"Bleak and solemn was the view" M. R James

Alfred Wallis 1855- 1942 Dock gates c1930 oil on card

Peter Cocker 1926 - 2004 Aldeburgh 1964 oil on panel 



One day a traveller

lived through life like a shadow

process of decay

Someone condemned to death says, or thinks an hour before his death, that if he had to live on a high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only have room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than die at once.

Only to live, to live and live, whatever it maybe.

Raskolniko meditates in Crime and Punishment text taken from the Outsider Colin Wilson

His way of seeing the world is pessimistic

and of heroes and Saints explorers and discoverers 

and of barren landscapes

the Romantic outsider is a dreamer of dreams

Thus I had wandered about the city, like a child in a dream inspired by a mighty faith in the marvellousness of everything. Up courts and down courts - in and out of yards and little squares - peeping into counting houses passages and running away.

Gone Astray, Night Walks, Charles Dickens

For who knows how many the best of men have gone without a trace

drawing to an end

I set off to walk

dispelling the emptiness

so carefree

walking for hours

the thinly populated countryside

in retrospect

the sense of freedom

when confronted with traces of destruction

reaching far back into the past

evident in that remote place

a reality that had vanished forever

as dusk fell

no longer remembering

the sense of liberation

gazing

the quiet street

a grey wasteland

the far horizon

an utterly alien place

now that i begin to assemble my notes

a certain private quality

lost in thought

contemplation

open the dead man's eyes

to look upon earthly existence

with the eye of an outsider

standing motionless

sets out on his last journey

silent expression

remains

many ages are superimposed here and coexist

silent oblivion

turrets and towers

symbolic pictures of the towns

Romantic Castles

ruined cities

the grey North sea

a water tower

speculation

departed this life

his last journey

boats and barges bobbing drifting

swathed in mist

watermills Jacob van Ruisdael

Cornelius Saftleven (1607- 1681)  A watermill and sluicegate, with a village behind 

Black chalk and grey and brown wash with touches of pen and black ink and red chalk

Hubert Robert (1733 -1808) France -  A watermill with a peasant on a bridge and a dog standing on the riverbank