Category Archives: Art

Book Review: Two Lights, by James Roberts

Two Lights: Walking through Landscapes of Loss and Life.
September Publishing, 2023. ISBN 978-1-9128-3617-8

You and I have read plenty of nature books that wax lyrical about the beauty of the liminal, the unfathomable gritty reality of walking along a muddy track on the outside of town between the sewage treatment plant, the football stadium, and the business park, and suddenly being transfixed etc etc by the unearthly and astonishingly loud song (for such a tiny bird) of the wren, rising etc etc above the mundane roar of the traffic and the air conditioning fans to transport the lonely naturalist into the unparalleled ecstasy of the mundane.

Fortunately, Two Lights is nothing like that.

James Roberts is an artist as well as a poet. He is lucky enough to live in the quiet countryside of the Welsh Borders: and to enjoy some of the country’s darkest skies, so that he can see thousands of stars, the milky way and comets. And he writes about it simply and beautifully. But no, he does more. He lets his imagination, his atlas of the world, the journeys he made when he was young, what he has read, his father’s decline and death from Parkinson’s, his wife’s journey through breast cancer and radiotherapy, history, the loss of wild places everywhere, take him to different places, and express what everyone is feeling in these crazy times, love and loss and desperation and, yes, beauty despite it all.

Roberts is an experienced artist, with the gift to describe his subject plainly without either getting excessively technical, or talking down to his readers: “Most artists are obsessed with space. Positive space is the area of a picture which contains the subject, the details, the face or figure in a portrait, the arranged objects in a still life, the trees and rocks in a landscape. Negative space is the area of the picture which surrounds the subject.”

Johannes Vermeer: Woman in Blue Reading a Letter. 1662 or 1663

He goes at once to the heart of the matter: “I’ve spent hours staring at Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, wondering how he managed to achieve the milky light in the room, the sense of silence, the open-mouthed expression on the pregnant woman’s face and the depths behind it.”

I don’t know about you, but I immediately downloaded an image of the painting – the book’s illustrations are all of Roberts’s own work – and spent several minutes with my new-found knowledge of positive and negative space, wondering how Vermeer had done it all so seamlessly, as if it was easy. Then I wondered how Roberts had written about it all so seamlessly, as if it was easy.

Two Lights begins with a chapter on the dawn, and ends with one on dusk, presumably the two lights of the title. Roberts says he is attracted to these times, these transitional lights, when forms appear or dissolve, when shapes shift, when negative space appears positive or vice versa, when birds sing, when what seems solid and permanent is revealed as constantly changing.

The book’s subtitle, Walking through Landscapes of Loss and Life, speaks of its themes: personal connection to a landscape and its wildlife, to all of nature; and within that, a connection between personal loss and the silent, invisible shockwave of human impact on all of nature, from the paleolithic to the present.

You might think that with global warming, deforestation, overfishing, soil erosion, draining of wetlands, damming of rivers, pesticides, pollution, growth of cities, nights so bright with streetlights that citydwellers never see more than half-a-dozen stars, nights without nightingales, corn without cornflowers, meadows without meadowsweet, hedges without “immemorial elms”, roadsides without primroses, garden Buddleia bushes without butterflies, the extinction of species… that we would need no reminding that we have lost something.

But Roberts is right, we’ve forgotten. Our leaders think of wars and armies, of immigrants and policies, of votes and elections, ignoring what is happening to the world all around them: like officers fighting on the bridge of a sinking ship.

He’s also right that lecturing doesn’t work. Perhaps the oblique, feather-light, razor-sharp insight of an artist and poet may do better.

Roberts walks the bare hills and valleys of Wales, recalling “the forest of my imagination … hiding beneath my feet, in these hills, waiting to regrow.” The trees were cleared thousands of years ago, the first people of Britain burning gaps in the forest to make way for their fields. Now:

“News bulletins have been covering fires in Greece and Italy, and also those in California … on the map, the brightest areas are in Africa. The whole of the Congo seems to be burning, Central and East Africa lit up, Zambia, Angola, Tanzania, Kenya. There are fires in places where it is now winter, in Australia, New Zealand, Patagonia. Even in the cold and wet north, in Siberia, Iceland and Northern Canada, there are blazes seemingly everywhere.”

Of course, in Britain, there’s not much forest left to burn, its 13% coverage the lowest in Europe, its nearly-extinguished wildlife among the most impoverished in the world.

Roberts dreams of the Great Bear Rainforest of the Canadian Pacific Northwest, of its rivers so thick with salmon that they seem to overlap like fish-scales, of its bears fishing in the rich waters, their salmon-enriched scat fertilizing the forested hills for miles around, wild with wolves. The bears and the wolves are gone from Britain now, along with most of the trees and nearly all the salmon:

“This was part of the great border forest, home to the last wolves in England and Wales. There are few stories of them, though they were still here when some of the old oaks which stand in the fields were saplings.”

His wife recovers; Roberts’s depression doesn’t go away. He reflects on a saying of the psychologist James Hillman, that depression is sometimes a right response to a damaged environment; you may feel like that because that’s how things are, “a sign you’re still sane”.

Heron by James Roberts

The text is interspersed, accompanied and enriched, by full-page prints of Roberts’s evocative ink paintings. He uses ink, water, and salt which creates dark specks with paler surroundings, random but orderly, wild but controlled, like an ecstatic dancer following the choreographer’s steps but connecting with the hearts of the audience.

Buy it from Amazon.com  (commission paid)
Buy it from Amazon.co.uk (commission paid)
I received a review copy of this book.

