2019

Blue started as a utopian project about hope, and where there is hope, there is longing, and where there is longing there is heartbreak, grief, and tragedy. The joyful-sad that is blue... The original text written by Novalis in the 18th Century, in which this contemporary version of Blue Flower is based on, was about longing:

“It is not the treasures,” he said to himself, “that have stirred in me such an unspeakable longing; I care not for wealth and riches. But that blue flower I do long to see; it haunts me and I can think and dream of nothing else." Novalis

Blue is the longing for the distances you never arrive in, it is the colour of solitude and of desire, the colour of  'over there' seen from 'here', the colour of where you are not. and the colour you can never go. Blue is the backward glance, the dream, the illusion.

"Longing is divine discontent. Longing brings the horizon close, it makes it possible. The ache, the humiliation, it is felt as the beautifully familiar. Longing has its own secret future destination and longing is nothing without its dangerous edge. We are a form of an invitation to others and to otherness. We are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing. In longing, we move to the unknown that we think we know." David Whyte

Nostalgia and the postcard:

I have been collecting postcards of every place I visit for Blue Flower for a final piece of artwork I haven't yet planned. For me, the postcard is the best souvenir of all because it ends up taking it's own separate journey from the place you were in to finally reach the hands of a loved one. A loved one you miss and therefore long for. Souvenirs such as this embrace a sense of longing doubly - they authenticate a past or otherwise remote experience and at the same time to discredit the present.  "What lies between 'here' and 'there' is oblivion, the void that marks the radical separation between past and present." (Susan Stewart). Postcards are all about longing, little documents that point towards the obscurity that time and place (and therefore experience) inhabits in our lives.

New view from the terrace, Granada

As I read more and more, longing becomes at its most basic fundamental level about time and space and therefore our connection with the divine. Even moments of 'love at first sight' are about an improbable meeting that happens between souls in a specific place and a certain time. At times, there is more weight given to the space-time event than to the actual soul one has encountered. So to long for something is to have a restless, unhappy, unresolved relationship with the unknown elements of time and space.

"It's quite overwhelming to accept the unknown. especially when there is so much potential."

Eric Francis

Last thoughts:

After much deliberation in the summer of 2017, I decided to embrace Blue Flower as my next project in my attempt to reject a world that is becoming more and more controlled and isolating. Humans are now inhabiting 'invisible environments'. Digital places that exist inside telephones and computers that are not real or grounded and full of longing. In these places, no one has a body - everyone is a ghost in these zones. Dangerous things happen when we lose our bodies because we lose the root of our longing. We loose our connection to the mystical. Things become extreme and desire gets polarised. We become obsessed with the idea and not with the reality. We become nostalgic and rooted in illusions.

"Whatever you desire of the world will not come to pass exactly as you will like it. But the other mercy is that whatever the world desires of you will also not come to pass. And what actually occurs is this meeting, this frontier. But it’s astonishing how much time human beings spend away from that frontier, abstracting themselves out of their bodies, out of their direct experience, and out of a deeper, broader, and wider possible future that’s waiting for them if they hold the conversation at that frontier level. Half of what’s about to occur is unknown, both inside you and outside you." David Whyte

The passions kindled by longing must be harnessed and used judiciously, or they threaten to consume our hopes and dreams. Blue was always a political project as well as a personal one. The personal is political and I wanted to paint something that not only resonated with you on a personal level emotionally but also something that picked up on the chaos of the world we are currently living in collectively. The sleepy steps we simultaneously take to make our own little fake utopias. Uncontrollable personal longing has the potential to damage our own experience of the world and our natural environments. "True fellowship among men must be based upon a concern that is universal. It is not the private interests of the individual that create lasting fellowship among men, but rather the goals of humanity. That is why it is said that fellowship with men in the open succeeds" I-Ching. Our current political and environmental crises are rooted in undisciplined longing. and the sad thing is, we've just not worked out that to be creative and connect to others is where wholeness exists. This is where contentment is. Earthly reality is when we wake up and confront our own ideas about the mirage we long for.

"For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love"

Carl Sagan

THE BREACH
Watercolour and charcoal on paper, 1m x 1m, Jessica Shepherd

'What is dark clings to what is light and so enhances the brightness of the latter. A luminous thing giving out light must have within itself something that perseveres; otherwise it will in time burn itself out. Everything that gives light is dependent on something to which it clings, in order that it may continue to shine. Thus the sun and moon cling to heaven, and grain, grass, and trees cling to the earth. So too the twofold clarity of the dedicated man clings to what is right and thereby can shape the world. 

