The gentlest of days.




I can smell it. Autumn. It is there in the cut fields of barley, in the damp sticky earth. But the light is returning to the woods, an opposite face to the shortening days out there. Here the leaves are falling and the sky is beginning to appear piece by piece. Soon the light will spill onto the beech littered floor. I am trying to capture a sense of the light this morning, a most gentle of days . Under the cedars the light hardly penetrates, but a little way beyond in a clearing the sun bounces off the shiny rhododendrun leaves. The burn squabbles and giggles behind me as I paint and then a squirrel comes to the edge of the paper and I stand still. So does it. We stare at each other, the squirrel senses something is not quite right and bolts up the nearest tree. Fungi are emerging all over the wood, on rotting branches – delicate ruffs of bracket fungi and tiny pale stalks of some mushroom that look like baby’s fingers. All around, the woods are yawning and I can feel the slowing of its breathing. It will not sleep for a while but its getting its pyjamas on.




Acrylic and charcoal on paper 150 cm x 60 cm.