I usually buy books for the allure of their colour and surface and shape and size, sometimes its the title. Here it was the title. But it wasn’t, as I...
I usually buy books for the allure of their colour and surface and shape and size, sometimes its the title. Here it was the title. But it wasn’t, as I first hoped, a transcript of the Dennis Potter play but something else, Rosemary somebody. In the end this painting was actually two paintings, two books put together. Slightly different in size. I worked with the given printed motif of thistles.
I remember seeing Dennis Potter’s Blue Remembered Hills on telly when I was around ten years old, and being blown away. It haunted me for years. I realised the adults knew what we are up to, in the woods, and the long grass, and down by the river. I thought “the game’s up.”
I was stung by nettles recently retrieving a football for Joseph. Such an old feeling that I had forgotten. Ten minutes of torture. Here’s my old friend in amongst the thistles and nettles and dandelions and sticky wullie…we were skin and bone, me and you, and blonde. You cut a figure like The little prince or maybe Oor Wullie. When I met you recently you were more like an older Art Garfunkel, your wonderful curls all but gone but your eyes were the same: piss-holes in the snow.
An influence over time - by osmosis - has been a book I’ve bought many times over and re-cycled a few times now - Island Years by Frank Fraser Darling. Life with his family in the Treshnish and Summer Isles.
Something of that book has crept in, and not just The Dutchmans Cap.