Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reimagining The Past

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This post follows on from one I wrote previously on ‘Rinsho’. Below are two painting I made in woods in my notebook.

With the art of Rinsho, the idea is to practice your calligraphy by copying, from books, that of the old masters. I like to think of the paintings made in the field, so to speak, as like those versions made by old masters and that copying them is like trying to reimagine a past event, where the body is trying to echo, through the gesture of painting, that of the original painter sitting in the woods; trying to imagine the trees, the sky, the sounds etc.

These are some of the copies I made of the characters above.

Rinsho

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After my last post I watched a video by calligrapher Tomoko Kawao in which she mentions the practice of Rinsho, where the calligrapher copies the work of ancient masters in order to enhance their own skills.

From what I have gleaned, Rinsho is not about crating the exact copy of given masterpiece but rather, it’s about the energy, spirit, dynamics, writing style, proportions, line characteristics, and so on. Rinsho is about copying the emotions, the mental state, the attitude, and the mood, that a given masterpiece comprises (see: http://www.ryuurui.com/blog/the-proper-way-to-study-chinese-japanese-calligraphy).

This interests me as regards the works I have made recently, such as the image below:

Having made this original image (and many others like it) at a particular moment in time, I’d been wondering whether I could do more with it. The practice of Rinsho gave me the answer.

Much of my work is about reimagining a past moment by trying to see that moment as it was when it was ‘now’. We can never know of course what a past moment was really like, but by understanding what makes the present moment for us ‘present’ we can use that knowledge to find our way back in time, at least just a little.

Copying the images I made – in the style of a calligrapher copying the work of an ancient master – seems to me to reflect this idea. As it says above, it’s not abut making a faithful copy (we can never go back in time) but using our experience to see something of the ‘energy, spirit, dynamics, writing style, proportions, line characteristics, and so on’. It’s about ‘copying’ the emotions, the mental state, the attitude, and the mood.

I have therefore started to use these original sketches as texts and to copy them, not to produce an exact copy, but to get a sense of that moment when they were first made.

Shadow Calligraphy

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On Saturday, whilst at Shotover with the kids, I took some time – whilst they were climbing trees – to paint some of the shadows cast by the trees. I started working with shadows like these back in 2017 and have recently started exploring this idea again. Below are some examples from my sketchbook made on Saturday.

Arrival/Departure

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It was almost 5 years ago in 2018 that I made these videos in a forest in Oxford and I’ve always found them entrancing. The play of the shadows across the paper has, for me, the feel of Japanese or Chinese calligraphy, as if the trees themselves were writing.



I have also, more lately, been reminded of the 2016 film ‘Arrival’ in which the writing made by the alien Heptapods has a similar look and feel. 

It was therefore a small step for me to begin looking at these video images as texts, ‘written’ in a language that, like the logogram above, has to be deciphered before it can be understood; a lost language belonging to a moment in time that has passed.

The ‘writing’ in these videos was made by the combination of trees, the sun and the wind, along with the person who filmed it – me. Indeed, it is the act of filming and framing these small areas of the forest floor which has rendered the shadows as something akin to ‘texts’ to be interpreted.

I’m reminded here of a passage I’ve often cited by Christopher Tilley who, in his book ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology’, 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.”

What these video ‘texts’ are describing is, I think, in part, presence, and what Tilley describes as ‘Other’. Something which would otherwise be invisible – my presence in nature – is, through the filming of the shadows, rendered visible. I must at this point bring in a passage from a book I wrote called ‘Brief Castles’ in which one of the main characters is describing his appreciation of a 13th century Chinese painting.

“Entitled Mountain Village in Clearing Mist by Yu Jian, the painting [shown below] was made all the more extraordinary on account of its age, made, as it was, around 800 years ago in the mid 13th century. This seemingly rapid work transported me to a time long gone. It revealed – much as with the Japanese haiku of Basho – an ancient and vanished moment, not so much through what it showed but how it was depicted. It was almost as if I could see the landscape before the painter himself. I could see the work as a whole (the landscape as a whole), but then, whilst picking through the gestures of the artist, evident enough in the brushstrokes, I could see the landscape as it was revealed. Yu Jian’s painting was not a painting of what was experienced, but rather the experiencing of what was experienced. It was almost as if the painting had become a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It wasn’t the mountain that was made visible on the paper, but the artist himself – his presence at that moment. 800 years after his death, and Yu Jian was as good as sitting next to me. Or to put it another way, 800 years before I was born, I was as good as sitting next to him.”

