As I feared, we didn’t manage to establish an internet connection from the small cottage in which we were spending our holiday on the isle of Anglesey. Back in Yorkshire, however, I am trying to re-establish something like the pattern of “normal life”. We have passed a very congenial week on the outskirts of the small town of Amlwch, in the north of the island, and I suppose that a measure of the success of the holiday is the fact that I wish we had arranged for two weeks there instead of only one.*
The greatest wrench I experienced heading back home this morning was the realisation that I was just beginning to form some sense of the kinds of things to which I ought to be attending as an artist, when I have to leave them behind. In many respects you might say that even two weeks would have been insufficient as the basis for really taking advantage of what I discovered there. I have come to realise that I have a rather under-developed sense of colour, and that my art normally is made to “work” through a sense of form and composition. The startling thing about Anglesey, however, is the experience of colour, which can only be described as outrageous.
I first became aware of this driving back from a trip out with my wife, and looking up to the hill which is the location for an enormous copper-mining complex. This goes back a long way in history, and in fact still operates. In the past the hill was simply torn apart by excavation. Now, however, the working has disappeared entirely underground. What caught my eye was the startling mixture of colours in the ancient spoil heaps. The surface rock is generally a rather dull grey, although these very ancient rocks have been distorted into some interesting shapes and textures. Where the proverbial guts have been wrenched out of the land, however, by quarrying and mining, the resulting spoil heaps can take on some quite startling colours, particularly where these are stained by mineral deposits. In a brief attempt to capture this in a sketch I found myself using colours I would never have imagined myself using in depicting rock forms.
I have brought back with me not only notes and photographs, but more interestingly, a collection of pieces of rock, and I’m hoping to do something with these.
The other occasion on which I was compelled to sit up and take notice of colour was on a walk along a section of the Anglesey Coastal Path. On this occasion it was the colour of the vegetation that took my breath away. Gorse, heather and blackberry were growing together, forming a dense, low-growing “mattress” of vegetation. The effect was akin to that of a work by some abstract expressionist. In the bright sunshine the combination of colour was startling in the extreme. Having said this, of course, I had to come home again and leave it all behind! It has certainly given me a great deal to think about …. and strong incentive to go back to Anglesey, although if I do so you can guarantee that it will be raining!
*I make that discovery every year, and never do anything about it!