Are you living on the premise that your life will become a complete thing only at the moment of your death?

What if, as the fragments of a hologram contain the whole image, all of your life is contained within each of its moments?

I don’t mean this as a sort of Kantian ethical mind experiment. Or a Matrix like silliness

More as a question of time.

Signs point the way and symbols represent something. Both are lent toward non-linguistic forms.

Both are also prey to magical thinking – signs and portents. We confuse them because we think they come from outside. Something outside of us is trying to tell us something. Like God, magpies, religion, myth, dropped toast etc. all these of course are side-effects of what occurs within us…

But what if symbols are not of human psychic origin at all? What if they are non-intelligent non-material extra-conscious pervasions? What if we are the symptoms?

Emma Somerset Davis is a painter, film maker and performance artist who encouraged me to do an MA and whose beautiful paintings inspired me to paint. She has this ability to put into words things that I can’t and to recognise in my work aspects i unconsciously hoped were there.

She has written this about my recent largest (150/120cm) and most ambitious painting (above) and has agreed to me posting it here:

…I really like the more sculptural forms appearing in this painting …these remind me of your found object  installation at Anna’s  …For me these forms are exciting as they animate and disrupt ‘meaningful’ orders of objects in the visible  of our day to day and make the invisible visible .. which is really inspiring and intriguing  ….… I  think this way of painting with more crystallised forms does something more interesting to your already loaded planes of colour/space in terms of exploring a mystical kind of action through painted objects, with the energy of paint rupturing and resisting  rather than creating narratives or characters…

Also visually strong for me is your more definite division of space through colour and line  …feels like a mysterious mapping of occupation/event/actions  ….. 

 ..I can’t really explain the feeling in words which is the sign of a very good painting though very exciting for you moving into this painting space

There’s a difference between flotsam and jetsam. Flotsam is whats left floating by a sunken vessel. its the outcome of a disaster. Jetsam is whats thrown overboard in order to perhaps save it, to lighten the load, or to provide flotation once the vessels gone, that is to try to change the outcome. I wrote a poem about Hemingway some years ago that touched on this

We each of us destroy ourselves in different ways

But there’s usually some irony involved

A true hero should be futile after all

Take poor Hemingway

Tossed around on horns and cast aside

A discarded husk before he died

That double wound that did Adonis did him too

When he realised it wasn’t him

Writing

At all

Bulls and boars come

For all those gods and kings

Dancing in the moonlit ring

On the bloodied silver sand

In the forest

In the glade

Which begs the question:

Faust or Oedipus?

An inkling of the tidal flood

A dawning of the awful truth just before the end:

Oh fuck so there’s

a difference

Between flotsam and jetsam

Oh God the bullring

Is the bloody and deluvian moon

Anyway I’m thinking about how i was forced to make decisions about what landscapes needed obliterating, flooding, and what needed saving or in the context of the poem, which parts told me required salvaging?

Do you ever understand anything by looking at it straight on? Nothing important is in front of you. Take death. Look at it as hard as you can. Examine it. Break it into pieces. Put it back together. Even experience it. Nothing. Understanding slides in from the side. Behind. Below. Under. Uninvited.

Also,

But

Can the subject go into an object by using thought? or can it only increase its surface? Don’t you glue/clue intelligence/understanding to the outside of a thing, a stone, a cormorant, a canvas, Love, Death, the future, wrapping it, concealing it, perhaps suffocating it? Can the subject (you) penetrate anything (other)? Or does the object penetrate you?

Anyway, after being stuck on this painting for a couple of weeks I finally made what i hope is a breakthrough. I found a packet of dark red powder we must have bought in India. Not sure what it was. Perhaps a powder for throwing at people during Holi or something. Interesting smell. I mixed it with varnish and it made a sort of tomato purée. I obliterated the hill and the tower and other details to which id become attached but were stopping work. Also the big fiery square from the last foray that I didn’t feel was working. What do i mean, not working? Something that was stopping the work moving forward. Driving forward to the end. Not obstacles as they can be got round. Impediments? Well once these areas had been puréed i could start to move in on the dynamic areas. The areas so dynamic they are parts of the end. The purée had served its purpose but wasn’t dynamic. I mixed up a big saucepan of green that I didn’t like but couldn’t waste so i rollered it over the purée. Not sure what’s next. I might sand some areas back to see what has survived.

