Giles Watson's Blog - Posts Tagged "art"
Collaborations with John Lincoln
This little playlist includes a small selection of the poems I have written during my long-term collaboration with the Lincolnshire artist, John Lincoln:
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=P...
Links to our books on Goodreads:
A Burnished Echo
The Fen-Gazer
The Green Pulse
Avian Dreams
A Symphony of Leaves
Myriad Circles
A Secret Garden
Here is the essay I wrote as a preface to another book of John Lincoln's paintings, at the beginning of our association. It recounts a visit to his studio in the Lincolnshire Fens:
“Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves” :
nature and spirit in the art of John Lincoln
Giles Watson
To walk into John Lincoln’s studio is to pass, in a heightened state of awareness, by the borders of an ancient wood on the edge of undrained fen, as a low sun slants across the landscape and turns the leaves translucent. There is a warmth and a vibrancy of colour which heighten this sense of epiphany, and I am reminded irresistibly of the moment beside the empty pool in T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, when the prosaic atmosphere turns poetic, and spirits are seen to be “Moving without pressure… through the vibrant air… And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight… The surface glittered out of the heart of light.”
A painting on the easel – work in progress – shows two vast pollarded willows at Baston Fen, in a blaze of golden light, each leaf fringed with its own halo, bark fissured with dark. A charcoal drawing of the same trees is pinned to the wall opposite, their limbs sinuous as muscles. John Clare, the labouring-class poet who was schooled beneath Glinton Spire, a couple of miles from Lincoln’s studio, would have called this a “dotterel” tree, and compared it with an “ancient pulpit” , from which some black-coped rook might proclaim its own deep and ragged gospel. The trees stand in silent dialogue with the finished works that surround them on all sides, covering every inch of wall-space, and piled ten canvasses deep all around the room. There are abstracts evoking natural forms, flower details in fleshy richness, a green orchid from a bee’s-eye view, and woodland scenes suffused with ethereal light. A heron takes flight, transformed into a bird-shaped blaze of sun, and a crow stands sentinel on his own pulpit of poppies and gossamer, a sunlight glow issuing from his mouth, the heat of his body made visible to the naked eye.
It is the woodland scenes which are the first to draw my enchanted gaze. A recurring theme is a fascination with impenetrability and the temptation to trespass: a preoccupation summed up in the title of an early painting, No Way Through say the sun-bleached leafless bones before the green condensed morass. The Badger’s Trees (2008) is an invitation to trespass through the dark shades of an unwalked autumnal beechwood. The boles are like columns, and the more distant trees are dazzled into soft-focus by a brooding sun. It is like looking down the nave of a forbidden cathedral, standing perhaps in a puddle of light from the clerestory, and the eye is drawn irresistibly towards the great natural rose-window beyond the cool, dark interior of the choir. The composition is not unlike Graham Sutherland’s Entrance to a Lane: it is a painting that any walker will instinctively understand, for the invitation is extended equally by the shadows, and by the promise of what may lie beyond the rise. Entrance to Lawn Wood (2010) makes a similar invitation, with its gradation of warm to cool shades as the eye is drawn towards the centre of the canvas. Yet here, the inclination to trespass between the tree-trunks is tempered by an inkling that it would be the height of clodhopping human clumsiness to do so, for the withered and beautiful tendrils of clematis would have to be torn away in order to gain access. Once again, the painting would serve as a perfect illustration to a poem by John Clare: 'The Nightingale’s Nest', in which the poet invites an unseen companion to penetrate the wood:
Just where that old man’s beard all wildly trails
Rude arbours o’er the road and stops the way,
And where that child its bluebell flowers hath got
Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails.
There have I hunted like a very boy
Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorns
To find her nest and see her feed her young.
The temptation to enter is in tension with a reverence which bids us leave the tendrils as they are, lest in our heedlessness we trample something precious underfoot.
