Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Emptiness

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I have just finished reading two books; ‘Helgoland’ by Carlo Rovelli and, ‘Cracking the Walnut’ by Thich Nhat Hanh. It was in Helgoland, a book on Quantum Mechanics, that Rovelli mentioned the writings of an ancient, Indian Buddhist called Nāgārjuna which, he said, had had a profound effect on him. Having read some of Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing before, I found a commentary of his on the writing of Nāgārjuna which I subsequently bought.

As Rovelli writes:

“The central thesis of Nāgārjuna’s book is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else. The resonance with quantum mechanics is immediate. Obviously, Nāgārjuna knew nothing, and could not have imagined anything, about quanta – that is not the point. The point is that philosophers offer original ways of rethinking the world, and we can employ them if they turn out to be useful. The perspective offered by Nāgārjuna may perhaps make it a little easier to think about the quantum world.”

Signlessness is one of the three doors of liberation, along with with emptiness and aimlessness. I’d always found the idea of signlessness and emptiness rather sad, bordering on nihilistic, but reading ‘Cracking the Walnut’ I understood how I had been viewing these terms incorrectly. If we think of an object in and of itself as something which has ‘self-nature’ then we are not seeing that object (and thereby ourselves) as what they (and we) really are.

We are not things isolated from other things. We are things which manifest because of other things, which in turn manifest because of other things and so on. Objects (and again, ourselves) do not have a beginning and end as such (no-birth and no-death). But rather, when we die, we change. (This is not to say we reincarnate; we don’t die and become born again as another person or thing – that’s clearly nonsense.) ‘Cracking the Walnut’ goes deeply into the concepts of no-birth and no-death and ideas of dependent co-arising which is beyond the scope of both this blog and my current understanding, but the ideas of signlessess and emptiness are about this co-arising. We are not separate things (selfs) existing outside of other things, but changing manifestations of a connected world.

As Rovelli puts it:

“‘I’ is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else.”

We are ’empty’ and ‘signless’ because we are not things in ourselves independent of other things.

It’s interesting that when I read Rovelli’s book and then words of Nāgārjuna (as explained by Thich Nhat Hanh), I realised that in some respects, I had been thinking along these lines in the way I perceive historical objects or places in my work, particularly when it came to the process of Goethean Observations.

For example, a Roman bottle I bought.

One can look at it as what it appears to be; a glass bottle dating to the 3rd century CE. That is its ‘sign’. But when we look more closely, we can see that it’s so much more than ‘just’ an ancient bottle. It’s sand, heated then blown into the shape of the bottle. It’s the place from whence the sand came; it’s the sea and the long process of rock weathered down into grains. It’s weather, wind and waves. It is the breath of a man who lived nearly two millennia ago. It’s one of many moments in his life. It is his learning, his skill, his thoughts and mood that day. It’s the place in which it was kept; the oil it contained and the woman who rubbed the oil rub on their skin. It’s the grave in which they were laid with the bottle; the dark, the silence, the chemical process that caused its iridescence.

It is then, empty. Not because there is nothing in the bottle (there is, of course, air), but because it has no self-nature. It is not a thing independent of other things. It is, as Rovelli put it above, ‘nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else.’ The sea, the sand, the breath, the thoughts, the hands, the skin, the grave and so on. And, just as it is for the bottle, so it is with us.

In a recent blog post ‘Genius‘, I mentioned David Whyte’s book, ‘Consolations’ in which he writes:

‘Each one of us has a unique signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language, and alongside it a half-hidden geology of our life as it has been lived: memories, hurts, triumphs and stories that have not yet been fully told. Each one of us is also a changing seasonal weather front, and what blows through us is made up not only of the gifts and heartbreaks of our own growing but also of our ancestors and the stories consciously and unconsciously passed to us about their lives.‘

In turn he describes the genius of landscape as being:

‘Genius is, by its original definition, something we already possess. Genius is best understood in its foundational and ancient sense, describing the specific underlying quality of a given place, as in the Latin genius loci, the spirit of a place; it describes a form of meeting, of air and land and trees, perhaps a hillside, a cliff edge, a flowing stream or a bridge across a river. It is the conversation of elements that makes a place incarnate, fully itself. It is the breeze on our skin, the particular freshness and odours of the water, or of the mountain or the sky in a given, actual geographical realm. You could go to many other places in the world with a cliff edge, a stream, a bridge, but it would not have the particular spirit or characteristic, the ambiance or the climate of this particular meeting place.

