Wild and Silent Places in Art and Life

Iceland

As I'm exploring potential wild, remote locations for art workshops, I'm learning what sort of landscape I most resonate with. According to the huge interest I've received for these potential workshops though, the idea of travel to out-of-the-way places has struck a chord with many others also. What is it about being in wild and relatively silent locations ( in a world where wild and silent places are becoming increasingly fewer) that draws us in?

I'm rereading Sara Maitland's A Book of Silence. After challenging herself to spend 40 days alone and in silence in a remote cabin on the Isle of Skye, Maitland, described the experience and went on to explore many levels and kinds of silence.

"I began to realise", Maitland wrote "that it was not peace and contentment that I craved, but that awed response to certain phenomena of the 'natural' world in which words, and even normal emotional reactions fail". She goes on to say, "I discovered in myself a longing for the sublime, for an environment that, rather than soothing me, offered some raw, challenging demands in exchange for grandeur and ineffability." Like Maitland, I'm also searching for these sorts of places.

Places of deep silence share a kinship with art, from painting to writing to music. I wrote about this in an earlier blog post you can read here.

Shortlisted for the Griffin Prize in Poetry in 2014, Canadian Sue Goyette wrote about the importance of silence in writing. "When it comes to writing, she says “it’s a masterful thing to not spell everything out” for the reader. She explains that when something is too specific it becomes inhospitable. The job of a writer is to take something ordinary and bring it into a state of grace. Adding silence to your writing does just this because the space you leave creates something bigger. A story without silence has no space or depth, nowhere for the reader to enter and create meaning".

There is a post on the website All About Jazz, on the role of silence in music. As well there is another on Classic FM blog about the importance of silence in classical music, where the author discusses Mahler's Symphony No. 9, among others. "The final passage of the final movement, Mahler's farewell to the world (he was diagnosed with terminal heart disease as he composed it), also contains some of the most poignant silence imaginable. The final notes are marked 'esterbend' (dying away), so it's almost impossible to tell when the silence actually begins but it's loaded with such incredible thematic weight that it becomes weirdly deafening. You strain so hard to hear something that, ultimately, you just can't."

While silence is essential in writing and music, it doesn't seem important in much contemporary visual art, where paintings often shout. To achieve silence in painting, the keyword is restraint: limiting the number of shapes, the amount of texture and number of lines, allowing some areas of colour to be strong and others grey or neutral. What is it that wants to sing in a painting?

There is a close relationship between the awe experienced in wild and silent landscapes and the expression of that in abstract paintings. The silence and the pace of nature help us slow down, to find a quiet inner space. And it's from that quiet inner space that creativity can happen and silence can be expressed. These are places my soul wants to go.

Liminal Time

The word liminal comes from the Latin, limen meaning threshold. an in-between place, a place of transition, a time of waiting and not knowing. Dawn and dusk are considered liminal places. Crepuscular animals, like foxes and coyotes are most active at this time of day, a time that is considered a magical time in Celtic spirituality and to Indigenous people which is perhaps the origin of their designation as tricksters. As I write this, the northern hemisphere has just passed the vernal equinox, where day and night are of equal length.We are in a liminal space between winter and spring right now, unsure if we will have one more storm or snowfall before spring finally settles in. We're also in a liminal place as we live through this pandemic with the anxiety and discomfort of not knowing. A time of great transition for the entire world, wondering what we've learned from this and what lessons we'll carry forward. Author and Fr...

Lessons that Stone Walls Teach

Dry stone wall in the Burren, Co. Clare, Ireland I've just returned from teaching a Workshop in Wild Places class in the Burren in County Clare, Ireland. Writing this post, I'm reminded of another post I wrote after visiting Inishmaan, the middle of the Aran Islands off the west coast of Ireland several years ago. Stone walls crisscrossed the island in tight webs like a fisherman's net. I wrote then that the web of stone walls made me think of the idea of putting limitations on our painting as a way of exploring more deeply and how walls give limits against the limitless. You can read that article here. As our group hiked in the Burren with our guide, Marie McGauran we learned that the walls are stronger because of the holes in them. The wind can pass through. The oldest stone walls, estimated to be 3500 years old are at Skara Brae, a Neolithic site in Orkney. Most walls were built in the 18th and 19th century, marking areas of private ownership and resultin...

Am I Too Old to Change? Embracing Life

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels I'm in the process, at last, of working on the book that came to me in a dream seven years ago. It has circled my head all these years, demanding I get at it. It's called: We're Not Done Yet: Coming to Art Later in Life . It has actually hung in the air a couple of feet behind my head, attached by a string like a helium balloon, like a cartoon cloud, waiting for me to get to it. Some of you will know of it because I posted a request on Facebook in 2019 asking for artists who have come to art later in life to reply to me if they'd like to answer a questionnaire. I received 168 responses plus earlier interviews I did before the put out the questionnaire. There was some overlap, and some didn't respond after they'd offered to. All in all, I received 128 responses. By a huge majority it was women who responded to my questionnaire. By the time we get into our 60's we bring a rich life experience to our work: m...

Janice Mason Steeves

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