DIARY OF A LAPSED PAINTER (1)
“It speaks in the second person.”
“May you embrace, in spirit, the companion your attrition keeps you from embracing in body!”
“all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.”
You are back painting after a decade lapse. Three months of running the gamut of materials — paint, silkscreen — on paper, canvas, mdf — primed, unprimed, gesso'd — & not to forget ideas; how the meeting of materials & ideas make sense in a stuttering kind of way.
You are critical. The reason for destruction outnumbering success 10-1 in the first month. (You are still not sure about that one success.)
Month Two you became cautious, taking stock of the destruction & the cost of destruction, financial & temporal & familial & psychological.
You documented the destruction on your phone. Flicking through you regret the ones that did not make it, & are shameful of the ones that nearly did. Delete.
“What do you see in your paintings?” you asked painters time & again in conversation, in public, before cameras, before everyone. You realise you sometimes asked the right questions & sometimes the wrong questions when you were not painting. In a way you were trying to kill the conversation, or the possibility of a conversation, (or at the very least make it painfully difficult), because if you could not continue to paint, for whatever reason, how could You continue to paint for whatever reason. Sorry about that — you know who You are!
But now you are painting again. Your taste, your tendency, your sensibility is taking shape for better or worse. Unperturbed by the other, flesh or concrete, you make & search for something that is gut & radical. No pressure then.
You thought you would empathise with you as a fellow painter, & you do in part, but you are crueler in your judgement of the choices you have made in sticking to an eventual blueprint that defines, chastens & embalms you & your relationship to you & your work.
You realise over the last decade looking at painting from the position of an art critic that, now, as a painter, you experienced good & memorable painting but rarely gut & radical painting. There were moments, sure, that you have assimilated & will draw from, but those moments were greatly conditioned by context, like Robert Armstong at the original KK after a 7-year exhibition gap; Paul Doran with a school of materials in the cold & bare of the economic recession at GOR; the emerging & raw Ramon Kassam cut up on the floor at Pallas Projects Dublin; friend Damien Flood's slop & precision upon a gradient democracy at GOR; Patrick Redmond's gut-wrenching U-turn in style at Periphery Space; Sarah O'Brien's string theory à la mess out of the online blue.
For so long you looked at paintings & wondered how you came to do what you do. You realise in the meeting of artwork & mind two consciousnesses clash. The artist's consciousness, demarked & delineated by implicit decisions made explicit in the way marks are put down, situated, & framed by the limits of a parameter too little, too much; & you, the observer, rearranging those decisions in your own little way.
The consciousness that made those decisions is as much free & prisoner to those choices. Nonetheless you are all there in the painting, without the lie of language, words or sentences getting in the way. You are who you are in paint.
Contra to the glib notion that painting is a self-portrait — if it is it is already dead! — painting is everything you are not & everything that society is, perpetually trying to organise its forward moving ambition into something whole & still & historical.
You see that now. You see the insecurities, mainly insecurities, the habits, the safeguards towards some complete thing that will ultimately be cradled in its transport from crate to wall to collector. Painting's ultimate compromise is that it is orientated towards an object that is tout court. Put simply, painting ends. You end.
Painting, like you, is always punctuated by an apology. Will it pass all those conditions you apologise for in terms of quality, best practice & best before when it goes out in the world. (You wonder if Merlin Carpenter's text paintings are made with the best materials to appease these market conditions if they fail on the surface in their slapdash immediacy.)
This is a problem you see inching into your consciousness, the object as a thing to behold, to festishise, to perfect, to whitewash, to buy & covet & stop in its expansion away from mere objecthood, consumption, towards the shits.
As a writer on art you saw patterns in a painter's tout court — the full stop before the bubble wrap. Even You who broke your mould, always retained a bit of yourself from before to after. Philip Guston's constant was brain pink, a cerebral fancy or eviscerated nerd.
For a painter to emerge from the pile you have to distinguish yourself from the pile. “Imitation is suicide.” Emerson goes on to say that if you do what you do & continue to do what you do without being conditioned or affirmed (hard these days) the other will finally catch up with you & what you do. The paradox is surface latent in the endgame of Emerson's thesis: beyond the paper bag of independence of mind & drive there lies acceptance by the herd. Kinship is everything & nothing.
Of course you will be identified with other artists, this being the observer's way to locate & ground you in their need to locate & ground you. Nuance will define your approach to you & you who looks & looks again.
You, with your references at hand, will see that the choices that you make as an artist in the making of art are determined by your experiences, not just on canvas, but from day one, when your Lego tower fell due to bad or good choices, or the affirmations you received from family members made you paint black into rainbows.
YOU AGREED PAINTING WAS A COMMITMENT TO THE LONG GAME & FREEDOM TO DO ANYTHING & EVERYTHING WITHIN THE LIMITATIONS OF THE MEDIUM. BUT YOU LIKED CERTAIN THINGS & FEARED OTHERS.
You ask: How do you see your paintings anew after kissing them for so long, so hard, faces pressed together so nose hairs, blackheads & eyelashes become a forest of black inking the feet of rainbows, until the sun breaks through those flexing & fluttering mascara muscles, its light washing away narrow vision to dilate everything with certainty, deplorably whole. Done.
Words & images is how you are going to play it, the game that is. You want to make paintings that are visually full & instant but also incremental in their reading.
You want you to say the Word, to imbibe the Word, drink back the Word so it becomes an embodiment of your experience of looking & reading. The best example you can give is the first page of Nabokov's Lolita where the author gets you to perversely & aggressively swallow the name “Lolita” in your reading by parsing the word, limb by limb, limb from limb, thereby implicating you in its implication.
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”
Putting words in your mouth. You are a giver if anything.
“Make of it what you will” the delicate handover from you who claims no responsibility for the reading & implication of your work is understandable. The baggage that you bring to the work determines a unique perspective. That is why consensus catches on your tongue, consensus being something that grows & accumulates by way of sheep rather than shepherds. “You are free to make of it what you will” is worse still. Condemned to be free in consciousness & choice is what kept Sartre up all night in letters & by-proxi politics. But this is what your press release condemns you to do. “You are free to make of it what you will” is not a democratic statement, but a handing over of responsibility, a responsibility that you ought wield not yield to the vagaries of your language. This is your art. It ought to be serious, precise, deliberate & aggressive in its delivery & desire if your radical gut is to be turned over, & you overturned.