I Did Not Know You Before You Came

(Notes from The Studio)

Change felt yesterday in the studio after such a long struggle. A feeling of having become lost in a forest of amnesia can soon start to redefine what you think is reality. Terrifyingly, the amnesia itself becomes a new place.

FINALLY… I found it. It was the ‘relationship inside the actual paint itself’. Only known by doing and doing until it showed up. I mixed up this oily, muddy grey mid-tone globule of Olive Green, white and madder. I thought, what a waste of paint, what a mess. Then, I shifted another pile into a slightly different colour with the same value, using Prussian blue. It was in those greys, which at first, I doubted while on the palette. As soon as I slabbed it onto the canvas in the background, the nothing colour was like a note of perfect music. I was shocked at its instant rightness. I was totally taken by surprise that I could see it, and at that moment, I knew this is what I had been longing for. The ‘feeling’ of this. That grey thing, that is not really anything, but is everything. It is like the love in a loveless marriage. The warm body of an affectionate dog on a cold day when everything else seems bleak. Trying to place value on a vast landscape view without being there. The deadness of that is replaced with the electrocution of standing on the top of a mountain with it all around you.

Then there was the method. Slabbing, not brushing. Letting the paint live, leaving it alive, not pounding the life out of it. The application of the paint had its own answer, as much as the mixing of the colour was the promise. Partially unmixed, the taints peeked through, here and there, with what was the enemy of homogenisation. They wanted to remain alive and yet together, not one but among, holding to each other.

Then another moment, shortly after, remembering, as the palette knife, took the purity of cold crisp, dark Prussian Blue and slammed it on by itself, with an edge that leapt forward and announced ‘a shoe’. A sharp shoe, better than black, because it could catch the light as it stomped on your neck, as this one did. And the day before, the underpainting, which is nothing more than a random act of God, a piece of material on the floor, a bucket, giant brushes, and a crazy man, just spinning and throwing, like a tidal wave against a groomed foreshore. This unconscious helper remains underneath, raw and exposed. It’s the key to the whole thing if only we can trust it. It’s the sun, which we can’t tame and should not try. Energy blobs caused by that act are left to speak instead of being muted. Calling out to me – ‘we have something to say’. A ruckus begs to be engaged with by the imagination, or is it just that it is already there, and it’s only my refusal to see that would allow me to blink and miss it? I knew and remembered the feeling and energy, but I had forgotten that the road was inside the action of trust. There is a life form inside this clump of coagulating paint – and it came here all by itself as a remnant of a violent event, of water, slashing brushes and invocation. I did not know you before you came.

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”

—-Joseph Campbell