Orienting the questions

Why all these questions about art??

I have no idea where my questions about art are going to take me. They’ve been with me for so long, and most of the time I didn’t even know that I had them. But they’ve never really gone away.

For some reason I never knew what I wanted to draw or paint. I don’t know why that was. The creativity literature might say that I had an over-active inner critic; I might have said that my experience of art school from 16 to 18 had left me utterly confused about what this thing was that I wanted to do.

I knew I wanted to respond to the world, I felt it every day. But the world seemed so awesome, so perfect in its beauty and variety, that I never knew where to begin.

In the years following my art school experience I tried to find my way. I travelled, first working as a disc jockey in a tourist-free Oman, then as an English teacher in Umbria, Italy. In Italy, surrounded by ancient stone and red earth, I painted and drew most weekends, slowly filling up the whitewashed walls of our spare room with images: of the view from my window, a vase of flowers, my boyfriend reading, windswept skies, the room itself. And every time I finished something, I thought, no, not this, not like this, something else, it’s about something else.

Over the years there were glimpses, tantalising moments when I seemed to gaze directly into the heart of the world and I knew what to do. But the practicalities of living in human time, of the need to work to eat, combined with my love of travel and my longing for adventure, eventually took me to a place where there was no art-making at all. I thought it was all over, in fact I rarely thought about it at all.

Then one day, 48 years old, recuperating at home from years of overwork as an academic trying to critique the shit out of educational research by means of complexity theory (a sleight of hand to get an Indian world view into the discussion), I unexpectedly tumbled back into the mystery. I had just cut a cabbage in half. I stared at it. Eyeballing the wavy fractals of its purple and white folds, I fell in; into all that had been so vast, scary, and unknown that my younger self had been unable to handle it.

Well, I scanned that cabbage, and then I coloured it in. It was a brilliant ruse on the part of my soul to bypass all the questions and confusion that had paralysed me for so long. The questions and challenges that had haunted me have never gone away, but for the last fifteen years or so that I’ve finally been painting full-time, fugitive answers have come and gone, simply through the act of doing. I still fret over what to paint, but the answer to the question of how to proceed has in some way answered itself, simply by refusing to give up.