Just off the A64…

Sometimes it’s possible to slip out and away. I don’t mean out of the room, or even out of the country, I mean out of the world, out of reality. It happened to me as I drove along the A64 towards York, passing the early summer fields rich with shades of green, ochre, yellow, brown, red, and the purple, blue, black, of tree-deep shadows.

A flash of vermillion on my right – poppies, thousand upon thousand, lost in a quiet breeze-blown seclusion in that field behind the hedge. I couldn’t help myself, and I didn’t want to. I had to stop and take a closer look.

Outside the car the summer surrounded me full on; heat and humidity, the cars and lorries flashing noisily past. At a break in the roar, with a nervous last look, I was across the road and being drawn towards the shimmering redness.

Off from the road, to the side of the hedge, a track led towards the calm of fields. Stepping onto the dry, pink, earth, I kicked up summer with every step as the rippling air pressed in and on, walking out of this world, to view another, the colour enclosing me on every side. Willingly I let it draw me in, and in that moment it all ceased – the noisy motion of the road, the breeze that caught my thin cotton shirt, the undertone of insect sound, dust, movement, that steam of the air – all stopped, made static as painting.

What mastery of brush. Each stroke a blur of captured movement, each daub a patch of distilled light, this masterpiece before me, this rich flat canvas of the view - and looking deep at once I was not alone. Joined in my thoughts, my sight, by those others all here in this moment, all here with me in this other place.

They’d been here before - Turner, Arp, Matisse, Chagall, Monet, Constable, Renoir, Breugel, Dali, the rest, known and unknown, observing the work of the Painter, all standing in me in this field - just off the A64.