7DOI 10.24412/2713-184X-2023-1-56-64
A CONVERSATION WITH ARTIST DAVID MOSS AND PHOTOGRAPHER CAROLINA HERBERT AT SKYSEA BEACH, THE GOWER PENINSULAR, WALES, UK
David Moss
Rev., is an Interfaith Minister, professional musician/songwriter and artist. David's immersive landscape paintings capture the beauty of nature in an Edenic form that invites you into a timeless joyful celebration of life
Carolina Herbert PHD,
is an arts psychotherapist, supervisor, educator and celebrant with over 20 years experience working with people, organisations and communities in post-conflict and conflict environments. As a singer/songwriter and photographer, Carolina has a passion for how the expressive arts can support us and enable us to be resilient and respond to the complex challenges we face in our world today.
On a sunny September day, David and I set off to Skysea beach on the Gower Peninsular* with cameras, paints and canvases. The dappled dawn light led us through archways of beech and sycamore drawn by the sound of the sea. Our plan was to immerse into the landscape and use painting and photography to respond to a request for articles on the theme 'In Resonance with the Earth'.
* The Gower Peninsular is the first area designated for outstanding natural beauty in the UK and the South Gower Coast is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). An area of stunning and varied wildlife rich landscape of cliff scenery, woodland and dunes Wwth the second largest tidal range in the world, the nature reserve is frequently covered by sea water and the limestone rocks provide shelter for the full range of rocky shore life, fringed in a green kelp forest https://www.welshwildlife. org/nature-reserves.
The creative process presented a need for us to surrender into the unknown. We were excited, there was an air of anticipation, as if something was about to be revealed and born.
In the beginning...
Blank canvases, charged cameras and a leap of faith.
While David made his artist camp on the beach, I went off clambering over the rocks at low tide. I felt like a curious wild explorer going to discover a place I had never visited before, to see what drew my attention and resonated.
The return - a conversation, a harvesting
After a couple of hours, we met back on the beach to share our experiences and discoveries.
David: You're back!
Carolina: Yes! I feel like I have been to another world to the bottom of the sea bed, peering into pools that mirror the sky in infinite circles. I spent a long time watching a heron that was so still, almost blending in with the rocks, just being. I was so grateful to feel so safe, it's unusual for me to feel this safe in wild nature.
Being in and photographing this rugged and wildly beautiful landscape, standing still like the heron was like a meditation that calmed and grounded me. It helped me get out of the chaos of my thoughts to a place where I felt so peaceful, like I have been taught the wisdom of the whole universe! When you are being still in nature there is no doing required only being.
David: Yeah I resonate with all of that! Especially the chaotic thoughts, I have plenty of them! For me that's the start of the process, trying to find a way to begin. This often involves a lot of swearing and sometime even tears! Tears of frustration or tears of overwhelm of the thought of what I am attempting to do in response to the vastness and beauty of nature.
Sometimes the stronger the energy and emotions, the more connected I feel and it gives me a better way in. The results come from a love of what I am doing. I have been watching the light change on the sea, it's been quite dramatic so I've been trying to pull all the ephemeral moments together. So yeah, I have been exploring the ephemeral.
Carolina: Yes, I witnessed how everything is so transient and ever changing in nature. As the light moves you can experience the landscape in a new way in each moment. It kind of reflects how transient life is. Through your art and my photography, it's like we are attempting to capture something of the essence of the moment.
David: Yes, exactly, and I found myself feeling certain colours.
Carolina: Yes, I love how you have used the colours. Is this a new style of painting that's emerged?
David: Well, it takes me back to my upbringing and a style I created when I lived at the coast in Yorkshire.
Carolina: Ah like a reminiscence, a style rekindled, and here we are on the coast of my childhood.
David: Ah yes! I found myself painting green, a colour I would normally associate with forests and woodlands. The more I tuned in, I have been discovering green today. The board I had brought with me had some green already on it from when I was painting in the forest in Wiltshire. And so, the green came out in this painting, serendipity!
Carolina: That's amazing, I was looking into one of the pools and it was such a luminescent green it was like a forest and then you have painted it without knowing it was there.
David: Wow, that's like the same green of the forest in Wiltshire, I had no idea it was so green where you were walking and here it is in my painting.
