A claw in one reality...

There’s a reason I don’t go out of my back gate after dark if I can help it and, if I do have to, I always keep an eye on the woodland….don’t laugh!  It’s not a big woodland, just the width of the cottages, but  it is a corridor to the much more dense forest just a couple of fields away. Once the light fades and the owl screeches and the dogs become fixated on what’s beyond the yard… I can feel it…something primal.

But what’s out there?

Foxes, badgers and the odd pine marten apparently. But, every now and then it feels like there is something more.

And then along comes YouTube. It’s always throwing something new into the mix for me.  Usually some interesting music choices, but more recently it’s been tapping into my psyche and presenting me with a rather different playlist.

Maybe it’s been listening to my thoughts as I’m mulling over the creation of a new series of work that pushes a little further psychologically into the human – animal – hybrids that are never too far away from my imagination.

I don’t know if you have come across the two story telling channels of Mr Ballen and Bedtime Stories?  For a while I was listening to both of them regularly until I decided it was probably time to break the habit. But there were two stories that stayed with me, and while each was a different yarn, they both featured the same ‘creature’ although through somewhat different encounters.  One told of a couple who had moved out to a farm in a rural part of the USA and ended up having a terrifying night when five wolf-like creatures spent the night circling their house, scratching at doors and generally making a bit of a nuisance of themselves.  The second tale was much more gruesome and involved an area known as The Land Between the Lakes. It featured the remembered story of a boy who was forced to hide from some rather unnatural predator as it ransacked a camper van and its occupants.

Europe has had its fair share of werewolf tales.  France and Germany especially.  You know the kind, bloke gets a bit over enthusiastic when the moon is full and goes on a bit of a murderous rampage. Maybe we are talking about clinical lycanthropy or even ingestion of some hallucinogen, but there seems to be a difference between the werewolves of legend and the large canids that haunt the forests of rural America.  These creatures that are known as Dogmen are something different.

We’re not talking werewolves of London here, although his hair was perfect allegedly. There’s no transformative process, no howling at the moon and if anything, if the sightings and reports have any truth in them, they would seem be a more liminal species…maybe with a claw in this reality and one claw in another.  Descriptions it seems, are remarkably consistent though.

Something I wasn’t expecting though, was a video to turn up on YouTube talking about Dogman encounters in Scotland, and even more disturbingly in my home county of Moray.

Of course we could naturally jump to misidentification but considering wolves haven’t roamed the Scottish countryside since around 1680, the notion of an oversized wolf roaming around seems…unlikely. The fact that it’s reported as bipedal is also a bit of a giveaway.

When the podcast talked about Culbin forest, I got chills. Even more so when I did a quick dive into the comments section. It was full of Moray folk talking about their own experiences of sightings of what was pretty similar to descriptions of the Dogman from the US stories.

Have you ever had that experience when you are in a woodland in the daytime and everything stops, there’s no birdsong, no crows giving it laldy, even the rustling of leaves from the breeze has gone….there’s nothing…except an uneasy sense of being observed?

I always knew there was a reason I hated being in Culbin.  I actually applied for a ranger job there when I was much younger, thank goodness I didn’t get it.  Even working with a team of guys repairing some paths by the dragonfly pond I remember feeling very on edge in the place.  It’s one of those weird places. A plantation rather than a natural woodland.  It was constructed to stop the movement of a large mobile sand dune and there is a village buried beneath the soil, so it already has a bit of a weird history. The trees are tall and straight and the understory vegetation is low. You can see through the trees easily.  There are wide logging roads too, but…there’s something about the place that’s disorientating.  It’s creepy AF!

A second video on Scottish dogman sightings appeared this week.  And against my better judgment, I watched that too.  This one came even closer to home including a sighting in the actual wee village I grew up in…and that freaked me right out.

So why am I telling you this?

Timing always fascinates me and this has come as I am already starting to find the concept for my next project forming.  As I have worked my way through the pieces for Portals Divine, I’ve been wandering deeper into the psychological processes. At the same time I’ve ended up in Jungian territory within archetypes and what it means to hold the energies of masculine and feminine while rediscovering one’s own divinity.

With one image however, affectionately known as Stagman, I had quite an unnerving experience when painting him.  I wanted to illustrate what a fully embodied masculine presence ‘might’ feel like.  The combination of male figure with certain stag-like features, the not so human eyes  that carried an unwavering stare, he exuded a quiet but intense energy and he absolutely scared the crap out of me.  I’d put the brush down and be working at my computer, and I was so aware of being watched. It felt predatory.  I’m not going to lie, I actually turned the easel to face the wall and at one point I had a very strong urge to run.

And that got me thinking.

Maybe I could create a whole series of encounters that can play with the human/animal hybrid form in such a way that the viewer is left thinking ‘what the fuck did I just look at’.

That unease…something so primal that while your eyes can make sense of the scene, your brain is not quite convinced. Maybe it’s the feeling that something primeval is watching you from the woodland edge, waiting for you to decide…are you going to stand and look, or are you going to run? Who is watching who?

Where Portals Divine asked what it was like to remember you are divine, this next series goes deeper. It strips the self right back and asks the question ‘what is it like to remember that you are animal, perhaps even prey?’ Maybe there will be an overlap of realities, maybe some legends will become real before our eyes… I just have to try and not scare myself while I am painting them.

As an aside...It’s fascinating to think that the Scottish Highlands and the Appalachian Mountains were once part of the same ancient mountain chain. Maybe they share more than geology. They say that there’s a reason Appalachian folk close their curtains as darkness falls, probably the same reason I don’t stray beyond the boundary of the garden gate.

Catch you in the liminal xx

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