A place then is also empty. It is a ‘vast and interconnected set of phenomena‘.

Suddenly, more quotes began to come to mind; quotes I have used many times before; all of them seeming to concur with this way of thinking. I mentioned some in another blog post, ‘Knowing We Are There.’

One is a quote from American author and essayist Barry Lopez:

“One must wait for the moment when the thing — the hill, the tarn, the lunette, the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada – ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there.”

Another by Christopher Tilley. In his book ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology’, he writes: 

“The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.”

Interestingly, I drew a diagram to represent my thinking when I read Lopez’s quote, and now, over a year later, having read Rovelli’s work and the work of Nāgārjuna, it makes perfect sense.

There is not a tree and a person. There is interconnectedness.

But this interconnectedness isn’t confined to the present moment. In a post called ‘Measuring The Past‘, I wrote:

“To climb the peaks of our imagination and see a time long before we were born is, at the same time, to descend into the depths of our own non-existence, wherein which dark expanse, our imagination lights the dark as it does the paths that lead away from our deaths. Imagination and memory come together to blur the boundaries of our beginnings and ends, as if, like a book, the unseen words that might have been written before and after are suddenly revealed in all their infinite number.”

When we think about emptiness and the idea that we are that ‘vast and interconnected set of phenomena‘, we begin to see that that network isn’t confined to what we perceive as ‘now’, but rather a network which stretches back in time.

Whenever I’m in an art gallery looking at a painting, for example, one of JMW Turner’s, I often think of all the people that have stood where I am standing looking at that same painting. The painting might be hanging in a different place, but over time, thousands would have stood exactly where I am standing in relation to that same painting.

The painting is a node in a network linked to everyone who has ever stood and looked at it. I in turn am in that same network, linked to each of those people.

We can interpret Barry Lopez’s and Christopher Tilley’s quotes as revealing how it is not simply about us, as subjects, observing other objects. They too ‘observe’ us. That is, they manifest at that moment, because of us, because we are looking and vice-versa.

Before reading any of the above books I thought in this way whenever i thought about objects in museums. It’s how I can build the worlds to which those objects belonged, because essentially, it is the same world. There is only one of these vast, interconnected networks; one in which everything that exists and has ever existed is connected.

Thinking in this way, the glass bottle is a node in that network. However, like the painting, and like everyone who has ever looked at the bottle or the painting, we mustn’t think of the objects as something static (something with a self-nature) that stand like chess pieces on a board. Everything is in flux. The bottle is not a thing which came into existence fully formed in the 3rd century CE, just as the man who made it wasn’t born fully formed years before. They are both manifestations of other phenomena. The bottle is sand, fire and breath. It’s the sea and the waves, the pull of the moon; all things with which, in my own life, I’m familiar. If I think of the sea, I think of my holidays as a child. The sea and the sand become nodes linking me with the bottle, just as a breath links me with the man.

Wave (goodbye)

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This weekend, two years after her death, we scattered mum’s ashes into the sea at a few places that have played a part in our lives as a family; Chesil Beach, Swanage and Shell Bay.

Swanage was a favourite destination for several years. We often went there with my nan and grandad (pictured below), and as we stood on the beach on Sunday morning, my thoughts were with them as well as with mum and of all the times we spent together, there on the front.

I’ve always liked the headland behind us in this photograph. It’s one of those features which reminds me so much of the past. The photo below of teh headland was taken by me on a school trip in 1983.

The image below shows the same headland, along with my brother in his dinghy, around 1980.

We then moved on to Shell Bay, another beach which occupies a special place in our childhood memories. The image below is of my mum and my nan on Shell Bay, again around 1980.

The image below, also on Shell Bay, shows my mum in the sea having tumbled out of my brother’s dinghy, and my dad on the beach looking on.

It was almost on that very spot that we scattered more of mum’s ashes, and it was so poignant and quite poetic, to watch the waves coming in to almost gather her up and take her away.

Now In The Past Of An Unreal Place

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The image below is one of the extended backdrops I’ve created using early 20th century studio portraits.

It has, I think, a connection with other recent work (below) which I’ve been making using graphite powder and oil, not only in its look, but also in the fact these images are both unreal landscapes. The image above is a portion of a studio backdrop which has been extended in Photoshop. That below was arrived at through manipulation of oil and graphite.

