Conjuring Eden

There is a moment, as an artist, when the painting leaves the tracks.

You’ve got your technique, personalised over time. You’ve got materials you can reach for blindly, so familiar by now, so embedded they are like an extension of the body. There are all the years of looking, feeling, discerning, intuiting, attuning – it’s all held in trust now. And all that easy accessibility can reliably translate into a passable painting. We don’t expect every painting to actualize so it’s ok to make work along the way that is still travelling, the ‘almost’ paintings that we may come back to year after year, unless they get bought as seen on a whim. I’m not writing about those.

The moment I’m getting at here, is when you’ve led the painting to water and by extraordinary luck, get to behold it as it starts to drink! It’s a departure from the mechanics. As I’ve said, everything is in place for it to happen but whether it does or not is by the same strange magic that breathes life into some creatures and not others. The most I can offer my painting when I sense this ‘birthing’ begin, is vigilance, commitment and a promise of freedom from my own interference.

I never lose awareness of the pure privilege of being present to witness that fledging. Like the best things in life, it requires two things stretched taut so that the dance can happen in the charged space between. With a rein in each hand, I have to be both ecstatically curious, (brave, untethered, lawless, all in) as well as upholding the architecture that makes the space possible. Technique, or at least paint so familiar that it can be exercised reflexively without compromising attention is in the right hand, while the excitable left hand holds its breath and tracks the thing.

Writing this, it’s harder than I thought to separate them out into definition because they can’t exist without each other. I imagine it’s like surfing or something. You need the skill, you need the wave but the moment of surfing is both and neither, it is its own thing. (Does it crack through reality by virtue of the danger combined with pure being?) But there was something deeper that I grew to know during the painting of Eden and it spoke of the necessary clash of the wide, beautiful field with the inevitability of the forbidden.

Eden is a provocative title because of biblical association and the way purity and sin have been leveraged to control bodies (and especially souls) but it was in the end, the only title that fit. The truth that emerged through this painting, is that when something is experienced as perfect, (the idyll) the only recourse is to break it, disrupt it somehow. To simply revere it would be to sentence it to a static misery of objectivity. There has to be an animating force. And it is in the motion to destroy, the ‘what if’ impulse, that the field becomes potent again and only then can creativity re-enter.

Hence lust. The instruction to not eat the fruit was accompanied by an invitation. Again, the coexistence of magnetising forces that set the stage for life. The longing that went into this painting! The wild quest to access experience that gets held at arm’s length, dangled almost, like the fruit. Coming from the insufferable blandness of life anchored to the train tracks. The madness of needing to destroy create breathe destroy create gasp see dive in again see feel be the wreckage that is also the temple. Two reins, the painting whispers to me. The tracks and the sky. Obedient, I commit and recommit to painting, so that something, something at least can become manifest. So that the painting gets to live. So the viewer has somewhere to enter, wander, get lost, deliciously obliterated – erotic almost, captured and released only when spent. Who knows. The one thing it can’t be is dead.

What am I saying? That Eden is a painting that is resolutely itself. That I watched as it pulled itself out of me like an exorcism of the mundane. That it came with some tantalising ministry that original sin should be part of a daily diet because it is where life lives! Not just in a sex way but in an everything way. When you need oxygen, take something that isn’t yours but just could be, and the fallout is more beautiful in its chaos than the temporary safety of slow suffocation.

God, art.

Eden, oil on canvas, 200×160cm