What do Artists do on Holiday? Part 3. (Final part)
One day I was sitting on the beach writing and something happened that I would in the past have always drawn or painted. Perhaps because I already had a notebook in my hands or maybe I was too lazy to set out paints, I remembered the opening passage of Iris Murdoch’s The Sea The Sea and I think a superbly artistic depiction. I decided to write a painting. It felt deliciously subversive and yet when I wrote the blog post yesterday I felt shyly reluctant to share this new thing. It is a serious attempt to bridge the widening gap between writing and making, I have no idea where this is going…
A Word Drawing.
The sky is the colour of mouthwash and out of the still sea, mountains rise like the backs of dinosaurs, the shallows are oily flat and edged with turquoise.
Nearby a man sits high on terracotta rocks cleaning fish, a large bird stands at a respectful distance. The man’s hands move in an easy repeating rhythm, broken only to throw fish guts into the sea which boils in anticipation. Occasionally he tosses a small silver fish to the bird, careful not to make eye contact. The bird grateful for this cross-species generosity warily hops from one foot to the other held back by an invisible force-field.
The man’s body is the same colour as the rocks, his olive shorts sun-dried and salt-stiff. If you didn’t know he was there you wouldn’t see him as so perfectly does he assimilate into the landscape.
