What is My Subject?
I’m going to do something slightly different in this blog, by using a song as an entry point into describing my subject. If you read my first blog, you will know that it is both the act of painting and the experience of encountering the finished painting that is of most interest to me. So can my paintings be said to have a subject? Is that a property of abstract painting or is it purely wordless, existing outside the objective narrative that we apply to other art forms?
I’m listening to ‘Time, As A Symptom’ by Joanna Newsom. It’s my favourite song. It is a complete artwork of birth, life, love, death and time. It takes all of me to listen to it. The poetry, the truth-telling, the composition, the voices, the arrangement. This song has come through her. It feels to me like a very feminine capture of what it means in every sense to have life. It makes me strive to one day paint something so complete, so ringing with truth. Every time I listen to it, I hear something else and I have listened to it so many times! Which makes me question, is it alive itself? Is it vital? Is it still creating itself with each play? Could a painting keep creating itself with each view or encounter? To transcend its form and exist in the greater mind that cannot be specific to the person experiencing it but yet feels entirely personal to them. That song is an artwork.
This is what happens: the song leaves me speechless but seeking. I can’t find words but I am actively trying to find an understanding for the song to land in. It embodies the essence of aliveness, which is at once needing to experience and understand everything, while knowing we can barely ever graze the surface. Wanting to be knee deep rooted in life and up to our elbows in the busy, messy engagement with the thing but sensing from somewhere bigger than us that the mystery is everything.
“But stand brave, life-liver
Bleeding out your days
In the river of time
Stand brave
Time moves both ways”
It is the mystery that endures. No science or religion can ever offer us a complete enough picture of what life is and what to do with it. But art can wrap itself around that mystery and deliver the unquantifiable experience of feeling deeply moved yet also entirely adrift. Part of a perfect whole and yet insufferably alone. Art makes it ok not to know.
Art makes it tolerable to face our weakness, our fear, our aloneness in life and death and our not knowing. By clothing the mystery, art helps us to see not the answer, but the beauty of not knowing and the glorious sense of oneness that comes from realising it has always been this way, it will always be this way and it is true for everyone.
“Love is not a symptom of time
Time is just a symptom of love”
We get lost in our thoughts, with our eyes cast down among all the things we are doing and bitty, nagging time seems to strangle us about our throats until, unbidden, the word JOY pops out! And it always will. Like bobbing up for air. Like a soul rushing towards the sun. We can only be held under for so long until life intervenes to make its presence felt and restore buoyancy.
“The moment of your greatest joy sustains
Not axe nor hammer
Tumor, tremor
Can take it away, and it remains
It remains”
A song, or think of a play that gives you shivers with the absolute presence of the moment and the truth being revealed by the actors – it enlivens you yet obliterates you at the same time. Because there is no time! You are restored to yourself yet also made aware there is no self! It is all just life expressing itself. And you surrender your little self willingly to be in that moment. In that audience, or standing before that painting. To see life. To be reminded. To hold and be held by the mystery.
“And every little gust that chances through
Will dance in the dust of me and you
With joy of life”
Yes, my paintings have a subject. But I don’t think it’s one that can’t be ascribed normal terms. My life is their subject, but only insofar as the fact of my aliveness. It is tempting to project and think that my good and bad specific life experiences go into the paintings but ultimately, I think this is a distraction. I hope it doesn’t sound too obtuse to say my work is to be connected to life as deeply as I can. That which is beneath the flutterings on the surface, be they good or bad. It follows that my artistic practice is to marry the experience of the viewer, to the experience of the act of painting, as closely as I can.
