Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic When landscape artist Tor Falcon chose the Moon as a subject of investigation, she could not have predicted how an idle wondering about lunar phases would amount to four years spent standing in the dark fields surrounding her Norfolk home in all weathers, seasons and moods, as she attempted to capture the high priestess of the night sky. Part obsession, part delirium, the project in its early days was also part wild goose chase. The Moon seemed to deliberately thwart her efforts: rising at odd hours, sinking without warning, or moving so quickly that its colouring and visage appeared to have altered in the seconds between each stroke of Falcon’s chalk on to paper. In those first efforts, frustration often equalled euphoria. Her diary entries reveal her exasperation: “18.00. No moon, extremely cold. Bewildered. Getting cross. Do star jumps.” And: “I’m sitting in the meadow, in the dark, doing nothing, feeling ridiculous, getting cold.” (Coldness is a recurrent theme.) After another attempt: “Why did I think this was a good idea? I’m cold. Drawings go in the bin.” She began to spend a lot of time in the company of bats.As she learned to see in the dark, feeling for her chalk colours by shape, allowing her sight to adjust, the Moon slowly began to reveal itself to Falcon’s eye. Her set-up also improved. After one night spent crouching on the ground, craning her head to draw the Perseid meteor shower, her husband made her a moveable, Moon-watching bed. A mattress laid on a wooden platform, fixed with cart wheels and handles for pushing it through fields, the bed meant that Falcon could study the Moon and draw in comfort. After a night spent crouching on the ground, craning her head to draw the Perseid meteor shower, her husband made her a moveable, Moon-watching bed The results can be seen in the exhibition Sugar Beet Moon, opening next week at Abbott and Holder Gallery in Bloomsbury, London. In some of her drawings, moonlight appears to spread into the surrounding darkness, in opaline waves. In others, it streams through silhouetted trees. The Moon is, equally, a seam of brightness, outlining black hills, or a pale crescent, ornamenting the surface of a river. It’s an intimate portrait. Falcon’s Moon rises out of the pasture surrounding her Norfolk home of 30 years, glows through the stands of ash and oak in her rewilded fields, hangs above the quarry pit ponds where her husband occasionally kayaks, their flat surfaces gilded with green algae. “Sometimes it’s this cold, detached, marker of time — just a rock going around us,” says Falcon, soft-voiced and graceful, standing in the calamine-pink kitchen of her flint and brick farmhouse, on a warm September day. “And other times it’s wildly romantic.” After her brother died, she recalls, “I went outside, and looked up; there was a 22-degree halo around the Moon. It took up the whole sky.” After graduating from Norwich Art School, Falcon devoted herself to raising three children with her husband, Andrew, a forester. When the children grew up and left home she began making art seriously. The subject of her first exhibition was a year of walking and drawing the Peddars Way, in Norfolk. “Built by the Romans 2,000 years ago, it is a dead straight line from nowhere to nowhere,” she wrote in the accompanying text. Falcon’s colour-saturated drawings call to mind the work of John Nash or Eric Ravilious. Similarly exploratory was “Rivers of Norfolk”, where she set out to follow 38 “rivers and streams, ditches and trickles”, drawing them over the course of four years, from source to mouth, and capturing with equal attentiveness a river foaming with effluence and the mirrored beauty of a drowned plain. Chalks have always been her preferred medium. In their shared aspects of physical duress, of intense looking and a deep sense of place, these projects primed Falcon for her years of investigating the night sky. Though immense in object and preoccupation, her study remains human in scale and humane in ethos. She writes: “Slowly I understand that the Moon isn’t a subject on its own, that it’s part of everything around me — the stream, the toads, owls, mosquitoes, horse chestnut blossom.” One of her favourite memories is of a spring night, “hearing a little toad near my feet, singing”. “The landscape is always what’s interested me,” she says. “This project felt as exciting as exploring a foreign country. Learning how to draw, look, listen, move about in the dark and follow the Moon and stars was astonishing. Made doubly appealing or confusing by the fact that I was at home. I guess it’s that weird thing of the every night marvel that is right under your nose.” Her exhibition’s title echoes this idea. “Wolf Moons and Sturgeon Moons are Native American names to describe a moon in a particular landscape and time of year,” she says. “I wanted to describe my part of Norfolk. Sugar Beet Moon is a November Moon, because, in my area, that month is all about the sugar beet harvest and the bang crash of lorries all day.” Her title encapsulates an unsentimental approach to this most sentimental of subjects. The Moon has long been memorialised by artists. Its symbolism spans cultures and centuries, signifying everything from fertility and immortality to the occult. Its dominion over time and tide is known but not, perhaps, fully understood by the majority of us that live beneath it. It is mostly ignored. But it’s this unwatched quality that appeals to artists. This month, the hours between dusk and dawn are also the subject of an exhibition Une Chambre à Soi at Château La Coste, in Provence. Curated by Margaux Plessy, 15 emerging artists have been invited to make work that tells the story of a single, sleepless night. Yet, in this age, a woman choosing to spend her nights outside, alone in the darkness, even in the middle of nowhere, seems a radical way to make art. Was Falcon ever afraid? She demurs. “Moz [my lurcher] is always with me, and there’s nobody around.” Only once, when a torchlight swept across the field, and fearing a poacher’s shotgun, did she retreat indoors. All of this is detailed in Falcon’s fascinating diary. Of a dead stoat, found one full Moon, she notes: “First came the greenbottles, then the devil’s coach horses and the undertaker beetles. The eyes were the first obvious thing to go. Then the undressing began: a ring of hair is suddenly evenly spread around it. The next day the chomping could be heard.” Her postcard-sized impressions of the Moon are annotated with descriptions that are haiku-like in their compressed resonance. “26 Sept 2021. 21.00 Waning gibbous. Rising NE. Fuzzy on leading edge. Big, ripe and bright. Warm, dewy. Tawny owl.” Daytime drawing now seems perilously boring: “Where’s the challenge?” Even now, the darkness thrills her. “In daylight I have space around me,” she writes. “I like to think I am a solid freestanding creature but at night, darkness invades that space, it bumps right up against me and crosses what I thought were my edges. It’s deeply comforting and I feel wildly alive.” ‘Sugar Beet Moon: An Artist’s Study of the Sky’ at Abbott and Holder Gallery, London, from September 19 to October 19 Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