Two other paintings, Celtic Glow (2007) and Celtic Light (2007), preserve those moments which any walker knows, just after one has penetrated a wood, and the iris is still adjusting itself to the dappled light and shade. Paul Nash coined the phrase genius loci, or “spirit of place” in his own attempt to explain the effect on the imagination of these moments of splendour experienced in familiar rural places . Often, such experiences are tantalizingly fleeting. Celtic Light simulates the effect of a momentary bedazzlement which trembles on the border of mystical experience: the saplings wear colour fringes, and the instinct is to look away before the retina is seared. In Celtic Glow, we stand in a darker portion of the wood, looking out towards a sunlit glade. Creepers on a bole are like the exposed veins of a limb, and the whole scene seems to breathe with light: the glade becomes a point of intersection between this world and some other. Yet the eye is drawn to the right, beyond the glade and its “heart of light”, where the wood bends back away into darkness. Perhaps it is an invitation to press further on towards other glimpses of the sublime, or perhaps it is in order to experience something more chthonic – a woodland underworld. Eliot, after the fleeting mystical experience by the empty pool, is drawn from light to darkness: “Descend lower, descend only / Into the world of perpetual solitude…”
A softer light suffuses paintings such as Celtic Glade and Woodland Interior (2008): perhaps it is moonlight, for there are suggestions of stars gleaming through the depths of the wood. Here too, there are further visionary moments: a coppiced sapling sends out a wreath of backlit leaves, which become lozenges of light, fleeting suggestions of the magical. Mature trees loom, blurred and dark in a distant haze of green and gold which diffuses into the bluer tones of the sleeping woodland floor. It is significant that Lincoln chooses to describe such woodscapes as “Celtic”, for the moonlit glade is a still more fitting scene for some fleeting encounter with another world, whether the protagonist is about to encounter the red-eared hounds of Annwn, or like Clare, is on the trail of a nightjar’s “jarring noise” .
In some of Lincoln’s tree paintings, the vision of spirit seems to centre on the tree itself. Celtic Tree (2007) is another canvas with warm margins and a cool centre which draws the eye inward. It might represent a real tree with ivy leaves growing up a bole – but I am reminded of the strange visual effects a child may achieve when it rubs too hard at closed eyes, and the darkness unfurls into vivid, green, swirling ferns. Trees and ferns and ivy are innate to our perception, even with our eyes closed and our fists in our sockets. In Beneath the Ivied Tree (2008), the tree becomes a personification of the waning year. The sun’s faded warmth is retained in the colour of the fallen beech leaves, but in the woodland beyond, all heat has leached away, and the scene might be constructed of ice crystals. The ivy and the algal bloom about the roots are the last bastion of the green, which leaches outwards through the ivy’s tendrils, awaiting the warmth of spring, when the rising sap will spur the green to invade the wood once more. We see not only the tree’s bole and branches, but also its roots and we look into the earth to watch the leaves becoming humus in a natural underworld.
The Singing Tree (2008) echoes Clare’s invitation: “Up this green woodland ride let’s softly rove” . At the margin of a wood, a great tree breaks the winter sunlight into beams and droplets. The tree itself is leafless, striated with light, and erect as a monolith. To the left of the composition, the branches of the tree become indistinguishable from the dormant woodbines and clematis which reach out to unite it with the wood, reminding us of the tendency for unmanaged ground to revert to woodland – an onward march of the trees. Many such trees can be seen in the region where John Lincoln paints: gaunt outliers to the woods standing beside drainage ditches, overhanging a green swathe of grass on the edge of a field. They are a feature of a landscape which has been reclaimed from fenland, but isolated pockets of true fen have survived, and are another rich source of inspiration for the painter. A series of paintings from Thurlby and Baston Fen (2007-2010) explores this wilder landscape, and the distinction between the naturalistic and abstract is increasingly blurred. A Fallen Willow continues to grow after the trunk has splintered, and a Cut Willow becomes a sculptural, poised form like a horned animal. The flatness of the fenland landscape also enables trees to become “the one upright among all horizontals” , and at times, it becomes a stand-in for the sun itself (Sun Tree in the Fens, 2004).
