Dark Mountain Print

There’s a sound that comes from the hedgerows in July: a green sound, a great cacophony of young birds with new wings, shouting their proud freedoms over the million wonderful brown rustlings underneath; it's a warm song of summer beginning in earnest, and it sings to our hearts of adventure under the long-eveninged skies. Hedgerows and waysides have always sung to me like this, in their beautiful chords of the season. As a tiny child I keenly peered into the holes made by Who-Knows-Whats and thrilled at the knotwork sorcery of roots. On the verges grew a wild library for me: weeds and truant grasses thrived unnoticed and yet held in their pages stories I was sure were important and ancient and wise. I have never stopped loving those roadsides that flash by beyond car windows, those mighty green kingdoms of undergrowth bordering our highways and byways. And I have always suspected that the feeling conjured in me by an old old hedgerow, gripping the centuries-old earth banks as I walk alongside it, is somehow a key: a heart-sign, deep beneath words in me, calling me to follow.

The congregations of the waysides have always drawn me too: those outcasts and travellers, peddlers, hobbledehoys, lunatics and vagabonds who make their art in the ditches and say their truths to all who pass by. I've long felt this edge-territory home: I make camp behind the road signs, draw faces in the dust where the sparrows bathe, and I watch. And I wonder about them all travelling so fast past... Where are they going? Who are they travelling with? What would we talk about if they stopped for a pee?

Have you ever had your head turned by the wonderful incongruous sight of a Gypsy wagon parked up on a roundabout as you drove by, a horse grazing on verge grass, and a man lighting a fire in the middle of this green island-in-the-tarmac as the unceasing slick of traffic roars on? That's the feeling I'm talking about - the leap in your chest, the feeling of being eye-witness to a still-possible dream, the joy of knowing it.

These are strange times: many many people have stopped really believing in dreams, or at best have packaged them up in a sickly little dollshouse called whimsy. We have been told a fairly grim tale: a grey snake of a tale that eats its own tail to form the 9-to-5 hamster wheel of progress. There's always a but just after a wild thought, a rote-learned reason for not being able to live the life you really wanted, and civilisation put it there.

Yet still there's a truth within us that yearns and hammers at the insides of our chests when we spy something from that other place, that other time and it recognises us in turn. And the ones who paint the poems which cause our inner truths to hammer like this are the artists, the wild ones, the glorious nutters - we all recognise them. Fondest of all perhaps, we recognise Earth's own green poem ringing in tune with our heart-harp-strings.

And these, these are the tunes I hear coming from the pipe of that colourful-coated traveller there in my painting. The tune he plays is in the key of hedgerow and yearning, it is the colour of love and oak leaves, and its words are older and more familiar than the cries we ourselves made as babies.

DARK MOUNTAIN print from original oil painting on wood made in 2011.