Stanley Donwood and Spirits in the Forest

 I received an email last week from one Stanley Donwood. It was a newsletter he crafts every once in a while, and I always try to read them for A) artistic perspective and B) mention of Radiohead. Donwood has created all of the band's original artwork for nearly twenty years, which boggles my mind. Concert posters? Album sleeves? They grace several walls. I guess this makes me an art collector.

Anyway, this piece of mail caught my eye, for it not only touched on A and B, but stirred up item C, which lingers just as constantly in my mind: nature, forests, trees. He talks about an exhibit of paintings from his Holloway project, part of which emerged in Radiohead's The King of Limbs art. It's got me thinking about spirits we feel in the forest, if they should be feared, or revered, or both. Let's go with both.


Holloway is written about more generally on Donwood's project page:

In September of 2011 Robert Macfarlane, Stanley Donwood and Dan Richards travelled to southern Dorset in search of a hollow way.
Moving south a mist lowered itself, wet smoke pooling in valleys and encircling hilltops. Southward was a descent, disorientating gradients rising as they fell. Elbowed hills reared up and the hollow way began to reveal its intentions; it would remove them from the everyday.
In an attempt to escape from the fogs, they climbed to the top of Pilsdon Pen, a sharp-sided hill now inhabited only by depressed cattle, but once some vital part of a vanished civilisation. The hill was indistinct, the fog was thick, the level hilltop seeming to float in the mist like a half-formed green raft. There was silence from the cows and a sense of waiting from the hill.
The three of them stood looking out into the void, gazing in the approximate direction of the valleys of the holloways. But there was nothing there, only wraiths, only shadows. They descended from the hillfort, feeling their way, each yard of country having to be uncovered, and all the while followed, haunted by silence.
Towards the close of the day they perhaps found the hollow way which they had been looking for. The everyday had gone, and night was falling swiftly. Things began to happen secretly around them, and the past conspired with the present, and those that had found the holloway before them were part of that present.

Here's what was published last week about the holloway paintings:

Nick gets the first say:

What this text brings to my mind is what a friend of mine once posited about world religions. While the idea was in all likelihood not uniquely his, it went like this. He suggested that the environment in the places where world religions were founded might help explain one key division among them, poly or mono theism. Those originating from more open and less forested areas tended toward monotheism while those in forested areas tended toward polytheism. 

The author here mentions Hansel and Gretel and the Blair Witch Project. Might these stories be a continuation of the same story telling that early polytheists had about the forests? It certainly makes me wonder. Maybe there is something to the inability we have to explain every sight, sound or smell that we find in the forest that leads our minds to filling in whatever our senses fail to fully explain.

Nick's response surprised me. I was still stuck on imagining scary forests in the UK. Isn't it entirely rolling green hills (sorry, that's my terrible imagination, I need to actually visit)?

But I get it. I feel like a pawn whenever I leave trails, like something else is directing my course or watching me from the canopy. Deer act cautious, so I do the same. Rain comes. I never expect it. I'm vulnerable, getting wet, relying on leaves for shelter. If I'm lucky. If it's summer. There is a certain unease about the whole affair, but then again, you can find elevation in feeling insignificant. Just frame it the right way.

In this Creative Review post about the London show, Donwood says this:

 "I had a kind of memory that the fluted columns and ceiling tracery of medieval churches owed its inspiration to the northern forests of Europe; the tall tree trunks, the interlaced branches above, the majesty of the woods. I wanted to take this caged spirit of the trees back into the forests, where sounds were free and untethered by religion, where the spreading branches supported the sky, not the roof of a church. I began to paint trees, bright, coloured trees, through which dark mists could percolate."

When I worked for Missouri State Parks, I was set on capturing that spirit. This is as close to a holloway as I got that summer. Pretty good for a second growth forest.

Robertsville State Park, Spice Bush Trail

Things to ponder.

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