Broken Willow (2010) is a tree viewed in a very different light, both literally and metaphorically. The cool tones of the surroundings contrast with the fleshiness of the wood, which is like a carcass, slaughtered and flayed, gnarled and raw as a Francis Bacon crucifixion. Yet again, there is the invitation to penetrate the darkness, this time through the hole in the bottom of the tree: a yawning chthonic orifice. Equally gnarled and leafless, but utterly different in tone, the thorn tree in While Dreaming in Blue Trees (2009) is impenetrable, orbed by the moon. Clutching, exposed roots implode into blue roses, the light orb of the moon shadowed by a lesser orb of darkness at the edge of a wood. The viewer instinctively listens for a hooting owl, and the tree, gaunt against its lunar halo, might be a Glastonbury thorn. The downward-pointing exposed roots are bleached as leg-bones, the feet stepping out into the flattened fenland field. Even a woodland has its nightmare visions: The Screaming Tree (2009) confronts us with the inevitable truth that birth, generation and growth are dependent upon death and decay. Yet in dying, the tree takes on new, organic forms, and becomes suggestive of life and motion. It becomes a woodland gargoyle with empty eye sockets, cryptogams bristling from its brows, and its own dead leaves spilling through the soil like one last, withered utterance. To the right, deep underground, a root clenches like a claw. The knotted wood of a Broken Tree (2009), with its icy lacework of white branches against a vivid purple background, becomes a crown of thorns, verdant beneath, blasted above. Graham Sutherland might have called this “a stand-in for a crucified head” , but here, the crown of thorns might be more of a safe-haven in the eyes of a bird seeking shelter.
A number of Lincoln’s paintings of impenetrable plants do, indeed, seem to be painted through the eyes of a bird. The most striking is Hedge Interior (2010), another painting which entices our fascination with looking beyond the light into the darker places. It might be the view of a bird about to penetrate to its nest, or of a hoverfly about to negotiate the ivy flowers. The hedge – an ancient one, as the variety of leaf-forms attests - fades endlessly into a golden distance, and our perspective alone can determine whether we interpret the hedge as barrier or as haven. A suitable inhabitant of the hedge might be the winter Wren: King of the Birds (2005). Clare’s “mossy rails” are there again, in the form of the fence above which the wren is perched, and the fence post itself is so festooned with ivy and brambles that it has become a tree in its own right. The composition is like a portrait – of a thorned Christ, perhaps, the wren perched upon his brow – but once again, there is a dark interior into which the wren may dart at any moment, particularly if it has the misfortune to be singled out for a folkloric hunting.
There are birds, but only rarely are there human figures in Lincoln’s paintings, and we are invited into a sympathy with the birds which never descends into anthropomorphism. Most striking of all are Lincoln’s crows. Deepings Crow Song (2005) – already mentioned above – depicts a young bird, the upper and lower bills still joined by flaps of skin. The natural history writer Roger Deakin, who praised the voices of rooks as “the roughest of folk song”, would surely have loved this painting, in which the bird itself becomes a nature spirit, warmth issuing from its mouth and seemingly filling the whole composition. Other Lincoln crows are built up in three dimensions out of pine needles and cone-scales (Fen Crow 1, 2007) or grass and papier-mâché (Fen Crow 2, 2007), and rooks stand sentinel, sunlit-red invaders outside a World War II pill-box in The Gathering of Crows (2006). Whether the exotic birds of the Self-immolation of Quetzalcoatl (2004) or the phoenix-like heron of Fen Spirit (2006), birds are either vessels of light, or looming clouds of corvid darkness (Fen Shadow, 2006). One bird, the whitened corvid of Vision in Hilly Wood (1992), is a stand-in for the spirit of John Clare himself, who, rejected by his earthly loves, has “snatched the sun’s eternal ray” through his artistic vision . It is spirituality informed by natural observation: crows really do sometimes appear to be white birds when the sun slants across their plumage.
The spirituality of Lincoln’s woodland and fenland scenes also finds meticulous expression in his pictures of much smaller things. Paintings such as Leaves and Grasses (2010) also speak of spirit manifest in nature, and here the “heart of light” is seen as if through a macro lens, or through the eye of a grasshopper. The canvas seems once more to invoke Clare:
Where moss did into cushions spring
Forming a seat of velvet hue,
A small unnoticed trifling thing
To all but heaven’s hailing dew.
