Finger of All Questions, Bolts Law

Inspired by walks around Bolts Law in County Durham where remnant lead mining flues, such as Jeffrey’s Chimney, draw the eye from miles around. W.H. Auden was inspired by this landscape in many poems including New Year Letter January 1940 in which he mysteriously calls this flue “the finger of all questions”. The line occurs in the dead centre of this epic 42 page poem about the fate of Europe in the Second World War as viewed from America. Spending time up there in different seasons helped me to connect with a slower turning of the world than that offered by social media and the internet, our apparent new reality. Laying slow drying oil, layer upon layer onto a resistant yet absorbing surface feels more real than it’s digital equivalent. Unlike Hockney and others I do not feel drawn to explore the representational realm of pixels but prefer to keep my fingers holding a brush, a painting knife and a rag, the age old tools of the alchemy of painting with their endless possibilities.