Marcel Proust on his deathbed, Paul-César Helleu, 1922
When in the late1960s I was first at art college in Wolverhampton, I was told to read Proust. I did but very slowly, gradually over the years reading bits of Swan's Way, The Guermantes Way or Time Regained, never actually reading all seven parts of 'In Search of Lost Time'. I dipped into it as if occasionally swimming in a dark pools, each of which was full of strange and exotic creatures, that turned out on examination to be based on the familiar forms of childhood experience.
Proust reminds us that everyday experience is strange. He suggests that although reality is untouchable and unknowable through human experience, that it sort of creeps in through the cracks. The cracks themselves are formed by the details of things and it is in these details that mystery begins.
Looking through grass
I sometimes trace my interest in being an artist back to when I was a boy lying down in long grass. I would stare into the grass and watch it move, gradually shifting my gaze upwards until I could see the sky. There was something about the scale of things, the texture of nearness and farness that seemed to be full of mystery. The grass was at one moment treelike and at another it was like a sea. I have written about my boyhood experience of clouds and how they could trigger my imagination in an earlier post, but they are always far away, and grass is something that you can press your nose up against. It is ubiquitous and thrives in all the cracks and gaps that nature teases open in our cities. In the spaces occupied by grass roots spreading out in the dark beneath city pavements, can be conjured other stories, tangled roots forming mysteries waiting to unravel themselves when the slabs are lifted.
I still draw grasses and other wind blown vegetation, gazing into the waving mass of plants in movement, trying to capture the energy flow of invisible breezes, as if this will enable me to somehow tap into a type of knowing that the grasses have. As I make these drawings in certain instances, as I get lost in the looking, I can feel as if I am part of an animist reality, conjoined with the swaying of grass stalks, as I too rock my body in tune with the breezes. I make rhythms with my pen as it moves across the paper; my hand dancing to the grass tune, as as I do, I am for once inwardly at peace.
Some sketchbook observations
However sometimes the vegetation is clipped and controlled and then it can become strange, menacing, full of a type of mystery that is a fusion between human and plant life.
A clipped hedge outside a block of flats
A small hedge next to a field in West Wittering
These clipped forms, are in my mind hybrids, now animal like in their transformation, still untamed even though shaped by human geometry. That untouchable, unknowable reality begins to creep through from underneath the hedge.
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