The River/The Heron by Sarah J. Stanley
Title: The River/The Heron
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