The bright, moving air
on painting the wind
Hello Friends
With each week that passes in the studio I swim ever deeper into the space of this painting. Or, perhaps more accurately I move deeper into the time of it.
I have a few trips away from the studio this month, but I am trying to keep this big painting moving, slowly, incrementally, towards a resolution that’s still some way off. Sometimes I think I can see it coming, then it slips away again.
When I posted this clip on Instagram recently I was asked if I wasn’t tempted to use a bigger brush to speed things up? The answer is no, it never really occurred to me. While there is, admittedly, considerable friction between this deep durational space of making and the practical reality of a deadline (albeit still some way off), I’m committed to this slow pace, to the dense filigree of fine marks, to the real brushstroke, made in real time.
You could compare it to the experience of reading a novel. We don’t skim it efficiently for information, aiming to get the job over with as quickly as possible. We enter its fictional world and move through it for as long as it takes. We enter its time, and let it do with us what it will.
On one level here, I think I am trying to paint the wind, or how the bright, moving air feels like a lively participant in the living world, not just an emptiness that other things happen in. The wind here in Orkney is a muscular presence. You don’t just hear it. You feel it bodily. It pushes and shoves and sucks and whirls through your hair, ears, fingers. The specific airt o’ wind I am thinking of here is the Westerly, that has the fetch of the whole North Atlantic behind it as it streams up and over the cliffs to hit you square in the face as you look seaward, salt-tasting, glittering with sealight, carrying fulmars and arctic terns and squalls of rain.
But I realise that I am also painting time. What I can see emerging here, by tiny increments, is a painting as something that’s gathering, thickening, acquiring depth.
As Greg Rook recently wrote:
“…art remains one of the places where time is allowed to thicken rather than simply pass.”
“A painting is never only an image in the present. It carries other paintings, old rooms, failed attempts, technical inheritances, bodily habits, private associations and unplanned returns. It belongs to now, but not obediently. That is one reason certain works resist the cultural demand to be instantly available. They have a past inside them.”
So, despite the generic daily scam emails I receive (sigh) that importune me to sell my ‘stunning artworks’ as NFTs in exchange for cryptocurrency, I will keep my commitment to the real work of making real things in real time in real places with real materials and our all-too-real, frail and tender bodies.
My hope is that, once it is eventually finished and out in the world, whoever may encounter this painting in some other room, in some other time, might feel the real, warm presence of breath, gesture, life and care in every tiny brushmark.
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until next week!
Sam
The painting is coming along quite nicely. All in good time.
BTW, I must finished reading your book The Clearing a week or so ago. You have such a gift with words and phrases Samantha. Frequently felt like I was there in Glasgow, in the house, experiencing the moments you described. These major life transitions are complex, to be sure. Thank you for putting pen to paper and publishing that.
Time and the wind stop for no person … except in your studio! 🌱