A portion of Lincoln’s studio is dominated by paintings which, like Clare, see the sublime in smaller things. A series of sensual, magnified flowers depict them as the reproductive organs they really are: flower petals are like labial folds; a poppy pod is womb-like, and the petals inside it might be a folded foetus; and flowers viewed in cross section, in all their vibrant colour, are also reminiscent of the uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes (Dark Seed, 2002). Other paintings suggest both the microscopic and the astronomical in one image: The Sun in a Seed (2007) might be an image of cell division or of the swelling of some distant Red Giant, but in any case, it makes explicit the relationship between light and life – a relationship which is scientific fact as much as it is spiritual metaphor. In Seed Division (2007) and Seed Mutation (2008), the canvas erupts in three dimensions, and nuclei and mitochondria might equally be suns or moons. A part of the mechanism of the seed or cell erupts from the painting like a pulsing, exposed trachea. Other, unrelated paintings reveal similar preoccupations with light, growth and spirit: Woodland Wraith (2009) might be a hibernating dryad, an infolded will o’ th’ wisp waiting for the dark, or the half-metamorphosed body of a moth inside its chrysalis, deep in the bark. Stylistically, these paintings may seem to be polar opposites from Lincoln’s woodland scenes, but in fact, the central preoccupations are the same: the intensity of the observation, the literal and metaphorical association of light and life, the fascination with the imaginative persistence of the sense of spirit and symbol in a post-Darwinian world.
It is fitting that John Lincoln should have drawn so much of his inspiration from a landscape beloved of that other intense observer, Clare, who grew up two centuries ago in nearby Helpston. Clare lived to see his own familiar landscape torn to pieces by the Enclosure Acts: trees were cut down, streams diverted, and a rotational field system which had changed little since the Middle Ages was superimposed with a grid of hedges. Enclosure turned Clare into an inveterate trespasser, to whom a signpost saying “No Road Here” was too tantalising to be ignored. Clare specialised in “bird nesting”: penetrating the seemingly impenetrable coppices and spinneys so that he could observe the nesting habits of “pettichaps” and nightingales. Sun Strokes the Brambles in Hilly Wood (1995) is an early painting which captures Clare’s vision on one of these jaunts: a tangle of impenetrable bramble leaves imprison the spectrum of sunlight, like natural prisms. Clare Triptych (1993) shows, to left and right, two pre-Enclosure trees, an oak and a willow, and in the centre, one of the bridges Clare must often have traversed on foot, dominated by teasels in a wild and watery foreground. The visionary Blue Anemonie (2010) depicts a three-dimensional underworld of Clare’s imagining, inspired by the folkloric belief that the pasque flower grows wherever blood was once spilt on the battlefield. Like some of Lincoln’s trees, the pasque-flower is a stand-in for the sun, making explicit once more the connection between sun, blood and the growth of plants: an expression of the natural cycle which would have been instinctively understood by John Clare, the agricultural labourer. The buried soldier who gives rise to the flower might equally be Clare himself in his dreaming state, recalling a whole tradition of Romantic painting, from Samuel Palmer through to the modern Ruralist school , in which the poet is depicted in a nurturing and enwombing landscape .
Our contemporary fenland landscape, cowering under the iron fist of modern mechanised agriculture, is twice removed from Clare’s pre-Enclosure world, and the imaginative manifestations of spirit that Lincoln depicts are fleeting indeed for most of us in a post-industrial age. Many of Lincoln’s paintings are inspired by “wildlife sites”: conservation areas which have been rescued from the onslaught of intensive agriculture. Yet it is significant that these paintings probe the depths of our spirits: we still respond to these moments of illumination, and recognise them for what they are, no matter how secularised and urbanised our outlook. Lincoln invites us, as Clare did before him, between the mossy rails, into the impenetrable: the wood, the hedge, where there is no road. Tragically, in our modern age, some of us never find ourselves quite there, in bodily form, and we must fly there as birds, on the white wings of our imagination. Only there, it seems, can our spirits find haven, “Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves.”
