The limits of strange

Painting as creative refuge will do nicely for now thank you

Painting as creative refuge

Samantha Clark

It’s about how to translate the experience…. Surely to be motivated to paint and allow images to emerge has to be a response to some sense of something, or the memory of a feeling…

Kshema Cooper

When people say what painting is to them it makes me stop and think, because I’m always half-consciously tracking my responses, my actions, my observations, in relation to what’s going on with my painting.

Perhaps everyone feels like an outsider to this process. I’ve certainly always felt on the edge of any world of painting that I’ve experienced in Europe, either here in the UK, or when I was living in Italy in the 1980s.

A few days after putting the two quotes above into my notebook, I wrote:

‘With the painting I always wanted to make mystery and strangeness’

This seemed wildly at odds with the previous two points of view. Painting as refuge? Not since I was in my early twenties. But something flickered when I read the idea of refuge; a quiet flame, hidden in some dark corner. Was that how it was back then? Drawing the leaves of a trailing house plant on the window in my Umbrian flat, multiple coloured pencils on tinted sugar paper, for no reason other than that I wanted to respond in that way. A little later, creating magic on cheap Indian paper from the curve of a battered awning, a rickety bench, a pile of mangoes on the ground.

I think those untroubled early responses might have been something to do with being so far away from European galleries; sufficiently distanced from all those inexplicably painted canvases which always inflamed and confused me in equal measure. I was much too young to have had abstraction offered to me as the only road. What astounds me now, so many decades later, is that this early confusion seems to still be exerting some kind of effect. I’ve been estranged from that free responding to the world for so long that there seems to be nothing left of it.

Well, that’s an easy story to tell. There’s truth in it, but I think there must be something else at work. It would be like saying that I left the UK because I was traumatised and fleeing. But there too, there was something else present. I wanted to adventure. I wanted to get away from what I used to call ‘this island mentality’ and find out how people looked at life in Thailand, how people in Burma made sense of the world. I suspect that I was always on track to reject European art (or did I feel that European art had rejected me?).

I was 19 when I drew the lichen wave, 23 when I saw the trailing tradescantia plant. I was an art school dropout with no profession or skills but it didn’t matter. I knew from my father’s books on Egyptian and Cretan art that somewhere in the world there were people who sculpted figures of fierce women with snakes in their hands and dresses cut below their naked breasts; I knew there were women with luscious long perms bending backwards towards the sky. As a child, I had been a regular visitor to the Chamber’s St Museum in Edinburgh, my home town. I used to make drawings from Egyptian friezes, noticing that often animals seemed to be more important than people; that sculptures and paintings showed human bodies with eagle heads holding up the sun, and snakes with wings balancing the moon. The world felt like a vast cauldron of wonder, waiting for me to discover it.

The Lichen Wave

Who knows what motivates the paths we take? My job now is to try to tease apart some of the strands of the weave to see what I might have missed, glanced at, smoothed over, not given enough attention to.

There’s another story I’ve been telling, which is about habits of super-engagement in the service of my determination to make a meaningful life. There’s truth in that one too, and in the need for the periods of disengagement and rest which such an approach to life requires from time to time. I’m in one of those for sure right now. But, there’s something else.

The two stories so far are a twenty-first century psycho-emotional framing of certain conditions, actions and emergent effects. The contain insights, but not any kind of whole truth.

‘With the painting I always wanted to make mystery and strangeness’.

Painting has never provided me with a quiet and gentle place to rest, a place to connect with myself, restore my equilibrium. I guess the flicker of that flame when I remembered drawing in Italy and India had indeed been about translating my experience, but my capacity to do that seemed to be limited to actually being in those places that were visually and emotionally so different, so stimulating and enticing. Back in the UK everything went silent.

Then, well, then there was the little matter of a twenty year interregnum. Twenty years of studying Indian things at university, getting a post-graduate degree in Education (because, what else could I do?), and my experiment with the mainstream. Academia opened its doors to me and made me a limited kind of star. But, and this is a third questionable story, I was in the wrong firmament, the wrong sky.

The early fractal paintings were solid, somehow. They were real, actual fractals; as real as the ice crystals on my Scottish winter window. They guided me with their materiality. But once India called again, I went into another kind of world. Symbols, references to things I could never know, an aesthetic of an entirely different kind.

I wrote recently about not being able to accept that European art in the twentieth century largely ‘stopped at the canvas’, in the sense of being an end in itself, abstract or otherwise.

By now I understood art in the world to be a means of pointing towards something beyond our human selves. That seemed to be its purpose, its power. What it pointed to could never be God for me, but that didn’t matter; I was content with the great, interconnected ecology that sustained our lives, and which I perceived to be under mortal threat.

I was now in quite a confusing situation. For some reason I couldn’t ‘just’ paint the beauty of the world as it landed in my senses. Somehow I had lost the capacity to enjoy painting as refuge; to work quietly on translating my experience of beauty and wonder into a form that could then be shared with other human hearts and minds.

By this time I was deep into my fascination with the idea of ‘the power of images’. I had discovered that I could respond to the energetics of humans in a room, creating images that spoke to the humans whose movements had passed through me; that I could make images that gave form to poetry, or manifested someone else’s dream.

Opening to the worlds of others

I started experimenting with placing objects from the museum beside each other; ibex heads, African doors, Pictish carvings, Indian sculptures, stone gargoyles.

