Lockdown in Lyon, France. The (shared) flat is cramped but has a large balcony. At one end: a small space for art (ancient metal table; battered cupboard). Anxiety, stress, inability to plan beyond the immediate term, and a lack of work to keep my brain occupied with anything other than the anxious times. Somehow, these proved to be the conditions for a period of intense creativity.
The trigger: a 14-day art challenge sent to me by a friend. The theme for Day 7 was “Material”, and I knew from the outset that on that day I would paint on a piece of cloth that I’d bought because the colours and its abstract design reminded me of Australia. More than two years after spending a month in Australia, all the looking at, talking about and thinking about aboriginal art in particular finally emerged – assimilated, integrated, made my own.
I work mostly from photographs. From my brain/eye to implement and medium (brush, paint on brush; objects, ink …), the pathway is somehow direct, immediate, and the mark-marking often feels spontaneous. I enjoy the physical feel of materials in my hands, their touch on paper. I like to get my hands messy with paint and glue and paper, creating multi-layered (multi-textured) works.
A few very specific “feels” stood out for me while I was making art in lockdown: the extreme stickiness of one particular oil pastel; the creaminess of paint that I finished applying using my fingers; the smooth surface created by intense rubbing-in (again with my fingers) of another oil pastel.
And there was another implicitly touch-related aspect to what I was creating. I was thrilled when I was in Australia to see some of those “negative stencils” made by the artist blowing/spitting pigment around their hand on a rock surface. Such hands found their way into my art. I drew around my own, and eventually fragments of these drawings, overlayered multiple times, became little works which were based on photographs of the gorge where I’d seen the original rock art.
In aboriginal mythology, the Dreamtime, creatures dreamt their own worlds into existence. Somewhere in my artistic process/practice (I was a couple of weeks into this period of creativity by this time), I felt/intuited the way in which my artist’s hand was creating the world (of my paintings) and perhaps creating itself in some way at the same time. Whatever I was doing, whatever was happening, was wonderful; I had a very fugitive “glimpse-feeling” of accessing something deep-rooted inside me.
After I’d finished what turned out to be the last little hand/gorge painting (the last perhaps precisely because it felt in some way final, the furthest I could go in this particular approach), I remained at my art table and realized that for the first time in probably years I felt calm, contented, serene, smiling, and looking out over the city.
Lyon, 18 May 2020
