Thoughts come before language
Painting as question
Hello friends
Words are slow to arrive at the page today, as if they are coming from somewhere far away. I stare at the page and write in stumbling bursts. Maybe I’m rusty.
I’m painting a lot.
For hours on end my mind inhabits the very tip of a tiny paintbrush, right where the fine hairs kiss the painting’s surface and leave behind a tiny smudge of colour. A flicker, a nerve impulse, travels through the muscles and sinews of my wrist and hand. Sometimes a bold arabesque erupts. Sometimes it’s hardly more than a twitch.
It’s not worded thought that drives this impulse, but something thought-adjacent; a feeling or a sense-memory, of a certain evening sky perhaps, or a day of gusting wind, a quiet sea under the moon, a shimmering field of grasses, a bright sun behind thin cloud, or the ever-present sea horizon that circles this island.
Brushmark by brushmark, broad fields and bands of colour slowly emerge and thicken slowly. They suggest the sky or sea or these low-lying islands, under glittering sunlight, or gentle moonlight, or cloud, or fog.
I’m not quite sure where it’s all going, but I can sense things are shifting, opening out. It’s a little scary, but also utterly absorbing. I just want to be in the studio, painting, all the time I can, to see where it’s leading me.
But connection and conversation are also vital. Art doesn’t flourish in a vacuum. I’ve been taking part in some online group ‘studio conversations’ facilitated by Matthew Burrows, which have been enriching and useful. In my notebook from our last session I see that wrote, paraphrasing our shared discussion and Matthew’s prompts: We think before language. Language helps us to remember and share, but thoughts come before language. The work knows before you do. Your’ artistic voice’ isn’t something you invent. It’s something you gradually recognise. Your job is to listen. It will already be there.
The work knows before you do.
It is your intelligence reaching out into the world, groping towards a metaphor, in search of a vessel, some shape or place or creature or sensation, that will help it take better hold of an idea, give form to a blurry question you are carrying, so you can begin to answer it.
I am holding a question about air and light and colour and water, how these move in the world and through our body and our consciousness, and how, when you really pay attention, you realise you can’t find the edges. And how we can only find our way into these questions through the real world, real places, real experience in a real body. This life. This place. This squally Atlantic gale buffeting these cold cheeks. This high noon Sun beating through these red-drenched closed eyelids.
The painter Winifred Nicholson wrote ‘I paint the air between things’.
Yes, that sounds about right. Of her home in Cumbria she also wrote:
‘There’s glittering sunshine and limpid rain in the sky, the plaything of the wind, which rushes about and leaves it in the end in the grass and shiny amongst the sheep’s scabious and cow dung…the wind blows right through the body...’1
Cumbria sounds a lot like Orkney. It also sounds like it gave form to the same kinds of questions that I’m in deepening into, in this long, slow journey towards a solo exhibition next year. None of these painting-questions will leave my studio until then.
I still have plenty of time to ponder them.
In the meantime, you can see a selection of work that I do have available in my studio at this link:
Join the Life Raft Creative Co-Working Session
You are welcome our creative co-working session every Wednesday from 3 pm to 4.30 pm UK time. It’s very simple. We say hello, share what we’ll be working on, then leave our cameras on and work together in quiet companionship for an hour, then sign off with a quick check-in chat. That’s it! If you miss a session or can’t make it live, a recording is usually made available to paid subscribers (though not this week as I was away.) You can find them in the subscriber chat HERE.
until next week!
Sam
Winifred Nicholson in ‘Unknown Colour: Paintings, Letters, Writings by Winifred Nicholson, edited by Andrew Nicholson, Faber and Faber, 1987.
“I paint the air between things.” Love this so much. Lately I’ve been leaning into the in-between. After my mom’s death two weeks ago I found it too easy to look for her in signs, and I feel a braver more intuitive urgency to look for her in between the signs, the interstitial places of uncertainty. I love that your art can give shape and color to these spaces.
I wrote a book called Being About that tries to speak from an understanding that everything we so crudely sub-classify as 'feelings', 'thoughts', 'sensations', 'language', etc are inherently-networked bodily structures that can gate behaviours - motion of a paintbrush for instance - without any necessary distinction between those categories.