Before the Green
“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.”
Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay
I’ve been thinking about those lines a lot recently. We tend to imagine spring arriving in green, but when you really look, that’s not how it begins at all.
For me, the first sign is always the black poplars along the river. I can see them from the courtyard where I work, a line of trees that mark the edge of the Avon as it runs through Malmesbury. They come into leaf very quickly, almost within the space of a week, but those first leaves are never green. They arrive in gold.
There’s a brief period when the whole line of trees catches the light. As the sun shifts its path through the season, rising and setting a little differently each day, it meets them. For a few weeks in spring, and again in autumn, they are lit in gold. It feels like a clear, almost overwhelming marker of time passing, of the world turning.
It’s that moment that has been staying with me. Not the full arrival of the season, but its beginning. The point where something is just starting to come into being.
Working outside in the courtyard over these past weeks, I’ve found myself noticing smaller and smaller things. The white blossom of the blackthorn, bright against everything around it. The gold running through grasses before anything settles into green. The sense that the landscape is changing, even before it becomes fully visible.
The paintings have followed that. They’ve become lighter, more open, allowing things to emerge rather than fixing them too quickly. Not trying to describe what is fully there, but holding onto what is only just appearing.
There’s something fleeting about this stage of spring. The gold in the leaves, the white blossom, the light moving across the trees, they don’t last. They give way quickly to something fuller, more certain, more recognisable.
But this is the moment that interests me most at the moment.
Not the height of the season, but its beginning. That brief, luminous phase where everything is just starting to come into being.
Some of the details shown here come from a recent group of paintings now included in Wild + Bloom at Gallery at Home. You can see the full works on my previous post.
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The Enchantment Of Bluebells