Perched on a grassy mound, I and a couple of others set out our painting kit and began to squint at the little church of St John the Baptist, Yaverland – the Isle of Wight’s only norman church, its guidebook boasts. We were spoilt for subjects.  This church oozes intricate mysteries from every pore of its pitted stone face, but I knew exactly what I wanted to paint – that dramatic black conical hat with the witch’s familiar flying atop it – referred to cutely in the guidebook as the bell cote.   In fact, I’d been itching to paint it for ages.

The point of the spire is to make people look up – and look up I did.  The weather-vane dragon at the top breathed smoke as the clouds scudded past, its crest and wings streaming like pennons, the dark shingles of the steeple roof, like magic-eye stereograms, forming enigmatic angles and reminding me dizzily of the witch’s zigzagging high-speed broom flight over the onion domes of Moscow in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.  My mind was evidently still streaking across the epochs, continents and dimensions spanned by that book which I had just put down that very week. To read it had been like taking a running leap into the unknown, trusting that all would make sense if I didn’t worry too much about where I was hurtling to. 

Back on the ground at Yaverland, to give my aching neck a rest, I crossed the grass to a bench with my packed lunch to stare across at the steeple from a new angle, and discovered that the weather vane was not a dragon at all, but most definitely a cockerel – none the less enticing for that, with its wild ruffled feathers and phoenix-like defiance.

Lunch munched, I returned to my perch and resumed my conical-hat fantasy.  There was an element of performance art to painting on this church lawn as it is on a mound, as mentioned, shored up by a stone wall bordering a very busy road below, so we had quite an audience of drivers and their passengers who had a good view of our stage set as they zoomed by.  No one stopped to applaud.  A fellow artist did come up to inquire how I know when a painting is finished.  My reply was “When I think it’s saying what I wanted it to say”, but I should have said, perhaps “When I feel it reflects what I was feeling at the time”, as most of my paintings come from an urge to express something about my excitement over a particular scene or moment.  Composition, colour and intensity of the marks definitely play their part in this.  What the onlooker sees can be quite a different matter, though. 

Eventually, as those scudding clouds could contain themselves no longer and it began to rain, we moved our watercolours to the protection of the porch and retreated into the church to draw.

At home I gesso’d over chunks of what I’d painted outdoors and worked over some of the lines, reflecting on our human desire to reach above and beyond, and how you don’t really have to step out very far at all to do just that; of which, more soon.