A reply to Sarah

My friend Sarah left a comment at my last post about the painting The Quickening (above), currently in progress. My response needed a little more space than a comment box allowed for, so I’ve replied here, instead.

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Sarah. ‘I know in pre-Christian traditions that the darkest period of the year was traditionally believed as a time that the veil between this world and the ‘otherworld’ was thinner and so beings, like the Mari, could readily pass through to this one. In “The Mare’s Tale” your Mari was part horse/part human and rooted in the mumming tradition and all that means to your personal history. However, the Mari of “Dark Movements” appears to be wholly a glorious beast of the “otherworld”, with no such human ties. The horse was associated with ‘power, fertility and prowess on the battlefield’ in Celtic Britain. I am very interested to see this new Mari emerging in your work, which, in my opinion, embodies the qualities it was once worshipped for and seems to be about life, not death.’

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Clive. ‘Sarah, horses have always been significant in my life and in my painting, and I see that this current incarnation of a flaming Mari Lwyd, its insides burgeoning with a foliate-ness refusing to be contained within the cage of its ribs and streaming out into the surrounding darkness, is carrying what I began fifteen years ago in The Mare’s Tale, to a conclusion I could never have imagined back then.

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The beginnings. My grandfather kept horses, and I recall my mother speaking with evident pride of his horsemanship. There were stories of him travelling as a young man to the United States, honing his riding skills by learning from from native Americans and even joining the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, though with benefit of hindsight these sound of the tall variety to me.

While her love of horses shone from her, I never saw my mother riding one, and there were uncomfortable silences when I pressed for explanations. She once admitted of an accident and a horse-kick to the spine that made her lose her nerve, but further details were not forthcoming. Notwithstanding that, she encouraged me and my sister to ride, and later, when I was a young man, I noticed the pride in her eyes whenever she watched me on horseback.’

‘I was always happier riding bareback, and my mum used to laugh and say that was the influence of my grandfather’s native American habits, though the reality is that I have almost no memories of him, or of him teaching me to ride. (I remember better his German shepherd, named Turk, retired from duty as a patrol dog with the airforce. Turk was set to look after me when as a baby I was put to sleep on a blanket laid out in my grandfather’s orchard. I remember the dog’s head looking down at me, and the weight of his paw on my back to deter me from crawling away from the blanket.)

As a boy I had romantic notions of my mother as a horsewoman, probably born of my early exposure to, and liking for the paintings of George Stubbs. Much later, in the first stage-production I designed and directed, I devised an appearance for a fairy in which she entered riding side-saddle on a unicorn. It was intended as a private message to my mother on the opening night, to show her how much I valued what she’d encouraged in me by way of an appreciation for ‘the horse’.

Shorty afterwards I began a painting for her, as a gift. She died before it was done, and so I never completed it, though I have it still, this elaborately attired equestrienne fairy painted in her likeness, sitting side-saddle on a rearing unicorn, and still serving the purpose for which it was intended, that of being a fire-screen. Behind the figure ribbons stream, carrying a text… now almost faded away… of the lines the character spoke as she appeared on the stage:

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“We are the stars in the sky, and we only come down to visit those who have been very, very good.”

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I have a feeling she’d rather like the Mari Lwyd emerging here.

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