The Nature of Spring
Extract from the opening chapter of The Nature of Spring, published April 2019 by Saraband:
THE LAND IS PATCHED with frozen and slowly thawing snow, depending on whether it lies in shadow or sunlight. Ben Ledi, this Stirlingshire landscape’s symbolic pyramid, seen through a waving screen of bare birches, has been whitened and softened and curved and blunted by masses of snow that fleeced the mountains in the night. Far below, Loch Venachar lies in a contre-jour dwam, its surface mimicking sky colours – iciest blue, various greys, white and gold – and contriving to hurl fragments of all of these up the hillside, so that it looks as if sky and loch and land have been daubed by the same brush, that this portion of the Earth has been unified by nature in colour and texture and purpose. Paul Cezanne would do just that in his later years, flooding his canvasses of Mont Sainte-Victoire with daring bravado, and from foreground to middle ground to mountain top and on into the sky, the whole patched with the same few shades of greens, yellows and blues, and leaving just enough canvas unpainted to insinuate flecks of brightness on mountaintop and cloud. He wrote then: “I become more lucid in front of nature…but I cannot attain the intensity which unfolds to my senses. I don’t have the magnificent richness of colouration which animates nature.”
And: “Art is a harmony parallel to nature.”
And his biographer Alex Danchez wrote:
“Harmony, like beauty, was being redefined.”
So, on a February afternoon of can’t-possibly-be-spring-yet, the ghost of Cezanne bestrides this living hillside between Loch Venachar and Ben Ledi, animating nature, redefining its harmony and beauty by flooding its canvas with a limited palette that does not discriminate from foreground to loch to mountaintop and on into the sky. The result is a landscape fizzing with energy. But is it spring?