Panoramic landscape over lofty portrait, the paired images were in a T-formation though were not apparently connected other than by nearness of location. On the narrow slice of wall between the two a single piece of notepaper was taped. It had dual titles written on it in erratic emerald, with both ascending and descending directional arrows indicating which was which. To say that it looked casual was to understate the point. Rather, it looked like an inscription on the inside of a public toilet door, and Mick hoped Alma could get through the final ten or so descriptive jottings without adding a big cock and its obligatory three crocodile tears of liquid genetics. The slim letterbox proportions of the topmost rectangle of art appeared to contain still a further minimalist abstract, although having just been misdirected by a sculpture’s eyeball Mick elected to look closer before he came to a verdict. Following the label’s raised green spear back to its point of origin he learned that this piece had been called A Cold and Frosty Morning, though the reasoning behind this choice was far from obvious. The picture was a Cinemascope view of mottled fog, a cobweb field that might have been achieved by taking a dark background tone comprised of black and brown and dark viridian and then applying overprinted fibres in a bleached and tangled fuzz, possibly with a sponge. Nose nearer to the cloudy marbling he could make out that the shade visible between the matted strands was actually a hyper-realistic study in acrylics which detailed an undergrowth of intertwining stems and branches, curling leaves reduced to nibbled fractals at their edges, all of this fastidious work concealed by the obscuring steam of down. It struck him that he might be looking at a bush or shrub horrifically enveloped in the spun threads of some huge arachnid, an albino strain if one went by the colour of its fine suspension bridge secretions. Was it one of Alma’s monster paintings but without the monster? Only when he noticed a small, pearly slug of pigment raised up a few millimetres from the canvas and connected to the budding twig above it by the slenderest of white lines did he realise that the architect of this fibrous enigma was not some mutated spider but, instead, a minute toothpaste-squeeze of silkworm. Having noticed this unusually industrious individual it was still almost a minute before Mick was made aware that there were dozens, hundreds of the dangling, glinting casts standing out from the surface, an infinitesimal and boneless multitude become a grain, a patterning of wet and glistening corrugations. It was marvellous and, at the same time, made his skin crawl. It encapsulated one of those electrifying moments when nature revealed itself in all its alien and appalling splendour, all its bio-shock. Realising that the foliage barely noticeable under the occluding fluff must be a mulberry bush, he felt a modest pang of crossword-puzzle satisfaction at deciphering at least the title of the work, despite having no clue how it related to the exhibition’s overall direction, or indeed to anything.
Stooping a little, hands on knees, he transferred his attention to exhibit twenty-six, immediately beneath. Instantly recognisable as figurative illustration with the straightforward appeal of a classic children’s book delineator, perhaps Arthur Rackham, this was more Mick’s cup of dormouse tea. Tracing the drooping arrow upward to its source he learned that this one was called Round the Bend. In soft and faded pastels, pinks and purples, greens and greys, an outdoor scene was conjured with a wall of towering conifers in the far background, underneath a churning and rain-bloated sky which nonetheless seemed colour-pregnant, immanent with spectra. Unkempt grass rolled undulant between the tree line and a rush-fringed river, slowly winding like some tranquilised constrictor through the bottom of the picture nearest to the viewer. Here, standing with great composure on the bank and almost to her waist in the sharp reeds, was a bird-boned old lady in a cerise cardigan and navy skirt, her lustrous brunette tresses now an ash-slide. Though it clung more tightly to the skull beneath than in her youth, her face still had a loveliness; was wry and clever, luminous with fearless curiosity. Mick noticed that his sister had made a mistake, a stumble with the aquarelle that made it seem as if the woman had crossed eyes, but this did not detract from the hushed, church-like atmospherics of the drawing. There the old girl waited, relatively small down to the picture’s lower right, head cocked politely like the listener in a doorstep discourse, a means-tested Alice pensioned to a fallow wonderland. Emerging from near stagnant waters to the left and reaching almost to the picture’s upper border, patently the reason for the tall and vertical proportions of the frame, was the deformed river-leviathan from item twenty-one. The stalk of its distended throat surged up and up out from a rippled lace of pond-scum, robed in slime, thick as a redwood with the railway-carriage head precariously mounted at its top end, tilting in a compensatory drift like a cane balancing on someone’s palm. Deep in their sockets, whelks lodged in both barrels of a shotgun, the monstrosity’s malicious little eyes were fixed enquiringly upon its human interlocutor. Unnoticed in the earlier representation, Mick could now determine that the thing had hands, or fins, or something: splayed and spidery dactyls with discoloured webbing stretched between them, predatory umbrellas raised in front of the freshwater basilisk and gesturing as though in trivial conversation. Tugboat-grinding jaws hung open in mid anecdote and there appeared to be the rusted carcass of a child’s perambulator, snagged on a three-foot bicuspid by its handle, in amongst the dripping pelt of waterweed. The carefully pencilled depiction, blotted here and there by artfully positioned teardrop-damage, floating bubble-globes in which the soluble crayon details bled like spectrographs, glowed with an ambience that was hauntingly familiar and which Mick eventually identified from his few Alma-instigated juvenile experiments with L.S.D. The tingling lysergic apprehension of a morning world about to start, beaded with Eden, was as he remembered. So was the exciting and uncomfortable sensation that this was the opalescent anteroom of madness, granting access only to whispering corridors, sedative monologues and a cumulative estrangement from the ordinary, the familiar, and the dear. The still, prismatic scene insinuated that unearthly worlds and inconceivable experience might lie behind more faces in the crowd than were suspected, and that the agreed-on family-friendly Milton Keynes of mass contemporary reality may not be privileged. The frozen moment was a violet-tinted window on the overgrown margins of being, the outlying wilderness of phantoms and hallucinations that encroached, a mind or two more every day, on reason’s street-grid.