landscape | Helen Colledge

What makes some paintings into premonitions? Is there something in the human mind that can peer into a dim future and translate it into paint?

looking resolutely ahead; turning away from the void! oil on canvas, 6×8 inches

Some shadowy rather scary things have been happening of late. The blog has been neglected while I tangled with them. Before even an inkling of anything occurred I decided to paint a small self-portrait – just a quick sketch – of me turning my back on the void. There even seems to be evidence of a haircut in there, foreshadowing the fact that, feeling disturbed, I would soon reach for the scissors.

Another odd coincidence involves a picture painted while I was still at school, of myself cycling down the notorious Fleet Moss – a climb so steep that a cautious descent involved passing others who had chosen to walk down for fear of somersaulting over their handlebars. The point in the road captured in that painting was, many years later, the place where my chain snapped while struggling up the same climb, optimistically attempting to tow a trailer loaded with camping gear. Something had to give and it wasn’t going to be my legs so the metal sacrificed itself instead, throwing me instantly onto the tarmac.

Fleet Moss painting on paper, A4, either watercolour or acrylics

painting of Fleet Moss – a dreaded hill in the Yorkshire Dales – picture probably created at around age 14 or 15

Did I know, all those years ago, that that spot high in the Yorkshire Dales on a terrifyingly steep bit of road was going to feature again in my life? Who knows? Something compelled me to paint that section of rearing tarmac.

It’s just as mysterious considering what draws artists towards those motifs that they become associated with forever, in the way that Mont Saint Victoire is synonymous with Cezanne. Why do certain scenes lodge in the brain, winkling their way into the psyche and why is it so much harder to paint well without that peculiar overwhelming instinct? Maybe some painters can manage it but I always find things flow much more easily when the subject itself takes over.

Are premonitions just coincidences? Even if they are, coincidences are strange things in themselves.

Therefore, how we explain coincidences depends on how we see the world. Is everything connected, so that events create resonances like ripples across a net? Or do things merely co-occur and we give meaning to these co-occurrences based on our belief system? Lieh-tzu’s answer: It’s all in how you think.

― Liezi, Lieh-tzu: A Taoist Guide to Practical Living

A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish – but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.

Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

the rare golden light that spills onto the hills just before dusk

This evening was the first one of the year that has been warm enough for me to sit on the hill and paint without hypothermia setting in. Even so, I’ve been trying to go and paint up there in recent weeks, putting up with the numb and freezing limbs that inevitably result. There is something so tempting about the last hour or so of golden sun that lights up the hills with a bright red glow. A recent conversation with a fellow painter from far away led to the revelation that my landscapes remind her almost of another planet. She doesn’t know this area though, and the fact that it sometimes resembles Mars, particularly when the red glow begins to brighten.

Having become an expert at hiding from the public while painting (I am unable to talk and paint and am envious of those who can – it seems a bit like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time …) it may be difficult to spot the plein air painter’s kit, let alone the painter, in the immensity of the fells.

where is the plein air painter?

plein air painter's pochade box on the hill

sneaking up on the pochade box for a closer look

On the evening when these photos were taken I had been reading a book about David Bomberg and, from looking at the illustrations for the umpteenth time, had realised that there was a similarity of process between his charcoal drawings and his paintings. I decide to paint as if I was drawing just to see what would happen and this picture was the result.

the painting in progress

I’ve added the next photo because Andi asked me why there are strange bleached-looking wave forms in the foregrounds of some of my paintings. I think you can see them in the photograph – they are particularly noticeable in front of the painting kit. These are the waves of pale, wind-blasted and sculpted, bleached reedy grass that translate into the more abstract forms in some of my landscapes, like the one below. Who knows, maybe no-one else can see them but me??

plein air painting in the hills, waves of grass in foreground

waves of wind-sculpted sun-bleached grass in the foreground

evening colours fall on Crosedale, oil on canvas plein air sketch, 6×8 inches

Out on the hill, as the painting comes to its conclusion, there is always enough light left to enjoy being alone in the stillness, with just birds (and sometimes curious sheep) for company. Then the day starts to disappear, mist drifts in from the sea and it starts to get cold. It’s time to move.

as light fades the mist rolls in

Helen Colledge

adventures in a painted landscape

Category Archives: landscape

Paintings as premonitions

Life on another planet: glowing red hills and waves of grass