Unlearning

As it turns out, even knowing how to break free of contours is very difficult. 

Some weeks ago, I had a studio visit from a fellow artist I greatly respect. She glanced wordlessly over a wall full of drawings until her gaze fell on a funny little mono-print I'd made. It's one of those I put up because I liked, but wasn't sure why. Everyone else who has seen it has said, what's that?

I say, oh, it's an elephant marionette, collapsed on the floor. Erm... that's the trunk, see?

The Fellow Artist I Greatly Respect didn't care what it was. She batted away my explanation, saying that it didn't matter what it was, it was the feeling that mattered, and she desperately wanted the drawing.

We arranged a swap.

But I wanted to just give it to her, because her gift had already settled over me like soft rain or a beautiful memory.

It doesn't matter what it is.

It's the feeling that matters.

When did I forget this? Slowly, slowly, form has overcome feeling, and even the word 'feeling' has become a mumbled apology. Feeling is not what matters. Ideas matter. Currency matters.

The words of the Fellow Artist effected a rushing release in my heart and mind.

That swelling yearning for a shift in my practice suddenly burst its banks, and it is this happening that has given me the energy with which I'm now working.

I returned to the little vase, yesterday. It all seemed terribly hard. Just how do I bypass the perimeters of the perceived object without pretension, without the affectation of naïvete? I had already experienced this struggle with the little bamboo boat: of what value is it to ignore the edge I can see perfectly well? I tried, anyway, and found that, while the drawing was not exactly successful, it still had the feeling and luminosity of the 'tighter' drawing, and possibly more purely - at any rate, I could see the potential, there.

So, with the vase, I tried again. Again, there is this problem of bypassing a particular ability I have in pursuit of another. All sorts of feelings of frustration and impatience arise. How does one begin, and where does one stop, when similitude isn't the object? 

I suppose the secret lies in attuning myself to feeling, and establishing a new standard for myself. It may mean stopping at a point where the image is still inchoate. It's going to be a difficult and interesting pursuit.

Here's where I stopped yesterday's drawing. It will do for now. I will get better.

Flux

I feel a shimmer of guilt whenever I succumb to drawing flowers. 

The Postgraduate Supervisor in my mind sneers, the Cool Kids shun me, the Galleries cough politely.

But lately I have been letting myself do it, anyway. And it turns out that, as with most self-indulgent pleasures deemed dirty by the powers that be, it is educational, deeply satisfying, and perfectly normal and healthy.

Here is today's offering:

On a more earnest note, I am pursuing a compelling idea at the moment that is giving me great energy in the studio. I'm not sure if I can even rough it out in words, but it has something to do with releasing form from the confines of a single moment or point of view (think Cubism, but madly beautiful, less brown and less boxy) and, most importantly, enabling the perception or implication of motion.

Oddly enough, each first attempt, so far, has resulted in the opposite qualities to those intended, as with the image above: meticulously observed, static and illusion-driven. There is a part of me that simply delights in drawing this way. I spent much of today in rapturous concentration at my desk, at one point discovering painfully that I had not uncrossed my legs for hours. 

I have always derived enormous satisfaction from conjuring three dimensions out of two, but right now I am chasing this other aspect - a shifting energy; movement; flux. I want the contours to break down, the light to spill out, the lines to quiver.

This fascination with motion may be reflective of my current state of being. In less than a fortnight, I will leave my happy, mostly peaceful home of three years, part ways with my wonderful sister, and start the adventure of living with my Beloved, his brilliant young son and their bouncy dog, in a house whose condition we fondly describe as a cosy squalor.

Even now, as I sit quietly in my tidy living room, the clock ticking gently, warm light spilling from the kitchen, I know that all the silhouetted forms of my furniture, so stable and sure, are really already in motion. This house has a new tenant arriving soon, the cleaners will be in, the keys returned. Everything is in flux.

All this stillness is only an illusion.

But, in the calm before the storm, I have some time on my hands. 

I have time, at least, to spend a day making a perfectly still image, an anchor, knowing that tomorrow I can return to the same vase of flowers and a new page, and discover what other possibilities are inherent in them, and inherent in me.

Playtime in the Infant Year