Every month the new moon, once again as in my painting, appears over the eight-hundred-foot hill, a quarter of a mile away, not silhouetted by the lingering light from the departed sun; but re illuminated by the freshly born moon itself as seen from our garden: So:” Dark, dark is the graveyard, before the moon”.

The Moon

I started two-night paintings, the first painting of poplars, the fresh new moon rising and the hill, the second, slightly smaller and with a bluish cast has already gone to its new home.

I cannot see poplars without remembering, from when I read the passage, first as a teenager, slightly incorrectly; George Orwell’s fictional poet’s opening lines of the Poem he was working on:

 Sharply the menacing wind sweeps over The (bending) poplar newly bare 

In this small painting 30cm x 39 cm of night falling in a lost rural Graveyard, is one of a few dozen paintings that I have done of Ballymole Hill, most to the left in the background and the slight dip on the skyline by the tall tree most to the right which is Barnnisky, at the top of the Devil’s staircase.

The trees themselves are not well as they are too close to the coast as gale-blown salt gets this far inland. So they are showing their mortality as they stand at the edge of the forgotten graveyard.

The graveyard in the gathering gloom is menacing in its own right and the failing light at dusk in the lonely countryside has connotations of menace itself.

All the paintings I have done of this hill from our own garden explore dusk and the three moments of time that occur as the sun goes down behind an eight-hundred-foot hill a quarter of a mile away.

‘Civil dusk’; when the sun dips below the apparent horizon is mad in the mountains as the perceived horizon can be so close, and although the sun is down the sky stays brighter for much longer than when it goes below the horizon far away, it is said of this time, the first setting of the sun, the ‘light breaks’. Further embellishment of these early dusk scenes is caused by the sun still shining brightly on the sea just a mile to the East. The sun is also too high above the real horizon for any pinkness or redness on the clouds.

Later there is ’Nautical dusk’ the sun is well down, and down for the people on the other side of the hill, the sky becomes dark blue all pink has gone from any clouds but the horizon is visible as a shadow in front of the sky. 

Then there is ‘Astronomical dusk’; At sea, the horizon cannot be made out against the sky and in the graveyard, all is pitch Black there may be stars and there may be clouds in any event you cannot make out your own hand in front of your face. 

The day has died. The graveyard is scary in the dark. Despair in the gloom increases, chill thoughts and self-reassurances that there is no danger in the dark; don’t work so well in the so lonely dark.

Then as in this painting, the horizon darkens as pale a pale glow lightens the wispy clouds that had been invisible then the new moon is silent in the sky. Shadows are as dark as dark can be. The pale light is there as well. Mist hovers. Damp things gleam.