Fragrance has an uncanny ability to transport us back in time. "When nothing else subsists from the past, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, bearing resiliently, on tiny and almost impalpable drops of their essence, the immense edifice of memory" -Marcel Proust "The Remembrance of Things Past"
Photos on my studio wall.
Fifteen years ago, I first thought of painting a rhododendron. I can pinpoint this moment because of reference photos I took that coincide with the birth of my first child. As time has gone by and my children have grown, I have taken hundreds more photos in preparation. I didn't have the facilities, opportunity or self-belief, to make the painting real until recently, but I always kept it in mind. When you think about something for so long you begin to doubt whether you are capable of recreating it in paint. It almost grows to big and wild and daunting.
My eldest daughter, walking through the churchyard, on the way back from nursery.
Paint rather than words seems to be the medium that gets closest to my imagination and recollections. I cannot adequately communicate a visceral or visual experience through words, only try to prompt another's interpretation in their imagination. As time has past I have tried to absorb the information on my photos, to understand how the leaves hang and the flowers are formed, and to try and bring my transient thoughts into painted reality. I have often been put off by my lack of ability to recreate an accurate representation, until I realised that it was not really about the rhododendron at all. The subject was just a reference point.
Rene Magritte ~ This is not a pipe.
Rene Magritte highlights the limits of representation in "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This is not a pipe). We can interpret the image as a pipe, but it is actually only a representation of a pipe. It cannot be held, used or truly known. It is like mistaking a map for the territory, as in the quote by Alfred Korzybski. A map is a useful tool but we must not be confined by it's symbols, become reliant on it, or forget to look for uncharted lands beyond.
A painting is like a map of a part of an artist's mind. What I really want to navigate with this work, is memory. So why am I painting an enormous canvas of a rhododendron? The size of the canvas, is to recreate the perspective seen through my eyes all those years ago. The subject is a bright, garish, in-your-face plant, an alien species that stood out enough to leave an imprint on me as a child. The vivid, fuchsia blooms stand out like beacons in the gloom of the woods and my mind. The towering boughs that I lounged in, that created dens that arched around me, have left a presence and immediacy I can still feel. I want to express these feelings from fresh childhood senses and burgeoning awareness, of enclosure and shelter, the oppressive buzz and suspended stillness of long Summer days, and the intrigue from the depths of the woods beyond. How do you convey a feeling of nostalgia in paint, how do you express a thing, never talked about, as it has not yet been cataloged or given it's own word. All I can do is to keep on painting until I feel "it" again.
A detail from my oil painting (still a work in progress).
Bright shafts of sunlight that pierced through the canopy, defining waxy, green, leaves in the shadows, replicate the awareness of my mind reaching back like a searchlight into memories. Memories that dissipate like dreams upon awakening, and get lost with age and overload. When I die, or succumb to senility, what was once real to me will be gone forever. We all know that memory is real, but what is it? Where does it go to when it is lost. I want to grasp this remembered moment in time using painting as an evocation, and drag it back, kicking and screaming to trap it on the canvas. Present it like a mounted specimen. A single moment in time that does not escape from the now that was me, into the endless lengths of past. I am trying to document and classify the lost world of me, a sort of inner time travel, as memory is what makes us what we are, mixed with an ounce of present moment and a sprinkling of future dreams.
Out in the garden to get better light.
Our understanding of what life is and how we anchor ourselves to it, was brought home to me through the diagnosis of my youngest daughter, who has multiple sensory impairment. The combination of her audio-neuropathy and short-sightedness, gives her a distorted version of reality. Sensory deprivation had trapped her in her own world presenting in autistic-type behaviors, that fortunately she is starting to come out of. Our eyes and ears are our distance senses. They give us our comprehension of reality and are how we learn to locate ourselves and balance. Like a cartographer with faulty instruments my daughter's map is distorted, but it is still reality to her.
Reflection of a weeping willow ~ Claude Monet.
Impressionism was created to some extent by Monet's failing eyesight, it was how he came to see the world. My daughter, loves painting and scribbling, standing at an easel was one of the things that encouraged her to stand unassisted. What does her landscape look like? Just as I strive to comprehend my existence, I hope one day she will paint her landscape and communicate it to me.
I love art. I almost drink it through my eyes and skin as if by osmosis, straight to the soul. Like beauty and nature, art is pleasure without satiation. Replenishing like pure, cool spring water.
Old opened oak. Photo. 2010. Markeaton park. Derby.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and it is impossible to please all of the people all of the time, but I think art should strive to connect to the masses. Here is an interesting link I found at Gillian Holding's Twitter: How gallery visitors view work.
I cannot stand elitism. The false mystery created by high-art priests, circling in their cliques and separating new clothes for emperors only. What is this hierarchy that makes one human animal more capable than another, to experience a work of art. The term "dumbing down" baffles me. I value the comprehension of clear expression. Specialisation and intellectualism are commendable pursuits, but if you really understand, exclusionary terminology can be put aside. Isn't that the wonder of a picture, that it can give you it's thousand words in one physical blast of interaction. A resonating mirror reflecting a journey.
Mona Lisa. Leonardo Da Vinci. 1503 - 1506.
Art that speaks to you as you walk past it, with the power to stop you in your tracks is my ideal. If I have to read a label in order to appreciate a piece, it still has it's place in the gallery, as a vehicle for depicting theories, but ultimately I look for an emotional response. Art can prompt a kind of nostalgia, fused with a primeval sense of homecoming that we cannot quite grasp before it fades. Leaving only a distant sense of sadness.
What is it about the Mona Lisa's smile that has intrigued for centuries. What is the answer to her enigmatic puzzle. This is the kernel in art I am searching for, the key to the doorway back to the source of inspiration. A portal through to the mysterious state the artist once inhabited. It is a rousing of something deeper. A clue of what it is that makes us more than mere functioning automatons.
Inside the oak. Photo. 2010.
An artist sends their energy into a creation, it's internal structure and outer form designed by thought and desire. When finished it is a separate, contained expression of human life released into the world. Captured evidence of why we are here and what we are about. This is were reproductions in books or online can be a massive disservice.
I wander through exhibitions like a criminal archaeologist, searching for meaning in the layers of paint, still infused with a residue of creation. Google art project is a wonderful find, enabling you to walk around and zoom in and out on the artworks. Turner's fingerprint caught for eternity in a watercolour. Bits of sand, rock and leaves caught in the paint when Monet painted outside. Such physicality and immediacy can connect us to a place and time, the story of the room, the brushes, the process.
Interior at Petworth. Detail. JMW Turner. 1837.
The simplicity of a line drawing, when only a pencil separates the mind from the image can convey a power and honesty, revealed by it's lack of interference. As Hockney said of Turners' watercolours "they come direct from the heart down the arm."
I have always been fascinated by forgery. Although an art of deception, a forger's intense scrutiny and accurate execution must give them an enviable closeness to the original artist. Whether by sheer craftsmanship, imagery, scale or use of colour and medium, art in all it's forms can open our perception.