Human life on earth is conditioned and unfree, and when man recognizes this limitation and makes himself dependent upon the harmonious and beneficent forces of the cosmos, he achieves success.  The great man continues the work of nature in the human world with respect to time. Through the clarity of his nature he causes the light to spread farther and farther and to penetrate the nature of man ever more deeply.' I Ching

With thanks to Amaya and Vida for all their help and guidance on this line of enquiry.

Giants in Thimbles V - Flowers of the Soul

I am happy to say that the first third of the collection is now complete. I spent a long time signing, dating and cataloguing them all. The signing process was a bit tricky this time around as the boarders of these leaves and the empty (or claustrophobic) white space round each leaf is incredibly important to the overall piece and I found that my signature kept interfering with each arrangement. I had been contemplating a signature change of late, as most people seem to know me as 'Inky Leaves' rather than 'Jess Shepherd' these days, but in the end I decided to stick to the old signature. I tried everything from logo transfers and monograms to pictures and name changes and none of them worked with the leaves. They just drew too much attention to themselves. So here I am, I remain to be 'Jess Shepherd' but in the form of a teeny-tiny signature.

Close up on the latest leaf, a Catalpa bignonioides. Watercolour on paper. 76 x 56cm

So with the signatures done I then spent a good few hours transferring both long and short stories about each leaf on the back. Each story included the catalogue number, the pseudonym, their Latin name and geographical locations at point of collection. Occasionally I have written where I painted it or how I was feeling when I found the leaf. Two of the pieces are denoted as siblings (Vincent and Victoria), two are about love (Judas and India) and of course four paintings came from the same tree (India, Indiana, Indie and Indo). Speaking of which, here's part of the mummified leaf of 'Indo' - leaf 100820151542 (above).

I feel that these brief accounts on the reverse of each painting are really important to do as not only do they give each item provenance, but they also reflect my own personality as a story teller and writer. I also rather like the fact that they are hidden and will probably not be found until well after I am dead, rather like the writings and lost paintings found on the backs of Marianne North's paintings in Kew during the most recent restoration project. 

Painting discovered on the back of painting 366 during the restoration of the Marianne North Gallery

I am not sure if you remember, but I decided to start writing on the backs of paintings soon after I wrote my first 'Giants in Thimbles' post about the collection because I wanted the pieces to have a temporal aspect to them as well as a visual. At the time I wasn't sure what I was accessing and why I wanted to do this. I have been always aware of how important the element of time is in botanical art, but back then I guess I also felt that the vastness of time was fitting for a collection such as this which questions scale and life so intimately, and, as time has ticked on (excuse the pun), I now feel much clearer on what it is I am trying to add to the pieces. I suppose it is a sense of nostalgia.

Writing the stories in the UK before framing. 

As I continue ask myself the fundamental question of 'what is it that moves me?’, I start to think about the memory and nostalgia in the context of the sublime - the flowers that make up the flowerbed of our souls and the terror of a time lost. C. S. Lewis refers to this feeling as 'Sehnsucht' - a German world that describes something that is intensely missing. Retrospection is huge - it can rattle through us all of the time to the point that the constant yearning for a time long lost can take over rational perception. One grapples with it - lost time is always there. We are, after all, the product of our memories, but you can't hold them in your arms. Nostalgia, like the memory, is vast and it is infinite in that there is no boundary to it - it is a dreamscape. One cannot simply join all the memories up back to a single point in time like the Big Bang because memories get fuzzy and punctuated the further back you go. There is no beginning or end, mere snippets that hint at a boundary.

Memory interests me on a number of levels because not only is it huge but it also, like a Gothic novel, can be deeply disturbing. The constant searching for a time long lost can bring on great sadness as well as horror and a sense of dread. Our horror over lost time is most likely linked to an awareness over our own mortality. Looking at it under the microscope and focusing on it threatens our sense of self preservation. Thinking however is different, in thinking we rebell against the tyranny of time and a hedge against the terror of our finitude (Arendt, 1981). With this I recognise that there is a difference between gentle reflection and nostalgia. However, memory will always have a magical quality to it. It allows us to time travel whenever we want to and it fundamentally, like language, makes us 'us'. It gives us our consciousness. If you can picture your memories, then you can imagine your future. However if you can't remember anything at all, then the future must simply just turn into a blank space, rather like the past. 