Clearing in the mist by Yu Jian

The brushwork again reminds me of the videos and this line in particular resonates with what I wrote above: “It wasn’t the mountain that was made visible on the paper, but the artist himself – his presence at that moment.” 

These videos are about that which is both visible and invisible; an absent presence. The trees are not in shot and all we see in the videos are the shadows cast by the branches and leaves. The moment the videos were filmed has also passed – is absent; the video pointing to the presence of the now absent film maker just as the shadows point to the trees that have also gone. 

By tracing the ‘writing’ in these videos then, I am attempting, I think, to take that absence (that of the trees and the wind – the past moment as a whole) and turn it into a presence. It is a theme which has defined much of my work over the last 17 years; the idea that the past was once the present; that what has passed was once ‘now’.

We can never recover the past and by tracing the ‘texts’ in the video, I can’t recover the full ‘meaning’ of this lost ‘language’. All I can do, through the gesture of painting, is re-create that presence, which, just as with the videos, quickly becomes as much about absence, as another moment in time slips away.

I can ‘read’ the ‘texts’ and try to recover that past moment, just as I might ‘read’ an object in a museum and – by understanding how the object acts like the trees as ‘Other’ and has done with other individuals in times gone by – try to recover, though an understanding  of presence, the myriad moments to which the object once belonged; 

A key point here is intent. In his quote above, Tilley is describing an artist looking at the tree rather than someone seeing the tree – among many others – as they walk through the forest. This is like me intentionally filming the shadows on the forest floor as opposed to walking through the forest where the shadows play without my necessarily noticing them. Similarly, when walking through a museum we can’t help but see many of the objects on display without really looking at them. However, there are those moments when we look with intent at an object and that’s when we begin to see it as ‘Other’ and make visible (through the awareness of our own presence) what has until that time been invisible; the individual long since lost to the past.

One question I ask myself is why shadows? Why not just video the trees themselves? For one thing, there is the aesthetic quality of the shadows on the paper, but another reason is that shadows point to things beyond the frame; they take the viewer further into the world shown by the image. That is what I try to do when I look at objects in museums. I try to see the world beyond them – the world that has long gone, whether it’s a 15th century inn (as might be revealed by a fragment of mediaeval pot) or an 18th century house (hinted at by, for example, a painting).

I have explored this idea with boundaries and shadows before and described the work in previous blogs: Patterns Seeping II and Tokens and Shadows. The image below is taken from one of those blogs and is based on the fabric tokens left by mothers leaving their children in the care of The Foundling Hospital in London.  

The Gone Forest

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Two years ago I shot some video at Shotover Country Park (see ‘Writing Shadows’) and finally, this weekend, I had the chance to edit the clips together to make a piece entitled ‘The Gone Forest’. The piece is something viewers can dip in and out of rather than sit through from beginning to end, and while it is a finished piece, there are lots of other ways I want to explore using these clips.

For now, here is the video:

Tokens and Shadows

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A while ago I made some sketches at Shotover Wood, tracing shadows with ink.

Thinking back to these and with regards the work I’m currently making, I looked again at these sketches and applied the idea of the quick, gestural painting to the patterns. The shadow paintings, like the related video work, were themselves about absence, of time passing, something being there (the woods at a specific time) and now being absent (revealed only through their shadows). This seemed to chime with the idea of the fabric tokens as also being about absence.

Writing Shadows

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On Tuesday I made my way to Shotover to work on a piece I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. The piece, about absent-presence, will, eventually, comprise videos of shadows in a wood, a few stills from which can be seen below.

But why woods?

