At the time that I was making this drawing I was scrabbling around in bits of Lacan and Hal Foster to try to understand ‘The Real’. I came across the notion of it being prelinguistic, undifferentiated experience and this as I made the white space sit between the two areas of drawing and it chimed with my feeling of what the Real might mean. There is a particular emptiness for me in this line. It seems to be there and not there – both act and consequence, an ambiguity. I am drawn to the line which in turn and turn about, draws me, the drawing a mirror into which I look, as as I look.
My mother died in early January this year. She was 91 years old. Thoughts of her, my relationship with her, her forming of me, my being with her, came to reside in the white space that both divided and united the two ‘halves’ of the drawing. Feelings of division and unification reiterate in my consciousness, and a sense of the irreconcilable. And back to my mother. She was a fierce person. She frightened me for the whole of my growing up and beyond. She meant to, but kindly; she thought that she was doing the right thing. One of her stock childrearing phrases was that ’….you have to be cruel to be kind.’ I used to draw. I copied cartoon cards – Snow white, the Dwarves. She was so impressed. She showed off my talents to friends. She was proud of her little boy. But she used her pride; I was a light that reflected upon her; the line was being drawn and redrawn in the distance, contradictions, and ambivalences, of our closeness.
I browse around. Much of the stuff is difficult for me. Often I am just looking at words. I looked up Hal Foster on ‘The Real’, crossed to Lacan and ‘The Real’, Found lacan.com, read ‘The Rustle of Painting’ by Barry Schwabsky, linked to David Row’s painting/website. (Art online cannot come across like the ‘Real’ stuff hanging or standing somewhere, but Row’s work struck a chord with me.) Solid and wordless in itself, it could be ‘felt’, looked at. I followed up with more of Row’s thinking via www.davidrow.com The gap between the words in the conversation that occurs with other works and the gap between the object and the conversation had with it by the artist, the gap between the words and my understanding, the gaps between the possible wor(l)ds, leaves me struggle room, like a loose straitjacket. Looking at words fits with the idea of being a kind of artist beachcomber wandering about between high and low water looking for stuff. It can be a word, or a piece of painting, an apparent connection between things and myself. It goes in the bag.