The third image below is a screenshot from a video I made called ‘The Gone Forest‘. Again there are similarities between this work and the images above, not only in its look, but also in what it shows.

It’s part of a landscape, one which once existed, but which is now a part of the past. In essence, this landscape is unreal in that it no longer exists; it isn’t a place we can go to except, as in the case of the images above, within our imaginations.

This fourth image is one of numerous shadows I have painted in woodlands using Chinese brushes and ink. It is like part of a lost language; a word created and written in the moment, describing that moment. In effect it represents what was ‘now’; the nowness of a lost moment.

Given the fact these look like Chinese/Japanese writing, I looked at using scrolls as a medium; incorporating both the painted image using oil and graphite as well as one of the characters painted in the woods.

Return to Graphite

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I used to work quite a bit with oil and graphite and have, in the last few days, returned to this medium. So far the results have been very encouraging, despite being without a studio and so having to work in the garden.

As well as sticking with oil and graphite, I have also begun experimenting with adding pastel; just white in these cases, but again I like the results, particularly the way the pastel mixes with the oiled paper to create texture.

Following on from these, I then started looking at how this approach could be used with the recent scroll work I’ve been doing. Again, the result has been encouraging. The image below is very much a prototype, but I can see the potential.

Genius

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I was recently gifted David Whyte’s beautiful book ‘Consolations’ by a friend in which, for the word genius, he writes:

‘Genius is, by its original definition, something we already possess. Genius is best understood in its foundational and ancient sense, describing the specific underlying quality of a given place, as in the Latin genius loci, the spirit of a place; it describes a form of meeting, of air and land and trees, perhaps a hillside, a cliff edge, a flowing stream or a bridge across a river. It is the conversation of elements that makes a place incarnate, fully itself. It is the breeze on our skin, the particular freshness and odours of the water, or of the mountain or the sky in a given, actual geographical realm. You could go to many other places in the world with a cliff edge, a stream, a bridge, but it would not have the particular spirit or characteristic, the ambiance or the climate of this particular meeting place.

By virtue of its latitudes and longitudes, its prevailing winds, the aroma and colour of its vegetation, and the way a certain angle of the sun catches it in the cool early morning, it is a unique confluence, existing nowhere else on earth. If the genius of place is the meeting place of all the elements that make it up, then, in the same way, human genius lies in the geography of the body and its conversation with the world.

The human body constitutes a live geography, as does the spirit and the identity that abides within it.

To live one’s genius might be to dwell easily at the crossing point where all the elements of our life and our inheritance join and make a meeting. We might think of ourselves as each like a created geography, a confluence of inherited flows. Each one of us has a unique signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language, and alongside it a half-hidden geology of our life as it has been lived: memories, hurts, triumphs and stories that have not yet been fully told. Each one of us is also a changing seasonal weather front, and what blows through us is made up not only of the gifts and heartbreaks of our own growing but also of our ancestors and the stories consciously and unconsciously passed to us about their lives.‘

I was really struck by this beautiful passage, not least in relation to my own work and, in particular, the shadow calligraphy I have been painting in woods. In particular, the passage regarding our ancestors really struck a chord. ‘Each one of us has a unique signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language, and alongside it a half-hidden geology of our life as it has been lived: memories, hurts, triumphs and stories that have not yet been fully told. Each one of us is also a changing seasonal weather front, and what blows through us is made up not only of the gifts and heartbreaks of our own growing but also of our ancestors and the stories consciously and unconsciously passed to us about their lives.‘

The scrolls I am preparing to make in particular resonate with David Whyte’s words, being as they are pictures from my childhood, including my grandmother’s garden.

The characters of each scroll could be that unique signature, not only of the present moment but also of our ancestors. It combines, which I always love, the idea of now and the past. It is, as David Whyte says, our language; the text of our story and the story of our ancestors too.

Latest Backdrops

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Fragments of early 20th century backdrops, lifted from photographs then digitally extended with titles taken from Rilke’s ‘Duino Elegies’.

The Living Know This Only In Gentle Leaf
She Shows Him The Towering Trees of Tears
No Longer To Live On Earth Is Strange
The Interval Between The World And Our Toys
The World Is Nowhere My Love If Not Within
Not Only All The Summer’s Dawns
Every Muffled Turning Of The World

Backdrops

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I’ve been working on the theme of backdrops lately, using those in early 20th century portrait photographs such as that below. 

To begin with, I remove the figure standing in front and then, using Photoshop, fill in the blank sections where the figure has been removed.