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=P...
Links to our books on Goodreads:
A Burnished Echo
The Fen-Gazer
The Green Pulse
Avian Dreams
A Symphony of Leaves
Myriad Circles
A Secret Garden
Here is the essay I wrote as a preface to another book of John Lincoln's paintings, at the beginning of our association. It recounts a visit to his studio in the Lincolnshire Fens:
“Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves” :
nature and spirit in the art of John Lincoln
Giles Watson
To walk into John Lincoln’s studio is to pass, in a heightened state of awareness, by the borders of an ancient wood on the edge of undrained fen, as a low sun slants across the landscape and turns the leaves translucent. There is a warmth and a vibrancy of colour which heighten this sense of epiphany, and I am reminded irresistibly of the moment beside the empty pool in T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, when the prosaic atmosphere turns poetic, and spirits are seen to be “Moving without pressure… through the vibrant air… And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight… The surface glittered out of the heart of light.”
A painting on the easel – work in progress – shows two vast pollarded willows at Baston Fen, in a blaze of golden light, each leaf fringed with its own halo, bark fissured with dark. A charcoal drawing of the same trees is pinned to the wall opposite, their limbs sinuous as muscles. John Clare, the labouring-class poet who was schooled beneath Glinton Spire, a couple of miles from Lincoln’s studio, would have called this a “dotterel” tree, and compared it with an “ancient pulpit” , from which some black-coped rook might proclaim its own deep and ragged gospel. The trees stand in silent dialogue with the finished works that surround them on all sides, covering every inch of wall-space, and piled ten canvasses deep all around the room. There are abstracts evoking natural forms, flower details in fleshy richness, a green orchid from a bee’s-eye view, and woodland scenes suffused with ethereal light. A heron takes flight, transformed into a bird-shaped blaze of sun, and a crow stands sentinel on his own pulpit of poppies and gossamer, a sunlight glow issuing from his mouth, the heat of his body made visible to the naked eye.
It is the woodland scenes which are the first to draw my enchanted gaze. A recurring theme is a fascination with impenetrability and the temptation to trespass: a preoccupation summed up in the title of an early painting, No Way Through say the sun-bleached leafless bones before the green condensed morass. The Badger’s Trees (2008) is an invitation to trespass through the dark shades of an unwalked autumnal beechwood. The boles are like columns, and the more distant trees are dazzled into soft-focus by a brooding sun. It is like looking down the nave of a forbidden cathedral, standing perhaps in a puddle of light from the clerestory, and the eye is drawn irresistibly towards the great natural rose-window beyond the cool, dark interior of the choir. The composition is not unlike Graham Sutherland’s Entrance to a Lane: it is a painting that any walker will instinctively understand, for the invitation is extended equally by the shadows, and by the promise of what may lie beyond the rise. Entrance to Lawn Wood (2010) makes a similar invitation, with its gradation of warm to cool shades as the eye is drawn towards the centre of the canvas. Yet here, the inclination to trespass between the tree-trunks is tempered by an inkling that it would be the height of clodhopping human clumsiness to do so, for the withered and beautiful tendrils of clematis would have to be torn away in order to gain access. Once again, the painting would serve as a perfect illustration to a poem by John Clare: 'The Nightingale’s Nest', in which the poet invites an unseen companion to penetrate the wood:
Just where that old man’s beard all wildly trails
Rude arbours o’er the road and stops the way,
And where that child its bluebell flowers hath got
Laughing and creeping through the mossy rails.
There have I hunted like a very boy
Creeping on hands and knees through matted thorns
To find her nest and see her feed her young.
The temptation to enter is in tension with a reverence which bids us leave the tendrils as they are, lest in our heedlessness we trample something precious underfoot.
