A Wordless Story
One of my most primal fears, that brings me right up into my animal brain and triggers a profoundly physical fear response, is not knowing the story. Here I contrast this with the freedom of abstract expressionism.
Presenting my work in an Instagram Live Q&A, September 2022
I have experienced a lot in my life and most of it has been made bearable by chronicling exactly what went on, mostly with the help of professionals or my few very close friends.
Until I have the story, my imagination makes compelling versions of what might have been really going on and these alternate realities terrorize me! But worse than that is the feeling of being entirely detached from reality, as though the ground has given way and not only am I falling into the fissure, I am doing it while spinning blindly, my stomach up around my mouth. I have flashes of everything I thought was real being shown to have been an illusion.
Why am I writing about this here? I am struck by the paradox of my life needing to be mapped entirely according to words, stories, sense-making narratives that place everyone in relation to me in the chronology of my life, versus my wild, wordless paintings! How is it that the most comfortable place for me to be is my artist one, where I’m blindly spinning in an alternate version of myself where the not-knowing is the purest, truest guide and comfort to me?
When I am painting, I have to wait for everything else to recede, to drop away. I have to meet the essential Lucianna who can escape her conditioning, her identities, her anchors in self (positive and negative) and let that wild nature play. Bring something to life. Show something new that is by me but not of me. It is a practice I have strived to cultivate to make paintings with the deepest integrity and artistic originality. It doesn’t scare me, it enlivens me.
“An honest and true investigation of self-in-painting” Artist James Cowland, reacting to a talk I gave about my painting.
In relational psychology, there is a term called ‘Splitting the Ambivalence’. I heard Esther Perel talk about it. It relates to when a couple have a choice to make, or something to settle between them which they disagree on. For example, whether to move house. The phenomenon is described when one person is strongly in favour, then the other person feels compelled to strongly disagree to the same proportion. I imagine it like a scale. If the person who wants to move is taking up all of the position of ‘yes’, then all that is left over for the other person is ‘no’. If the person can move slightly in their position, it releases terrain for the ‘no’ person to soften towards.
I have had this in mind because I am interested in these invisible power structures and I believe educating ourselves about them can be empowering in maintaining healthy relationships. But I bring it up here, because I wonder if it can apply to two parts of the same person. Bear with me!
I have often said that I need to paint in order to feel balanced in myself. Probably I have worded it more strongly than that and been the kind of artist that yells ‘if I don’t paint, I go mad’ or something off-puttingly histrionic (but true!). So why is it that when I have periods where life prevents me from painting, due to school holidays or exhibitions or whatever, my need to clutch at my stories and understand my world through solid, trustworthy narratives feels heightened? And when I am painting, I have far more resilience to go with the flow in my life.
Could it be that my personality self and my artist self are engaged in a version of ‘splitting the ambivalence’? My life feels safest, is most creative and outwardly balanced when I am able to paint and live in roughly the same proportion. There is no need for conflict or justification or the triggers of not feeling heard, seen, honoured. Two parts of me, co-existing in harmony and informing each other from very different sources of wisdom.
Maybe there’s something in that, or maybe we just like opposites these days. It is equally possible that I have absorbed the polarisation that is showing up just about everywhere and internalised it to the point where I’m even applying it to myself!
Still, I find it fascinating that the thing that feels most unsettling to me is in a different context, the thing that most enlivens me. My fear and my purpose being flip sides of the same experience. Perhaps there is a way to train myself to sit with that freefall of dread and know that it is life’s way of emptying me before proceeding to create whatever comes next. Easier said than done. Being empathic, intuitive, highly sensitive and close to the border between worlds/dimensions means that I have to attend more carefully to my wellbeing, but it is also where my paintings come from, so I wouldn’t change it.