I have then extended the ‘canvas’ using Photoshop to generate missing information.

This fits in nicely with the idea of reimagining the past, where those who lived are obviously missing and what we are left with is a fragment from which we have to build an imagined view of the past to stand in front of.

Komorebi

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I discovered a lovely Japanese word today which describes the very things I’ve been painting and filming in the woods. Komorebi 木漏れ日 (pronounced kō-mō-leh-bē), means, literally, ‘sunlight leaking through trees’ and describes the rays of light dappling through the leaves of trees and casting shadows on the forest floor.

The fact that I’ve been painting these shadows as characters which themselves resemble Japanese characters makes this word even more fitting.

Acorns

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In my work I have always been interested in the past and how we can empathise with those who lived long before us. I like to think about how we access the past and how we build a picture of the long lost world as best as we can. We might start with a fragment of pottery, a detail in an old photograph, a piece of writing, a coin – it could be anything; but we often start with a fragment.

With that fragment, we can then build outwards within our imaginations, trying to experience the world from which the fragment is estranged. We can try to hear it, feel our way around it, see movement as if it’s now and, as I’ve written before, one of the best ways to do that is through the natural landscape. After all, those who lived in the past would have known what it is to walk in the natural world.

We experience a wood in much the same way as someone a hundred, two hundred or five hundred years ago. Yes, their experience would be different in that they would know the natural world differently, but they would see the trees moving in the wind, see the sun make shadows on the ground, see the clouds, the sky, feel the rain and so on. We might not be able to experience a town or city as they would but we can better know a wood as they would have known it.

I have been doing a lot of work in woods lately, painting shadows cast by the leaves of the trees and I like the idea that trees themselves start off as seeds, and that from these small beginnings they grow, reaching out into the world around them. Seeds and trees are therefore a good metaphor for how I try and experience the past. Starting off small and growing up and out to feel my way into a world that no longer exists.

With the shadow work I’ve been doing, the shadows are like the traces of the past – the fragments. With them, we can try and imagine the trees which cast them, building out to picture the sun, the sky, the clouds, birds and all the other trees in the wood.

The wood therefore represents the past; a world in which we might find ourselves walking, experiencing it as best we can like those who lived before us. We start with a seed and planting it within our imaginations, we allow it to grow into another world.

Thinking about I might represent this pictorially, I’ve recently been looking at scrolls and have come up with some ideas of how I might create some work using the format, using the shadow calligraphy I’ve been creating in the woods.

Scrolls are very precise objects – almost ceremonial. They have a form that is both rolled and unrolled and this is something which interests me as regards my work on empathy and the past. The rolled scroll is like our beginning – our fragment, our seed or acorn. It’s like that first bit of knowledge which once untied we begin to unroll. And as we unroll, it’s as if the acorn is growing, reaching out as it begins to build the world of the past.

I love this idea of unrolling. In my Goethean observation, I noted the following in the final phase:

The solidity and tightness of the rolled state – the past hidden.
The untying.
The unrolling and revelation.
The fragility and expanse of the unrolled state – the past revealed.
Then as now.
Delineated.
Breathing.
Defined.
Sounds.
The re-rolling and hiding.
Quiet.
Ceremony and calmness.
Past and present as one.

I can add to that – growing. The scroll is the tree rising up and putting out its branches while putting down its roots into the ground. I like the idea that as the scroll unrolls, it somehow keeps expanding.

One of the things I’ve been looking at is how I can use the scroll’s background. Rather than just using a piece of material, can I use that material as a canvas somehow?

Quite a while ago I was looking at the backdrops used in studio portraits of World War I soldiers (see ‘Backdrops‘, . ‘ WWI Backdrops‘, ‘Backdrops (Odilon Redon)‘, ‘The Past in Pastoral‘) and so I thought that I could use these backdrops as a background for a scroll. The image below is something I did several years ago where I isolated the backdrop in the postcard.

The following is how it might work as a scroll, complete with a character painted in the woods.

The studio backdrop is something in front of which people would have stood to have their picture taken. Those people have long gone and we – or whoever is looking at the scroll – are standing in their place. The painted character is that which I painted in a real wood and represents a moment – ‘now’. When I imagine a past event, I am trying to imagine someone who lived at the time. In a sense, our imaginations are like a theatre where we assemble this moment, complete with backdrop, props, actors and maybe even a script. The idea of the backdrop works very nicely with this.

