'Spring Light'

Mark Titman believes that the artist and the viewer do not have to suffer for art. However, he does believe you have to appreciate what is around you. Being lucky enough to live near the Heath with its "bleak" or Black Death connotations, Mark particularly enjoys Spring on the Heath and the contrast this season brings to the space. The contrast of the "Bleak Heath", against the new crisp skies is both symbolic and miraculously normal. Normal, in that the Heath frames and enhances renewed every day human activity in a way that neither the city nor countryside can.

Blackheath with its gleaming spires and dark horizons has a looming sky which offers refreshing activity and luminous warmth in the Spring. Coming out of the darkness of Winter, Spring’s warmth and light touches the Heath and its inhabitants gently. It raises the spirit of the passer-by. The rolling Heath seems like a gently dappled seascape. Here, the occasional passer-by gets lost glintingly in its vastness. Though contained, the space with its wide horizons offers views upwards and onwards and in some way gently inwards. The lack of advertising, signage and human interaction make the markers of St Michael’s Church and the other churches in the area all that can be seen.

These churches like sentinels and lighthouses anchor the ground from floating free of the earth. They talk like standing stones. Yet the Heath and its churches are also paradoxically mute, vowed to silence; like the ancient monks who once inhabited the vastness of oceanic wilderness. In Spring, the passer-by no longer battles the Winter’s wrath with stoicism. He now sails free spirited over the Heath. The scale of the individual is shrunk in such expanse. Yet the warming light enobles and encourages the city dweller. Here the jogger, kite flyer and walker are lost to the sky, earth and uplifting hopes for Summer, yet are fixed and located in themselves and the nearness of what they are doing.