19 Apr Snow in both stirrups

I’m missing the studio space. Of losing myself in concentration on ink and brush, pen on paper, watercolour staining and dripping down paper. I’ve hung the house with paintings of other landscape but now when I look at them, I see the traces of forests and fairytales. One I named Snow in both stirrups (2019) after a Buson haiku.

A tethered horse,

snow

in both stirrups

Yosa Buson

The poem has a sense of loss. Where is the horse’s rider? Why is the horse tethered and saddled and left in the snow? But it also has a sense of fullness. Both the stirrups are full. The image of the tethered horse is heavy, the snow is light and alone. In 7 words there is so much contrast. The tree in the image leans out over the water. Doing what it would do without the path that runs by it, but still feeling almost placed – a Disneyland version of Tasmanian wildness placed halfway on a nicely timed day walk close by the warmth of the Cradle Mountain Lodge.

This work sits opposite the wall of cypress pushing through the window. Imprints of the stories projected on and from the tree have reflected themselves onto it. Now the tree feels like a fairytale. Sometimes reminiscent of Brambly Hedge mouse mansions and larder stores of picnic supplies, sometimes a tree obscuring a witch’s house high up on chicken feet, scuttling around the forest behind it. Next to it hangs a small painting that doubles up on the colours, repeats the shapes. A view from the structure of Gordon dam down over the black trickle of the river. A shift in distance and perspective and the calm silver water (of Dove lake) has become a thick inky blackness. It too reflects the cypress. The river becomes a limb, the vertiginous pull of the river flips into a drag up into the branches.