Lockdown
Lockdown has had elements of dream and harsh awakening for me. Slow-time and weeks wash by. The same view, the same routines but Spring turning in full sight into Summer.
Three months. An enforced retreat? A deliberate plan? Just more chaos and a reminder of how very little we really control?
I certainly retreated quickly from the shout-storm of opinions and posturing. Fear and loathing in full force.
Grief, both palpable and remote, stored under the ground, to burst into the future. The mess of life, suffering laid bare and beauty in such generosity. And love. Love in huge cascades of public outpour as well as in all those little vital places. Connection through new ways and in the airways. I chose and choose to focus on what we all have in common. The moments of intense beauty in many forms, ephemeral and tantalising.
Some things changing, something demanding change, all things shifting and reforming and breaking apart and reshaping in strange new ways.. New connections. Slices of still reflection in the strange stillness of early lockdown. Images of butterflies and flowers in a cornucopia of life; winds carrying an abundance of birdsong and sunlight playing endless patterns of musical silence on the trees and grass.
Most days a wandering or a purposeful walk to the wooden shed, nestled under a beautiful copper beech, where sometimes I paint. The wind shaking leaves to share a life force flow of love and I look up and see light dancing like Botticelli’s Angels. I am reminded, again and again, that we are all connected and that in each breath life flows in an endless cycle of becoming and dissolving without trace.
Time expands and contracts.
Each day, nature shifts the story and I look again at the familiar suddenly made new and strange.
Everything is changing and there is, as Hunter S Thompson said, no going back.
Indeed.
I counted 14 new or re-worked paintings since lockdown in March.
The themes running through them are reflections of Nature in all her colours and beauty, Climate change (a growing series) and Dreams.
With love and gratitude
Simon