The Reason for the Work

A few days ago, I was asked for the eternally annoying question “So, what drives you to paint?”. After briefly bristling that I also sculpt, etch, and build, I actually did have a sudden insight.

Despite most days in the studio feeling like I skipped school to play without adult supervision, it turns out that I actually do have a raison d’etre for making what I make, even though I never could manage to find any cohesive narrative thread before. I think the reason is that I only have this way of existing in the world, even if I try to stop. And the times when I have stopped have been the worst in my life. Less compulsion, more simply that other ways of being don’t fit

Anything else is unsustainable. It falls apart and tangles up on itself until me, and everyone around me, is confused and miserable, and often physically ill or injured too. Burnout makes people stupid.

The philosophy and the making developed together. Probably some time after I read “the wonderful story of Henry Sugar” by Roald Dahl at thirteen. There’s never been a time since then when I didn’t value both. It was the story about meditation with the candle. and knowing the inevitability of one’s imminent death. A man suddenly finding and aligning with his values in his last moments. making that last act a worthwhile one to the best of his ability

And if today were my last day? If I knew I was dying and that everything was precious, what values or priorities would I find I had? And what if I lived that question every single day?

This hasn’t always led to good things. It’s caused me to be naive, accept bad behaviour from friends and family, and to fail quite hard at some of the ordinary things of life, partly due to over-thinking, partly due to expecting people around me to have the same bug-eyed hyperfocus on their own values. They didn’t.

Probably the worst consequence has been that I waited. a lot. I trusted or hoped that my own life could handle the time burden of someone else’s values. The up-side of all that waiting was that it gave me time to learn. not grand things, but boring, technical skills that only cumulatively become something worthwhile.

The technical aspect is the thing that took the most time to build up. and the ongoing drive towards the rational has produced some of the technical skill I want. I have a long way to go. The surprising thing perhaps is that aspects of reality don’t lend themselves to “realism”. because paradoxes and emotions, and abstraction are all real things. A perfect reproduction of a single person doesn’t tell the whole story of who they think they are versus what everyone sees. A face doesn’t tell you about their ambition, or their voice. and I could easily fall into the hole of gluing easy symbols on and calling it a day, but that almost always feels contrived, preachy, even lazy.

I would be remiss not to say something respectful about the traditional artistic works that use symbolism to preach directly. I have what’s probably a modern attitude to didactic art, but if I’d not been exposed to my parent’s copy of “A World History of Art” [by Hugh Honour and John Fleming] all through my childhood, I’d never have realised the scope of the practice. Direct symbolism is an ancient practice, and it directly affected me so pretending I am above it in any way is just silly.

There’s not always an easy path to making sense of the work. and admittedly, mostly I react to beauty the same way I react to profound truth. I’m not entirely comfortable with this though, probably because of ancient Greece: Quite aside from our sensible distaste for their rationalisation of abuse of everyone who was not a free, rich, adult man, they also saw truth and beauty as evidence of each other. To the point of almost comedically pardoning a murderess because she showed them that her breasts were too beautiful.

To make any artwork really carry more than surface meaning I usually have to think very, very carefully, unless I get lucky and the right idea arrives in the shower. or 20 minutes after I leave the studio. If it ever happened in a convenient place I might fall off my chair in shock. The work, when it really works, almost always surprises me. It’s one of the things that keeps the curiosity-demon fed.

The current work makes this concrete: a group of paintings about human migration, voluntary and involuntary. They’re small canvases but heavy, and loaded with paint and politics, because you can’t paint seriously about migration without addressing the story that’s left its cancerous threads in everything: Jeffrey Epstein and his enablers. These are the people whose machinations directly drove billions of people around the world into unnecessary wars and poverty. They degraded science, they impacted many people’s ability to travel and work, they promoted laws and policies that reduced care for the most vulnerable and they degraded democracy by promoting corrupt politicians and helping to corrupt legal systems everywhere they worked. They directly contributed to violent wars that contracted markets and led to life being more polarised and harder for almost everyone.

I have strong opinions, but I hesitate to prescribe thoughts or feelings for viewers. People should have their own thoughts. If I had any ambition for my artworks besides enabling the making of more art, I’d hope people who see it want to make their own work, in whatever field they find energy and curiosity in.

I honestly think that if you’re a creative person (and we all are), if you fail to create in the ways that you most resonate with, you lose your connection to reality. For someone else it might be building community, or playing incredible chess, but for me, that means making. Making everything I have even a hope of learning to make. Anything else takes me away from my tumultuous love affair with reality as it is. which, like any grand romance in the genre, ends inevitably in death. But unlike the worst of the fictions, the practice of making values rationality over ideology