18 September 2020
In a bin or in a museum?
The skies have been salty and full of humidity over the past few days, and this is usually great for painting. This is one of two studies from the other night. I am always amazed at how different each of these studies can be. Each evening light, just like me, can be so different. Lately, as we approach the end of winter, these skies have been delicious. In this one I managed to paint until just the exact moment when I knew I had to stop. It felt like I was taking an exam back in school and just as the teacher said “Time everyone”, I was putting my pen down on the desk. (of course in school this never happened, but hey!) I caught the bloom just at its climax. It isn’t often I have such perfect timing. And indeed, looking at it now, I see a ripe tomato.
This reminds me of a tidbit about the British writer Anthony Trollope who my teacher Leo adored but whom I've read yet to read. Mr Trollope worked at several Post Office’s throughout his life and had a reputation for punctuality. He wrote 47 books during his life apparently by writing in 15-minute intervals for three hours per day when he wasn’t working at the Post office. Over the years I've read two different versions of his strict writing discipline. One, is that he wrote early morning, afternoons, and evenings, and he managed 250 words during each session. When he got his 250 words he'd stop and put down his pen whether or not he was in the middle of either a word or sentence. The second version I've heard is that he put his watch on the edge of his desk and he worked until precisely 8:00 AM, when he put his pen down either in the middle of a word or sentence, then left for the Post Office. Naturally, someone like me thinks of him when I realise how just how undisciplined I’ve been in my life.
But today, here in the 21 century, I found myself thinking about the relevance of these small studies. It wasn’t at all in any unpleasant way, I was just contemplating their worth in the grander scheme of things. I guess it means that I hope that they do communicate something to someone else at the very minimum. Do they have an inherent worth? Are they able to convey an emotion to another human being? Would they surprise anyone? I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I do sometimes practice this secret way of judging them. It’s a game actually. I imagine that one of these small studies is on a wall in a Museum tucked away and off from the main gallery, then I wonder if I would notice it when walking by it. Would I make a bee-line for it? Would it take its place among the better pictures that surround it? Of course it’s amusing to admit this, but I’m not embarrased, It’s just something I do. I cannot speak for other painters, writers or composers, but I do know that everyone secretely wishes to see their own work somewhere other than on a wall in their own bedroom. Why not a museum, I sometimes think?
My little game that I play with these paintings is linked to the way I also visit museums. When I’m in a museum and move through rooms, I first like to stand in the middle of the gallery and do a 360 degree turn while scanning for something to catch me my eye. Usually, if I am not pressed for time, and crowds permitting, I like to walk briskly through to the end of the entire show only to then return to the start so that I’ll know not to miss something extraordinary at the end and I’ll have time enugh to spend with it.
I kind of like this small game because it means that I can imagine something good coming out of all this work. It could get pretty lonely if one wasn’t able to see beyond their own canvas board after all. I imagine too, if when a woman contemplates her face and hair, her neck and shoulders, does she allow herself to wonder if others find her beautiful, or even interesting?
I remember once, a long time ago when on a hangliding weekend in the alps with some friends, I was writing in my diary at a cafe one morning. A friend and fellow pilot came by and joined me. He was used to seeing me with my diary on these trips each morning at a cafe. He asked me if I imagined about the audience which might read these pages. I said that I didn’t worry about that, I simply liked writing about things seen and heard each day; about flying in the clouds, about art, about people, everything in fact. I basically said that I wasn’t writing to be read by anyone else, I had gotten into the habit of keeping a diary for the fun of it. My friend was a well educated Frenchmen, logical and rational, to a fault, a math teacher in fact and he wouldn’t have any of this. He said “Chris, one writes to be read”. His remark stopped me in my tracks and I confess that I found it difficult to rebut his remark for I could understand the flaw in my reasoning. But it was too hard to explain to him that I hadn’t really thought it through enough about whether or not there was an end game to any of it. I was just keeping a diary for the enjoyable pleasure of writing. By then anyway, I was hooked already on writing about the weather, my days, my dreams, my faults, and all that thinking that we humans do all the time. Years later, I understood that if these pages weren’t read in a diary form, then somehow, there would be another purpose for it. Its reason hadn’t yet become clear to me any more than this.
In truth, There was a reason I had wanted to begin a diary but I didn’t want to reveal all that to him out of discretion. I began the diary in 1986, because like so many other people, I had wanted to create a dialogue with myself, to place myself into the days of own life. I had tried a few times earlier but like many people, I couldn’t get it off the ground. But on a boat to Greece one wintry afternoon, with a big hangover, I finally got serious.
But there was another reason. It was because I had never known my father intimately. I knew almost nothing about his past. Due to circumstances out of our control, we became separated, so from the age of eight, I saw him only for brief moments thereafter and consequently I knew almost nothing about what made him tick. I know now that it’s through families that children find out about their parents but we didn’t have one that included grand-parents or cousins. Our past on both sides of the family were like lone continents, uninhabited and unexplored. But WW2 had severed much my mother’s family, and they never really recovered.
But I certainly loved my father and he, me, but our life was made up of one evening here, or another one there, every couple of months, then it became years. Only the letters between us acted as small bridges, then he died during me second year in France. So, in the back of my mind I also harboured a deep secret with this diary, and it was to write about my life so that if, and when I had a child of my own, they would know something about me.
Now, almost forty years later, and without children, my diaries are huddled together like in an orphanage at breakfast hour, all lined up on long shelf and surrounded by books in my home. I actually appreciate this irony. But what I couldn’t know when I began writing the diary was that I was learning to express myself in those thousands of pages and thousands of days. I also realised later that because I wrote, I also recorded infinitely indescribable details that became stored within me as tangible memories. Meanwhile, I also was learning to write and find pleasure in it for its own sake.
So yes, even to paint, is inherently a desire to communicate one’s ideas however inchoate or obscure they may be, because it too, is it’s just like revealing to oneself, or to others, an emotion. But first and foremost, these crafts are both primarily created for the simple pleasure and challenge of doing these things. After all, like any kind of job one takes, one never knows where it will take them, or what they wil take away from it by the end of the experience. Like the thousands of pages and the thousands of pictures, will they end up in a bin or in a museum? Who knows? The whole point of creating books and pictures is to reveal truths to the author and painter, who, b.t.w, are sometimes, the very last to know them.
No comments:
Post a Comment