Catalpa bignoinoides leaf, 76 x 56cm, watercolour on Saunders Waterford HP

“The future enters into us” (Rilke)

"The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river. Then one sees through the surface to the depths. In those moments I find one of my greatest satisfactions, not that I am thinking of the past; but that it is then that I am living most fully in the present. For the present when backed by the past is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close that you can feel nothing else, when the film on the camera reaches only the eye. " (Woolfe)

Clockwise from bottom left: John Randall Turney 1834 – 1905 (great, great, great grandfather), Nancy Lord b1825, (great, great, great, great, grandmother),  Arthur Fincham Turney 1874 – 1969 (great, great grandfather), Frank Nicholson (great, great grandfather), Grace Crowther (great, great, great grandmother), Jessie Pretoria Nicholson 1900 – 1978 (great grandmother), Frank Nicholson (great, great grandfather), Dora Shaw (great, great grandmother),  Frank Turney 1903 – 1988 (great grandfather), middle: Harriett Fincham 1840 – 1919 (great, great, great grandmother)

When I was young I used to work for the Weald of Sussex Lacemakers making lace. It happened quite by accident. I used to watch them do their demos at the museum and eventually they asked if I would like a go. I took to it like a duck to water and in a matter of a few weeks one of the lacemakers called Janet bought me the entire kit for my birthday. I felt so lucky. My mother then commissioned the local woodturner to make some personalised bobbins for me. These were indeed magical times.  I was drawn to the complexity of the lace as well as it's delicate nature. Things become as delicate as a memory with time, items fade and break. I feel our fascination with the intricate and fragile comes from us acknowledging our own fragility. There is a level of appreciation that comes from the intricacy of lace too. It is as if these complicated items condense time because they take so long to make. Intricately handmade items are reservoirs of time and despite being heavy and dense with time, they, like us, are defenseless to decay.

Greg Dunn's drawing of the hippocampus, a region of the brain that is important for memory 
and navigation and coincidentally looks a bit like lace.

As a painter I am steadly becoming interested in how the 'vision' of nostalgia manifests in our minds as 'imaginary perception' or 'virtual perception'. For example, I am fascinated when people say that after seeing one of my big leaves they are instantly transported to the dens of their childhood where they can see the leaves up close. Often they deliver this very rational response after an irrational gasp. With time I have come to realise that this gasp is markedly a response to the memory rather than a simple reaction to a painting. The gasp is nearly always a deep rooted, primal gasp - its shrouded in shock, horror and pain - like a pinprick. Its an interesting reaction of horror and surprise and I wonder if it is the emotional response to an unexpected opening in the vastness of time. Unsuspecting, the observer wasn't ready for time travel, caught unawares they are harshly reminded of their mortalty and perceive it as a threat. Nostalgia, the type that can creep up on you, reminders that come out of the dark without you calling on them, are always perilous.

Greg Dunn's fantastic drawing of a cell in the retina. Twitter: @GDunnArt

After hearing about the 'den memories' of my clients I started to think about what one 'sees' when one remembers. I was surprised that the leaves, all supersized, took them right back so acutely. After much analysis I have come to realise that when I remember an occurrence or scene that happened long in the past, I,  like my clients, can only focus on the 'objects' and not the landscape. That object, so fully charged with sentiment, totally takes over like a landscape. Textures become magnified in their experience. As I sit and recall one of my biggest memories, which is of a place where many events occurred, I can't see 'the place'. The 'place' is instead represented by a myriad of tiny objects that reveal themselves in the form of a well organised kalaidoscope - one which refuses to be captured and contained but is organised nonetheless, and everything is blown up out of proportion. For example, I try to remember an area where I used to play - I try to remember the trees, the leaves, the map of the land, but all I can see is an old water butt in that area and pictorially the only thing that is in focus is the dried, green moss growing on it. There is a bigger landscape around me but it is blurred and out of focus. This seems odd to me as I have no real sentimental attachment to this waterbutt, but the moss does draw me in.

"Memory, that guardian of time, guards the instant alone. It preserves nothing, absolutely nothing, of our complicated and artificial sense of duration." (Bachelard)

I wonder if the blurring of the landscape is a result of my myopia (I couldn't really see as a child but this wasn't picked up on until I was 14 years old) and so attempting to test this further I think of another den, only the leafy floor with all of its crevices is in focus, or the bit of graffiti in one of the old metal huts. The rest is a blur, obscured by filtration. The fish pond - only the rough texture of the concrete container and the intense heat are memorable, not the fish. Behind the electricity building - only the flaking paint of a red telephone box and the smell of baking chalk is well defined. Only the flakes where my hand touches are in focus, or the textures governed by heat and smell, and I wonder if that is the answer. Is what one can only perceptively focus on in a state of nostalgia are the things that touched another sensory gland - be it sound, smell or touch - along with the eye and not just the eye alone? I am unable to focus on the wood as a whole, only the bark of an individual tree which I probably touched.