Tara louise hughes’s marvellous insect faces

The Gunnersbury Triangle nature reserve this autumn has a new and wonderful nature trail: a series of insects’ faces by Tara Louise Hughes. Tara, when not studying art and illustration, has proven herself a capable conservation volunteer. Now, she has brightened up the reserve for children and adults with her painstakingly fire-etched close-up drawings of insects.

Her damselfly head is a study in miniature detail: the hundreds of pin-point eye-elements (ommatidia) in the insect’s large, forward-facing eyes; the precise distribution and length of the bristles on the top of the head and on the mouthparts; the accurately-observed antennae.

The Stag Beetle head is suitably fearsome, a study in armoured magnificence with interlocking chitin cases for head and thorax, and those extraordinary antler-like mandibles.

The Monarch Butterfly’s head couldn’t be more different: a study of a delicately furry head, a shy eye, and the tenderly coiled proboscis peeping out on the right.

With the Flesh Fly we’re certainly back in scary territory, the rows of stiffly corseted bristles announcing that this insect is ready for action.

The Buff-tailed Bumblebee, a mild and welcome presence in the reserve, and in gardens wherever there is a suitable supply of flowers. The furry insect seems shy under the artist’s gaze.

If not evil, the Red Wood Ant is definitely fierce and single-minded, as anyone who’s ever been bitten by one can testify. Tara’s fire-etching has brilliantly captured that take-no-prisoners energy with the insect’s smooth bullet head, businesslike antennae, and efficiently-hinged jaws. Take a careful look at those scorched textures at the top of its head.

Tara’s Tortoise Beetle shows the distinctly tortoise-like carapace from the underside, its knobbly texture skilfully burnt into the wood, the little head jutting out under the curved rim with the antennae cautiously feeling the outside world for possible danger.

Tara’s website is at https://taralouisehughes.medium.com/

Art: Technology and Nature in Perfect Harmony

Gail Dickerson in her studio

The artist Gail Dickerson creates her paintings through what must be a unique combination of observation of technological artefacts and the deliberate application of natural materials through the recreation of natural processes.

Fractal detail of painting
Fractal detail of painting

Thus it is no accident that her paintings have a natural, accidental, chaotic look: they are created from actual earths, muds and clays of many different colours – real earth pigments – and they are allowed to form themselves on to the canvas through processes that recreate the basic geological processes of erosion (of rocks) and deposition (of sediments). Gail crushes and grinds the earths to form usable pigments: of course she also transports them to her studio, just as glaciers transport rocks as ‘erratics’, grind and crush rocks to rock-flour as moraines and the thick, sticky boulder clay that covers the little hills of Southeast England.

Earth pigments from Wales, Skye, Edinburgh ...
Earth pigments from Wales, Skye, Edinburgh …

Then she mixes the pigments with water and a binder to make simple paints, and pours them on to her canvases, where they flow, evaporate, diffuse, and arrange themselves into the beautiful fractal patterns of sand-dunes, beach ripples, estuary channels, or just puddles seen in her paintings.

A work in progress (evaporating - there are reflections from the liquid in the white central area)
A work in progress (evaporating – there are reflections from the liquid in the white central area)

The other input to Gail’s paintings is the high-speed world of modern technology. She strips printed circuit boards from abandoned devices (which with today’s instant obsolescence often means only a couple of years after they were made) and draws their patterns on to her canvases. In an earlier phase of her work, she actually placed assorted components on the canvas and allowed them to leave their “shadows” behind as pigments flowed over and around them.

Printed circuit boards and a painting based on them
Printed circuit boards and a painting based on them

Circuit boards form patterns as their wiring is optimised to follow shortest paths for the many interconnections, as well, sometimes, as to provide sufficient spacing to reduce electromagnetic interference between the rapidly oscillating currents in the tiny wires. (Gail commented that these technical terms would make good names for artworks.) Gail had redrawn or imagined suitable wiring layouts on transparencies, and it was hard to tell her imaginings from the real thing, so convincingly did they wander in apparently optimal directions between components.

PCB transparencies showing optimisation of wiring paths
PCB transparencies showing optimisation of wiring paths

Gail then transfers the circuit layouts, suitably transformed, to her canvases, where they and the variously oozing, evaporating earths in their chaotic patterns do a dance together, neither taking over, neither too prominent.

Controlled electronics, chaotic earth pigments
Controlled electronics, chaotic earth pigments (detail)

For me, it’s a figure of the modern world, where man makes use of nature – ColTan ore turning into electronic components, sand turning into silicon chips, oil turning into the plastics and resins of insulation and circuit boards (after all, all materials are ultimately from nature), and the manmade patterns of thought, algorithmically-designed electronics, squeak and chatter at their inaudibly-high GigaHertz frequencies (as recently as 1994, we all had slow old modems that audibly squeaked when connecting to the Internet to retrieve emails and  briefly browse a few small klunkily laid out early web pages, how quickly things change in that world).

Detail of PCB layout among earth pigments in one of Gail's paintings
Detail of circuit layout among earth pigments in one of Gail’s paintings

For me, then, Gail’s paintings, made in nice old buildings a stone’s throw from the Shard, the river, and Shakespeare’s Globe – inevitably, just about to be turned into expensive new apartments or offices – beautifully sum up modern life. We are still rooted in Nature: our tailless ape ancestry of course, our drives for food, water, sex, power, sleep absolutely apelike; while another part of us races ahead in the bustling city, now sprawling across the river from the City of London to the Docklands and down onto the South Bank around London Bridge and the suddenly burgeoning glass towers of Southwark. Alexander Pope had it right in his Essay on Man when he describes us as

     Created half to rise and half to fall,
     The glory, jest, and riddle of the world.