the forest library: portals and paths

I have been re-reading The Old Ways, by Robert Macfarlane. I am not a huge fan of his, except for the way he introduces one to some great artists and writers – in the past I found Tim Robinson, Nan Shepherd – and in this case a Spanish artist called Miguel Angel Blanco.

In his basement in Madrid, Blanco has a strange kind of library, where the books all lie on their sides, each one in an open-ended numbered wooden box – The Library of the Forest, La Biblioteca del Bosque. Its books are not only books, but also reliquaries. Each book, or rather book-box, records a journey made by walking, and each contains natural objects and substances gathered along that particular path.

– Macfarlane writes (edited) “The Library of the Forest owes its existence to storm and snow. Between 30 December 1984 and New Year’s Day 1985 a severe winter gale struck the Guadarrama Mountains. Miguel was trapped in his small house in Fuenfría, a southern Guadarraman valley. When at last the storm stopped and the thaw came, he walked up into the valley, following a familiar path but encountering a new world: fifteen-foot-deep drifts of snow, craters and root boles where trees had been felled, sudden clearings in the forest. As he walked, he gathered objects he found along the way: pine branches, resin, cones, curls of bark, a black draughts piece and a white draughts piece. When he returned home to his house he placed the gathered items in a small pine box, lidded the box with glass, sealed the glazing with tar, bound pages to the box with tape and gave the whole a cover of card-backed linen. In this way the first book of the library was made. Miguel called that original book-box Deshielo, ‘Thaw,’ and it became the source from which a stream of works began to flow.

“His manufacturing method is unchanged in its fundamentals. All his book-boxes contain objects he has collected while walking; the results of chance encounters or conscious quests. The found objects are held in place within each box by wire and thread, or pressed into fixed beds of soil, resin, paraffin or wax. Each book-box symbolically records a walk made, a path followed, a foot-journey and its encounters.”

“Each of my books records an actual journey but also a camino interior, an interior path.” – Miguel Angel Blanco.

In the woods I walk in I find new chapters and internal paths every time, though usually I am walking a well known route.

Here is the portal to the sitka plantation. it seems strange that this fence with its stiles is here at all since it’s too slight to have any effect on deer or rabbits, or livestock, or humans. The simple wooden bench stiles are rotting and it’s easier to duck under the top strand of wire.

At the other side there is the same fence and stile.

and the portal is a bright green hole in the greyish brown of the trees.

I often refer to these close-planted musty aisles of trees as “Mirkwood” but they are not all bad. I expect there are plenty of spiders and sparrow-hawks, but I read yesterday that sitkas sequester far more carbon throughout their lives than other conifers, as much as mature broadleaf trees. The dense carpet of dropped needles is silent underfoot; only the very tops move in the wind.

It is an enclosing  place, secret and secretive.

It seems unlikely that they will be harvested – they  aren’t a commercial proposition now. so they stay to keep their carbon, and their dusty rows like old library stacks.

Between the planted parts of the wood there are various old quarries where trees, mosses, ferns and blaeberries grow as naturally as disturbed rocks, earth and paths allow. There are elderly silver birches covered in a weird fuzzy growth of twigs holding witchy postures, surrounded by their spindly offspring.

Single larches and Scots pine tower over the birches. I have evolved a route that winds up and down in a serpentine fashion, another snakes and ladders scenario, labouring up the steepest paths, following contours, and then plunging down again. I don’t follow the mountain bike trails which are almost vertical.

Everywhere there are cutouts and gullies, and huge spoil heaps.

Down in the bottom of Millstone Quarry there is a pool, covered in duckweed. It’s a long way down, and looking half empty in this dry climate-change summer. Kemback woods  have been our best place to walk on sunny days, in the dappled shade,

though taking one path through head high bracken on a hot early morning I picked six or so ticks off my trousers, and another four off B’s head, then found later on that I had missed two small ones on her and had to get them off with the tick twister. There were three different kinds, very small grey ones, hard to see even in B’s fine coat, then black and reddish brown ones. But on looking them up, I find that these are all sheep or deer ticks, the small ones are just younger, and the reddy brown ones are females. About once a year I manage to miss one and have to remove it which is usually not a problem, as long as you do it quickly and cleanly, though last time I got it off and then lost it in my trousers, which is another story.

they seem to be most active in the early morning, but I am avoiding that particular path until late autumn.

Walking down the track next to Millgate woods .. named on the map, but just a few silver birch left in a pasture field.

Roadsides are full of wildflowers

on another walk, over Lucklaw Hill, on the top the moor vegetation is surprisingly colourful

parts of the blaeberry cover being reddened

with ripe berries

and now in my garden the echinaceas are at full blast

busy with wild bees

and others that only seem to be bees.

All into the mix in my palette

Then watching a Year on the Mountain, Blencathra in the Lake District, where the colour seemed to have been turned up to a magical vibrancy.

I finished this one (61 x 61 cm) and christened it “Lets Go to that Land” after the poem by Meerai Bai,

a close-up …

and this little one, “If You Ask – ”

“Making a Path to the Beloved”, 80 x 120 cm

I have been working on my artist statement for various applications. Robert Macfarlane and Meerai Bai have been the main influences.

Pilgrim trails, ritual walks;
voyages in, an interior path;
imagined geographies, memory maps.

A place within a landscape corresponds to a place within the heart.

How, in painting, the mark, however made, can be a way of returning these named and unnameable things. How drawing becomes mark-making, and the materiality of the paint – its layering, its colour, its malleability – becomes a response to an encounter with a dynamic entity.

I came up with a poem from the titles of nine paintings –

LET’S GO TO THAT LAND
MAKING A PATH TO THE BELOVED
TO THE FIELD
TO GATHER TREASURE
IN THE LIBRARY OF THE FOREST
AND THE COLOURS OF FLOWERS
IN THE HILLS
IF YOU ASK –
WHERE MY BELOVED SHALL BE FOUND

In the Library of the Forest ….

Now I must update the website and add these paintings.