Daniel Sprick’s Hiraeth – A Little Light Magic

There is a word in the ancient Welsh tongue which captures the deep longing wanderers sometimes experience for a lost home, or for a vanished place where our hearts once found their comfort. This profound feeling, called “hiraeth,” perfectly describes this unsettling yearning, this atavistic desire, this romantic hunger for the lost homeland in which our souls might find rest in equilibrium with nature, in harmony with the world and in concord with our ancestors. The pragmatic Saxons called it “heimweh,” which meant “home-woe” or “home-pain,” but this is neither full nor rich enough a word to describe the personal and mythic mixture of sadness and nostalgic pleasure that encircle the Celtic hiraeth (pronounced “heerath”), which folds together the feelings of spiritual emptiness and physical yearning we experience when dwelling within this sensual and emotional state.

Daniel Sprick, Lilacs, oil paint on wood panel, 30 x 24

The English called it home-sickness, but hiraeth is beyond being merely a longing for return to the familiar; it is a void which can only be filled by envelopment in the beloved, the mythological home we desire and mourn, which may have never actually existed, which may never have been manifest in the world, may be a place where our souls sense their source, where the spirits of our forebears call to us, where our histories entwine with the land in perfect harmony with our spirits. In our hiraeth we imagine ourselves in concord with this perfected place, our selves disintegrating into unity with this homeland.

Daniel Sprick, Bed, oil paint on wood panel, 10 x 12

The master painter Daniel Sprick conjures his hiraeth in images, in humble interiors which capture simple moments of his domestic life. Here it is in his vision of an unmade bed full of the glow and light of white sheets, where the sleeping and rested body has left its mark on creased and rumpled cloth, a nested refuge and sanctuary floating over the rich darkness of a polished warm and wooden floor. Here it is in a cityscape of the Denver skyline under the embrace of clouds, set behind a balcony setting of platters and fruit, spread stretched and sublime under sunset’s long pink and sensual glow. And here it is, composed and arranged in blue and white ceramics and milk-white jars, a peeled orange and flowers picked out in a ray of light, against a sticky and dawn rose sky outside, framed by the foliate shapes of natural forms. A glass ball replicates the twisted and empty room. Everything is doubled in a mirror which faces us, but no-one is present here. There is no reflection of the observing artist, no sign of any observer. Who will fill the void? Nature abhors a vacuum, and the clean blankness of these bare platters begs us to bring food – the absence invites us to offer ourselves to the communal table, to fill these empty spaces, to satisfy our hiraeth.

Daniel Sprick, Still Life and the City, oil paint on wood panel, 24 x 30

Sprick has learned to find his way along the enchanted paths that lie beyond ordinary technical mastery, and has entered the unknown country of divine light, a supernatural and marginal world of sensory magic. His paintings resemble reality, but they share his subtle vision of the space between our world and the world of vibrating light. Here is his hiraeth, crafted from light. “Energy is in vibration and everything in the universe is vibration,” he says, “and so, really, I speak of it metaphorically without even knowing what vibration really is on a physical level – you know, you can see sound vibration sometimes on the surface of a glass of water. I understand acoustic vibration, that’s the easiest to understand, much more than light vibration, because I have to take the physicists’ word for it there.”

Daniel Sprick, Fantasy Landscape, oil paint on wood panel, 24 x 36

Outside he paints in the morning light beside still waters, in the sunny brightness at the rapids, at twilight beside the riverbend. Back in the studio he is a conjurer, shaping light to create a magic world, inventing imaginary landscapes. He belongs to nature. Sunlight has never shaped the riverbank like this, where the umber undercut meets the reflecting water, and circled sunshine beams through nightfall, but Sprick senses how the special play of light might touch the soul and arranges his oils like the interlacing verse of incantation. “What we see is just a little bit of what’s actually going on. I can’t really consciously put spirit or the next world into the painting, not really consciously, it just comes out that way and it really only comes out to people who have eyes to see it,” he says. Here is his hiraeth. The landscape is glorious to him, and its sky arches over him standing high upon the misty land. He is Thoreau’s transcendent hero, this painter of the return to the archetypal home.

Daniel Sprick, Destiny and Aspiration, oil paint on wood panel, 60 x 30

A woman clasps her hands in warm affirmation, in grateful prayer, in happy abandonment to complete and open welcome, framed dark against pink and purple snow, under a pale sky split by a low oak branch at the edge of a cold nemeton in an icy land and backed by a house in shadow, waiting to be joined by friends and family. She is the embodied spirit of the friendly hearth, the incarnation of hiraeth’s warm flame, standing before air, on frosty earth and frozen water.

We live among many whose lives are complete in hearth and heart, who may never feel hiraeth. They may hear the word but never know its music, they may see these paintings but never perceive a lost spiritual or physical home in them, for they have never wandered far from their own, and though they may rest easy in pragmatic and contented lives, their hearts, while beating an earthy and steady pace, are dulled to the rhythms of other spheres, and their heavy ears cannot hear the romantic and mystic melodies of the imagined land; they are closed to the counterpoint of hiraeth.

Daniel Sprick, Imaginary Creek, oil paint on wood panel, 24 x 33

Wanderers can never truly come home, for they have gathered the wide sight that long travel brings, and they hunger for a remembered time and place which has slipped away into the foreign country of the past, and their metaphysical longing can never be fulfilled – but their eyes may open wide to the healing Sprick’s pictures bring, a substitute for the lost and sacred center, an anchor, a new foundation. Here is his hiraeth.

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