Carl
Fredrik Hill visits Lake Buchanan
‘The new school,’ Carl Fredrik Hill writes
in a letter, from Montigny to Lund, in June
1876,
‘involves carrying out one part only of the
picture
and blurring all the rest.’ Now it is June
1989,
and today nature is painting precisely so,
it too a stubborn master soon to be
confused.
A lone pelican goes at the water’s edge
beneath a
tropical-grey sky. So heavily its wings
beat!
This mournful inland lake has now put on
its
July colour – a molten silver in a silver
mist.
Alchemy. In the hermetic vessel now and for
so long
the elements’ transformations are taking
place.
Yes, silver over the hot dead calm.
To swim round the boat is like swimming in
tea-water.
It is not anchored. It is far too still.
No anchor line would be sufficient anyway.
It’s several hundred metres here. We too,
the swimmers, are birds. And do not notice
it.
Far off the sound of a speeding boat.
Moving in another direction. In silver.
Believe me
there are places, in both geography and
dreams,
that could not be painted in any other way.
So does form emerge out of the formless,
and the formless out of form.
Maestro Hill! How much you knew after all!
And how self-evident wasn’t it
that you afterwards had to consign it to oblivion!
Let it fall deep into the waters of forgetfulness.
The coin that seesaws down into the depths
and is gone.
‘The score or so pictures which he did
himself
that were in the room he apparently never
paid
the slightest attention to afterwards.’
(to Dr Birgit Rausing)
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