An Art Pilgrim year
When the sleeping policeman finally got up and walked off the stage
52 articles later, I’m still here. For me, the articles all connect to each other like beads on a string. It doesn’t matter that anyone reading will only have seen one or two, or that they have no idea about the string.
When I started in October 2024 I said that I wanted to explore the ‘intractable questions’ about art that I had carried with me throughout my whole life. I knew that the questions were still there. I’d been painting for years, but though the paintings were some kind of answer in themselves, bigger questions, such as how they sat in the context of my own culture and time, were as mysterious as ever.
My relationship with painting is strangely vexed. Sometimes the vexation has receded and the momentum of a series, or a way of working, has carried me forward, in what seemed at the time to be a relatively unproblematic way. There’s certainly plenty of work. My determination not to be stymied this time has been unshakeable.
I tried at first to work in the way that other people seemed to – in the studio by 9, work all day – the way that had been sold to me as how people who were properly committed to this path ran their lives. But something, some layer of innate, cellular intelligence, would not allow it. I listened, I adjusted. I developed an approach which involved no plans or intentions, no disciplining, no forcing; I tried to learn a new way of being, making space for whatever wanted to happen.
From time to time, though, I would have this sense that something was still in my way. For most of my life this something had been an enormous, unpassable rock, which had only twice rolled away spontaneously. The first time I was living and working in the foothills of the Himalayas in Northern India. One day it just rolled off down the mountain and suddenly even the most beaten-down shack hammered together from cooking oil cans became inexplicably beautiful. There was no question about whether or not I was going to respond, just an easy interaction between my awareness, a pencil, and a cheap piece of paper. That feeling vanished the minute I returned to the UK.
The second time it rolled away I’ve written about many times before; the time the cabbage tricked me with the photocopier and the watercolours, and my current period of painting began. There were years of abstract play after that, two return trips to India, and an interesting strand of painting in response to musicians, dancers and theatre-makers in various collectives that I became part of.
Then the pandemic shut us all down.
At first I was quite glad of the peace, and I felt I had a store to draw on. I had my recent trips to India, an even more recent trip to Venice, and when they ran out, an internet full of ancient artefacts and creatures. I mined it all, tried to keep going with all that I had felt and seen and absorbed. Perhaps if there had been no pandemic, if I had kept interacting with my groups and other external influences, I would never have noticed that the rock was actually still there, albeit in a reduced form.
It seemed to have shrunk down to what I came to think of as a ‘sleeping policeman’, a speed bump in my road. I knew that I often had to step over him to begin painting, but I had no idea why. What was he doing there? What did he want? What was I missing, doing wrong, ignoring?
I was dogged, in the habit of keeping going, focussed in my determination not to have my art stolen away ever again. I can see now how that determination was a subtle version of the survival push that had saved my life so many times in my younger years.
I thought I had learnt that push energy was an unsustainable source of creative fuel, but of course that energy was still alive in my system. These things are like the walls of a house; they’re so much part of how we’ve learned to exist in the world that we can’t see the ways that they adapt and transform, and persist. Until a wave peaks, or a cycle in the spiral of our lives comes back to hover above a previous version of itself, and for some reason things have to change.
That happened in 2024, when I decided to stop for a while. I decided to wait and see what would happen if I didn’t make any art; to let go of the thing that said, ‘only this, this is the only thing that is keeping you alive, you cannot, under any circumstances, allow this to stop’.
After some time, I decided that I needed to take some action in a new direction, and that’s when I found myself writing.
Where colour, image and form had needed to be coaxed out of the inexplicable shadows, my words tumbled over rocks, sparkling, reflecting the light of the sun. Nothing had to be done. Words dropped into my mind in the middle of the night, appeared on my computer screen during the day. Quietly, without fanfare, without push. It was as if they had all been lounging around in some part of my being, chatting to each other; filing their nails, smoking the odd joint, nattering about this and that, waiting for their time. And then their time came. They slid down a chute, still chatting to each other, totally unphased about being out in the air, or about landing on unknown soil.
They haven’t stopped. They’re not in a rush, not here for any particular reason. They give me regular massages, pass me the joint from time to time. And they have the most kindly, sparkling eyes.
Thank you for reading my Substack anniversary reflections. Thank you to those who subscribe, for your comments, and for all the wonderful conversations we’ve had this year.
Happy Anniversary 🫶🏽