child's-eye view

During the school holidays, my small son and I had been walking to a "faraway" park: an early lesson for him in the art of compromise as we negotiated how each of us could make the best of an afternoon outside in the wintry sun. I got to walk and he got to ride on the roundabout when we got there. 

I wanted to represent this walk in my next painting: how we had discovered the walk together, what happened to us on the walk and how walking with a small child makes you, allows you to consider familiar things with a fresh mind.

When the painting started to suggest itself I was reading Bruce Chatwin's Songlines. Two themes seemed to connect with the notion of The Walk: the aboriginal representation of landscape and the fundamental need to walk. I wanted to think about how I could express the landscape of this walk and also celebrate the connection with the land and ourselves walking can bring.

The Walk                                acrylic on canvas, 100cm x 100cm

To help my children make sense of how the world works I find that I chop the whole into smaller thinkable pieces and between us we develop a more relevant labeling system. So Thursday becomes gingerbread-man-day as we nip into the shop on the way home from school to buy the local paper and treat ourselves to something from the bakery then choose between walking home the tangly-hedge-way or the Post-Office-way, as road names don't hold much meaning for a four year old.

Although it is not a circular walk, a circle best expressed our experience of the walk: we set off, we passed several landmarks, we got to a place, we passed the landmarks later in  reverse order; we found ourselves on the way home again.

sketchbook; colourwashing background and circles; blocking in sections

First we walked on pavements, turning corners past rectangular brick walls and square green gardens: this part is represented by the geometric shape in the top left corner. The contrast between that and the curves of the circle echoes how urban and rural landscapes can affect us in different ways. We didn't feel the walk had started until we got past the straight bits and on to the mud. By following the same route many times, the characteristics of the different sections revealed themselves: we looked into the dark  hedge to find bright round cushions of green moss and dripping scarlet berries; we bent double to look at the upside down trees reflected in the silver grey water; we counted the neat fence posts against the blushing sky but couldn't count the tangled hedge posts; we lifted our eyes and felt ourselves to be right at the centre of the tallest trees reaching up into the pale afternoon light.

tangly hedge; reflections in the water; fence and hedge; stop and look up

After our ride on the roundabout the rosy glow began to leave the sky. We set off to retrace our steps and make our way home, however as the sky was changing and the day  drawing to an end the sections of the walk took on a more sombre age-old quality. We didn't feel like we were going over old ground, we were seeing and sensing it anew. I have conveyed this by changing the sky around the outside of the painting. We can never go back to a place and find it to be exactly the same, we can't recreate the past, we can't hold on to the present: we move through time in one direction.

Homeward bound on our last walk of the holiday we found the moon in a puddle.