Rest walls ……wild flowers and painted stones are set among the buttressed roots, to bring the traveller good fortune, and stone terraces are built up around the trunks in such a way that the shade seeking traveller may back up and set down his load while standing almost straight. These resting places are everywhere along the trading routes, some of them so ancient that the great trees have long since died leaving two round holes in a stone-work oval platform. ….the rest walls impart blessedness to this landscape as if we had wandered into a lost country of the golden age. Peter Mathiesson. The Snow Leopard Be light ,light, light- full of light! I should like to be riven by things I see as though by lightning. Hilde Domin … to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called “visions”, the whole so-called “spirit world”, death, all these things that are closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out by life that the senses with which we would have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God. Rilke In the car the Tuareg said he saw with his eyes and his head in six ways- How did I see? With my eyes, head, heart, hands and feet.
The stones are the intense blue- particularly intense today with the north wind, cool and fresh and the clarity of light that brings. My hands are sore from moving stone yesterday. I have also had a few of the dry thorns in my feet and they leave a painful reminder of their fearsome spike. What a lovely task slowly removing the stones. Such a simple thing to do with an extraordinary quality in the finished drawing. A luminous quality that echoes the luminosity of the colours today. The Northerly wind has brought a phenomenal clarity to the colours and depth I haven’t seen before and I am dazzled by the blue and pink in contrast to one another.
The landscape is bleak, made bleaker by the haze- tabbub- but I love the flatness. Sometimes the flatness is very near and sharp. And sometimes the flatness has huge distance in it. How do you define space, distance visually? How do we quantify distance? How do we depict it?
[ making sand line, blue volcanic plates] We come into a new landscape with great plates of stones red coloured and blue, sometimes grey pink. I see a blue patch and know what to do. Just a slight shift to what is there. We heard thunder and I saw a spectacular line of lightning opening up for a split second and then huge thunder. Rain, big fat drops of rain in the Sahara! The rain comes very suddenly. Thick and heavy, so I get very wet and marvel at what the water is doing to the colours now glistening with water. Pools of water formed in the hollows of the big stones. The stones are volcanic and some are hollow and break when you tread onto them, they are crumbly underneath. The rain leaves as abruptly as it came. For a moment the stones glisten with the water’s glaze, iridescent, metallic before they retreat back to their dry palette.
Those brave desert trees that inspire a great deal of admiration in me for their courage in growing here.
We came into a new wadi which was sharply defined – forms of black stone against a pale pink colour like the ‘balat’ (clay pans) that Ali calls white. Black – eswad White- abyad There was a beautiful curved slope of pink stone in the far ground and it became obvious to me to echo the rhythm of the lines with a single line in pale stone on black. The dynamic of the single line was a continuation of the rhythm in the existing lines of the landscape already set up by the pink and black stone and the distinct delineations between them. That the simplicity of the line, the boldness of it echoed the starkness of the landscape at its best. Where simplicity of form is at its most powerful.