writings

journal Fragments

ON THE BROW OF THE HILL relentless wind from a hard blue sky. Rakish winter light spread across the valley floor, clouds approaching at the horizon never quite arriving. The eye searches, questioning the subject, the painting, and the palette, for a time wondering what light, air, paint and paper have to do with one another. And then there is a moment of elation as the thing begins to breathe. The wind sharpens. I look down at my watch. Sheep come close, quietly nibbling. The market town slumbers in late afternoon haze, and as I load the brush again and return to the image I find that I have lost the thread.

ARRIVED ON BICYCLE. Spent the day working down on my belly looking up at Albert on Horseback. David Rich jogged by. Said we must have a drink sometime then disappeared down the road. Crows called from Albert's nest of pines as I ruminated over the idea of equestrian monuments, and tried to understand the scale and proportions of this one, destined it seems even as it stands pre-eminent over the festive events on Smith's lawn, to eternally skirt the edge of the wood.

BETWEEN THE CROWNS OF OAKS and after cloudbursts a blue green distance. Bright openings in the cloud ceiling. The Thames hidden winding behind dark stands of pine. Thoughts settling.

THIS WHITE-FACED ROW of houses a small poem. A whistling gardener works throughout the day in pungent April terre-verte, children in and out of the shed, the smell of garden mould and moss, the clouds announcing rain. Here is a place in which conversations wander, where a tune whistled· through a gentle shower makes more sense than the picture I could paint.

VILLAGE HIGH STREET leads to lakes, Magna Carta Lane to the River Thames. Coopers Hill looks down on Egham. Egham spread between straps of concrete. M25 crawling, groaning, to Chertsey. Sanatorium tower, victim of time, gales, tired and still, commands the hill above Stroud whose road narrowing to one lane runs past Hogster's Farm, past the hidden Cenotaph, past allotments, the railway, to Prune Hill.