A Quiet Companion

Walked all day through live oak and manzanita

Scrabbling through dust down Tamalpais –

Thought of high mountains;

Looked out on a sea of fog.

Two of us, carrying packs.

Gary Snyder, Myths and Texts

There are figures in the landscape here. The landscape is an abstracted lattice of brushwood. It is bleached and mottled by light or stained with shadow. There are nameless fruit here, and silvery leaves. The figures are solitary. At first glance the individuals appear distinct in each painting – different ages, depicted at different times – but a closer look reveals them to be, in spirit, one figure. She emerges from the landscape and is made of the same stuff as the landscape. Whilst her mouth is often concealed by briar and branch, her eyes are watchful; she is contemplative and vigilant.

I have a walking companion. Together we have hiked high above the Saguenay Fjord in Québec; we have strode the length of sands between Bamburgh and Seahouses, Lynn and Wells. We have meandered, heads hunched, through rain-glossed mediaeval streets of Mantua and Spoleto. Together we have wandered around the mouths of gloops on Hoy, tracked parched waterfalls up to Kinder Scout, and followed canals and trunk roads between Ely and Denver.

On all the hundreds of walks we have completed together, barely a word passed between us, but our shared, voiceless conversations continue to astonish me. Almost silently on these walks, we have assembled an album of common images, incidents, sensations and associations. By walking noiselessly together, we have learned how to look, and shaped a mute space in our imaginations full of pictures.

When making these recent paintings I have thought a lot about the companionship of my quiet walks, and the possibility of holding a similar near-silence in the paintings’ still surface.