WINTERING

Before they will start to grow in Spring, some seeds need to go through a process called vernalisation. Without the months of cold, the process of new life can’t begin once the days lengthen.

 

Being in anything other than the summer of our life is very unfashionable, but I had a crisis with my health last year, after a long time of not really addressing how dicey it was.  I’ve realised that if I want to be more well, more of the time, I must accept the challenge of how to recover more deeply.  A large part of this has been to embrace my own process of vernalisation or wintering. 

 

This has been characterised not only by rest, but by withdrawal, reducing the responsibilities I expect of myself, and giving myself more empty time. Nothing you want on your LinkedIn profile, but the classic stuff of convalescence – which is another unfashionable notion.   

 

Interestingly, the conditions of convalescence seem to also be good conditions for painting.  As I want to do more painting, I’m realising how hard it is to be consistently creative. Compared to finding a painting, painting the painting is the easy bit. Solitude, time, and reduced distraction seem to be as crucial to my creativity as they are to my recovery. 

 

One of my favourite painters, Paul Nash, described his life as an artist as less that of the modern virtuoso in the studio, and more of the ancient hunter scouring the landscape. This resonates with me deeply. Each of these paintings has been a quarry that I’ve had to bring to bay. Some days, I come home empty handed. Sometimes, I can flush something up almost by accident, within feet of the car.

 

But most often, I am like Nash’s wandering tracker: watching the sky, re-treading promising trails, rubbing the earth between my fingers. 

 

There is something atavistic about it; quite ancient and held outside of time. Finding myself in this marginal place, I feel I have enjoyed winter more than I did before, feared it less perhaps, and glimpsed a bit of what it might be for. 

 

I felt some trepidation about painting winter, week in week out for its long extent. But perhaps by engaging with it on its own terms, it’s been fruitful. Stripped back and essential, the winter landscape has kept me busy with its underlying geometries, its scars, and its extraordinary, surprising colours. 

 

I hope that as the daffodils and tulips nod hopefully outside, you’ll enjoy these views of winter; and of wintering.

 

Benmo, April 2023.