Scroll Work

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I’ve been looking at ways of developing work with scrolls and in particular, how to utilise the background of the scroll to compliment the character (the main focus of the artwork).

It was whilst looking through some old family photographs that I found one of my grandparents, taken at Shotover in 1952. This is the wood where I have been spending time recently, painting the characters for use in the scrolls.

Taking the photograph of my grandparents, I had the idea of using that as the background image, with two of the characters painted in the woods (see image above) positioned on top. The result was, for me, unexpectedly moving.

I’ve always been interested in the idea of the ‘nowness’ of a past event, and how, when we look, for example, at a photograph from the distant past, we can find details that help articulate that sense of now. For me, in the photograph of my grandparents, it’s the shadows at the top of the tree trunk. They point to the space beyond the edges of the photo – the sun, the sky, the canopy of the trees etc. and that sense of ‘now’ is further articulated by the characters painted on top, after all, they are themselves tracings of shadows painted at a particular moment in time.

Goethean Observation: Japanese Scroll

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The process of 'Goethean Observation'

Introduction

There are many different interpretations of the Geothean (a method of observing as described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)) method, but the one I prefer to use is that described by Iris Brook in her paper, “Goethean Science as a Way to Read Landscape,” which is, basically, as follows:

1. exact sense perception [bare facts: perception]
2. exact sensorial fantasy [time-life of object: imagination]
3. seeing in beholding [heartfelt getting to know – inspiration]
4. being one with the object [intuition]

1. Exact Sense Perception [Perception]

Now the observer attempt to approach the object from a clearer, more objective standpoint.. This stage was called by Goethe, exact sense perception and is characterised by a detailed observation of all the ‘bare facts’ of the phenomenon that are available to our ordinary senses. It is an attempt to see what is present with as little personal judgement and evaluation as possible.

An example of trying to let the facts speak for themselves from Goethe’s own work is his extraordinarily detailed observations of colour phenomena. Rather than draw hypotheses or work from a theory his investigations involve colour as experienced by himself, as used by artists, as created by dyers, as used symbolically, as seen in animals and plants and so on.

For the student attempting to carry out this stage with their own phenomenon, drawing can be a useful tool, because in drawing our attention is brought to previously unnoticed detail or patterns.

Another tool used is to ignore some knowledge, for example the names of things… Attempting to find another word to describe the part you are indicating to someone else often leads to a looking again.”

2. Exact Sensorial Fantasy [imagination]

“The second stage of looking at the phenomenon is what Goethe called ‘exact sensorial fantasy’ (Exact sinnliche Phantasie). An aspect of this activity is to perceive the time-life of the phenomenon, that is to see the phenomenon in time. This means no longer seeing the thing in an objective frozen present as prompted by the first stage, but as a thing with history. That history can be drawn from the phenomenon with the use of an imaginative faculty that cultivates temporal and physical relationships…

The shift between the two modes of seeing is a small one, but the world does look very different when seen in a state of flux.

In this phase the imagination can be used as a tool to vary what is seen and attempt to imagine it otherwise. The obvious link to the phenomenology here is with the use of free imaginative variation. First suggested by Husserl, this is a means of deriving the essence of a phenomenon by pushing the eidos of the thing beyond what can be imagined. The second stage could be seen as a training of the imaginative faculty in two directions: firstly to free up the imagination and then to constrain it within the realms of what is possible for the phenomenon being studied.”

3. Seeing in Beholding [Inspiration]

The first two stages of Goethean method could be characterised as an engagement with the phenomena, first by seeing its outer static appearance objectively and then by experiencing something of its inner processes. In the third stage one attempts to still active perception to allow the thing to express itself through the observer. We attempt to step outside of what has gone before and make space for the thing to articulate in its own way.

The detailed information is somehow transcended, but just as exact sensorial fantasy requires exact sense perception to anchor its dream-like activity, seeing in beholding needs the content and the preparation of the other two stages if the researcher is to articulate the thing. Goethe terms the changes necessary to our everyday consciousness as the development of ‘new organs of perception’.

To experience the being of a phenomenon requires a human gesture of ‘self-disspation’. This effort is a holding back of our own activity – a form of receptive attentiveness that offers the phenomenon a chance to express its own gesture.”

4. Being One with the Object [Intuition]

“The first three stages of the Goethean method involve different activities and ways of thinking and these could be characterised as first using perception to see the form, second using imagination to perceive its mutability, and, third, inviting inspiration to reveal the gesture. The fourth stage uses intuition both to combine and go beyond the previous stages.

