Water from the sky, from the ocean, from the heart

Pastels, 85 x 55 cm

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The symbolism has had many interpretations from others from the print I keep in my folio, as does most of my work.. I like to accept it from my original intentions: the funeral may be a dark symbol, but its brilliance of colour and contrast make it a light against the incoming storm. The figures (or mourners if you will) are in modern dress and hence somewhat inappropriate comparative to the ancient and no longer practiced Celtic and Norse practice of setting a warrior spirit free. The calm of the sea against the incoming storm implies foreboding and peace simultaneously. It leaves a paradox enforced by the figures that recurrs in my work in differing forms more than any other theme. It gives me the opportunity for beauty and tragedy, light and dark, that I find deeply appealling and akin to my own nature.

Watch hands on an ancient clock, slow but still moving. Clicking in the dark when there’s no one home. Echoing in a hall with light spilling in through the frosted glass.

Like when the game is over and it’s time to hold and time to kill, the very very last drop of milk splashes onto the page and the very very dark blue moves in the corner. Walking with me to the end of the isle pewter cups full of thick liquid that catches in the back of your throat and makes you sputter like a fire or a kerosene heater or a lamp or an old sick car with students in it too dumb
to know
not to try.
No time to write or think or curl my fingers around, a dove’s leg curse or a jewel. Pierced, oh sure, like that a pinprick in an open sky, a babbling tower. Water from the sky from the ocean from the heart, clipped, triggered and muzzled, strapped to the enormity of it. Colour-blind and balanced, capsized and immersed, a bridge that’s a seething landscape.
Titan for a Tuesday, dry as a bone wrist or a Doll’s house in the desert.
It smells like strength and vicissitude with only what you want and a cold turned spoke.
Staggering and with a head full full of light, only small acts of kindness, what else is there to find for us silent at the edge of the day?
So then it’s only you and me in a saturated blue, long kisses hard into each other
sweat and confirmation, an engine of conviction, a weapon of devolution.
A slow turning and immense mill with a lidless sacrifice and an angry wasp, pulled from one strung heart sharp over ribs. There’s only breath and life
and no promises from either, go guarantor for me that I’ll be alone,
prove me right with skin that colour, hand that soft, a zealot with a placard walking in the rain.
Drama and faith are such poor excuses.
Only hints and grace, something gone, out into the soft and never ending night with a half heard cry.
I’m sad for you, baby.
I know. I know.
I saw the tremors and the shadows in the kitchen. Like leaves and seeds bent around a chain link fence on a quiet day. It’s only me, just me, that’s all.
I can come and visit and hold your head up for you while you try and sing, like before with both hands that you pushed to my throat.
Wait for me, oh wait for me baby.
I know my arms are empty and ugly and I have hard edges and sway and rock and twitch twitch twitch and I’m sorry for all these things and for the old woman made up for no-one and for the beautiful girl so autistic she couldn’t see and for the tiny mad child that I was
and for the tiny mad child that you were, dirty hands and sweet,
sweet,
bruised skin.
Twelve o’clock on a Friday night,
Run my hand down the side of my face. Crack each finger individually.

Give up, give in.

Whisper and kiss the side of my mouth.

Someplace or something warm.

It’s okay.
It is.