The forest is not a place I merely visit; it is a stage where reality and dream entwine, where the everyday dissolves into something other. It has always called to me, from childhood fantasies to adult journeys, a realm of shifting shadows and whispered promises.
On the Edge of Bohemia, 44x77cm, 2021, Black Acrylic Gesso and Floor Paint on Collaged Watercolour Paper.
Childhood Enchantment
My first forests weren’t only made of trees but also of stories. The Brothers Grimm painted woods alive with danger and delight, while The Singing Ringing Tree on television turned them into surreal worlds of enchantment. Disney animations brought colour and song to their shadows, while the funfair murals I adored hinted at hidden pathways to other realms.
Closer to home, the Wilderness and Dan y Graig Hill flanked my village like quiet guardians. They weren’t vast, but to my young mind, they stretched forever. Here, I was both hero and witness. Trees became towers, branches transformed into beasts, and every rustle of leaves carried the weight of a thousand imagined footsteps. These woods held my fears and my fascinations, alive with the essence of those fairy tales I loved so much.
The Forest Beyond
As I grew, my forests expanded. Family camping trips took me to the Forest of Dean and the New Forest, and one summer with the Cubs, I found myself on the edge of a Scottish wood, its silence as profound as its vastness.
Then, in the summer of 1968, I stepped into a forest unlike any I had known. We traveled to Germany, where the Black Forest unfolded like an opera set, grand and full of hidden dramas. It was a summer marked by tension—the Prague Spring crushed, the spectre of Russian tanks lingering in every adult conversation. Against this backdrop of geopolitical unease, I found myself in a forest that felt otherworldly.
The Black Forest was alive with its own mysteries. Log cabins and painted wooden buildings appeared like props in an unspoken tale, while narrow walkways beckoned into an unknown world. I collected souvenirs—small metal badges to nail onto my child-sized walking stick, proof that I had wandered here.
Yet my imagination betrayed me. I had expected the trees to be black, shadowy and impenetrable, like the enchanted woods of my stories. Instead, they were earthy browns and greens, their beauty grounded and tangible. I was both awed and unsettled, caught between the real and the imagined.
A Return in Mist
Decades later, in 2002, the Black Forest called me back. This time, I brought my wife, Debra, and a bag packed with charcoal and heavy watercolour paper, ready to capture the essence of the place. But nature had other plans.
It was the wettest August in Germany in forty years. The forest was cloaked in mist, a shifting veil that turned trees into phantoms. Paths dissolved into whiteness, reappearing as if summoned by unseen hands. The forest breathed, alive with its own rhythm, and we were drawn into its depths, like actors in a play without a script.
Drawing felt impossible, the dampness seeping into everything, but inspiration took another form. One evening, I made a series of signs: arrows, nameless nameplates, and numbered circles. The next day, we wandered into the mist, placing these nonsensical markers where the forest seemed to ask for them. They gave no direction but mirrored our sense of disorientation, turning the woods into a living installation, a dialogue between us and the trees.
Saxon Switzerland
Years later, in Saxon Switzerland on the edge of Bohemia, I encountered a forest unlike any other. Everything was muted, as if the world had been washed in grey. Mist clung to sandstone peaks, and the trees stood like solemn sentinels, their tops fading into the sky.
Here, the forest whispered in tones of quiet melancholy. The scent of damp pine mingled with the earthy richness of fungi, and resin dripped from trees like liquid amber. Every step felt like trespassing into a dreamscape.
The rocks tumbled like forgotten thoughts, their fall undoing centuries of stability, while the forest floor was a painter’s palette of greens and greys. The canopy above held the light in its grasp, turning it soft and spectral. The silence here wasn’t empty—it was full, heavy with the weight of time and nature’s secrets.
oN ThE eDGe oF BoHeMiA
by Robin Mason
...just tones of grey now, the distant hilltops vanishing: mid-toned, mid-grey, warm grey, cool grey, platinum grey, winter grey, grey hair, grey day, greyness, shale grey... pantone grey vapours.
The colour of moisture, surrounded us, smelling as fresh as pine needles, splintering the forest floor with ‘a carpet of reverie’: the shape of an artist’s palette.
Heading east, searching for more souls to dampen, the moist colours with their ‘ghostly paling presence’ indulge in acts of insignificance. What does the colour ‘fresh aroma’ smell like? A glance is returned, and the word paint is mouthed without a sound.
From the heads of hills that peer back at us, as if out of the white capes of the barber’s chair where the falling rocks, like locks of hair, tumble, undoing all the stability of their growth. There, sand-stoned gravel expanded by the heat of the day is trapped in the ice of each night, yearning once more to be tossed through the basin of the Elbe, swaying beneath the tranquil sun-smitten sky, shadowed by the shared clouds of millennia, drunk on the scents of flowers, lost and entangled in a language of no colour.
The clouds trace each peak here, tree tops gather and silhouette themselves like stage set props that sit and re-enact Caspar David Friedrich’s painting, the one in Hamburg, we sit a while and reflect.
Beyond the canopy of trees, a heady damp mist fades the fluorescent colour of photosynthesis into green greys of fungal growth that speckle the ground. No sound now, just the gentle sway of leaves, while the visible drips of sap and resin mingle the air with the smell of fungus and fir tree...we walk to the sound of grass shoots from footsteps, springing back to life.
We leave that place forever searching for its sunlight, we leave that place, entangled in its fecundity...
The Curtain Call
The forest has never been just a setting; it is a character, a story, a presence that shapes and reveals. It is a place where magic realism feels less like a genre and more like a truth.
Every forest I have walked—whether in childhood fantasy or mist-shrouded reality—has been a stage where the boundaries of my imagination dissolve. I will always return, seeking its shadows, its whispers, its endless unfolding stories.
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