Being one with the object in this fourth stage allows the human ability to conceptualise to serve the thing: we lend it this human capacity. When the phenomenon being explored does not have the ability to think, it is the most participatory part of Goethean observation.

Our ability to think creatively and to initiate future action is the faculty being used here and thus the dangers of abstract creation not tied to the phenomenon are great.

Being one with the object allows an appreciation of the content or meaning of the form as well as the form itself… At this stage of the process of Goethean observation it is acknowledged that the phenomenon is at its least independent of human reason.”

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The object is long, perhaps two feet in length. It is off-white in colour and comprises a rod around which a white material is wrapped, bound with a pale gold braid. The object feels nice to hold; it has a nice weight with a texture that is both smooth and rough to the touch. The gold braid is attached to a wooden, half-moon shaped rod of wood around which the top of the scroll is fixed. The braid is wrapped around the circumference of the scroll and as I unwind it, the scroll seems almost to relax. Once unfastened, I begin to unroll the scroll from the top and at once I’m presented with the dark turquoise material patterned with small flowers in gold. It’s a little difficult in the artificial light to be sure of the exact colours. This section of material extends about 18 inches as I continue to unroll it, whereupon it meets another section of material which, centred on the turquoise backing, extends 3/4 of the width of the scroll. It is just over an inch high and again comprises a pattern of flowers, again in gold, but with a cream coloured background. 

As I continue to unroll the scroll I see that this small section of material sits at the top of a section of paper on which the characters of the scroll are painted. The first character extends about 12 inches, comprising four distinct sections of brush work. Obviously I can’t read what it says, and as I unroll the scroll down further, smaller characters appear on the left next to a slightly larger one. Underneath these three smaller characters is a red, printed icon. Underneath the larger character beside these three small characters are two more larger ones. As I continue to unroll the scroll, the paper section ends with another small strip of material matching the one at the top but narrower. The dark turquoise material extends beneath this another 10 inches and as I continue to unroll I reach the bottom where the scroll is wrapped around the heavier, ivory coloured rod. There’s a lovely, defined feel to this action, where the end is reached.

Looking at the characters, I can see that they obviously have meaning, that they are painted with an obvious purpose. I can see where the ink is heavier and where it has bled into the paper and also where the brush is dryer. Here I notice the ink is streaked. Even though I cannot read what it says, I can read the gesture of the calligrapher as he or she moves down the paper. As I look at the characters, I can see that along with the gold flowers patterning the dark background there are also flowers in a darker, turquoise colour. The gold of the two strips at the top and the bottom of the paper part of the scroll match the hanging braid at the top of the scroll which in turn picks out the gold flowers of the background giving the whole scroll a sense of unity. Overall the scroll is just over 1m 60cm in length and just over 45cm wide

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The scroll obviously comprises different parts; the backing material and strips of fabric, the wooden rod at the top, the plastic one at the bottom, the gold braid for tying and hanging and of course the paper section with on which the characters have been written. I can imagine the mind of the calligrapher, how as they wrote these characters, they might have sounded the words in their head. I can almost hear the sound of their thinking along with that of the brush being dipped in the ink and then scraped across the paper. To someone who doesn’t read that language, these words are mute, but because of that I can almost hear their sound in the mind of the calligrapher, perhaps because mine is quiet. I read the scroll by following the gestures. The words become a language of the moment in which they were made.

The sound of the brush on the paper is different where the density of the ink is different. I can almost hear the fullness of the brush touching the surface of the paper and as the ink is released from the brush into the paper and as the brush loses the ink I can hear the sound of the brush change from a slide to scrape, like rolling waves, falling to scrape on the shingle of the beach. I can also read the pauses between the characters where the calligrapher loads the brush once more with ink to make the second character. Here , the sounds of the place in which the words were painted find a way in. Again, there is the same change from the full sound of the loaded brush to the scrape of the ink as it’s lost. 

The parts where the brush is dry, where I can hear it scrape across the paper, is where I can see the gesture of the artist most clearly. 

Once made the paper would be cut to size and mounted on the material. Was the material chosen specifically for this text? Does it add to the meaning? That I can’t say, but I like the contrast between the precision of the background (the straight edges of the material) and the fluidity of the brush work. Where I can hear the sound of the brush work I can almost hear the sound of the scissors cutting the straight edges of the material, the strips and the paper. 

