Seeking the Event
The word ‘moment’ comes up a lot in relation to my paintings. I have a series called Moments of Truth and I talk about moments of encounter between viewer and painting. I want to say something about what these moments embody for me.
I Will Bear You Up, oil on Arches Huile paper. From the Moments of Truth Series.
There is a moment that precipitates an event. There is a particular moment when you could say the filters are dropped. The screen that you subconsciously chose for safety or to make the enormity and chaos of life manageable comes down. It’s the moment in a crowd of dancers when the DJ reads the scene perfectly, using some DJ subliminal superpower and drops the exact song that makes every dancing body roar. It’s the big yes, and it includes a gigantic ‘f*ck it’ and a release of fear and of pretending and of trying to inhabit smallness.
It happens too, when you think you know someone because you have read all of their cues and heard their stories and interpreted their look… on the surface level, you have understood this person according to common values. But there comes an event – it can be anything – and you see that person as if for the first time and you see them because you have dropped all of your ‘knowing’ about them. Suddenly, that person is a world, not a pigeon hole. And there is a delicious moment where you can almost touch life. It can’t last because we quickly seek to find order and return to our compartmentalised perspective as an instinctive way to exist within the infinite chaos. The threat to our self-concept is too great. It is why love is a rollercoaster and it’s why we like art and music in small doses among the greater project of our daily ‘busyness’.
“It is only by risking from one hour to another that we live at all.”
But I think the deeper reason why we can’t experience these mind-opening life-glimpsing events more consistently, is because they are contingent on our acknowledgment of death. By nature, we can only understand the glorious beauty of life by allowing that it is impermanent and momentary and unpredictable and that it hinges on death. Death is what makes it meaningful. Paradoxically it is what gives us life! It is the driver. This might be why we find the ‘event’ more manageable in an audience. The togetherness is essential to lend us the safety we need to be able to let go. We’re going to die but we’re all in it together. And yet, it is the reminder that in death we are actually alone that is our greatest fear.
“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.”
I guess as an artist, I seek to make work that speaks of these events. Or work that can induce such moments. Something beautiful and awful, exquisite and ordinary. You bring your eyes and a little willingness and my paintings deliver the experience. But to be a great artist, the small doses aren’t enough. We can make a painting that points to one facet of life – maybe something observational or political – and it satisfies a craving but is over as soon as it has begun. Yes, you might say, it landed in me. I got it. But what if the project was to create art that can sustain that experience? For the surface of the canvas to be so dynamic, like a living thing itself, that you never run out of things to discover. The act of looking is met with the gaze back from the painting and the event arises between the two for as long as the eyes are open. It recreates the meeting point between two people on the brink of falling in love, who really begin to see each other. And in the moment of witnessing the aliveness of the other, to have our vitality mirrored back and held in place, death be damned! A glimpse of self-knowledge that goes beyond the shallow limited earthly perceptions we compensate ourselves with. It can be quiet, it can be raucous, it can be a panacea and a new wound simultaneously. It is the end of hiding, numbing, settling, playing small. It says ‘I am here and here I am and anything is possible’.
Art that keeps asking for more. Love that keeps asking for more. Life that keeps asking for more. It is never finished because that would be to miss the point. Is it treacherous to face death? Yes. It it essential to flower into being? Absolutely.
Great art seeks more than moments. It can deliver us of an experience that sustains us.
