Continuing my series on art in lockdown, considering the pictures on my walls.
In the last two months, I’ve developed a different relationship with being outside, as if I’m passing through a hard barrier each time I venture beyond the front door. Here in London even before the pandemic it was not uncommon to see people (mainly foreign tourists – we residents are more blasé) wearing masks to protect them from our comparatively high levels of pollution. Now even the very air can make us sick.
Yesterday we escaped the city for the first time since lockdown and drove to meet friends for a socially distanced walk in the woods near their home in Oxted. I hadn’t realised until we arrived how much I’d missed nature – it’s a cliché to talk about the healing properties of trees and birdsong, but as I discussed in a previous post, it’s a cliché because it is true. It’s corny, but I felt free as we walked along the dirt paths through woodlands, sun spotting the ground with light, stopping now and then to locate the birds we were hearing on their high branches. It was (another cliché) restorative, after long days of being sequestered indoors, trying not to listen to the desperate reports on the news.
Maybe that’s why I love this print by the English artist Richard Bawden (son of that most English of artists, Edward Bawden). It’s entitled Solitary Walk, which suggests to me not the easy camaraderie of our woodland stroll with friends, but the kind of amble you make on your own, just to think. That kind of walking isn’t like the Situationist dérive, which, although prioritising dreaming as part of the condition of walking, is typically set in an urban environment, a sort of rebellious dawdling. The dérive is the same as drifting, which you might very well do in the woods, but the quality of drifting in the woods is different, just as the air is different.
The walk that Bawden invites us on is solitary because the path ahead has been made for the walker, who is also the artist, also the viewer – as if the trees have parted for him / her alone. The palette is simplified, almost monochrome – green / blue / white / gold – so that what we are immediately drawn to is the vertical pattern of trees, the horizontals of ground, horizon, sky, canopy. The walker is moving through a grid representing distance, along a path that narrows at its furthest reach. And distance is a beautiful geometry we can only appreciate when we are standing at a fixed point.
Bawden’s woods remind me of one of my favourite wooded walks – in Tunstall in Suffolk — which may not be coincidental, as Bawden is also based in Suffolk (although his patch is Hadleigh). Perhaps that’s why certain pictures chime – they remind us of inner landscapes we hold and return to again and again. The artist could never know this of course, but something seen and remembered connects us. I don’t make that Tunstall walk these days – and haven’t for some time even before lockdown – so all I can do is continue to hold those woods in my mind.