Woods

Since I was a child, the image of the forest or wood has been an important one. From when I was 7 or 8, the past seemed like another place – a ‘foreign county’ – rather than another ‘dimension’ of the place in which I lived, and that place, when imagined, was always thickly forested. I’m not sure why exactly, but I can remember being enthralled by the oft quoted ‘fact’ that in the past, a squirrel could travel the length of England without touching the ground. (See: Postcard from Corfe Castle 1978)

As an older child in the 1980s, when the tension of the cold war was still a part of everyday life, the thickly wooded past became a place of retreat, a world to which I could escape the threat of nuclear war. It was also around this time I started reading role-playing books (like Fighting Fantasy) whilst developing an interest in magic and adventure (if not quite Dungeons and Dragons). I began to create maps of imagined lands which, again, were often thickly wooded. These too were places to which I could escape and were in many ways a conflation of the past and my imagination. (See: Maps for Escaping)

Of course, as I became an adult, my imagined landscape changed. The past was no longer a place, in parts indistinguishable from worlds of monsters and magic, but indeed a different dimension of the place in which I lived. And yet, despite this difference, the symbol of the forest/wood remained a backdrop to my work (See: A Backdrop to Eternity). To imagine the past was, for me, to imagine a wood, vast and untouched, and in some respects, it would be true to say that my interest in the Environment developed as much as a means of preserving and accessing the past as safeguarding the future. The fact that many of these forests have vanished or been so depleted means their absence in the present – a stark difference between now and then – has become a metaphor for absence itself.

Even when I have sought to connect with those in the past, who lived through the most horrific events, the image of the wood returns as a means of reaching out to them.

A quote to which I’ve often referred from Paul Fussell:

…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.

(See: Proposing Moments of Patsoral

I discovered this quote whilst making work about World War I and it tied in with what I had been thinking, how it was impossible (and indeed unethical) to make work about these events directly (i.e. as though one were there), but possible to make work about the difference between now and then – about the attempt to empathise with people in the past, especially those who have lived through such traumatic events.

(See: Somewhere Between Writing and Trees)

The Woods, Breathing

This brings me onto Adam Czerniakow, another figure I have discussed extensively in relation to my work. (See: The Woods, Breathing)

As I wrote in that blog: For almost three years, Adam Czerniakow was ‘mayor’ of the Warsaw Ghetto. One of the inspirations for this work is a line taken from his diary, which he kept whilst living in Warsaw in occupied Poland from 1939 to his death in 1942. On September 14th 1941 he wrote:

In Otwock. The air, the woods, breathing.

On occasion, Czerniakow was allowed to leave the ghetto to visit the Jewish Sanatorium at Otwock just outside Warsaw. It was one place he could find some respite from the horror and torment he endured in the ghetto.

For Czerniakow, the woods were a place in which he could escape the horrors of life under Nazi occupation. He would also seek escape in books, and one night, on January 19th 1940, he  wrote in his dairy:

…During the night I read a novel, ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’ – Grey Owl… The forest, little wild animals – a veritable Eden.

Paul Fussell’s quote is worth repeating here:

…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.

This brings me back to what I wrote earlier, how it’s impossible for me to make work about the experience of war.

What I can do however is allude to war through its opposite – to borrow from Fussell – in “proposing of moments of pastoral”. This opposition between war and pastoral is there in the line about Otwock. It’s there too in Czerniakow’s reading of Grey Owl’s book set in the wilds of Canada. The question is, how can proposing moments of pastoral, enable us to bridge the divide between now and then, between those who suffered the horrors of Wold War I and the Holocaust and those of us who read about them?

In many respects, we can empathise with them not as victims but as people who lived lives before the war or whatever trauma they were faced with.

Shadow Writing

Before I get onto the ‘shadow paintings’ I made at Shotover, I want to remind myself about a blog I wrote on Chinese painting (See: Chinese Landscape Painting)

It contains a quote I have come back to time and time again from Christopher Tilley:

The painter sees the trees and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects… The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to how a 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 for him something that would otherwise remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… the trees and mirror function as other.

And my final paragraph discussing the work of Yu Jian:

Like the trees, the mountains [Yu Jian painted] share that agency; they too ‘see’ the painter’ and it’s almost as if the painting becomes a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It’s not the mountain that is made visible on the paper, but the artist’s outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence.

I wanted these paintings to be images, not of shadows per se, but of a moment in time. They are as much about the rapidly painted strokes delineating that moment as the shadows they are tracing. I also like the way they resemble Chinese or Japanese calligraphy and could almost be a language whose meaning is lost; the language of a moment that has been lost.

 

© Nicholas Hedges 2024