With my beachcombery attitude to this stuff, I keep on picking things up until it gets too dark and cold, and then look in the bag to see what the day’s tides have thrown up. Smudgy paint, thin, drawing that changes, evolves? Working with rolled – up pieces of old t-shirts, cleanly defined fine distinctions being difficult, only longer sharper boundaries and borders are possible for me. Beak and feet pose the biggest problems, birdy details demanding to be structured appropriately. Consistency of touch will hold whatever it turns out to be, together. Like the good-enough mother, the good-enough painting as the best that might be hoped for, is what I hope for. My painter is not presently good enough; the stuff in the bag remains in ever-present danger of being returned to the sea when the light goes and cold closes in. This particular bag of pigeon and paint is just about sustaining me through the mental and physical cold weather that exists at the moment.
I notice as I sit here writing, that the sun is out. The sun comes out periodically in my daubing too. A smudge of paint suddenly seeming to light up the thing with a pertinent contrast or harmony; somewhere along the line there may be a painting to be had. I’m working with the t-shirt material stretched over my finger tip, rubbing and dabbing the paint – it hadn’t occurred me yesterday. The painting, if it is to be there might just emerge from my tidal sediments as the tip of something. My beachcomber must be alert to the clue; false alarms seem to be the order of the day, periodic excitements rising and fading. But just along there somewhere….. might be a dull example of grey English stuff….Back to the beach tomorrow. What was yesterday below the surface might now just be emerging.
One of the difficulties in a multipurpose workshop concerns the buffeting clutter of different things. Out for a ride, back to my workshop, rush in with bike and cycling gear, brush up against drawing, damage it – hours of work irrevocably changed. Things can be too precious; I’ll try to fix it. It won’t be quite what I intended. But I now realise that I didn’t know quite what I intended until I had stopped working on it. In fact I didn’t intend anything other than to be there and to do that. Do I do this stuff in order to find out what are my intentions, or rather, were, my intentions? Seems a little odd really, a kind of walking backward through life, travelling in reverse, discovering only what was. Each moment unfolds initially in a place that is not known, until it is left behind; the journey takes place within the dynamics of waiting.My stuff tends to look like my stuff. My errors, accidents and mistakes similarly have a consistency of style about them. They are not ‘not me’. My brain often fails to pay attention to the job in hand. It goes off somewhere else leaving my hands without guidance. Spilling, damaging, dropping, forgetting, are central to my signature. What to do? Name the accident? ‘Drawing Damaged by a Cycling Helmet?’ Not really. ‘I’ damaged it with a cycling helmet. Can the thing retain some validity by incorporating the damage into itself? Or does it remain ‘spoiled’. That’s what a people do. Has the drawing learned anything from the experience, have I? We two appear to have some common characteristics; we stand for each other. Or is it that I just don’t want to waste the effort? Or is it too late? Draw it again? Can’t be done. I imagine two drawings on a wall. The first is ‘Pigeon and Clouds’. Next to it, ‘Drawing Damaged by a Man with a Cycling Helmet.’
What can be said? It is a drawing. An image of a bird, above it tonal cloud-shapes,no horizon. The bird is linear. Form is implicit in the way in which the line works? The rest of the drawing is tonal. Shading suggests clouds. Two techniques? The lines of the bird are abstracted from observations. So too are the clouds, but the directions of flow, as it were, seem opposed. Line, taken from the bird, creates distance, bird as vehicle for something other? Tone is placed into the cloud, descriptive? Is that so? In the writing that is how it beginds to feel. Both drawing and writing are a bridging of gaps between things whose reality is uncertain. Gap between object and image. Gap between maker and made. Gap between material and faith. Gap between what is and what might be the case. Bridges in the air.
What can be asked? How has this happened? Sensory and sensual, I did this. Fumbled and stroked my way from nothing to something, from not knowing what I was doing to seeing what I had done. I was the bridge, built from the centre to the ends, hanging precarious in the air. An illusion? Like the bird and the clouds?
A little boy in school uniform stands so still under the pine tree, staring down. A pigeon lay dead on its back. I stop and look with him. “Birds die quickly.” he says, “My birds at home die quickly. So do chickens.” I tell him that I draw dead birds and that had I something to put the pigeon in, I would take it home. He says that had he a bag he would give it to me, “It died with its eyes open.” As I am nearly home, I decide to take it with me. I pick it up. The little boy goes on his way.
The pigeon and I might have crossed paths previously. Perhaps it visited my garden, wandered about on the grass observing me as I looked out, flew above my house. I wonder about its last flight, what it saw, how it felt, and what a bird can know. I think of it in the tree above me as I walk to the shop for my paper. Perhaps at the moment that I hand over my Guardian token, the pigeon falls to the path below.Now its body lies in my room. The magenta-pink of its breast forms a soft swelling shape. I have felt for same days a need to draw. Now I am the little boy.
I can get myself so tightly in a corner that all thought is circular; my brain struggles like arms in a straitjacket. As the arms attempt to escape, the brain’s claustrophobic panic proceeds. I stopped working when this piece was completed for ‘The Send Off’, a show at Knole House based around two poems, one by Wilfred Owen, a second by Carol Ann Duffy, curated by Franny Swann. The piece was hard work to make, and rather wore me out. I became estranged from it. It, and I, felt contrived, laboured and weary. As a serial doubter, I probably shouldn’t be surprised. I still dip into looking at stuff, reading things. One thing that has impressed itself upon me, I think, has been that no matter what the backstory to work, this or that artist’s stuff tends to have a consistency of ‘style’, for want of a better word. It is possible and frequent for me to listen to or read what an artist tells of a piece, and remain utterly incapable of connecting word and object. That bothers me. It is too simple to blame the work and immensely discouraging to blame oneself; and the mind’s arms slip into the jacket. Conversations can be had. Rational statements can be made. As long as sentences make sense, the backstory, contextual landscape, however it is described, makes sense because of language. I wrote a review of ‘RECURSIVE’, (posted on a-n Reviews) a show curated by Jane Boyer. It was difficult to write for some of the reasons in this piece. I began to wonder if I was engaging in the kind of exercise to be found in school writing classes, where students are given a visual image, perhaps a photograph or a reproduction of an artwork, and are required to base a story on it. The differences between the work displayed by the various artists in the show were quite marked. Meeting them with their work made me think that as well as being somehow about something describable in terms of research, engaging with contemporary questions and so on, the work was intimately also ‘about’ the artists in a structural sense; what was in gallery was not only the content of the work, but was the form of the artist. Notions of ‘style’ stain my brain; style indicates the general way in which an artist is disposed to work. But ‘style’ really goes beyond the notion of signature, to the core.( Style is also the signature form of some kinds of bad art, non-art-pretend-art, dishonest art, consistency conflated and confused with substance.) And notions of style, disposition and self, in their repetitive sense, can make vulnerable this thing named artist, style being both surface appearance and essence of self. What the straitjacket facilitates seems necessary to the person, in order to maintain the continuous unresolved struggle which is misrecognised as art. Being the artist is a distraction from the business of divesting oneself of the jacket-need. The possibility that one is only behaving like an artist, giving the impression of being an artist, maintaining a neeeded self-deception, is infused into daily life. I’ve kind of said all this before, and this is the grey time of year. As greyness repeats so does a greyness of the mind. I like to draw, though.
