How long does an idea take to birth?

Nine months, it seems... or is that five years?

October, 2014

Last time I wrote about my initial attempts to respond to my visit to the murals and temples of Kerala, South India. I started doing drawings of the temple sculptures, abstracting them, playing around with shapes, trying to find some kind of interesting way to respond to what I had seen and experienced.

I’ve been trawling through hundreds of photographs of that time, trying to make sense of sketchbook experiments, fragments of ideas. I photographed what I was doing most days, and now that I’m finally taking the time to stop and look, I can see more or less clearly how things evolved. It’s like watching a time-lapse film of a seed becoming a plant becoming a flower, except that in this case there was no final blossom, everything just carried on, right up to the present day. Or perhaps it is like a plant, because though it went on and on, I can see now how ideas peaked and then faded, only to be replaced by something else.

At the time I was just following and following, and, in a way, waiting. I had this sense that everything was just a tiny breadcrumb on a trail, that it had to be leading somewhere. I imagined that it would all keep evolving until finally I would be able stretch up a big canvas or start out on a big piece of paper, knowing what I was doing, finally able to make the kind of paintings that I had dreamed my whole life of making. That was why I never looked back, never planned another exhibition, and never really paused for too long to look at what was coming out. I was a dam that had been blocked up for decades, and all that mattered was to keep the sluice gates open and let the water flow. I was always not there yet.

It all looks different to me now, ten years later. But for today I’m interested in digging into the records and tracing the tiny shifts and movements that slowly transformed both the drawings of the sculptures and the bold charcoal drawings of my mythical natural worlds into some kind of response to the Hoysala sculptures I saw in 2014.

The drawings gradually became more textured, echoing the stone that the images were carved from, the rough surfaces of rocks. A line appeared, tracing the contours of the tribangha¹ and the dancers’ curves, trying to move beyond their forms, to indicate their breath, their life. When I focussed in on details of the flow, I found that they were just like the details of the large natural world drawings; at this level of scale, everything morphed into rivers and rocks, plants and streams.

At some point, everything went in the opposite direction and reduced down to the simplest shape of a line of stones. Then the dancing line appeared again, spilling over the stones; it decide to become a dancer, and then the dancer embedded herself back into the stones again.

Finally the line chunked its dancers into a collection of frames, like the divided Jain paintings of Sravanabelagola, but here the frames were filled with stone-feeling dancers, emerging out of the rock and falling back into it at the same time.

After a while longer, the forms started reducing back down to more linear elements. Then they wanted to move; I cut up some dancers and scattered them over a dark background. Eventually the flowing lines that followed their curves started to connect multiple figures, making them recede a little back into the stream of their life energy once again.

All kinds of experiments followed. Eventually, and true to form, the explorations went as far as they could, and then everything came to a stop. The final image of the four below marks a period of something like a whole month, when I had no idea where to go next. I painted grounds in every shade of deep earthy pink and orange, arranged them next to each other. Put shells on them, laid down drawings and images. It was as if I was waiting for some kind of sympathetic magic to suddenly gather everything up and make it all into something that would excite me, thrill me, satisfy me.

And then one day, half awake with my coffee first thing in the morning, this happened:

While I was looking the other way, with no fanfare whatsoever, my dancers just quietly sneaked onto the page. They threw a random composite of pillars and boxes together and jumped inside them, laughing.

I think these are probably the most satisfying drawing or paintings I’ve ever produced. Why? Because that line is completely free. It has no thought, no self-consciousness, no plan, no awareness. These dancers don’t give a shit, about anything. They just rose up from all the looking and all the feeling and all the studying and all the trying, and they said, ‘that’s all in the past, we’re here, alive, right now’….

My very own dancers, just suddenly there, a perfect example of emergence in creative process. Something shifts, conditions change on multiple levels (most of which are beyond the conscious mind), and something new just pops out. This is how nature creates; multiple feedback loops continually interacting suddenly produce something that can’t be directly traced back to any one thing in a linear, causal way. The anthill collapses, the flock of birds change direction, the slime mould moves away from danger, and it’s impossible to say what made the change happen.

Thinking of human beings as complex adaptive systems is difficult, because humans have consciousness, as well as all of their unconscious material and biological drivers. People act in response to biological and psychological imperatives (which they’re mostly unaware of) all of the time, and in that way humans are no different from slime moulds or weather systems. But on top of all this often unacknowledged cellular and emotional material, humans also have this pesky consciousness, which usually has a whole set of agendas of its own (often at odds with the rest of their being).

For me, consciousness, self-awareness, is probably the most problematic aspect of my creative life. I’ve learnt that there’s an inner impulse within me which, in some way that I don’t fully understand, always knows what to do, expressively, in response to my experience. But most of the time my desires, my wishes, my conditioning, my cultural learning, so many things, push up from my unconscious at the same time. For some reason they generally shout the loudest, and end up drowning out the quieter knowing. Try as I might with my conscious mind, even though I can see all this very clearly, I seem to be powerless to stop the interferers (who are unconscious) from taking over.

When the dancers appeared, I tried to just give them their heads. I kept on creating the conditions, letting things interact with each other, feeding in colour and shape and line, trying to make space for whatever wanted to appear. I had no idea what was happening, and no idea what wanted to happen.

It turned out that it wasn’t about ‘knowing what to do’², but something else, something intrinsically unnameable, fundamentally untrackable. I knew that I hadn’t made the shift happen, other than by showing up, day after day, and trying to open to the whole weird mess of feeling and desire, experience, instinct and memory.

My dancers had birthed themselves, and they were joy incarnate.

1. The tribhanga pose, is when the body bends in three different angles; head and shoulders one way, hips another, with the third angle at the knees. I talk about that more here.

2. I once wrote a piece about a fantasy future where I saw myself standing in a huge, white studio, big skylights overhead, in front of a large stretched canvas. The most amazing thing in this fantasy was that I was confidently and happily painting, because I ‘knew what to do’. All the mystery of my childhood experiences of endlessly moving and not knowing what was going on in the classroom, and my early experiences of art school where no-one would teach me anything; the sense of never knowing what my art was going to be about or how to do it; all resolved in this one glorious image of ‘knowing what to do’.