As I roll the scroll back up, it’s as if the scroll is rolling itself, as if it has spoken long enough and needs to rest again. As I roll, I’m aware of the change where the dark material and the text changes to the off-white reverse of the backing material. This plain, off-white material is silent, unlike its interior, where the pattern and the text have spoken. I can just see the text through the material as I roll it, whispering as it’s gradually rolled away. 

Did the scroll hang anywhere or was it always rolled up? Was it gift for someone? Did the text have any significant meaning for whoever gave it or received it?

Having rolled the scroll up its full length, it is once more the coiled scroll. I pick it up and I’m aware of the difference between the rolled scroll (quiet, portable, weighted) and the unrolled scroll (which speaks in the sounds both of it making and its meaning) which is light and different to hold.

There are then two very different states of the scroll and as I coil the braid around it, I feel as if I’m in control, whereas when it’s unrolled, I tread around it very carefully. In its unrolled state it is fragile but large, in contrast to its rolled state.

Having rolled the scroll up and tied the braid, it’s as if I am silencing the scroll for a while, knowing that it will speak again. It certainly feels like it has a life of its own and is waiting to be awakened.

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Rolled up it’s silent, but is thinking – it has something to say; it’s as if the actions and the thoughts of the calligrapher are contained within; as if the moment of its making is waiting to be sounded with its unwinding.  As I loosen the braids the scroll breathes. There is a sense of ceremony, waiting for that moment to be revealed in this moment, as if the moment contained within will become one with the moment in which we, ourselves, are contained. 

As I unroll the scroll, it’s as if the scroll is taking a breath, as if the pattern is an intake of breath ready to speak that which is on the paper. 

As I continue to unroll, it begins to speak. The painted brushstrokes are words of a language, not only in the sense of one spoken by a particular group of people, but the language of the moment in which it was made, the ambient sounds, the brush work on the paper. 

The backing is the breath. 

As it remains in its unrolled state, it breathes. It is a thing all of its own. That moment in time delineated by the sound by the fluid brushstrokes and the precision of the material in which it is framed. As long as it’s open, unrolled, the moment of its making plays in the present.

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The solidity and tightness of the rolled state – the past hidden.
The untying.
The unrolling and revelation.
The fragility and expanse of the unrolled state – the past revealed.
Then as now.
Delineated.
Breathing.
Defined.
Sounds.
The re-rolling and hiding.
Quiet.
Ceremony and calmness.
Past and present as one.

Mistakes

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I like it when I make mistakes, or, as in the case of this painting, it wasn’t going the way I thought it would. I’d stuck some inked leaves on the canvas as per a recent painting with the aim of introducing some colour, but having done so, the canvas looked a mess and wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do. So, I took my palette knife and scraped it across the surface of the canvas, removing all the leaves and some of the pain and what was left I really liked.

The leaves reminded me of fossilised feathers which is in keeping with the general theme of my work. The colours too reminded me of classical greek ceramics as in the image below.

As with some other recent paintings, I decided to add some flashes of green to the leaves which also worked really well.

The Leaf Is Singing Still

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A music work in progress the title of which comes from Mary Oliver:

“What can I say that I have not said before?
So I’ll say it again.
The leaf has a song in it.
Stone is the face of patience.
Inside the river there is an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends.
Take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce but take it also to the forest.
The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still.
I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, and the leaf is singing still.”

Past Present

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After completing a recent painting (see below), I wondered whether to add colour as per the initial idea, but I liked the painting as it was and was concerned about spoiling it. The consensus among friends was to leave it as it was – which I did.

A Past Present 1 - oil and leaves on canvas

Instead, I decided to create some much small works to see how the addition of colour would work and the following small canvases were the result. I do like the addition of colour as it reflects the idea of the mind trying to animate a relic of the past in order to imagine the object as it was in a time long since passed. Looking at the blackened leaves (representing the shadows of the leaves acquiring form) becoming green with the sky behind, I think this process is well articulated. I will now work these up to larger canvases.

Scrolls

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I’m going to be producing some scrolls using the shadow calligraphy I’ve created in the woods and having had a scroll made recently, I’ve been looking at how to take this further, using the whole scroll as an artwork, rather than acting simply as a framing device for the painted character.

To help with this I’ve been looking at buying a scroll and the image below shows three that I found for sale on eBay.

Looking at the material used in these, I was reminded of some work I did a while back using fragments of fabric which I then extended onto paper.

