Craving amongst the trees at Exmoor
It was lunchtime and I decided that lunch times are for getting out, taking a walk and relieving the frustrations and tensions created by the morning’s hard work.
So I pulled out of my drive and headed for Dunkery Beacon with my sandwiches and flask of coffee to where I knew I could find some very pleasant wood carvings amongst the trees at Webber’s Post just below Dunkery Beacon.
The sky was beginning to look nicely blue, the birds were singing all around me and the grass and fir trees were looking very green as I parked up, all of which started to put me in a better humor.
Wood sculpture at Webbers Post in West Somerset, Exmoor
I particularly like Webber’s Post car park. It is a bit bumpy because it is made all natural stone with a few clumps of grass and the occasional tree but the views are wonderful across the valley and there are some very pleasant walks either up to the top of Dunkery Beacon itself or down into the valley where there is a very nice small river that flows down into Horner and the eventually to the sea.
The wood sculptures are amongst the trees besides Webbers Post car park and stand three or four feet or more in height. It occurred to me that a nice game for some children would be to discover how many wood carvings they could find. I wonder if I have found them all yet? Perhaps it doesn’t really matter because they are just really nice things to see, nestling amongst the fir trees on this high hill above the Horner valley.
Abstract carving at Webbers Post West Somerset, Exmoor
The second thing that children or even grownups may find an interesting thing to do is to try to decide what the wood carvings represent. I was looking at one and was convinced that it was an apple but, as I walked around it, the carving seemed to change into a heart shape and the stalk of the apple seem to change into a sticking up hair of a head.
There are other wood carvings that would defy a description except perhaps they remind one of Picasso’s Guernica.
Some seem fairly representational of birds or squirrels
Others seem very abstract such as cones with patterns on them.
I wondered how the wood carvings got here. Perhaps an artist was commissioned to do the work because, if they had just appeared overnight, I’m sure the Exmoor National Park Authority would have removed them by now. But they look so natural and free that it is nice to imagine that they may have been created by a wandering artist who just happen to have a chainsaw with him (or her).
One final thought occurred to me, as I climbed into my camper van. If the very same sculptures or wood carvings had been displayed in an Art gallery, I wonder if my attitude to them would have been different. Would I have walked around them more carefully and spend longer looking at the ways that the shapes moved within the structure of the carvings.
I remember the length of time I spent at the Tate Modern Art Gallery in St Ives, Cornwall where I spent hours viewing pictures from different angles and admiring the way the colors blended into each other, creating different impressions, depending on the angle of viewing.
Beautiful views at Webbers Post on Exmoor, West Somerset
Are these wood carvings lesser art because they are displayed amongst trees? Or perhaps it is that, when we go to an Art gallery, we go with a particular frame of mind and with have our imaginations primed for action.
When we go for a walk in the countryside, there are so many impressions created by the clouds, the sky, the trees, rivers, flowers and animals that if we were to try to analyze these impressions in detail, our brains would perhaps become overloaded. On the other hand, a carving or sculpture presented on a plinth at an exhibition provides bundles of impressions with boundaries and is perhaps more amenable to closer analysis and abstract impression.
Whatever! As I drove away, I felt greatly relaxed and knew that I would be returning to the wood carvings of Webber’s Post, Dunkery Beacon, Exmoor in the West Country of the UK.
Bye for now
Rob