LEAVES IN LOVE | Limited Edition Canvases

One bright morning when I was 12 years old, I killed a small bird.

It was not bothering anyone; it was just perching by a leaf. It was not expecting the low-velocity pellet set in motion by an asinine young boy.

Now it lay dying upon a bed of leaves.

They say the soul is like a bird. In which case, I had killed a soul.

In Farid al-Din Attar’s Mediaeval Persian classic, ‘The Conference of the Birds’, the quest for meaning ends with self-realisation. The wise hoopoe gazes in the mirror at its own reflection.

Ever since that morning, through the grist and sweat of life, through the unlived dreams and failed experiments, through loss and a modicum of joy, through leaps of faith and pain of rebirth, the bird has haunted me, chastised me, guided me, freed me.

The most abstract painting of all is the blank canvas. Yet a life begins not on a blank canvas, but as a palimpsest. Previous iterations linger.

Many cultures embrace the notion of impermanence, the idea that a soul traverses realms carrying energy, both positive and negative. These ideas emphasise the importance of cultivating a compassionate world and of departing this existence in a state of love.

And therein lies the possibility of evolution, of redemption.

Each change in medium or scale - painting to photograph to print - alters the image, the meaning, evokes new apprehensions in unexpected and sometimes revelatory ways. All is in a state of flux and the boundaries between states are permeable.

Inspired by visits to the Dhanakosa meditation retreat in Balquidder, Scotland and the Butchart Gardens in Brentwood Bay, Canada, the works which comprise ‘Leaves in Love’ are designed to facilitate collective contemplation through a play of colour, texture and scale.

The works are the passage of a soul that has never been ‘mine’. It is not a possession but rather a fractal which is akin to a bird or a leaf on a tree I have been privileged to assume for a time.

In the manner of the early opponents of photography, one could argue that the creation of an image is a futile attempt to possess time by freezing the soul as the bird was frozen in the moment of its death.

Yet the images in ‘Leaves in Love’ intend to insinuate life, change, movement, and above all, hope, nudging us to notice what is right within us, right in front of our eyes.

The pun in the title, of course, is deliberate, suggests dying, departing on a journey, as well as the leaves of book or tree.

In the words of Suhayl Saadi:
Paint is cut from seams deep in the Earth and the ‘Leaves in Love’ are dancing sculptures. In percussive composition, the textures emerge like a meeting of mountains, tones re-arrange so that the work begins to harmonise. We ‘see’ a sea, we smell the seaweed, we taste the familiar saline liquor, and our bodies start to hum.

As one becomes more immersed, the boundary between the observed and the observer gradually dissipates. The bird turns to flame, then to a corpuscle pulsing through our heart, then to the breath of a saint on stained glass, then to a fleck of stone on a Caledonian hillside, the glint of a gem in the crown of an Iron Age queen, a beach at low tide, the sound of an arpeggio…
(Read the full review by Suhayl Saadi)

In the blinding light of that morning, slowly, blood turned the leaves brown. I watched the soul leave the bird’s eyes, and resolved never again gratuitously to kill another living being. There and then the banal horror of the bird’s sacrifice generated the architectonic of a voyage towards a possible light.

I hope you will enjoy ‘Leaves in Love’, as we journey together.