I'm almost embarrassed to be here once more saying 'hey, my work has changed again!' But such is the nature of painting, it's an ongoing process of learning and developing, seeking out that which feels authentic and pleasing and enjoyable – because what's the point of painting stuff you don't enjoy?!
In my last post I was talking about how I'd arrived at the idea of painting faces and figures, a sort of resurrection of themes from my past. And I really got into it! I worked on a series of panels, a couple of canvases, and was for the most part happy with them. They were united by a general sense of obstruction and a lack of communication, of being boxed in, trapped. One particular piece I was working on really started to bother me. I couldn't make it work in a way that pleased me. I liked elements of it, could appreciate it on an aesthetic level in some ways, but I guess it just left me a bit cold. I talked to it, asked it what it wanted! And it had no answers for me. I felt a sort of mental blankness – like there was maybe something going on underneath but there was this concrete slab on top of it all.
The troublesome painting.
And then I had a dream! I'd been lying in bed thinking about my work, feeling a bit grim about it, but a chink of light in the gloom appeared before I fell asleep. In the dream (I'll summarise, I don't want to send you to sleep) I was in a big German train station looking for the train to Berlin. I couldn't find it for love nor money, and I couldn't understand the signs even though I'm familiar with the language. Eventually I just got on a random train, in the hope that it was going to Berlin. It was hugely crowded, there was a woman practically sitting on my lap. It dawned on me at this point that I should have asked someone where the train was going – so I asked someone and no, it wasn’t going to Berlin. We'd just stopped at the first station so I pushed my way through all the people and leapt off the train, thinking I'd make my way back to the original station and start again but I couldn't remember the name of it and none of the apps on my phone could help me.
I shared this dream on Facebook and when I read it back the line 'I couldn't understand the signs even though I'm familiar with the language' jumped out at me. Oh, the language is art! This is about my work! A friend suggested that maybe getting on that wrong train was about going in the wrong direction with my work and it felt so absolutely right. The wrong direction, getting hopelessly lost....yup! I took this enlightenment into the studio with me the next day, and had a bit of an epiphany.
I'd put the troublesome painting to one side and picked up another that was in its very early stages. There was a face filling most of the board and I caught myself thinking 'right, how am I going to decorate this face?' Aarghh! No! That's when I realised I'd fallen into a trap I'd made for myself, which was something along the lines of 'I paint people. This is what I do'. In exactly the same way that previously I decided I was an 'abstract landscape painter' and I had to break out of that box. And again with 'I paint abstracts' which led me up another blind alley. These portraits I'd been doing, which I realised were self-portraits in the sense that they illustrated a kind of frustration with my life – they were actually paintings about themselves! Sort of like the snake swallowing its own tail, I'd painted portraits of myself feeling boxed in by the very thing I was painting.
I hastily painted over the early-stages face, feeling great relief as I did so. An image of a plant popped into my head and I just thought 'why not paint a plant?' So I painted a rough approximation of a plant. I put words on it. I had fun with it. I just worked intuitively which is how I work best. I think going down the 'figurative' route was an attempt to bring more meaning into my work, to be 'serious' and have serious ideas behind it. I even tried to apply my paint more seriously! Which is absolutely all well and good, if it feels right. But it didn't. I think I desperately wanted it to feel right, for the uncertainty I've been feeling about my work for some time to be over – to feel happy and confident again about what I was doing. But deciding that 'I paint people' immediately limited me and very quickly it started to become forced and formulaic.
It’s very liberating writing on the wall!
This whole process and the 'aha!' moment has left me in a place where I no longer feel blank. I feel reconnected with myself, with the raw energy of the creativity that I'm harbouring inside me. I am divesting myself of the pressure to label myself. I am process-led, at the end of the day. The ideas will take care of themselves. I'm giving myself permission to paint the fucking plant!
