Sonia Stanyard's paintings of cabins evoke a sense of the traditional forest hideaway. Refuge. Cabins have been our shelters at the frontier of nature for centuries all over the world and not least for the pioneers of North America.
Ellen Glasgow, A Pulitzer-Prize winning author, friendly with Thomas Hardy was one of the first naturalist writers. In 1935, Vein of Iron was published to great acclaim, though now out-of-print and much of the description reminds me of the feeling captured in Stanyards paintings.
Within a screen of yellow sycamores, she saw the cabin beside a tiny stream, as bright as quicksilver, which darted over bare rock. Around them, the wilderness closed in, murmurous, myriad-coloured, inscrutable. Above the wilderness and the violet-blue rim of the mountains, the autumn sunset was throbbing...
The wind dropped and died in the valleys; the light thinned and paled over the mountains; the rustling of the leaves, like the stealthy patter of bare feet, sank from a murmur to a sigh and from a sigh into stillness. Only the small hidden lives, the creeping furry shapes, within and without the forest-only the scurrying of mice, the burrowing of moles, the shuffling of toads, the scampering of ground squirrels - had inherited the twilight. With the fainting wind, all the wild earthy scents grew stronger and closer.