I like the idea of the backing for the painted ‘characters’ incorporating this idea of the fragment which would then extended into the body of the scroll support. This would itself support the idea behind the characters; that they are all that remains of a moment in the woods which we can interpret as a ‘word’, thereby returning, in our minds, to that lost moment in time. The pattern of the fragment in the support might be foliage which which would then be extended across entire support, echoing the idea of the moment being extended in our mind’s eye.

I think this idea would work well both with paper and fabric, so I shall be busy trying these out soon.

As Yet Untitled

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I’ve started a new painting on an 80cm square canvas which takes the concept of shadows cast by trees in the woods by using actual leaves. These are first dipped in black ink to simulate the black ink brushstrokes of my other paintings – for example those I painted in situ at Shotover, then placed on the canvas painted with white oil paint.

I’m not sure where this will lead, but the idea behind the painting is that of re-imagining the past. Taking the idea of the shadow paintings, the shadows are then ‘re-imagined’ as actual leaves, still with the idea of simulating the same calligraphic style. I will now introduce colour into the work as the next phase of the re-imagining process is to imagine the actual leaves, trees and sky etc. How that will look… I don’t know as yet. One artist who does keep popping into my mind however is Cy Twombly.

Holes

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Whilst painting in the woods at the weekend, I also used my shadows notebook, painting some of the shadows which invariably meant the pages stuck together as the ink dried.

I like the effect however and in particular the holes left by the ripping paper as I peeled the pages apart. They called to mind the exhibition I went to see recently at The Courtauld Gallery in London, featuring the charcoal portraits of Frank Auerbach.

These drawings were carried out over long periods of times, during which they were worked and reworked, causing the paper to rip which the artist would then mend. I loved seeing the rips and the mendings and wonder if I could do the same with my own shadow pieces, building up, in the process, a palimpsest of moments.

Scroll

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The paintings I made at Shotover, using ink, rice paper and calligraphy brushes, are like written characters from an unknown language; a language which is created then lost the moment it is written down.

It is the language of the present, which comes and goes in the blink of an eye; a series of ‘nows’ renewed and discarded second by second (‘Forever is composed of nows’ – Emily Dickinson).

A friend of mine recently mounted one of these paintings as a scroll and, framed in this way, that sense of the paintings being part of a language is enhanced, causing the viewer to ask, not so much ‘what does it mean?’ (as an artwork), but rather, ‘what does it say?’ (as a word).

Because it is saying something. We just can’t read it.

The only way we can engage with it on that level – the only way we can read it, is by following the gesture of the marks themselves; following with our eyes the strokes of the brush – perhaps even going so far as to copy them onto paper. That way, we re-create, kinaesthetically, the moment, lost to time, in which they were made.

Whenever I’m in an historic place, whether a building or a part of the landscape, it’s my embodied imagination which helps bring me closer to the people who once walked and lived in those spaces. By tracing or copying the paths they took, I am able, in some small way, to connect with them.

The same is true of these works. The viewer can understand them only by following the marks; by recreating within their embodied imaginations the gestures I made as I painted them.

As I’ve said, the scroll confers on the marks the sense that they are part of a language. That the scroll is hung on a wall also tells us the marks are important, or at least worthy of display. Perhaps they are reminders that the present moment is important; that eventually, all our present moments will be reduced to this – however we live our lives; a single trace, like a fleeting shadow.

In terms of the paintings themselves, these marks are the tracings of shadows cast in a small part of the woods in which they were made. It is all that remains of me, my thoughts, my actions, the trees, the birds, the breeze, the light, the weather in that moment; everything that existed in that particular moment in time is reduced to his single character.

I haven’t titled these pieces, but I’m wondering whether, when I next go out to paint, I should make a note of a few words (as per the lists I’ve made when carrying out walking meditations) and use those. In that way, the viewer can perhaps use the gesture of the brush strokes to recreate the scene from which it was taken.

A Calligraphy of Shadows

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Taking advantage of the beautiful, sunny weather today, I got up at the crack of dawn and drove over to Shotover Wood to collect some shadows. Armed with my drawing board, rice paper, calligraphy brushes and ink, I walked among the trees and bluebells and found a number of spots in which to paint undisturbed.

It really was just so beautiful to sit among the birdsong and paint for several hours and by the end of the session, I had painted 43 shadows which I was really pleased with.

© Nicholas Hedges 2024