late stART

writing from the Mani, Greece.

I used to sometimes paint on holiday. Now being away is an opportunity to paint more than at home. Years ago I sometimes went away without paints and then had to ransack local shops for whatever was available. One year it was children’s wax crayons, and a collage of bits found on the beach stuck on to a bit of cardboard box. I quite like rummaging and beachcombing and making do. There was also a small roller that I found I a hardware shop – for painting behind radiators, I think – that turned out ideal for giving an idea of mountains in watercolour pictures.

Nowadays I carefully pack acrylics, a palette of warm and cool blues, reds and yellows, plus titanium white, and this year, raw umber (for the black it makes with ultramarine blue). I know I can mix all the colours I will need from these. What I don’t know, in a new place, is exactly what those colours will be.

The old Greek olive tree in the first painting used ultramarine blue, alizarin crimson, a little cadmium red, and cadmium yellow deep. The second painting happened when I used up the colours left on the palette, with an inch wide brush. No deliberate technique, just trying to cover the page with what was left. The result quite pleased me and has some interesting areas that I may develop later.

What amused me most though was realising that the colours I will need to paint the ruin of the olive oil factory are exactly these. The colours of old concrete and brick, with plants pushing up between the cracks, constitute a kind of negative colour space of the trees.

Bringing a fragmented art education together

I started with drawing, not realising at the time how helpful that would turn out to be. “Drawing for Non-Artists” – my neighbour brought the adult education brochure round to show me the class because she knew I wanted to learn art, as a consolation for a broken relationship and a tribute to succesful eye surgery. Fantastic class and teacher, now a good friend.

http://drawingfornonartists.weebly.com/

Here I learnt how to look at the world around and make marks on paper, and I fell in love with the process, the absorption, the struggle.

Since then I have signed up for classes in drawing outdoors, watercolour, painting, life drawing, painting levels 1, 2 and 3, painting in contemporary practice, and now, advanced painting. Evening classes, painting in groups, summer school courses. The low point was an oil painting class where people were told to copy a landscape from a postcard. I got out quick and asked for my money back. High points came from tutors who prompted and prodded and pushed, while also enabling (Val Bestwick, Hephzibah Rendle-Short, I thank you!)

It’s been a pick-and-mix kind of art education, more practical than theoretical. This year I am trying to bring the fragments together and let my individual painter’s voice emerge more strongly from the various influences and inputs. That’s why I chose a day workshop-type class. It’s been a roller coaster so far but I feel that there is a shift happening.

One day, an art tutor suggested we think of our studio space as a lab where we could explore our painting. I was appalled at the idea…

I am moving from full-time work researching the linguistics of metaphor to spend more time with art; having a studio is one of the joys I am reaching for. Everyone I know seems to want a lab. Me, I want a studio.

The lab yearning is part of the physics-envy so prevalent in my field – humanities with reliability and null hypotheses; testing poetry; replicated experiments on the meaning of metaphors. All the messy glory of human understanding reduced to numbers.

Cut, cut, slash, slash.

“If we get rid of all this individual superfluous subjectivity, then we’ll understand what it’s about.”

No, you won’t. All you’ll know about is stripped-down, less-than-human puzzle solving.

You won’t know how one man comes to kill another.

You won’t know how a woman’s heart breaks, again.

You won’t know how I muddle my way through to understanding another person from what they say, from how they look, and from where their eyes move.

You won’t know what happens when my body jerks in recognition of beauty perceived, in a response that moves out from my core. The hesitant wonder in front of the canvas when I make that happen. Those moments of fearful recognition that keep artists going back to the studio. The studio, not the lab.

Where the lab must be kept pristine, germ-free and shiny, the studio accumulates cuttings, images snipped from magazines, jottings on odd bits of card. Pens lie scattered around after their last use. There’s a dried-out rose in a dried-up jam jar – transformed to a new beauty. There are colours on the cloth, on scraps of paper. Colours that recall a finished painting and the emotions it carried. Brushes stand, waiting. Tubes of paint lie, calling. Paintings stalled and speaking. Books open to revisit. Rose petals.

There’s a poem to be found, a composition to be worked out, shapes to be thought through.

Dance labs, metaphor labs, poetry labs – all longing to be psychology labs, which in turn want to be biology or physics labs, or more lately neuroscience labs. I don’t want a clean, regulated room; a series of trials and tests; hypotheses rejected; data collected. I want a ‘research studio’ where colours and shapes mix with lists of metaphors and patterns of talk. Where possible meanings are tried out as sketches, and thrown or kept. Where paintings are imagined and happen.

There’s hard work and there’s thorough, skilled work. And there’s enthusiasm, energy and play. There’s uncontrolled chance and happenstance alongside expertise and skills, nourishing and richness. Not the poverty of a lab environment, not an uncontrollable chaos, but a human mess – of the enticing, the interesting, the amazing, the possible, the perhaps – that allows the emergence of beauty, awe and laughter.

Three days a week working at the job. The rest for art.

Stretching and sizing canvases, mixing the ground. Now I need white wine vinegar to mix with egg yolk for tempera to seal the ground. Traditional preparations alongside finding images, finding a studio, noticing the city streets after years in the country. Tree shadows cast under street lights; leaves scattered on the grids of paving stones. Windows and layers of lives inside.