"Touch fills our memory with a detailed key as to how we're shaped, a mirror would mean nothing without touch. We are forever taking the measure of ourselves in unconscious ways. Touch teaches us that life has depth and contour; it makes our sense of the world. Without that intricate feel for life there would be no artist, whose cunning is to make sensory and emotional maps" (Ackerman, 1992).

Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lightning Fields

As you are aware, our brains are able to interpret two-dimensional drawings as representing a three-dimensional objects. To do this, our perceptual system uses a series of educated guesses to fill in the gaps. Apparently, our brains use the same guessing process to reconstruct the past. Like with a puzzle, we piece together our memories, based on both what we actually remember and what seems most likely given our knowledge of the world. Just as we make educated guesses in perception, our minds’ best educated guesses help 'fill in the gaps' of memory, reconstructing the most plausible picture of what happened in our past. One of the things that interests me is something called ‘boundary extension’ – a remarkable phenomenon where our visual memories consistently recall seeing a more wide-angle image of a scene than what was actually present. This is due to our brain filling in the gaps and its role is to help us engage with the world that around us and beyond what we see. Rather predictably, boundary extension is reduced when we are emotionally roused or anxious, which resonates well with the cut-off edges in my botanical dystopia. So could boundary extension be another reason why the scenery is often blurred and why things like leaves and moss appear so crisp? Is this why in our memory, scale frequently reveals itself in a confused and chaotic state comparable to being in a chapter of Alice in Wonderland? 

“If our heart were large enough to love life in all its detail, we would see that every instant is at once a giver and a plunderer.” (Bachelard)

As a work in progress on the easel: Large Catalpa leaf, 76 x 56cm,
watercolour on Saunders Waterford HP in the UK pop-up studio

With my Alice in Wonderland leaves, I am also beginning to observe how the temporal quality of botanical art can be intensified with changes in scale. The manifestations of time in this branch of work are numerous (inclusion of life cycles, time to complete a piece etc.) so it is always there, lurking in the paint. Equipped with this understanding about the connection with scale and time I am reminded of Einstein's theory of Special Relativity and the discovery of 'spacetime' - a four dimensional description of our world that incorporates basic Euclidean geometry with time. It is beginning to feel as though the perceptive power of our memories is more closely linked to the four dimensional parable and I wonder if this is why our memories can also be so terrifying and subliminal - because they don't fit into our Euclidean 'interpretation' of the world. Is it that our memories not only remind us of our mortality and a time lost, but that it also connects us to the seemingly impossible, forcing us to question what is real and what is not? If we sit and think about it, consciousness has to be at least four dimensional, if not more, and maybe this is how art helps us to transcend our 'being'. I remember touching on this briefly before, but it is only now where I am starting to understand this from a more formulaic standpoint. 

"Time is a reality confined to the instant and suspended between two voids. Although time will no doubt be reborn, it must first die. It cannot transport its being from one instant to another in order to forge duration." (T. S. Eliot)

Whatever the case may be, I am happy to say that ten pieces of a rather large, muddled, botanical dystopian puzzle are now being put in their cages in a little shop in the backwaters of leafy Surrey.

Biblography:

Ackerman, D., (1992), 'A Natural History of the Senses', Vintage Books
Arendt, H., (1981), 'The Life of the Mind', Harcourt Publishing Ltd.
Bachelard, G., (2013), 'Intuition of the Instant', Northwesten University Press
Brady, T., (2008), 'Blurring the Boundary Between Perception and Memory', Scientific American
Carrol, L., (2007), 'Through the Looking Glass', Penguin Classics
Lewis, C. S., (1966), Surprised by Joy, Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich
Eliot., T. S., (1935), 'Burnt Norton, Collected Poems', 
Intraub & Richardson, (1989), Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory&Cognition, 15:179-187

Papova, M., (2016), 'Intuition of the Instant: French Philosopher Gaston Bachelard on Our Paradoxical 
Experience of Time', Brain Pickings
Papova, M., (2015), 'Virginia Woolf on the Past and How to Live More Fully in the Present', Brain Pickings
Papova, M., (2015), 'Virginia Woolf on the Elasticity of Time', Brain Pickings
Rilke, M., (2011), 'Letters to a Young Poet', CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Smith, P., (2015), 'M-Train', Knolf Publishing Group
States of Mind (2016), 'Tracing the Edge of Consciousness', Wellcome Collection Exhibition Booklet

Swaminathan, N., (2007), 'Can you believe your shifty eyes?', Scientific American

Wittmann, M., (2016), 'Felt Time: The Psychology of How We Perceive Time', MIT Press

Woolfe, V., (1985), 'Moments of Being', Harcourt Publishers Ltd.
http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/b_resources/shock_and_awe.html