Last weekend was the Parallax Art Fair at Chelsea Town Hall. I took along the second painting in my ‘Bones and Bonfires’ series, and had some enlightening conversations about it, during which I discovered for myself the response that comes when someone asks me what it ‘means’.
My first natural response, is that there is no meaning separate from the work itself and there is no work itself without the viewer, so basically, if you need a meaning then it’ll be inside you, and if you don’t that’s just fine because the work is as it is. However, I decided to let that answer lie and try to extract what kind of energies I had put into the painting, and the whole series, consciously or not.
The response depended on the questioner. One person elicited an answer that felt very true in the telling.
It started from grief. At first, for several weeks, all I could do really was paint long black ink lines on paper, on the floor. They looked like bonfires, but stark, without colour without flesh – very much like bones. They contained motion and energy but they wouldn’t keep you warm. Nonetheless the motion the clear sharp cutting of the lines through whiteness, the pushing from the bottom of each stroke and letting go at the top – it was something I needed to do.
Then, maybe the following year, I felt that there was a yellow energy behind the lines, not a sunny energy but one like an old, scarred wall, like the walls in Krakow when I used to go there in the early 1990s, walls before renovation, a beautiful dirty saffron full of history and understated gleam. I painted that, layer upon layer, allowing the glow to get stronger.
And this year, it was clear, the bones were the bones, and the person had been transmuted into colour, into energy, into redness, a redness that was held in the painting and rose backwards to fill in the bones. The energy didn’t disappear it intensified. This one was painted almost entirely with my hands, and there were pressings and bangings of the canvas, more much richer than the original simple sweep of lines on blank paper.
So the painting I tend to call ‘the big red one’ turned out to be a transmutation of death.
But I didn’t entirely realise that, until somebody asked me. That’s the beauty of art fairs, most people just pass by but those who stop engage with the work in ways that are often surprising, and even shocking to me (some people were afraid of my paintings, some saw delicacy of emotion and others horror films!) and some ask questions in a way that elicit answers I had never thought of before.
That’s the potential and the joy of standing in front of any painting, it may elicit a ‘meaning’ or something in you that you had no idea was there. Go and see some art if you can, wherever you can, as soon as you can! This, I think, is what it’s for.