The Earth is a Boneyard but it’s Pretty in the Sunlight

I haven’t read Larry McMurtry’s ‘Lonesome Dove’ but this quote encapsulates many of those things I am pondering in my art and my life.

If there have been 117 billion humans to have walked our earth, most are recollected only in the way that they form the dirt upon which those of us still breathing walk. The idea of our natural world as a memento mori has long captured my imagination and I return to our collective land as a shared tumulus in my painting time and again. It’s been a sad few days since finding Kathmandu’s remains in front of the house having been missing for 6 weeks and giving him a worthy send off to Heaviside Layer where I hope there are a great many frogs, mice and sunny spots on the empyrean carpet. Our feline friend adopted us around three years ago and he was an old man when he came to us so I think it was simply his time: he was the Jellicle Choice. Finding his long since perished remains was disturbing and hard to see. It fell to me to collect up his departed self and commit him to the ground in a shady spot by the field where he would snooze on a sunny day. Surrounded by white roses and apple trees I believe he would have approved of our choice. Deathly reflections are morbid and often so difficult, yet they allow in the light where it wasn’t before. The meadow at the bottom of the garden has long been a boneyard and my lovely Kathman’s bones have been surrendered to their similarly grassy fate but where the sun shines through the trees I feel tremendous gratitude that we were his humans for a while.

I feel like all of the paintings I have made recently are boneyards. Not landscapes or reflected places but tapestries of spent being. Not being a religious person I have often baulked at the idea of graveyards and have never visited those where my loved ones are laid to rest. I feel tremendous comfort in the idea that we die as individuals but in death we return our borrowed molecules and residuum to Nature where life continues its unabated cycles. Forgotten but re-collected. Our existence is so brief but our deaths go on forever.

Farewell, pussy cat x