The River’s Turning: Notes on the Micro Seasons

28 Oct

“The subtle changes of nature are the poetry of time.” — Japanese proverb

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how quickly the season turns — how a few days of wind or rain can shift everything. We’ve all seen it: the sudden gold of a tree that was green only last week, the way the air sharpens overnight, the fields darken, the light draws in. These are the changes that often pass almost unnoticed, yet they mark time as surely as any calendar.

In Japan, time is measured differently. The year isn’t divided into four broad seasons, but into 24 poetic divisions, each further split into three smaller parts, creating 72 micro-seasons, each lasting around five days. Their names are wonderfully evocative: Wild Geese Return, Cold Dew, First Frost Descends, Silkworms Hatch, Mist Begins to Linger.

Each one captures a fleeting event in the natural world, a brief turning of time that’s noticed, named and remembered.

I love this idea of living within such fine gradations of change. The smaller rhythm of time feels closer to the way the natural world actually moves…slowly, continuously, and never quite the same from day to day. To see a year this way would be to mark it in light and in colour, just as I try to do in paint.

A Micro Season by the River Avon

At the bottom of my garden, the River Avon curves gently past a long line of black poplars. This has been their time of turning. A few days ago the trees shimmered with green-gold leaves catching the low autumn light, their reflections glancing off the moving water. Then, almost overnight, the wind came — that unmistakable autumn wind, insistent and restless — and the air was filled with drifting leaves.

For a few days, the world seemed to glitter with movement. The poplars gave up their colour to the air; the river carried it away. And just like that, the season had shifted again.

This moment, , was its own micro-season: perhaps one we might call Leaves Let Go, or Poplars in East Wind. A brief chapter in the longer story of the year.

Painting Change

In the studio — or more often, outside in the courtyard beside it — I try to hold these moments in paint. My work is built in layers: light over shadow, tone over tone, each mark both concealing and revealing the last. The paintings shift constantly as I work, just as the weather does around me.

It’s often the final, quietest gestures — a thin glaze of colour, a faint edge of light — that bring everything into balance. These are the moments that complete the work: subtle changes that hold the memory of movement and time. Painting becomes a way to listen to change, to find a stillness within it.

Here is a series of paintings of the poplars from the bright turning days in 2022.

Towards New Seasons: The Blue Mountains

In November, I’ll travel to Australia, where I’ll spend a month on an artist residency in the Blue Mountains. It will be a kind of seasonal disruption…leaving autumn behind for the brightness of the southern summer.

I’m curious to see what the micro-seasons of that landscape will be: how time reveals itself in a place so different, yet still bound to the same rhythms of weather, light, and renewal. Perhaps there, I’ll learn new ways to notice the small changes to mark time not just in colour, but in scent, sound and water.

A Closing Note

As I prepare to travel, I’ve been thinking about how much of the year we live through without truly seeing it. Maybe this is the quiet gift of the micro-seasons is an invitation to notice the smallest changes, to find beauty in the in-between.

Over the coming months, I’ll be sharing notes and paintings from both sides of the world; from Wiltshire’s rivers to the new to me beauty of the Blue Mountains.

You can follow the journey and receive these reflections in my newsletter, Among the Wildflowers, a monthly letter about painting, landscape, and the shifting light of the seasons.

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