NATURE AND ART
Find Your Place of Ease
Why creativity still matters
Years always seem to accelerate as they get into their stride. It’s another one where creativity feels like a luxury; there are so many things to worry about. I touched on this in an Instagram post back in late February 2021:
I carried the shadow around with me on my walk today; it nested in my stomach while the sun shone. I tried looking at the world upside down to see if it made any difference. It didn’t. I envied the roe deer the spring in their step, white bounce, brown flash. By the end of it the grey wind had won and the snow had started to fall. Even tears freeze today.
What I wrote at the time, the week that Russia invaded Ukraine, still holds true but I’m getting better at balancing my conflicting thoughts which at the time left me feeling guilty about allocating time to any sort of art.
One thing that helped me with this, immeasurably, came as I started to re-read Nan Shepherd’s ‘The Living Mountain’. Nan writes about working on her manuscript for the book during the latter years of the Second World War and just after:
“In that disturbed and uncertain world it was my secret place of ease.”
How I wish I’d chosen to reread the book in Spring 2020, or late February 2021. It’s not lost on me either that at first reading the sentence had floated over me.
How sad too that prevailing circumstances persuaded Nan to put her manuscript away in a drawer for 30 years. To think that such a wonderfully poetic book about place and nature might not have been published.
I resolved not to put my own creativity away in the drawer. It makes too much difference to my happiness.
It, and nature, provides me with my own place of ease.
If you’ve read this, thank you. I’m new to Medium and hoping to grow my writing here. I plan to share something about why I write in a future post.
I am primarily a visual artist; my practice is influenced by the qualities of water and by nature’s own mark making. From the colour and movement of the River Dove close to my previous home in the Peak District and its shifting transcriptions of sunlight, to the soft mirror of ephemeral pools in North East Scotland where I now live, I make abstract and individual fine art prints and mixed media works.
The threads that bind my work irrespective of media are curiosity and fluidity.
If you’d like to see what I make you’ll find examples on my website.
