Responding to life as though it were perfect
On beauty, happiness and art
Hello friends
Another chilly morning in the studio. I open the door, set down my coffee cup, and inspect how yesterday’s work looks, now that it has dried.
I am…underwhelmed.
I’m making a start on a new body of work that will, I hope, take me all the way through to a solo exhibition in October 2027. I have grand hopes and a stack of big painting panels waiting. But right now, everything is tentative. Everything is aspiration. After immersing myself in the work of Turner and Constable at Tate Britain, and paying homage to my Art Mothers last week, I am reminded of all that a painting can do, the emotional power it can carry, how long its message can last. But my own efforts look so meagre, my ambitions for it laughable.
How do we begin again, each day, with some hopefulness, some focus, when our efforts seem so weedy, so fruitless and all around us the world keeps looking bleaker?
In search of some words of wisdom for this moment of doubt, I reach for a book of Agnes Martin’s writings that’s still sitting on the side of by workbench from researching last week’s post, and from its well-thumbed pages a battered old photocopy falls out, a facsmile of Martin’s own spidery handwritten spiral-bound notes.
I read:
“When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life”
And
“All art work is about beauty, all positive work responds to and celebrates it. All negative art protests the lack of beauty in our lives”
And
“We respond to life as though it were perfect”
As though. Yes.
“The goal of life is happiness and to respond to life as though it were perfect is the way to happiness. It is also the way to positive art work.”
I think back to the effect that Agnes Martins’ paintings have had on me when encountered in real life, and the wordless bloom of an emotion I can only call joy that they effected in me, as if in response to a crescendo of music, and I think she must have been onto something with that ‘as though.’
“When you look in your mind you find it covered over with a lot of rubbishy thoughts. You have to penetrate these and hear what your mind is telling you to do.
You must discover the art work that you like and realize the response that you make to it. You must especially know the response that you make to your own work. It is in this way that you discover your direction and the truth about yourself. If you do not discover your response to your work you miss the rewards. You must look at the work and know how it makes you feel.”
There is a tough-minded rigour in Martin’s appraisal, a recognition that not all work is successful. After all, she notoriously destroyed all of her earlier work. But that did not discourage her. She persisted until the paintings she made matched the beauty she could see in her mind.
“We make art work as something that we have to do not knowing how it will work out. When it is finished we have to see if it is effective.
An artist is a person who can recognise failure.
There are many failures.”
She says this so plainly, without drama, without self-pity, without discouragement. On we go.
“An artist’s life is adventurous. One new thing after another.”
A necessary reframe for me, today: the work is always new, always coming at us from around the next bend in the road. If we don’t keep going, we’ll never get to find out what it might become.
We work as though the next painting will be perfect, will be beautiful.
“Beauty illustrates happiness; the wind in the grass, the glisening [sic] waves following each other, the flight of birds, all speak of happiness. The clear blue sky illustrates a different kind of happiness and the soft dark night another.”
For all the earthliness of these examples of beauty, and its attendant happiness, to be found in nature, Martin insists on the presence of an indestructible idea of beauty that persists in the mind, whether we find it in the world or not.
“Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awarness [sic] of perfection.“
Beauty, then, cannot be entirely destroyed. Not as long is it lives on in us, as an awareness of its perfection, as long as our inner lives have not been entirely colonised by the violence and ugliness of capitalism.
Throughout these winter months I’ve been making an effort to get outside for a walk most days, whatever the weather. On Sunday, strong and squally showers kept putting me off going outside until, mid-afternoon, I realised it wasn’t going to pass so I better just pull on the waterproofs and get out there. I even persuaded Andrew to forgo a lazy Sunday afternoon doze to join me.
As soon as we set off striding briskly up the hill towards the sea, a sharp squall of hailstones came hammering in from the west. We had to pull our hoods close to protect our cheeks from its painful sting, our vision limited to a narrow tunnel view of waterproof trousers and boots tramping on the wet road, the battering of hail on Goretex filling our ears as we shouted ‘lovely day for it!’ to each other over the racket.
But, as swiftly as it arrived, the hail was swept onwards before the scouring wind. As we came to the shore the huge, churning sea and salted air were a single gleaming pearlescence in the pale spring sunlight, here and there punctuated with the bright yellow trumpets of the first brave daffodils.
Time and again this winter I’ve found an inexplicable, wordless happiness arise in me on these walks, feeling the warm of my blood pumping through my hands as the cold wind grips them with the all heft of a firm handshake, my cheeks stinging and my lungs sucking in air so cold it feels mentholated. I am always, always glad I got outside.
With so much darkness, turmoil, destruction and violence gathering momentum around us, I find I just want to turn towards this light and effervescent beauty. I just want to make paintings that share this feeling. I want to pay attention to delight. I want to make paintings that capture something of that light, air, breath, brightness, that feeling of expansion, relief and calm you get when you look up at the sky and watch the clouds racing, or look out to sea and watch the waves lift and smash, or see the moon sailing through veils of cloud in the night sky.
When the inevitable ‘rubbishy’ thoughts come to tell me that this ambition is facile, naïve, or vainglorious, I take courage from Agnes Martin’s simplicity and directness. Beauty is indestructible because it persists within us as an idea. Beauty illustrates happiness, and happiness is the goal of life.
“We respond to life as though it were perfect.”
Thank you, Agnes. I will.
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until next week!
Sam
Agnes Martin’s brilliant advice about finding our way in to what makes us happy by paying close attention to what we respond most positively to echoes Joseph Campbell’s notions on that topic:
“The way to find out about happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you are really happy — not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self-analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what is called following your bliss. We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth.”
I think an important part of the hero’s journey (that I’ve been thinking/writing about lately) is just this self-analysis of what we resonate to in the world. This can help us stay on the right path in our work and the rest of our life. Thanks for your fine words and images about all that, Samantha! 🌱
A timely post. It’s so hard to put aside what is happening in the wider world and focus on what is perfect, and beautiful and true. Going to carry this with me today.