Two other paintings, Celtic Glow (2007) and Celtic Light (2007), preserve those moments which any walker knows, just after one has penetrated a wood, and the iris is still adjusting itself to the dappled light and shade. Paul Nash coined the phrase genius loci, or “spirit of place” in his own attempt to explain the effect on the imagination of these moments of splendour experienced in familiar rural places . Often, such experiences are tantalizingly fleeting. Celtic Light simulates the effect of a momentary bedazzlement which trembles on the border of mystical experience: the saplings wear colour fringes, and the instinct is to look away before the retina is seared. In Celtic Glow, we stand in a darker portion of the wood, looking out towards a sunlit glade. Creepers on a bole are like the exposed veins of a limb, and the whole scene seems to breathe with light: the glade becomes a point of intersection between this world and some other. Yet the eye is drawn to the right, beyond the glade and its “heart of light”, where the wood bends back away into darkness. Perhaps it is an invitation to press further on towards other glimpses of the sublime, or perhaps it is in order to experience something more chthonic – a woodland underworld. Eliot, after the fleeting mystical experience by the empty pool, is drawn from light to darkness: “Descend lower, descend only / Into the world of perpetual solitude…”
A softer light suffuses paintings such as Celtic Glade and Woodland Interior (2008): perhaps it is moonlight, for there are suggestions of stars gleaming through the depths of the wood. Here too, there are further visionary moments: a coppiced sapling sends out a wreath of backlit leaves, which become lozenges of light, fleeting suggestions of the magical. Mature trees loom, blurred and dark in a distant haze of green and gold which diffuses into the bluer tones of the sleeping woodland floor. It is significant that Lincoln chooses to describe such woodscapes as “Celtic”, for the moonlit glade is a still more fitting scene for some fleeting encounter with another world, whether the protagonist is about to encounter the red-eared hounds of Annwn, or like Clare, is on the trail of a nightjar’s “jarring noise” .
In some of Lincoln’s tree paintings, the vision of spirit seems to centre on the tree itself. Celtic Tree (2007) is another canvas with warm margins and a cool centre which draws the eye inward. It might represent a real tree with ivy leaves growing up a bole – but I am reminded of the strange visual effects a child may achieve when it rubs too hard at closed eyes, and the darkness unfurls into vivid, green, swirling ferns. Trees and ferns and ivy are innate to our perception, even with our eyes closed and our fists in our sockets. In Beneath the Ivied Tree (2008), the tree becomes a personification of the waning year. The sun’s faded warmth is retained in the colour of the fallen beech leaves, but in the woodland beyond, all heat has leached away, and the scene might be constructed of ice crystals. The ivy and the algal bloom about the roots are the last bastion of the green, which leaches outwards through the ivy’s tendrils, awaiting the warmth of spring, when the rising sap will spur the green to invade the wood once more. We see not only the tree’s bole and branches, but also its roots and we look into the earth to watch the leaves becoming humus in a natural underworld.
The Singing Tree (2008) echoes Clare’s invitation: “Up this green woodland ride let’s softly rove” . At the margin of a wood, a great tree breaks the winter sunlight into beams and droplets. The tree itself is leafless, striated with light, and erect as a monolith. To the left of the composition, the branches of the tree become indistinguishable from the dormant woodbines and clematis which reach out to unite it with the wood, reminding us of the tendency for unmanaged ground to revert to woodland – an onward march of the trees. Many such trees can be seen in the region where John Lincoln paints: gaunt outliers to the woods standing beside drainage ditches, overhanging a green swathe of grass on the edge of a field. They are a feature of a landscape which has been reclaimed from fenland, but isolated pockets of true fen have survived, and are another rich source of inspiration for the painter. A series of paintings from Thurlby and Baston Fen (2007-2010) explores this wilder landscape, and the distinction between the naturalistic and abstract is increasingly blurred. A Fallen Willow continues to grow after the trunk has splintered, and a Cut Willow becomes a sculptural, poised form like a horned animal. The flatness of the fenland landscape also enables trees to become “the one upright among all horizontals” , and at times, it becomes a stand-in for the sun itself (Sun Tree in the Fens, 2004).
