Midway on our life's journey

Tonight I finished the painting that has been blocking my easel for the last eight months.

Eight months of despairing confusion. I knew in some inchoate way what the painting was about - trees shuddering in the wild winds of a winter night, evoking the night sea journey - yet there was no energy there for me, not even the pallid pull to completion, the bourgeois artist's petit mort. It felt like painting - more primal to my life than speech - had left me forever.

A few evenings ago, I got it, the image's connection with the opening stanza of Dante's Divine Comedy:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

che la diritta via era smarrita.

Ahi quanto a dir qual era e cosa dura

esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte

che nel pensier rinova la paura!

Tant' e amara che poco e piu morte;

Midway on our life's journey, I found myself

In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell

About those woods is hard - so tangled and rough

And savage that thinking of it now, I feel

The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.

(trans. Robert Pinsky)

These are the lines I've scrawled on the surface of the painting in thick arterial crimson. For I too in my fortieth year went through crisis; yet for me, death was not bitter, rather a beautiful being who occasionally comes into my arms to dance, lyrically. I feel like I've come out the other side, reborn; and hopefully, this painting completes that phase of birthing.

Rust Anima

Pablo Picasso observed it would be interesting to take photographs of a painting while in process, to capture its complex organic emergence. Here are two moments for viewing - one obliterated forever yet preserved in digital form; the other as 'final' as any work can ever be, yet subject to physical decay.

My anima wanders - sometimes leaving me deserted for months at a time. This week she has made an unexpected visit, an intense ferment of feeling. Intoxicated, suffering, the paint drips darkens coagulates like heart's blood, undrunk, unwanted. Another Pablo (Neruda) provided this torn lament, scribbled onto the painting, an appropriate epiphany:

Those who wanted to wound me wounded you,

and the dose of secret poison meant for me

like a net passes through my work - but leaves

its smear of rust and sleeplessness on you.

I don't want the hate that sabotaged me, Love,

to shadow your forehead's flowering moon;

I don't want some stupid random rancour

to drop its crown of knives onto your dream.

Bitter footsteps follow me;

a hideous grimacy mocks my smile; envy spits

a curse, guffaws, gnashes its teeth where I sing.

And that, Love, is the shadow life has given me:

an empty suit of clothes that chases me,

limping, like a scarecrow with a bloody grin.

- Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets, LX (translated by Stephen Tapscott)

Two self-portraits

Seven years separate these two self-portraits. I finished the one on the left (Cubist Self Portrait) earlier this week in a flurry of intersecting vertical and horizontal brush strokes. Twenty minutes of rapid wrist work to complete a painting that sat glumly on my easel for six months, blocking all efforts to move beyond. In those six months I traveled to Barcelona, read both published volumes of John Richardson's biography of Picasso, and studied the blue, rose and cubist periods in detail, not knowing what for. Now I know, dimly: a new direction in portraiture has opened for me. Ghostly, the image glows through, like an X ray, unlike the firm fleshy visage of the younger me in the self-portrait on the right. Have I dematerialized, becoming ectoplasm or phantasm? They say the body completely renews all its cells over a period of seven years. Perhaps they never return with the same self-confident solidity.

Truth

This painting is one in a series of six inspired by Chinese calligraphy. The underlying ideogram (executed in sumi ink) poses a basic concept. Ink spatters and successive overlays of red tones in acquarelle pencil and water colour problematize the strength and durability of the central motif, without ever succeeding in totally obscuring it.













The great Tao flows everywhere.
All things are born from it,
yet it doesn't create them.
It pours itself into its work,
yet it makes no claim.
It nourishes infinite worlds,
yet it doesn't hold onto them.
Since it is merged with all things
and hidden in their hearts,
it can be called humble.
Since all things vanish into it
and it alone endures,
it can be called great.
It isn't aware of its greatness;
thus it is truly great.

Tao te Ching 34.

Shakespeare in white

Earlier this year, I dreamed that I was having an interesting conversation with a female painter. I was looking at the paintings on the white walls of her loft and realized that all the paintings were white, creating space for attention to texture, the material substance of paint and the act of painting itself.

Over the next few months, I paid homage to the dream and the lineage of white paintings created by Ryman, Rauschenberg and others, by putting together a series of white multimedia pieces, compiled of chalk drawing, fashion magazine cut-outs, autumn leaves, straw, scrawled calligraphy, charcoal, coloured chalk, layered over by successive washes of white acrylic paint.

This Shakespeare painting is my favourite image from the white painting series. Each white wash bled the underlying chalk drawing of the ubiquitous image of Shakespeare, obscuring and partially obliterating like time, history and death, the forces evoked in Sonnets 11-12, which are also inscribed on the painting:

XI.
As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou growest

In one of thine, from that which thou departest;

And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestowest

Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.

Herein lives wisdom, beauty and increase:

Without this, folly, age and cold decay:

If all were minded so, the times should cease

And threescore year would make the world away.

Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,

Harsh featureless and rude, barrenly perish:

Look, whom she best endow'd she gave the more;

Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:

She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby

Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

XII.
When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer's green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake

And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence

Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.