Fever

Yesterday, when I was in the library. I took out a copy of a book about the North Downs Way, that runs from Farnham to Canterbury, so see what I might find in the way of research. Richard Long has using walking as part of his sculptural performance (?) and I have my father's interest in the green roads that criss-cross the UK. So it occurred to me to go and walk following this route.

Then reading the introduction, there is a mention of Graham Sutherland, who I usually associate with west Wales. Again, half bits of memory stream out and I know he produced some Palmeresque images in the early 30's before he moved towards semi-abstraction. Some one else who I am reading about is Iain Sinclair and his walk around the M25 in his book called London Orbital. This kind of walk with the layers of history and mythology, obviously, appeals to me. So a walk along the North Downs Way again, is gaining ground. Realising that I can not do the whole thing in one go, so I can use the book to take little steps on this journey.

Thinking of it as a walk from left to right, I could see that a landscape book would be a good way to record the images and ideas that I saw. Taking small steps, I could split the book up in sections of the various walks that I could follow. The landscape format follows the route, but should I start at Farnham or Canterbury. Should I start inland to work my way towards the sea or go from the inside out, beginning in Canterbury to Farnham?

Each walk becomes an episode, do I need to structure it literally? One of the book I read using a splinter layered/fractured technique was Fugue for a Darkening Isle, which has a lot of flashbacks and is disjointed in the narrative. Maddeningly confusing, until you reach the end as you as the reader start to weave all the pieces together. Again, it does not really matter for my record. The journey can start anywhere, even the mid point and it might only need me to start where I start collecting my walks from.

The title of this blog is amalgam of Surrey, England and the Dreamtime from Australia, too opposite points. I have wondered if I could use classical Greek and Roman mythology similarly, yet we have the 18th century gardens that where created as an idea classical landscape. As a student, it was suggested to me that I should look at Claude's landscapes whom I was told, Turner greatly admired. Again, the BBC2 series' Chronicle, a TV history first popularised Rennes-Le-Chateau and its mysterious as well as introducing me to the painter Poussin. Secret codes hidden in pictures and sacred geometry, fascinating to a child.

In a lot of children's saying and games, we have the survival of some of the pagan past. When a cousin mentioned Jenny Greenteeth, an old cannibal that lived in some water lodges near home, I felt it was a surviving spirit transformed from a lost goddess to a weak demon on the fringes of the world kept alive by the thoughts and fear you have as child. So when I got the North Down Way book, I found another about children's games. As I have written about the link to Cricket, often minefield of rules and laws that have to be follow. It was another piece in the research that was firing me up.

So I bought a A3 (approx. 11 x 16" for those in imperial) landscape cased sketchbook, as this can give me a long thin piece of paper. It represents the journey across the country and giving me the room to add images in two across one page. Now I am itching to begin.....