Broken Willow (2010) is a tree viewed in a very different light, both literally and metaphorically. The cool tones of the surroundings contrast with the fleshiness of the wood, which is like a carcass, slaughtered and flayed, gnarled and raw as a Francis Bacon crucifixion. Yet again, there is the invitation to penetrate the darkness, this time through the hole in the bottom of the tree: a yawning chthonic orifice. Equally gnarled and leafless, but utterly different in tone, the thorn tree in While Dreaming in Blue Trees (2009) is impenetrable, orbed by the moon. Clutching, exposed roots implode into blue roses, the light orb of the moon shadowed by a lesser orb of darkness at the edge of a wood. The viewer instinctively listens for a hooting owl, and the tree, gaunt against its lunar halo, might be a Glastonbury thorn. The downward-pointing exposed roots are bleached as leg-bones, the feet stepping out into the flattened fenland field. Even a woodland has its nightmare visions: The Screaming Tree (2009) confronts us with the inevitable truth that birth, generation and growth are dependent upon death and decay. Yet in dying, the tree takes on new, organic forms, and becomes suggestive of life and motion. It becomes a woodland gargoyle with empty eye sockets, cryptogams bristling from its brows, and its own dead leaves spilling through the soil like one last, withered utterance. To the right, deep underground, a root clenches like a claw. The knotted wood of a Broken Tree (2009), with its icy lacework of white branches against a vivid purple background, becomes a crown of thorns, verdant beneath, blasted above. Graham Sutherland might have called this “a stand-in for a crucified head” , but here, the crown of thorns might be more of a safe-haven in the eyes of a bird seeking shelter.
A number of Lincoln’s paintings of impenetrable plants do, indeed, seem to be painted through the eyes of a bird. The most striking is Hedge Interior (2010), another painting which entices our fascination with looking beyond the light into the darker places. It might be the view of a bird about to penetrate to its nest, or of a hoverfly about to negotiate the ivy flowers. The hedge – an ancient one, as the variety of leaf-forms attests - fades endlessly into a golden distance, and our perspective alone can determine whether we interpret the hedge as barrier or as haven. A suitable inhabitant of the hedge might be the winter Wren: King of the Birds (2005). Clare’s “mossy rails” are there again, in the form of the fence above which the wren is perched, and the fence post itself is so festooned with ivy and brambles that it has become a tree in its own right. The composition is like a portrait – of a thorned Christ, perhaps, the wren perched upon his brow – but once again, there is a dark interior into which the wren may dart at any moment, particularly if it has the misfortune to be singled out for a folkloric hunting.
There are birds, but only rarely are there human figures in Lincoln’s paintings, and we are invited into a sympathy with the birds which never descends into anthropomorphism. Most striking of all are Lincoln’s crows. Deepings Crow Song (2005) – already mentioned above – depicts a young bird, the upper and lower bills still joined by flaps of skin. The natural history writer Roger Deakin, who praised the voices of rooks as “the roughest of folk song”, would surely have loved this painting, in which the bird itself becomes a nature spirit, warmth issuing from its mouth and seemingly filling the whole composition. Other Lincoln crows are built up in three dimensions out of pine needles and cone-scales (Fen Crow 1, 2007) or grass and papier-mâché (Fen Crow 2, 2007), and rooks stand sentinel, sunlit-red invaders outside a World War II pill-box in The Gathering of Crows (2006). Whether the exotic birds of the Self-immolation of Quetzalcoatl (2004) or the phoenix-like heron of Fen Spirit (2006), birds are either vessels of light, or looming clouds of corvid darkness (Fen Shadow, 2006). One bird, the whitened corvid of Vision in Hilly Wood (1992), is a stand-in for the spirit of John Clare himself, who, rejected by his earthly loves, has “snatched the sun’s eternal ray” through his artistic vision . It is spirituality informed by natural observation: crows really do sometimes appear to be white birds when the sun slants across their plumage.
The spirituality of Lincoln’s woodland and fenland scenes also finds meticulous expression in his pictures of much smaller things. Paintings such as Leaves and Grasses (2010) also speak of spirit manifest in nature, and here the “heart of light” is seen as if through a macro lens, or through the eye of a grasshopper. The canvas seems once more to invoke Clare:
Where moss did into cushions spring
Forming a seat of velvet hue,
A small unnoticed trifling thing
To all but heaven’s hailing dew.
