If you ever leave Havre Gosselin , on a late summers evening, after the sun goes down, say 10pm, having swum with the phosphorescent plankton that glows when you disturb the water as you swim so that the stars above are mirrored by the plankton around you. 

 

Well sometimes the moon will be up. 

 

Say a sliver of the moon tonight. When you turn to walk up the long grass bank to the monument the sky feels like a dome above you and the moon hangs like a marble in the sky. Especially on a late warm still summers evening on Sark.

 

And I remembered that moon when I was in South Africa over this last winter. I had travelled out to camp on a farm in the last valley in the  Cederberg mountains before the desert begins one valley over. I was walking back from the swimming hole late, in darkness and the moon hung like a marble in the sky, the our constant companion.

 

Yet if you look through binoculars or a telescope the surface seems so alien to me. Potted with craters and what look like pans. Bright in the eyepiece the more the sun shines on it. During the solar eclipse in March, the word totality was used to describe the moment when the moon covered the whole earth. A perfect round shadow as the moon was just the right distance between us and the sun to create the shadow.

 

I had never heard this description before and yet in that totality moment, the edges of the moon could be seen be the sun shining through. Those edges were mountains. How high I wonder the are to create a view of their valleys here on earth.

 

I began to use watercolor in South Africa after joining a class. I struggled with the techniques but took them to the Cederberg on a whim. And on another whim I found a large pack of kitchen sponges in the payment aisle  of a builders warehouse. 

 

The round marks are the kitchen sponges. I used a lasagne take out tray to mix the paint in and started exploring. Stand very close to the paintings and the colours marks and layers is an alien world. Like the moon a painting can be seen from afar in totality and yet up close it as though the surface is as alien to the painting as the moon surface from afar seems to us. 

 

 

I also came to realise that the colours of watercolour are different at night. In daytime they can seem dull,muted. At night the light up under white light, they seem to glow more to me. I think if these as night painting, best seen under those conditions as in daylight they will appear very different.