Inbreath, outbreath. Sunrise, sunset. High tide, low tide.
We live in and as repetition
Hello friends
For the last few months I have been fully immersed in making a series of new paintings for an upcoming exhibition I’ll share more about very soon. However, I am about to winkle myself out of the studio, to leave Orkney’s shores and head south for a week of meetings, galleries, exhibitions and conversations in Cambridge, London and Edinburgh.
It will be a change of vibe, that’s for sure. The last weeks have been spent like this, drawing line after line after line…
There’s something seductive about the repetitive action of making a simple mark again and again, watching the surface slowly gather complexity and depth.
We live in and as repetition; our breath, our heartbeat, the rhythms of waking and sleeping. Inbreath, outbreath. Sunrise, sunset. High tide, low tide. And yet within the repetition of the living world there is also growth and change. This comes without striving or seeking. It just unfolds, either incrementally or in sudden eruptions.
Repetition has always been part of human expression. The repetitive actions of ritual, prayer, or meditation have always offered us an inkling of something we have many different words for: the infinite, the divine, transcendent or Absolute.
In George Mackay Brown’s novel “Magnus,” an imaginative retelling of the story of Orkney’s patron saint, he describes a Mass the saint attends just before his martyrdom as a ritual in which all time was gathered up. No past, no future, only a present moment opened to its full amplitude, a still point in time, a singular moment that reaches deep into past and future and binds them together.
Repetition, then, is not something to be afraid of. It has power.
I no longer worry about my work becoming repetitive. I’ve learned to follow my fascination just as far as it feels compelling, allowing ideas to layer and deepen over time. I’ve learned to sit with boredom and impatience, and instead of avoiding these uncomfortable states, be curious about them and what they might reveal.
In any case, the composer John Cage questioned whether true repetition was really ever possible. In an interview from 1985 he said:
Schönberg said that everything is repetition – even variation. On the other hand we can say that repetition doesn’t exist, that two leaves of the same plant are not repetitions of each other, but are unique. Or two bricks on the building across the streets are different. And when we examine them closely, we see that they are indeed different in some respect, if only in the respect how they receive light, because they are at different points in space.
In other words, repetition really has to do with how we think. And we can think either that things are being repeated, or that they are not being repeated.
If we think that things are being repeated, it is generally because we don’t pay attention to all of the details. But if we pay attention as though we were looking through a microscope to all of the details, we see that there is no such thing as repetition.
Repetiton has to do with how we think.
I’ve learned to trust that my work will keep evolving naturally. Change might be revealed, as Cage argues, from a refinement of attention, each tiny variation of the hand-made mark as unique and unrepeatable as waves breaking on the shore.
Or change might arrive suddenly, after a slow build of tension, like a storm breaking. It might come after a mistake disrupts habitual actions and sets things off in an unexpected direction.
And of course change comes in reponse to new information or stimulus, to a disruption, or a break in routine.
So, while I admit to some reluctance to the upheavals and disruptions that travel away from my island home involves, I accept that meeting new people, seeing new art, being in new places and experiencing new things will benefit me, and my work. And once I’m actually on the road, it will be fun. Old friends and new await me.
There won’t be a Life Raft co-working session this week as I will be on the move between Cambridge and London on Wednesday afternoon. We’ll launch again the week after, as usual.
And when I get home I’ll be strapping in to finish this work-in-progress, the moon bathed in a sunbeam when I walked into the studio this morning…
that’s all for this week!
Sam
Your thoughts on repetition and change chime true for me, Sam. As a psychologist, I have found that the biggest changes happen not by intention, but by an organic emergence from the same old same old.
I found this piece about repetition helpful. I tend to move on to something else if I feel bored or that I’m being repetitive - there’s something in the collective unconscious that urges us/me to “try something new” rather than stick with the uncomfortable feeling of boredom. Thankyou!