A portion of Lincoln’s studio is dominated by paintings which, like Clare, see the sublime in smaller things. A series of sensual, magnified flowers depict them as the reproductive organs they really are: flower petals are like labial folds; a poppy pod is womb-like, and the petals inside it might be a folded foetus; and flowers viewed in cross section, in all their vibrant colour, are also reminiscent of the uterus, ovaries and fallopian tubes (Dark Seed, 2002). Other paintings suggest both the microscopic and the astronomical in one image: The Sun in a Seed (2007) might be an image of cell division or of the swelling of some distant Red Giant, but in any case, it makes explicit the relationship between light and life – a relationship which is scientific fact as much as it is spiritual metaphor. In Seed Division (2007) and Seed Mutation (2008), the canvas erupts in three dimensions, and nuclei and mitochondria might equally be suns or moons. A part of the mechanism of the seed or cell erupts from the painting like a pulsing, exposed trachea. Other, unrelated paintings reveal similar preoccupations with light, growth and spirit: Woodland Wraith (2009) might be a hibernating dryad, an infolded will o’ th’ wisp waiting for the dark, or the half-metamorphosed body of a moth inside its chrysalis, deep in the bark. Stylistically, these paintings may seem to be polar opposites from Lincoln’s woodland scenes, but in fact, the central preoccupations are the same: the intensity of the observation, the literal and metaphorical association of light and life, the fascination with the imaginative persistence of the sense of spirit and symbol in a post-Darwinian world.
It is fitting that John Lincoln should have drawn so much of his inspiration from a landscape beloved of that other intense observer, Clare, who grew up two centuries ago in nearby Helpston. Clare lived to see his own familiar landscape torn to pieces by the Enclosure Acts: trees were cut down, streams diverted, and a rotational field system which had changed little since the Middle Ages was superimposed with a grid of hedges. Enclosure turned Clare into an inveterate trespasser, to whom a signpost saying “No Road Here” was too tantalising to be ignored. Clare specialised in “bird nesting”: penetrating the seemingly impenetrable coppices and spinneys so that he could observe the nesting habits of “pettichaps” and nightingales. Sun Strokes the Brambles in Hilly Wood (1995) is an early painting which captures Clare’s vision on one of these jaunts: a tangle of impenetrable bramble leaves imprison the spectrum of sunlight, like natural prisms. Clare Triptych (1993) shows, to left and right, two pre-Enclosure trees, an oak and a willow, and in the centre, one of the bridges Clare must often have traversed on foot, dominated by teasels in a wild and watery foreground. The visionary Blue Anemonie (2010) depicts a three-dimensional underworld of Clare’s imagining, inspired by the folkloric belief that the pasque flower grows wherever blood was once spilt on the battlefield. Like some of Lincoln’s trees, the pasque-flower is a stand-in for the sun, making explicit once more the connection between sun, blood and the growth of plants: an expression of the natural cycle which would have been instinctively understood by John Clare, the agricultural labourer. The buried soldier who gives rise to the flower might equally be Clare himself in his dreaming state, recalling a whole tradition of Romantic painting, from Samuel Palmer through to the modern Ruralist school , in which the poet is depicted in a nurturing and enwombing landscape .
Our contemporary fenland landscape, cowering under the iron fist of modern mechanised agriculture, is twice removed from Clare’s pre-Enclosure world, and the imaginative manifestations of spirit that Lincoln depicts are fleeting indeed for most of us in a post-industrial age. Many of Lincoln’s paintings are inspired by “wildlife sites”: conservation areas which have been rescued from the onslaught of intensive agriculture. Yet it is significant that these paintings probe the depths of our spirits: we still respond to these moments of illumination, and recognise them for what they are, no matter how secularised and urbanised our outlook. Lincoln invites us, as Clare did before him, between the mossy rails, into the impenetrable: the wood, the hedge, where there is no road. Tragically, in our modern age, some of us never find ourselves quite there, in bodily form, and we must fly there as birds, on the white wings of our imagination. Only there, it seems, can our spirits find haven, “Lost in a wilderness of listening leaves.”
