22 September 2022
Seven small syllables and seven small paintings
I was watching a film the other night wherein two characters seemed interested in one another. Speaking on the telephone, split screen, the woman, at one point, says to the man, “I have been thinking of you”. Then the screen seems to fill with an empty pause full of desire.
Just seven small syllables, like a line of Haiku marking a time and place that press this moment out of all others into someone’s startled heart. This tiny set of words for any man or woman can either set them sailing or shipwreck them both. And chaste like a pearl necklace it’s the most restrained string of words in the whole, wild, world of romance.
It is a poignant place, this space, where two people meet weightless, where’s there’s no gravity nor expectations beyond their earthly hopes and dreams.
I began to think about the sudden desire that lives within this small set of words as if they were precious stones inlaid upon the clasp of a fragile necklace. They are uttered at the very onset of a love affair at the front door but also perhaps much later on if a couple is both lucky and thoughtful.
But in each case it’s an invitation to engage intimately, for it’s a clean and embossed calling card that needs a quick reply.
In a world of love, everyone has either received these small words or delivered them softly themselves, maybe whispered in a chapel or on a card from Paris, or maybe just from the other side of the bed.
And though we might seem to live in a world of false expectations, there is promise in every busy signal for Cupid has all our numbers.
And like a love story at its dark end, dusk too, at the close of each day, seems to poison the light with regretful refrain.
These seven images, all painted within months of one another, share the barest of necessities and they speak to me of those seven syllables that place an intimate bookmark of time tracing my own appearance into this fragile part of the day when I come out to paint. And like desire, they too possess an uncertainty, but not without an idea concrete enough to live within their own brushstrokes.
And though I did not set out with an idea of making such evocative paintings, these come the closest to any love letters I’ve ever written.
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