Carolina: Yes, and here we are on a Jurassic sea bed area where the forest from hundreds of thousands of years ago still remains, over there on the beach
you can walk on it, it's so green and you can see the tree roots. It's gives such a mind-blowing meta perspective to imagine where the ocean is now there was once forest.
David - Wow, like revealing a whole other world! I was drawing with a pencil it pulled of the paint
and revealed the white emulsion on the board underneath, so I used my stanley knife and started etching a bit like I did with those etcha-sketch boards when I was a child, I started scratching away the paint, creating dimension and texture. Kind of like excavating the past. Any image is evolving and revealing so much more beneath the surface. It took me back to my past and sitting on the beach where I spent my childhood. So
being here today has been feeling like an excavation into my own history.
Carolina: That's powerful, how do you feel?
David: It's like a return to such a peaceful place, so pure, I love it! It's the resonance of the place, I am resonating with the past in the present.
Carolina: Yes like a full circle, it looks like there is a circle in your painting! And how interesting that you were able to capture the texture
of the actual rocks without being there, they are very sharp and scratched and grazed me as I was clambering over them. How were you able to resonate with being there without being there? It is as if you were connected through a deeper way of communion.
David: Really! I don't know, I guess it's like a tuning in and a surrender to another way of receiving information.
Carolina: When I started walking, I noticed a circle in a rock that seemed to mark the start of my journey. It made me focus on a sense of wholeness. The nature that I am walking in is not demanding anything of me, it was undemanding, totally accepting of me. Once my thoughts settled and calmed down it was such a relief and reminded me of the joy of roaming freely in nature as a child. This is what I love about photography it gets me out of my head and into the present moment.
David: When I am part of nature, I am. It reminds me of a quote 'One is when he does not think' Alfredo Offidani.
And now looking at your photos, it's like going into another world millions of years ago, like you have been time travelling!
Carolina: Yes! There was a moment where I almost felt like I was a primitive being. There are
lots of stories and legends around this area of people living in caves, they even found a skeleton in nearby Paviland Cave that they dated as 33,000 years old, apparently its one of the oldest examples of a ceremonial burial in Western Europe. Incredible perspective right! I tried to imagine for a moment what would it be like if there wasn't
any civilization and I lived and existed within nature. I know of course it would be incredibly harsh.
David: You would be eating a lot of seaweed!
Carolina: Ha yes! I did taste some and put it on my skin, I wanted to dive in and experience a full immersion into the landscape. It started
to help me return to being a human at one with nature and having to live with it rather than being in the world we have constructed. I felt like I could stay there forever. Why is it that when you have found such a profound sense of peace with a wild environment that you don't want to leave?
David: Is it because you are home? Here I am?
Carolina: Yes, that's it, being fully present and finding the peace and stillness and a sense of home. A full immersion in the ancient wisdom of the landscape.
David: Yes in it, with it, part of it, not separate. I am thinking that photography and painting is both observation and at the same time being within - that's where the magic is. When I can communicate that 'being within', that's where the authenticity of the painting is. You do that all the time with your photos. It's like the photos are as close to it as being there.
Carolina: It's interesting that I am not thinking technically when I am taking these photographs but really wanting to honour, through my being, the greatest beauty that is already there.
David: Yes I echo that in my paintings honouring the beauty, honouring the presence, stepping out of the way.
Carolina: Yes, as if the self goes through a dissolving to become a channel. Moving out of the way to create space and then through the artistic process you can bring the resonance of what is around you into being.
David: Yes, so that something new and life-giving can come through.
Carolina: Yes, I am so grateful for this time. I can't wait to look at the drone photos. It was a powerful experience to fly the drone, to travel high up like a bird and look down and get a completely
different perspective, a new way of seeing, it was so surprising, stunning and uplifting, I wonder what the images look like.
Endnote: perspective from the eyes of a bird...
"The creative process, like a spiritual journey, is intuitive, non-linear, and experiential. It points us toward our essential nature, which is a reflection
Reference for citations
Moss, D., Herbert, C. (2023). A conversation with artist David Moss and photographer Carolina Herbert at Skysea beach, The Gower Peninsular, Wales, UK. Ecopoiesis: Eco-Human Theory and Practice, 4(1). [open access internet journal]. -URL: http://en.ecopoiesis.ru (d/m/y)
of the boundless creativity of the universe" John Daido Loori*.
https://www.azquotes.com/quotes/topics/creative-pro-cess.html
*
