Astonishing Splashes Of Colour
I look like the art student I once was. My clothes are dusted with orange, as if I've rediscovered my tin of chalk pastels.
David Hockney's show at the Royal Academy in 2012 was a carnival of the seasons, with lurid paintings of felled forest, and May blossom hedgerows like enormous serpentine monsters slowly heading north. I have found a ready-made Hockney in the woods. A log-pile abandoned here twenty months ago has blossomed bright orange, densely dotted with coral spot fungus. Some of the globules are fleshy, vivid and fresh; on closer inspection they look like the OCD spotty sculptures created by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. I get fungal spores all over me as I move a branch somewhere I can photograph it, into the light. Age has smeared a palette of burgundy and white along the knotted contours and fluorescent green algae makes a contrast.
My stomach used to lurch as the autumn leaves started to fall. I dreaded the skeletal winter trees. But now I see Andy Goldsworthy brilliance among the mouldering leaf litter, Yayoi Kusama's feverish growths and Eric Ravilious brush strokes in the bland symmetry of brown and grey drilled fields.
Maybe it was art school that showed me the colours and forms. Maybe it was the creative gene. Or maybe it was the time my mother told me about the chaffinch when I was six or seven years old.
It was a dark winter night. My mother was standing at a bus stop in sub-zero temperatures. It was so cold a bird dropped dead at her feet... this was sounding as poignant as one of the Hans Christian Anderson stories I'd been reading, but what I remember is that I wasn't all that interested in the bird until she described to me its colours. I think she might have said it seemed too perfect to be dead. 'It was so pretty, Jo'. It was a male chaffinch. Pink, chestnut, blue-grey.
I've seen the colours ever since.
David Hockney's show at the Royal Academy in 2012 was a carnival of the seasons, with lurid paintings of felled forest, and May blossom hedgerows like enormous serpentine monsters slowly heading north. I have found a ready-made Hockney in the woods. A log-pile abandoned here twenty months ago has blossomed bright orange, densely dotted with coral spot fungus. Some of the globules are fleshy, vivid and fresh; on closer inspection they look like the OCD spotty sculptures created by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. I get fungal spores all over me as I move a branch somewhere I can photograph it, into the light. Age has smeared a palette of burgundy and white along the knotted contours and fluorescent green algae makes a contrast.
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| All photographs by Jo Sinclair |
My stomach used to lurch as the autumn leaves started to fall. I dreaded the skeletal winter trees. But now I see Andy Goldsworthy brilliance among the mouldering leaf litter, Yayoi Kusama's feverish growths and Eric Ravilious brush strokes in the bland symmetry of brown and grey drilled fields.
Maybe it was art school that showed me the colours and forms. Maybe it was the creative gene. Or maybe it was the time my mother told me about the chaffinch when I was six or seven years old.
It was a dark winter night. My mother was standing at a bus stop in sub-zero temperatures. It was so cold a bird dropped dead at her feet... this was sounding as poignant as one of the Hans Christian Anderson stories I'd been reading, but what I remember is that I wasn't all that interested in the bird until she described to me its colours. I think she might have said it seemed too perfect to be dead. 'It was so pretty, Jo'. It was a male chaffinch. Pink, chestnut, blue-grey.
I've seen the colours ever since.
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