A view from the margins

Trying to work with what's here

I was so stunned to find out that there’s an automatic AI-generated reading of this that I just recorded my own. It’s far from perfect, but a first attempt. I’m not sure what to do with the images, which I don’t describe this time.

Writing Art Pilgrim for the last ten months has brought home to me how much I still struggle to find an entry point into the art of my own culture. My art school experiences in the 70s flipped me out of my own environment and sent me hurtling through space; bouncing me first onto the rich red soil of the Umbrian countryside, then catapulting me to the snow peaks of the Himalayas, and the distant mountains visible on a Tokyo skyline. I held on, just, by letting my pencil wander over rhododendron trees at nearly 5,000 feet, testing my magical brush pen on strange stone gods decorated by the shoes of dead children in Shinto shrines.

My adventuring was grounded by the colours and shapes I found. A white marble temple against a green hillside forest, the smell of fresh tatami when I sneaked into a temple on a Tokyo side-street and found myself alone in front of a black stone Buddha, golden filigree metalwork fanning out into quiet space. Tibetans burning juniper boughs for incense, the touch of the hot stones beneath my feet as I visited temples in remote hillside villages, the sound of wood and paper doors sliding open in my tiny traditional Japanese two-roomed apartment.

Perhaps I’ve never fully returned to the prosaic click of a conventional British door, or to sitting on chairs. I still take my shoes off when I come into the house. I’ve painted the walls of my art room with the warm yellow ochre of North Indian pilgrim robes. Here in Scotland, I still look longingly outwards, seeking the feeling of those colours and shapes and sounds that fed me for so long, missing the smell of two-stroke and feeling a pang every time I get a whiff of pancake rolls as I pass the Chinese restaurant at the bottom of my street.

I see everything with a stranger’s eyes. Not only when living in India and Japan, but here in my own culture as well. This is the secret gift that I was given; to have knowledge of nothing (I left home at 16, left art school at 18). Unqualified, I had no experience of the norms of progression to university and expected job openings until well into my thirties, when I finally got sick of busking it as an English teacher, and of continually having to make up my own story.

The ‘experiment with the mainstream’ that followed lasted almost twenty years. The first bit, the degree in Indian art, history and philosophy, was a holy miracle. Everything I had seen and felt and loved flowed into the dry lectures, the chronological unpicking of previously inspiring verse, the long hours of memorising Devanagari script and struggling with Sanskrit conjugations. In the Gandhi Peace Foundation in Delhi I had arranged five different translations of the Bhagavad Gita in front of me and studied all of their different interpretations, standing next to a display case that housed the bullet that had killed Gandhi and his final possessions, the barred windows open to the screeching mynah birds and the sound of traffic, the smells of frangipani. Now, we took a year to translate the first two verses from the original. I was transfixed. Even this tiny glimpse into the multiple meanings that were held in every syllable and foundational root opened out a world to me that had been completely hidden until then. Going back to India to research two final year projects gave me access to interactions and exchanges that deepened everything I loved beyond measure, and I found myself wondering that I had never found the miracle of this kind of engagement until then.

But, like all of my long peak experiences, the degree eventually came to an end, and that was when I decided that it was time to try to find a way to function in my place of origin. The summer after graduation I briefly went back to English teaching and was horrified by the feeling of going backwards in time. I saw an advert in the paper for a Masters in Education and signed up. Ironically, it turned out to be my position as an outsider to everything – political culture, the norms of psychology and sociology, and lack of the experience of grafting for a PhD and dreaming of entering academia – which gave me an angle on it all, some kind of purchase in the for me utterly weird world of British higher education and academic culture. My outsider perspective build me a career for the next ten years.

That’s all a long time ago now. I returned to my art around 2008, and in the following fifteen years or so of my full-time art practice I didn’t think much about the fact that I was, once again, doing my own thing as an outsider in terms of the art that was going on around me. I ignored the art world at large, drew on all my loves and influences, and just tried to keep going. Then in 2024, needing to digest, I called a big pause.

It feels a bit like the end of the Indian studies degree now. I’ve spent years immersed in colour and paint and line, fulfilling my earliest imperative, and now that period of intensity has ended. Since 7th June this year, when I published the final chapter of my art adventures here on Substack, I’ve been looking around me, trying to find things to respond to, things that will make me think and learn. I find that I’ve woken up, once again, in the middle of everything I rejected, with nowhere else to go, and now no desire to go anywhere else either. This time I’m an outsider not only to the contemporary art world in the UK, but also to the older cultural manifestations that I find here, in art, architecture, and philosophy. I’m trying to find points of entry, ways to appreciate and relate to what is here, in the city of my birth. I’m way out at sea once again, but I know that my particular version of being at sea is all I have, so that’s what I have to work with.

My latest art adventure was to investigate what someone had told me was ‘the Sistine Chapel of Edinburgh’: the Mansfield Traquair Centre. Originally built as a Catholic Apostolic church, it was designed by Sir Robert Rowand Anderson and completed in 1895.