Right. Ive had to change the lighting. Not sure how i feel about it. Mostly i work in poor light conditions. Why? Because the light as it presents itself is one of many materials and I’m interested in working as much as possible with what is to hand? Why? That’s for another time. But also because i like not being distracted by detail. Poor light means i can work generally and not get painterly? Why? That’s for another time too because the main point i want to make here is one of the great struggles one faces is the encroachment of the landscape. There’s the encroachment of the figurative too of course and in this painting I am now struggling with both. In fact let me add a third – the encroachment of the symbolic. What? I mean the human brain is good at identifying pattern, or rather it is a pattern maker. Regardless of whether pattern is intrinsic to nature, which it is, the encroachment is limiting and if one isn’t careful, one starts to think ooh – something is presenting itself here, something to be interpreted, or even ooh look I have painted a landscape, a figure, a symbol. But this would mean surrendering to the superficial, the surface where we spend all of our lives already. The echo-chamber of our own brain (aot mind) where pattern is just repeated data on a feedback loop of degrading value.

On another note I’ve noticed that a lot of abstract painters are into scratching their paint – in a sort of neurotic extension of this so called mark-making in art. If i ever start scratching then it means I’ve failed.

Turbulence

Tension

Entanglement

Essence vs Appearance

Im an interested party to the painting. Don’t be authentic, allow authenticity – thats the struggle.

Keep going until there’s an Event eg might be picking up a smear of paint hanging off the side of the canvas with a roller and printing it across the background until it’s all used up. The Event is only ever conjured. It smacks of accident, slides in from the side amidst the chaos structure and distraction. It cannot result from intent. It can only be allowed to happen.

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We exist in this Holmesian space don’t we? This clue drenched crime scene where PROBLEMS are SOLVED. Sherlock Holmes and the Metabletica. The Platonic Clue that clues us all together. Splash patterns, tool marks, evidence of intent, motive… But what if we are Unclued? What does that look like? Beautiful anarchy. All these philosophical mind experiments inventing new templates. But what happens when we shed our templates entirely? Shed the whole question-answer cause-effect machine? Demolish our shared temples and our personal shrines? Stop going outside and start the real journey? Answer.

At some point painting becomes about going from an authentic response to what’s not yet on the canvas (raw materials, tools, state of mind, state of world, everything etc) to an authentic response to what IS on the canvas that has become its own world. That’s not necessarily an aesthetic consideration or painting for effect, but an interaction as free from idea as is possible. Risky business inviting catastrophe.

Turbulence

Tension

Entanglement

Concealment

Revelation

From the distance i hear the opera of a Lidl being built

We medieval children think cathedrals are external

And that over their construction we have some control

How would we know if the universe vanished?

And if we vanish how will the universe know itself?

Come on, we don’t ascend to knowing do we.

The way is down. Always down.

Also what happens when language is withdrawn?

A flattening. Language lends dimension.

And if counting stopped?

Stillness. Mathematics lends movement.

Without words and numbers a blackbird in flight from bush a to bush b

Is a line joining shapes on a canvas.

Do i want to imagine that absence?

Of course. A reimagining of a world not destroyed by words and numbers

Intrigues me.

Language after all, failed with the first metaphor.

It fixed us, trapped, between things, excluded.

It has only ever described, proscribed, ourselves in relation.

The first word destroyed the world

Because at its utterance the world became merely

Like a world

The ‘wine dark sea’ no longer the sea but a thing like a thing in relation to another thing all within a grammatical hierarchy.

A place with its own presence but colonised by language.

Now to be honest I don’t mind.

The struggle between thing-in-itself and language is a beautiful thing in itself.

It’s why art is.

It’s why I’ve always strived to write metaphor-free poetry.

My interest lies upon the tense membrane between language and the world.

Why are you so against illustration in your art?

Because illustration is a form of opinion and therefore uninteresting

Or rather opinion is limiting to the point of self-destruction

It’s the by-product or effluent of language in league with the senses defining our surface world

Why are you interested in idealism, formalism and abstraction?

Because I’m interested in bypassing language and our senses as these are what our world is built from and not what the world is. They are superficial and belong to the surfaces of things.