The River/An Apple by Sarah J. Stanley

Title: The River/An Apple
Artist: Sarah J. Stanley
Medium: pencil on paper 
Size: 42 cm x 43 cm 
Framed size: 50 cm x 51 cm 

"There’s a poem I retrieved from a sketchbook early this year. I copied it out into my current sketchbook and took a trip to the river. The river Dee is where I go to calibrate in times of stress or sadness, and I have been trying to draw it for years. I still can’t. Not how I need to. It’s a constant backdrop to a lot of my work. When I am loud and antagonistic I don’t paint the river. I draw the river when I am pensive and humbled. This ongoing body of work about the river Dee is very close to my heart and bones. My mother may be estranged but the river nor the fish nor the single, solitary, predictably stoic Heron is not.

"I make a lot of work using fragments of memories from an abusive childhood and imbibe on the parts I find solace. A departure from my usual oil work, I find drawing a more fragile and vulnerable medium for me, and I hope that the work is received but the viewer with the sincerity, vulnerability and devotional nature in which it was made."

The river

The river is my mother

The water outlives me by centuries

Before I was born

The river was carving paths in the hills

Slowly and calmly

The river won’t provide warmth

But it won’t ever drive a car

Refreshment and guidance 

I go to her banks to bleed

A stone as flat as 100 sheets of paper

Skims over the lead grey surface

Again and again

A meditation

Just as the heron

'Single and solitary’ Phyllis says

Celibate to noise

Except sinuous and soporific

Watery chaos

A ripple to guide a feather

I bite into an apple

And throw the core in the current

You’ve existed for centuries before me

Tales of streams and tiny tree saplings

What do I know

The spike of the heron

Pricks into the apple core

She places it by her side

Unmoved like the river

Perhaps we are siblings

Learn more about Sarah J. Stanley here