cloud names III

presentiment  harbinger  ominous  obscurus  precipitous calamitous

skein  messenger  flotilla


My own names for clouds.

mind and body

"She could smile to herself now to think what contortions the body may twist itself into when something goes wrong in the mind. That detestation of food, those dizzying moments when you twirl helplessly on a kind of vacant devilish merry-go-round; that repetition of one thought on and on like a rat in a cage; those forebodings rising up one after the other like clouds out of the sea in an Arabian tale....."


The Wharf by Walter de la Mare from a collection of short stories entitled: Modern Short Stories edited and introduced by Jim Hunter, published by Faber Educational Books, 1969.

cloud names II

"Watchtower Smoke Syringe Hoof Pick-axe Tribunal Knickers Whip Soap House Dog Photo Revolver Dysentery Fire Scissors Shin Train Bowl Typhus Turnip Latrines Sun Coat Soup Lawyer Bed Child Straightline Coal Blanket Phenol Wool Fly Bathroom Rat Moustache Tooth Stove Lice Screams Skull America Barbed-wire."


Refusal by Soazig Aaron, translated from the French by Barbara Bray, published by Harvill Secker, London, 2007.

cloud names I

"She and her friends agreed to give names to the forty-five kinds of clouds in the five different languages they spoke. They spent some time agreeing on the names, repeating them, and then making up words out of the first or second letters of each name, and so on, then doing the same with the names spelled backwards.....

......Right up to the end, Klara told me, the clouds helped them get through the blows, the screams, the lack of privacy-....

......She gave me the list of clouds. One is missing."


Refusal by Soazig Aaron, translated from the French by Barbara Bray, published by Harvill Secker, London, 2007

cloud quotation

"When I do not walk in the clouds
I walk as though I were lost."


Antonio Porchina  Voces 1943

Translated from the Spanish by W S   Merwin.

fear of flying

Once, taking a much delayed night time flight from the island of Cyprus, where my father and I had attended the wedding of my youngest sister, I fell prey to an overwhelming anxiety concerning the safety of air travel, and our journey in particular, a powerful presentiment of disaster taking an unshakeable hold on my mind. Overwrought by the long waiting, oppressed by the darkness of the night, and longing for home, I became convinced that my father and I would never see our family and our home again, that we would fall out of the sky over land or ocean, thus to perish.

As we took our seats in the aeroplane, I was conscious of a fine tremor throughout my body, a parched mouth and pent up breath escaping my lungs only in small gasps. Once seated, I placed my clenched hands, icy despite the heat of the night, in my lap, closed my eyes for a moment. In that moment, I felt the warm enclosure of my father's hand, taking my own in his, as though I were a child. He did not speak, beyond remarking that my hands were cold, there was no need for words; my desire to implore him to reassure me that we would reach England safely assuaged by the compassionate pressure of his hand.

At present, experiencing an anxiety of the most profound order regarding my ability to draw, I realise that whenever I think about the act of drawing, I suffer the same symptoms that possessed me whilst suspended in the airspace over Europe; a pounding heart, mouth as dry as the desert, chilled, damp, trembling hands, a nervous flutter in the gut. I have not touched pencil to paper, yet am wholly in thrall to the fear of failure, a terror of taking wing and thus becoming vulnerable to the possibility of falling.

Of late, desperate to calm my fright, which is a grave impediment to my practice, I have taken to closing my eyes, and imagining the loving warmth of my father's hand closing over mine, affording me precious comfort, and conferring upon me the reassurance that it will be possible for me to begin to draw once more, even though it may be many months before I feel that I am ready to make the attempt.

 I shall never again, beyond the bounds of memory and imagination, experience my father's tender concern, shall never again be able to take his hand in mine, as I did during the weeks of illness before his death, and as he took mine during that interminable flight from Cyprus, but I have at least the cherished remembrance of his paternal sensitivity, the selfless love he extended towards his family throughout his life, and which guided his every action.

my odd children

During a troubled adolescence, I made the decision never to have children, convinced that I would not be able to bring them safely to adulthood. Over the years, I have seen no reason to revoke that decision; rather events have persuaded me that my offspring were best left unborn, although I admit to something of a fleeting feeling of regret when I have occasion to touch the fine, shining hair of the very young, or become aware of a small, vulnerable hand steeling into mine.

As I noted in a much earlier post, I once read that Werner Herzog likes to think of the films that he makes as  children, bestowing the greatest love upon those which are perhaps disabled in some way. As for my own work, having destroyed all but a relatively small number of drawings, I come close to regarding the more eccentric drawings of tree, mountain and rainbow remaining, as my odd children; drawings which are decidedly quirky, and which sprang from a powerful imperative, the greater number of them coming into being whilst I was struggling to recover from an episode of depressive illness.

The last three years have been barren. There have been no offspring, no images clamouring for release. It is as though I had suddenly been rendered infertile. Perhaps illness was the motivating force behind that series of drawings, at least in part, for the tree and mountain drawings were begun before my breathless descent into the abyss. At a remove of almost five years from that devastating period, I find myself only partially recovered, still prey to an agonising sense of worthlessness  and an all encompassing terror of committing myself to the creation of a drawing which may fail my intentions.

I have a binding connection to my odd children, and, for the present at least, cannot bear to be parted from them; I cannot let them take their place in any other world but my own. In that sense, I am an extremely possessive mother; it is my instinct to protect these unusual drawings from harm, from the critical gaze of the viewer. I harbour a desperate need for them to be liked,  to be understood, to elicit a positively evaluative response, whilst yet knowing that I cannot, or should not try to dictate the terms of their reception, although perhaps it is true that without my communicating the circumstances of their coming into being, they would be difficult to comprehend, or appreciate. It is my feeling that they exist in the liminal space between art and art therapy. They were not made, strictly speaking, within the context of a therapeutic consultation, but they were born of a profound need to communicate that which I found impossible to to express by any other means, and their birth was occasioned by an overwhelming personal calamity. I made them, not only as the artist I then felt myself to be, but as a being consumed by forces that I was unable to withstand without psychiatric intervention, and a committment to drawing. Thus it may be said that the making of them was of therapeutic value to me; they afforded me the opportunity of releasing and exploring difficult material visually, and that perhaps they would not have existed but for the particular circumstances of their creation.

Therefore, I surround myself with my odd children, still puzzled by them, although I know them intimately, still learning from them, and as yet unable to surrender them, for they offer me hope and the reassurance that I will become able to draw again, that the well spring from which they emerged is not irrevocably drained dry despite my lack of self confidence with regard to making further drawings.  I remain convinced that two paths lie ahead of me, in terms of the creation of new drawings, one being the resumption of cloud formation drawings, this time with the particular skilled attention granted to one with the benefit of hindsight, and the other the making of a suite of images informed in their method and character, their qualities, by the series of drawings of tree, volcanic mountain and rainbow which preceded them.