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Work 2. Bird Box

 

Another taken from the path today and one we have had our eye on since the end of the last seasons video messages.1 Perhaps it was episode 29 or 30 I'm not sure but we took a few sketches and discussed its merit for representing the lockdown state, in the UK that is. Strange how we live physically here and mentally there, at least our fiction is based there, in any case we settled on the bird box for the lockdown.

The difficulty here was trying to get a sense of the complexity and stickishness of the forest in the background without resorting to a kind of unobserved simplification that is always an option; one can just decide on a dark tone then make a game of it. Of course in a sense simplification is the whole shooting match and we need only look to Van Gogh's compacted landscapes for the iron standard of powerful simplification in landscape, but at the moment I feel like building the thing up in little salvos that sweep across and which together will achieve a more varied and unpredictable tone. So we went in, out and through, trying to build a jagged sense of space in the background whilst emerging the trees in higher hues and if anything we were conservative in this matter as the colour that is visible in the heavy snow, usually on the vertical of the trees or in the wonderful under branch oranges, becomes exaggerated. These colours have not become brighter, it is the snow that has changed everything else, one might even say that the colours have been framed differently, and so in the changed context appear changed themselves. Is it too early to suggest comparison to recent events and Mr B? The Biden administration taking on the exaggerated hue of social goodness in the dire afterglow of the far alt right? Well it is too soon and I regret mentioning it but lets just say that we referenced this type of thing in our montage where the little munskydded2 Biden is ghosted by the Underwoods.3

Some large log shaped strokes gave us the tree trunk along with smatterings of pea green and yellow brown on the underneath of the main limbs, topped with various off white tones for the settled snow. You know I rather like working on this path. The more one looks and spends time there the more motifs reveal themselves. One might even be tempted to propose a full season limiting ourselves to this one path, like studying a blade of grass,4 but to do that is the type of conceptual schtick we have refrained from since taking up the brush back at Carbeile Wharf. However, while we are limited by both the sciatic nerve and the weather we shall remain here for a few more studies I imagine.

Regards the nerve it would seem that a naprapat Magnus in Arninge5 has hit on the root of the problem and with his acupuncture has greatly reduced the pain, and his prescribed exercises we are progressing well. You know I could kiss him! Over the Christmas period, whilst we laboured over Dane Bowers, we were on crutches and spent next to every waking hour in discomfort then with a visit to naprapat Magnus a couple of weeks ago who put the pins in and the nerve pain has 90% vanished. He was at pains to stress however that I have a spinal injury that will take five or six months to rehabilitate from fully so dragging the necessaries around the fields and forests is not a good idea just yet. This problem would you believe started in October and can be traced to an injury sustained performing what I now know to be an extremely ill advised yoga exercise which was recommended to me by a cousin of Helen's as we semestered in Jämptland. To be fair to the young man I had requested his assistance and his stretch did work well for me until one day in October there was a rather sudden give in the lower back and oh no you don't the disk was herniated. My real problem since then is that I have made it worse through self diagnosis and online advice and exercises that made naprapat Magnus cringe.

We are on the mend however and with this second study have taken up a little handful of snow and are beginning to shape it into a sphere ready to be rolled out. By the time of the thaw I'd like to think we'll have something worthwhile to melt.

Yours,

John

1 Video number 30.

2 Munskydd is the Swedish word of face mask. 

3 Refers to the popular political drama The House of Cards which follows the careers of two corrupt democrat politicians. John's placment of the Underwoods behind President Biden perhaps suggests some return to the previous style of behind the scenes corruption? 

4 Likely to refer to Van Gogh who wrote: "If you study Japanese art you see a man who is undoubtedly wise, philosophic and intelligent, who spends his time how? In studying the distance between the earth and the moon? No. In studying the policy of Bismarck? No. He studies a single blade of grass. But this blade of grass leads him to draw every plant and then the seasons, the wide aspects of the countryside, then animals, then the human figure. So he passes his life, and life is too short to do the whole."

5 Most likely refers to Arninge rehab & friskvård.

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