Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
IN PRAISE OF DRIFTWOOD
Recently,
looking for a day’s pleasant outing, my wife and I scanned a map of the upper
half of the North Island and asked ourselves what significant towns or centres
there were which, in the whole of our lives, neither of us had ever visited.
There turned out
to be only two, on opposite sides of the island.
Raglan and
Gisborne.
Deciding
Gisborne was too far away, we opted for Raglan, drove about an hour-and-a-half
from Auckland to get there, and found ourselves thoroughly enjoying our
excursion. I won’t tell you everything we did and saw in Raglan as this is not
a Year 8 class and you didn’t visit this blog to read “What I Did in My
Holidays”.
But I will tell
you something that struck me as we wandered along the long black-sand beach
with half a mile of surf crashing and shouting beside us.
I was struck by
the driftwood and found myself obsessively photographing it.
What is it about
driftwood that brings out the artist in people?
As I’ve noted
before on this blog [look up the posting
“On the Potency of Ruins” via the index at right], driftwood, together with
derelict farmhouses with rusted corrugated iron roofs, was once one of the most
common subjects for New Zealand painters to tackle. I seem to recall Hamish
Keith somewhere remarking how driftwood, like decaying sheep’s bones, had
become an artistic cliché as early as the 1950s. Yet here I was fascinated by
the stuff and stopping in our walk to photograph it.
Two things occur
to me.
One is that
nothing becomes a cliché unless it originally had some wide and potent appeal
to people. If people once turned into clichés strong and silent men, or whores
with hearts of gold, it was because there was a huge audience who wanted to
believe in such creatures. So too, driftwood, especially on a vast and open
beach, has a huge appeal, and it must take considerable discipline for painters
NOT to paint it now that they know such beachscapes are derided.
Second, I asked
what the appeal of driftwood is. I think it is a combination of an awareness of
history and an awareness of the creative powers of nature.
Driftwood
clearly has a past – a history – as it has come from somewhere else and been
swept or blown or floated to where we meet it. It is a wanderer as we are, not
fixed in place like the living tree from which it came. Sometimes it has a
human element in its history. (Some of the specimens I snapped were charred and
had apparently been used, unsuccessfully, by holidaymakers for beach fires.) So
when we look at driftwood we are looking at something that tells a story.
As for the
creative powers of nature, driftwood is preserved by the salt-sea water in
which it has been floating, smoothed by the blowing sand, which acts on it like
sandpaper, and dried and bleached by the sun. It becomes a non-representational
sculpture, like a late Henry Moore. We can read into it limbs that are not
limbs and yet as smooth as skin.
Am I rationalising
too much here? Possibly. Perhaps, as I did in my earlier piece on ruins, I
should simply acknowledge that a matured piece of driftwood has simplified
lines and is therefore aesthetically pleasing.
And I’ll leave
it to you to look at some of my pictures and see what you think.
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