I juxtaposed things that fascinated me for no reason other than this fascination; the outline of the plan of an Indian cave-temple, an African tree, the cross-section of a snail from a 19^th century biology text, trusting that somehow things would find their place together.

I learned that things happened when you did this kind of thing. My own pattern-seeking mind, or that of my audience, would make connections, weave stories, create meaning. I only had to bring things together and the living minds that my paintings interacted with would do the rest.

I worked for about five years using this approach, and then, in 2023, the playing with symbols and juxtapositions came to an unexpected conclusion with the ‘Mythical Landscape’ series. These flowed out over a couple of months and then they were done. I could have carried on, there was something I loved there that I was still enjoying. But carrying on suddenly felt like a formula, a repetition for no reason. Like it or not, the energy was spent, something new was needed.

My objects and symbols had gone in two directions. In the mythical landscapes I was now mixing ancient artefacts with abstracted plants and creatures from the world of mid-century textile design, pushing strong colour to its limits . I had moved on from the spidery black line (the pen factory in Australia went on fire so that was the end of that) and was using a strange, ‘folded’ nib that made everything more angular and staccato.

This is a folded nib!

There was also another strand of work: larger, more considered paintings.

I remember looking at this image some weeks after I had made it, and starting to feel uncomfortable. Layers and layers of human experience and questioning seemed to be coming towards me out of a strange primordial blue. There was a tree, so we seemed to be on land, but there were also bubbles in the air, as if we were underwater, and fish flying towards the moon. The humans were together, but the man was precariously balanced on two balls, and the woman on an unstable single triangle.

A few weeks later I called a pause and decided to leave everything for a while. Some months later, I started writing.

I’ve spent many years exploring ancient philosophies and symbols. Over time, without properly realising it, I ended up creating the very mystery and strangeness that I had always wanted to see and feel in painting. I’ve learnt that images and symbols do indeed have power, in ways that I wasn’t expecting; ways which are beyond my understanding, and which can sometimes be not entirely welcome.

I see now what a heavy thing this was to take on. I knew that the kind of power that ancient artefacts were created to manage or placate could not simply be dismissed as ‘a god’ assumed to be residing in a concrete form¹ . I also discovered, slowly and indirectly, that their power could not so easily be relegated to the distant past. I understood intellectually that the power of images was the power to bend human psyches, but I didn’t expect what I made to have the potential to make inroads into my own psyche, in ways that began to feel strange.

Symbols are not playthings. The use of symbolic artefacts in their original contexts was and still is part of ritual activity, carried out in groups, held by communities, and grounded in long histories of mythology and repetition. The power of images is not to be trifled with, however sincerely; it seems that in many cases it needs these traditions of holding.

I’m curious to see what happens next. Perhaps I’ll just write now. Write, and probably paint privately, when I feel like it, as I have been this past year.

From Malay dancers meet flying apsaras

Perhaps there will be a cycling back, a returning to at least the spirit of earlier work, such as the dancers; my precious companions, who finally broke free after years of studying the Indian stone carvings.

The energy of the free line has been my preoccupation for so long, and perhaps I got diverted from that. Not exactly from the principle, which was trying to hollow myself out as much as possible so that the life force could travel through me uninterrupted and surprise me on the page. Perhaps, though, the life-force became entirely the way that the process worked (no planning, only improvisation) rather than being visible in the line itself? I don’t know.

I often think of the dancers; of their lightness, their irreverence, their humour. The forward-moving impetus impelled me to move on, to leave them behind, and I never fully understood why. That onward movement was fuelled by many complex, often competing impulses, and perhaps these needed to be allowed to run their course in order to disentangle themselves.

Images also have the power to summon light, to make you want to move your body, to tickle your ribs and make you laugh out loud.

Perhaps I’m beginning to let go of all my unconscious ideas about personal responses to the beauty and complexity of the world ‘not being enough’. To realise that what I make does not have to be sufficient to the mystery, only to be my own (because, to my late-arriving surprise, it seems that I am myself an emanation of that mystery).

I need to acquaint myself more compassionately with the rock that so often rolls across my path and understand it for what it is; a knotty fabrication made up of confusions, misunderstandings, unseen influences, unhelpful ideas, and attempts to understand.

My rock is neither real nor unreal; it's just a system-creation that has emerged over time². I refuse to dismiss it as a mind-creation (‘stop analysing everything’), a psychic deficiency (‘she needs X therapy’), or lack of a solid emotional infrastructure (‘she’s overcompensating for X in her childhood’). Each of these explanations fragments the whole, demeaning the miracle of system adaptation through time.

What matters now is to appreciate the possibility of freedom; knowing that the rock-conglomerate will continually try to repeat the mechanics of its formation, believing that its efforts are what has kept the system alive so far, but understanding that the bonds that hold it together can be gently loosened now without any danger to to the whole.

1. Many traditions are very clear that their images or ideas of god are not referring to the outer, supernatural forces that the bible refers to in its prohibition against bowing down to graven images. These traditions are clear that the gods are personifications of human attributes and/orl emotional/psychic forces.

2. If anything has convinced me of the usefulness of a complexity/dynamic systems framing for understanding what emerges into the present, it’s the ongoing story of my own relationship to making art. The long reach of initial conditions (still exerting effects today); the idiosyncratic nature of multiple interwoven influences and accommodations; and, perhaps most fascinatingly, the mysterious nature of the decentred guidance that speaks through the body and tries to move me always in the direction of my best flourishing, despite all of the obstacles that other parts of my system have been conditioned to put in my way.