A Section Of Time and Light

I wanted to include this passage in an MA essay but decided it was too "diary" like...

April 2010

It’s a beautiful spring day in the South of England, typically for April the sun comes and goes, warmth barely touches the earth before grey cloud cover blots it out, and its quiet. Quieter than normal, in fact. I live near Gatwick Airport and not a single plane has taken to the skies today. In fact air travel over the whole of Northern Europe has ceased. People are fussing and complaining and being stranded at crowded airports or being turfed out of hotels, if they could find one. What could’ve happened to cause our communication systems to collapse so spectacularly and leave our skies so eerily peaceful? Terrorists? Global conflict? Fuel reserves finally dried up? No.

Nature has proved herself to be master over man once again. The event this time is a biggie, 100s of miles away from my tranquil back garden a volcano has heaved tons of ash into the air. Its drifted from Iceland in the winds and nobody can tell where it is going next, and aircraft are at risk from the particles being sucked into the engines causing them to fail and the planes to crash.

I’m sitting here smiling. Whenever nature does something like this it always makes me smile. Easy to smile when no life threatening events come to your island, easy to smile when people who can afford to take air journeys are slightly inconvenienced: but even when my village in Kent was cut of by snowdrifts in the early 80’s and no food could get through to the supermarket, and then later in the 80’s the violent winds brought down trees and roofs and cut us off once again, I still smiled.

This is why I revere nature in my work, and use it to power my colours and images without trying to control it and guide it. I rely on acts of chance and changes of light that are unpredictable even though the role of an artist is usually that of a controller of environment and the smallest details are thoroughly designed and conceived. I am neither a scientist nor a designer, I am an observer, and my role is to simply encourage others to observe as well, to look at what they take advantage of every day, lest they forget how easy their life is and who or what is actually in control.