The most striking feature of the Centre, now used for weddings and events, is its murals, painted by an artist called Phoebe Anna Traquair in the 1890s.

I tried my best to ignore the subject matter; the banks of golden-haloed angels blowing their long horns, the dejected humans being saved by Christ. I wanted to open to the beautiful turn-of-the-century forms, the arts and crafts feel, the references to much older Italian paintings, the influence of Burne-Jones; to receive it all as paintings, images in colour and line. But I just couldn’t do it. The qualities I talked about in ‘God above, God below’ were all there, in the upward gaze. Literally, as the murals were high above our heads, and symbolically, in the sense of the focus on heaven, life after death, and the existence of other-worldly intermediaries with wings.

Mostly, I didn’t recognise the stories. With the one above, at first I only saw two figures embracing, one with wings, one without, both with haloes, about to kiss. The one without the halo was stepping into holy space, signalled by Mary and the infant in front of them, while outside on the growing grass, a soldier was about to knife a woman with a baby. I knew it was Mary and her son, so my outsider status is already somewhat suspect. Then an ancient 5 year old memory of a brief spell at Sunday School reminded me of the story about Herod’s men. Perhaps I’m not so much an outsider as a refugee.

I had nothing to hold onto with this one. A pile of women appear to have been drinking, and an angel is trying to rouse them.

There are angels everywhere.

‘Ten virgins that took their lamps and went forth to meet the bride’.

I realise that many people, when faced with a situation like this, would research the background and history of what they had seen, before writing a carefully-worded, well-referenced account of who Phoebe Anna Traquair was; where she sat in the Arts and Crafts movement, and perhaps what was known about her in relation to the art history of Edinburgh at that time. For some reason I have no interest whatsoever in doing that. That’s art historical writing and not what I’m doing here.

Having said that, I’m thinking a great deal about context in relation to art at the moment. I have an unfinished article that’s exploring the loss of history which I currently feel all around me, as Google selection, Instagram triviality and AI fabrication try to reduce everything to a blandified, context-free moment of consumption. I have many arguments about why context and history are vital.

At the same time, when I think about images, or music, I think, I don’t need to know, do I? The image either moves me, touches something, or it doesn’t. The piece of music the same. I want to feel a piece of art or the music, not read a dissertation on it, or fill myself up with historic description. Either the art has power for me, or it doesn’t.

I tried to receive Phoebe Anna Traquair’s paintings in this spirit, to let them touch me as skillful line, wondrous colour, extraordinary juxtaposition of figure and fig-leaf and branch. But it was too difficult. Although I’m not a Christian, I nonetheless brought my own context; all my biases, and everything I know and have experienced and don’t relate to in Christianity. I couldn’t receive the paintings without their symbolism and imagery igniting my own stories and associations.

This seems to be an example of how the contexts we bring are inescapable, even if we choose not to engage with history and other contextual information. For me, it’s also something to do with the historic weight that I feel Christianity carries. Not only that it’s so frequently life-denying and guilt-inducing, but that many of its beliefs were used to underpin a colonial history of plunder, subjugation and the deliberate undermining of non-Christian cultures. I feel all of this when I see angels sketched out above my head, however exquisitely.

It’s my outsider position in relation to Hinduism and Buddhism which frees me to appreciate what feels so different in a Mattancherry mural or a painting on the walls of a cave at Ajanta. I have studied some of the contexts for both of these, and it seems to me that the stories behind the murals in Mattancherry and Ajanta come from a very different sensibility. Rich and varied, there’s no one narrative. There are stories of battles and loss, but as part of life, not as the background to a specific martyrdom. Gods and Bodhisattavas are shown embedded in a teeming, fecund natural world, filled with animals and people. There are mighty battles, courtly scenes, atmospheres of love, spirits playing musical instruments. Eyes gaze out at the viewer. The gods and their stories, or the potrayals of the previous lives of the Buddha, move me with their recognition of the beauty and complexity of life, whereas Phoebe’s beautiful forms and colours seem to tell an unending tale of romanticised woe.

Mattancherry mural, Kochi, Kerala, South India. Furtive photograph taken when the guards were looking the other way, 2014

Buddha as Padmapani, Ajanta Caves, Maharashtra, India.

Detail of Ajanta mural

I’m in deep water here, starting to compare the artistic expressions of three major religions, none of which I participate in, and only two of which I’ve studied in any detail. But there’s something about looking at the art that was made to serve these different sets of ideas that fascinates me. These religions emerge from a cultural context, and they go on to shape that context for hundreds of years afterwards; in the cases of Christianity and Buddhism, often spreading far beyond their lands of origin.

Perhaps I’ll try going back to the beginning. Here are two examples of early Buddhist and Christian art, both made roughly 200-300 years after their founders’ deaths:

Third century Fresco of Jesus as the Good Shepherd

Gods and celestial beings worshipping an empty seat under the peepal tree 1st century, BCE

In the early months of writing here, my direction was clear. Now all the advance pieces have been published, and every week is a wide open mystery. I’m following a breadcrumb trail, and I have no idea where it will lead me.