My brain boils over

Swimming in a sea of Indian images and underground worlds

Having been fabulously diverted by writing about Indian art for the last few weeks, I now have to try to make sense of what happened to my image-making after I got back from my last trip to South India. This stuff is getting harder and harder to write about as I get closer to my current life. I’m still ten years away from the present day but I can feel the charged atmosphere of those ten years sneaking towards me like smoke curling under a door.

I was doing nicely with my fractal paint images for the first five years of my return to art. I was living with the cells and the rain, the shapes of river deltas, the movement of sap travelling along a branch; not particularly looking for any kind of change, as I could see that things were developing of their own accord, without me having to get too involved. The first trip back to South India fed me colour; deep umbers, glowing ochres, vermillion skies. These became flat fields of viridian, endless mixes of rose madder, floods of Naples yellow across increasingly large sheets of watercolour paper, as I continued with my circles and running paint.

But the Indian images had also started wanting me to pay attention to them from back in the spring of 2012, before either of those trips. Here I am in October, 2013, just before the second trip, preparing for a workshop. I’m looking at the natural forms, and I’m looking at the dancers, and I’m trying to see how they’re going to join up, what they want to say to each other.

Preparing for a workshop, October 2013

It’s all there, photographs I took of dancers at Thanjavur during my fieldwork in 1994, a cosmic poppadum from the first Kerala trip, a sandpainting, a drawing of myself in a dance pose, quotes from Hindu creation myths, books on the patterns of natural forms, electron microscopy images of cells, Mattancherry murals. I’m completely overwhelmed, and in love with every image, idea, running colour and dancing form.

And then I went back; to see the Mattancherry murals again, to explore the Jain paintings, to feel the Hoysala temples. Where the first trip fed me colour, which flooded seamlessly into my paintings, the second trip fed me forms - different ways of painting humans and animals, different approaches to arranging forms in space, fractal temple designs that I could walk into and around; atmospheres, feelings and sensations that all longed to somehow be translated into paint and a moving line.

This time, there was no effortless osmosis between experience, hand and paper. I was so full of images and ideas that I could scarcely breathe. Not knowing what else to do, I started making straightforward, conventional drawings of elements of the sculptures which captured my interest.

Eventually I start rubbing things out, reducing them, abstracting them…

At the same time, and perhaps in reaction to these small studies, I was continuing with the wild life natural forms, shapes and lines; now in pencil, charcoal and chalk, rather than paint and ink. I unconsciously moved from following the actual fractal edges of running paint to starting to make my own cellular worlds.

They started small, then gradually got bigger and bigger…

…until finally they became large, 6ft x3ft...

I adored these drawings, and the way that they just soared into life with the greatest of ease. I don’t know how conscious I was of it at the time, but they were a brief vindication of my basic philosophy, which is that if you manage to get out of your own way and just let what wants to happen proceed, mysterious things will appear that are quite beyond the reach of your own mind.

The whole process was alive with its own energy; real energy, like the Chinese landscape paintings, rather than anything my mind might think up trying to capture or portray or represent the energy of life. The line that flowed onto the paper was as real as any river, as strong as any growing grass.

The problem with living without clear, overarching goals, though, is that whatever the life energies are that power the explorations of the present, they seem to run in waves, or perhaps cycles. Things complete; they peak and then fall, they come to an end in order to renew. The visa is refused, the degree ends, the cells redirect of their own accord, because you’ve been so focussed on living in the present that you didn’t notice the need for change.

So it was with the beautiful energy of wild life. The fractal edges of paint gave way to the charcoal line, which got bigger, more expansive, more completely trusting of itself, until the drawings were bigger than my own body. For a while there was total faith in that line; chasing the feel of cells, the forms of rocks, the curving lines of growing things. And then it tipped over. After a few large drawings, it began to lose its way. I tried to follow. I found sections that were satisfying, but overall, the energy seemed to have fulfilled itself and nothing I could do was going to bring it back.

I tried slowly whiting things out. That was interesting, but it didn’t take me anywhere new.

Having just written this though, now I wonder. Does the creative impulse of a phase really just run out? Does it, in fact, have its own life, and therefore its own death? Or could it be that something just needed to shift, that something at that point might have required my awareness to become more involved, perhaps to start making more conscious decisions about direction, or to choose an element to work more consciously with? I’m now wondering if this could be what’s happening every time I get lost, feel that something is finished, and begin the painful process of waiting for the next wave to appear.

The next wave appeared in the form of everything that poured into me from my second trip to South India. Perhaps if I hadn’t had that massive input, I might have found new life in the cellular themes. But, I had stood again in front of the murals at Mattancherry, flooding my mind with teeming ochre and tumbling red. I had been to Sravanabelagola, climbed thousands of steps to stand underneath a massive white Tirthankara; seen the Jain paintings that I had only seen in books in the flesh, standing alone in a dark and deserted building, unmarked, apparently of no interest to anyone. And I had been to the temples at Halebid and Belur; spent days burning my feet on baking temple flagstones, taking picture after picture of dancers and elephants, obscure corner carvings, unfinished carvings and fractal temple walkways. The input was in, and it wasn’t going to let me rest.