The elusive nature of 'my' art
I had bitten off way more than I knew how to chew
There’s a kind of irony in the fact that I’ve been waiting for ‘my actual, real paintings’ to appear, given that my earliest reaction to the world of art was to be put off by individualistic fixations on originality and personal style. I was never looking for brilliance, world recognition, or sales. What I was hoping for though was paintings that would do for me what I thought paintings should do, ie. excite me, shock me, move me, amaze me; invite me in to a world of colour and texture and magic, show me something new, unexpected.
I wasn’t thinking about being original or different. I wanted to find out how to work with life energy, how to manage what felt like a kind of power. The power of images. I believed in that, I wanted to make paintings that moved with the shocking power of life, of aliveness. I never stopped to think about what a challenge this was going to be for someone who hadn’t been able to see the point of painting after Malevich’s White on White (1918); who was sickened by art school bohemian pretentiousness by the age of 17. I had become unconsciously averse to the idea of art that was generated by individuals trying to work out a personal vision, and I had no idea how hard it was going to be to find an alternative. That’s really why my art died, somewhere back in the 1980s. It wasn’t because the teaching that I did for a living was taking all my energy, or that I had no time. It was because I had no idea how to proceed.
When I finally did come back to art, seduced by the split-open cabbage, it was easy at first because the miracle of natural forms showed me the way. The fractal whorls of the cabbage were the greater mystery, the power beyond myself; I knew that I could never attempt to make any art of ‘my own’ that would compete with such beauty and complexity. And then India called. That made sense, in that the role of art in much of India’s history, and still today in many of its everyday practices, wasn’t that search for personal vision which so missed the point for me. The challenge for me then was to try to work out how to respond to the energy of an art that was not about individual vision, when I was an individual responder. How was I going to find a personal response that somehow remained true to this bigger sense of art as a connector beyond the individual?1
My art has been through many iterations since the 2013/2014 trips to Kerala. I faithfully copied the sculptures of the dancers and musicians until in the end their energy found its own form; I made peacocks for a friend until they too broke free. I can see now that my instinct for the free line was my way of unconsciously trying to avoid making the kind of art that I saw around me; cleverness of technique, prettiness of colour, strivings for a signature style. I didn’t understand it, but something seemed determined not to let my mind make plans, or to let my hand fall too far into its capacity for accuracy and skill.
It was an uncomfortable way of working. I wanted to be surprised, to let the line do its own thing in response to something other than my conscious ideas, but that meant that the results often were surprising, in ways that I found hard to deal with. I was fascinated by the whole process. This was one of the reasons that I never stopped for too long to reflect or to plan another show, I was always just interested to see what was going to come next. What weirdness might appear, what unexpected combination of colours, what curious forms?
And there were plenty of these. The peacocks and the dancers grew into tangled creature combinations, a strange protector appeared. Dancers became goddesses with birthing genitals, Indian forms mixed with Malay, sculptures started to walk off the page towards me. Shells and barnacles appeared (I had moved to be by the sea), mixing themselves up with the dancing forms.
At the end of 2018 I was drawn back to looking at Indian cave temple plans, again. I was stunned to find out that I could now wander around the caves of Ajanta on Google maps, looking at things I had only seen in books from many angles, finally seeing how bits of architecture and painting connected up. I loved the ground plans of this and other cave temples, the shapes of the multiple cells and shrines, carved into the living rock.
I loved them, and I had no idea what to do with them. I can’t just copy them, I thought. Why would I just want to reproduce their shapes, what would that mean? So I played. I played with the shapes, dropping them on top of each other.
I drew a composite temple plan superimposed over a temple side-view and a shrine aerial view, then put a drawing of a master architect from an ancient Orissan palm leaf scroll in the middle of it all.
I was just following, quite perplexed by the whole thing; I couldn’t see what it meant, or how I was supposed to make paintings from it all.
A few months later an 18th century biology text found its way to me, and then there were birds, bat skeletons and sections of molluscs.
The skeletons went into the caves, along with extended dancers and African trees.
In the end I gave up asking what it meant and just let the elements play with each other.
Something interesting was happening. Then I had building works in my house for six months, and other stuff that kept me away from art for most of 2019. There was a trip to Venice, where I realised how desperately I needed to leave the caves, travel again, and get some fresh input from the outside world.
And then the pandemic came.
I want to be clear here that I’m not talking about God, or the Divine. I understand that for many people the greater context is conceptualised or named as such, but for me the greater whole is physical, ecological, earth-bound, cellular. I am a life-form, a small speck of life-energy floating in an interconnected web of other life-forms, as we navigate tides, winds, currents, flows, unexpected collapses, miraculous recoveries…
So I finished here, from there, after starting here.
It all makes sense somehow when reading your words.
Your work looks back at me. It’s not quite something I have experienced before. They say animals recognize eyes. Other than portraits most work doesn’t have eyes that look back. Yours often do. The clarity and directness of them looking out of their page, their plane… it is haunting and revealing.
So you can be satisfied. There is an otherness you have achieved. What it means I can’t say. A doorway has opened for you which has not for others.
A gift, indeed.
Fascinating, and inspirational. 🙏