What is 'my' work?

Looking in the wrong places for what was always there

A previous essay of mine, ‘Opening to the Worlds of Others’, was recently restacked a couple of times. It described painting in response to watching other artists (mainly performers) working with a teacher; a situation where I didn’t have to wonder about subject matter, or deliberate approach, or materials. The live energetics of a very intense kind of working were happening right in front of me in real time; all I had to do was allow myself to open and respond.

After a while though, I started to feel that what I was doing was in some way derivative, in the sense that it relied upon this stimulating input. I started to wonder where ‘my own’ work was; what I would produce if I was left alone in a studio all day, in the way that I had been conditioned to believe that artists were supposed to work.

This thing about finding ‘my’ work has dogged me forever. I had instinctively rejected contemporary art at the much-too-young age of 17 on the basis of my experiences at a London art school, sickened by what seemed to be its inward-turning focus and unfettered individualism. As I fell into Chinese and Indian art I became captivated by their orientation towards all that was beyond the individual; the mighty power of the Tao moving invisibly through the landscape, the Indian temple image resonating with the living presence of God.

I had always been overwhelmed by the miracle of the world. I didn’t know what I wanted for my art, but I knew it was something to do with wanting to respond to the wonder of this miracle; not literally, but to the essence of it, somehow.

When I started drawing again after I left art school, I soon found out that copying what I could see onto paper didn’t work. The world was too perfect, too complex, too breathtaking. I wanted to devour its impeccability, rub its patterns all over my skin. I was enchanted, frozen; in awe, of everything.

I had this strange sense that one day the wonder would just reach out and claim me; that it would guide my hand and begin to reveal itself onto the canvas, the paper. This is how it is when you have no education, no mentors, no wise elders. You make up a child version of the thing that’s trying to call you. You have no idea that this is not at all how it works, that nothing, in fact, is going to float across the space between you and it and make itself known. That would be living life forwards, powered by a mysterious knowledge of the path that needs to be taken, when it fact there’s no sense other than backwards, and that much later on.

In art, you have to do something when faced with this wondrous world, it doesn’t come for you. The thing that I didn’t understand was that doing something meant translation, transmutation, transformation. It meant seeing the tree, the jug, the face, the sky and then putting something onto paper or canvas that was no longer that thing. It had passed through me, so it could no longer be what I had perceived or felt. I was its witness, and now I had to speak on its behalf.

When I saw the beginnings of my witnessing, I was distressed. This was not it. This was not the breathless moment that had penetrated me; this was an ugly, human, fake version of the thing. It was obviously just crayon on textured paper, graphite on watercolour tooth, plastic acrylic smoothed onto board. None of it acceptable in any way.

Decades later, I began to understand. That this is where you start; with your human mark, in all its materiality and non-it-ness. You have to accept your own disappointment, your own limited possibilities, the complicated ugliness of your own marks. And for some reason I seemed intent on making exactly the kind of line which pushed the very sense of ugliness that everything in me was reacting against.

I had learnt the skills of accurate drawing; I was quite capable of representing something beautiful, or of making a beautiful drawing in response to something beautiful. But some rebellious undercurrent gradually began to emerge, which was stronger than my conscious desire to capture, or make, a formal kind of beauty. This was my free line. I’m sorry, it said; you’re here to be a flow, for your line to flow out of you, in way that you’re not going to like. Brace yourself, because you’ll find no easy satisfaction here.

I could feel the truth of what it wanted to do, but every time the free line began to move, I was dissatisfied. This couldn’t be it, surely? Making these fast, messy, unplanned things, that were always wonky and somehow wrong? I ran with it, gave it its head. I began to realise that my line was the living force that I had so admired in Chinese and Indian art, the force of unruly life, only just under my control.

The speed and hastiness of it, its insistence on its own momentum, disturbed and unsettled me, every time. I seemed to have found ‘my work’, but I didn’t recognise it as mine, often didn’t even like it.

Having rejected the individualistic focus of contemporary European art, and even as I became more and more fascinated by the bigger, wider agendas of Chinese and Indian art, I see now that I missed one essential thing. If what I wanted to was to allow energies greater than my small being to pass through me, then there was no ‘my’ art to be found. Looking for ‘my own’ vision or interpretation, even when I just wanted to interest and surprise myself, was just as individualistic an approach as that taken by any other artist in the contemporary European tradition. I had been blind to the fact that I needed to jettison the idea of making ‘my own’ anything.

Weirdly, the very thing I wanted was happening, but it often seemed to be irritating to my spirit. Perhaps it was because abandoning myself to chance and randomness every time I sat down to make something was actually quite unnerving. But the alternative - not inviting in the unexpected, having a plan, or working carefully on something for hours or days or weeks - seemed even worse, because predictability seemed to suck the life out of everything.

It’s ironic that now that I’ve given up trying to find ‘my’ work, I see all the more clearly how it’s actually impossible not to in some way stamp the particularity of your own emergent system all over whatever it is that you make. The strange and simple truth is that when I use my hand and my pen to respond to something in the world, there’s an idiosyncrasy in my marks which can neither be suppressed nor manufactured.

I don’t have to seek out powerful and disturbing subject matter in order to feel the pulse of the world, and I don’t need to try to nurture the spirit of the lifeforce in my line. My hand moving across the page in any way at all transmits the energy of the greater lifeforce in its own particular way, a way which I couldn’t suppress even if I tried.