This is a season when a cyclical grief comes around for me again, and the only thing it makes any sense to do when it strikes is to paint. I’ve run out of canvases and this has by now (it’s happened so often!) led to a new kind of signature painting – going over bright, calm paintings with big black movements, although the one above isn’t bright and calm but actually a sign I made to take to a protest. If I didn’t have a deposit sitting with the rental agency I would definitely be putting those black strokes and swirls over the walls as well.
The brightness or in this case the blood-red letters, peeks out from under the blackness, like moments in grief when you catch sight of something, a butterfly in the summertime, or a leaf falling from a tree, or the glint of a piece of rubbish lying on the street or a mushroom growing on the grass verge that brings you back into the world around you for a moment, where you were all along.
Gestural painting is amazing for expressing not just pure life-force, but all the flavours, colours, textures and speeds of human emotion. Painting with music helps the flow to be even more effortless for me and the breath joins the dance, often as a counterpoint. I may do some brushstrokes but I generally go over them with my hands, because nothing feels done until my hands have pressed directly, with a warmth, pressure and speed that is absolutely unrepeatable, and of the moment. The other thing I like to go is squirt the paint directly onto the canvas and spread it with my fingers from there. The paint doesn’t capture an emotion, or depict it or represent it – it really does express.
Colour, texture and the motion that can be seen, or rather responded to with the body of the viewer, make a way of expressing feelings which is significantly different from words. So using words to try and express that in itself seems a slightly stupid endeavour. It feels as if it’s worth saying, though, and particularly to share the experience with others so you can try it too, if you have a sadness, a despair, an anger or a joy that remains somehow in the body, the heart, the mind, and feels inexpressible, resistant to words, not wanting to be shared interpersonally. I really recommend getting a tube of cheap paint and an old piece of cardboard packaging and just going for it.
The real pleasure, if you can call it pleasure when you’re expressing pain, which I think you can – is in the moment of making the painting. But there’s another one when you stand back and look at the painting and it speaks back, and there’s a kind of visceral conversation. Then I find there’s also a desire to share the painting with people who are close to me, and this can be done without finding words for feelings, which can be tiring, and intensify the problem.
Paint communicates perfectly, physically, without words.