Happy Sadness

“That feeling of nearness to the shapeless ghost, Ambiguity, is what I want most, what I want to put inside a book, what I want the reader to sense.  And because it is at once a thing and a nothing, the reader will have to find it, not only in what I have written, but also in what I have not written.”

Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking.

The tenuous link between one thing and another, one thought and that which follows, one sensation and the next.  These spaces hold a quality that is indescribable, possibly because they are experienced so briefly.  For the human mind that loves nothing better than to make sense of the world, the ambiguous is perhaps avoided and ignored.  Like an eccentric great Aunt that most of the family tolerate with humour but cannot really connect with.

To me ambiguity holds the essence of something transcendent, something beyond reason and rationality.  It is pure abstraction and it defies categorization.  For this reason, I love it and it is also one of the reasons that I love abstraction.  I like not knowing what the story is, or the possibility that there is, in fact, no story at all, or a million stories captured in a micro second.  I like to be left with questions rather than definitive answers, because questions are the stepping stones to learning and more questions.  Abstraction allows me to feel before thinking.  It allows me to experience something with my senses before my mind kicks in.

Recently, I have been experiencing a sensation that does not have an adequate adjective to call it’s own.  It is the feeling of happy sadness.  It is perhaps one of the most beautiful feelings that I know.  I like the fact that it is nameless.  It sits wafting between two emotions that are essentially in opposition to each other.  It defies definition because really, it does not make any sense and yet it certainly does exist.  It is a feeling of joy that is delicately stained with a past grief or melancholia or an uncertainty.  It reminds me of the twin genres of painting: the still life or Vanitas and the Memento Mori.  Flip sides of the coin of life and death. One side depicting the glorious pleasures that are possible for the living and the other a reminder of the fleeting nature of such pleasure, the ever present imminence and possibility of death.

The inherent quality of happy sadness seems to invoke the spectrum of human emotion.  Like the memento Mori, it reminds us that one cannot hold on to emotional states.  Happy sadness and other states of ambiguity are warm incubators of beautiful ideas, of metaphor, poetry, music and art.  Happy sadness is the freest of birds, never meant to exist within the confines of a cage or a definition.  

Finding Form

Finding Form, Thinking About Thinking

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.  The creative mind plays with the things it loves.”

Carl Jung

As a child, at bed time, whilst waiting for sleep to descend, I would entertain myself by watching my thoughts.  I would make a note of the starting point then (try to) relax and let my mind wander.  After some minutes of this,  I would pull the brakes on my train of thought and then work my way backwards to  the point of origin.  The intention was to figure out how I started with one thought and ended up somewhere else entirely in the space of a few minutes.  It was like a contrary form of meditation. Rather than stilling the mind and focussing on the breath, I would instead focus on my thoughts and completely ignore my breathing.

Sometimes I would  also just see and feel patterns.  It is a sensation difficult to describe, a strange confluence of seeing, thinking and feeling.  I remember a kind of shaking sensation that was accompanied by a visual of  fine, black scribble.  Another version was a soft, dense, white, rubbery feeling - like biting into an eraser.  

At other times I would play a game that involved visualising the colours of numbers and letters.

I have always loved the associational journeys that the brain makes. 

I have always loved thinking about thinking.

The processes of making these paintings in a sense mirrored the circuitous routes of my thought pathways and an ever changing emotional landscape.  They underwent numerous transformations over a period of some months.  Compositions would continually shift, colours would be re-mixed and re-applied until they were exactly the right hue.  It was at times a difficult process with no certain outcome.  Many of them were initially quite complex, a layered grid of gestural and painterly marks.  Gradually these earlier layers would be covered with flat paint and the introduction of more distinct forms and geometric patterns. Seemingly random and indecisive, these actions of layering paint, of revealing and obscuring, echoed a voyage of ideas, memories and dreams.

In a sense these paintings are cerebral self portraits or snap shots of my mind in action.  They are about thought processes, decision making, questioning, remembering, day dreaming, freedom, boundaries and the linkage of ideas and sensation. 

They are about how an idea can form from something that may initially be indistinct and end up as something concrete, how the organic forms of dreaming and reverie relate to  the more structured trajectories of rational thought. 

The language of abstraction and the use of geometric pattern alongside organic forms have helped me to visually depict these somewhat nebulous processes of the mind.

Finding Form opens at Tim Olsen Gallery, Sydney on the 15th August 2012

Brunswick Heads

I am living in town.  After many years of being in the country, it is good to have people around me again.  Cars driving past, children in the street, people living their lives, behind the lighted windows of their homes.  

Tonight, as I sat on my front veranda, I could see a woman walking to and fro in her apartment across the road.  She seemed to be floating backwards and forwards across her room.  Perhaps she was dancing or listening to music.  I liked knowing that she was there.  Like me, inhabiting her own space, doing her thing, imagining her own stories and dreams.  Perhaps one day I will meet her as she puts out her garbage and I will say hello.  A brief greeting will perhaps connect us for a moment in time.

An American man knocked on my door this evening to tell me that my car lights were on.

The other day my children came home from a birthday party.  They were given these beautiful bubble wands as parting gifts.  We wandered around town together and they were continually creating these streams of beautiful rainbow coloured bubbles. They glided down the streets, into cafes and across the paths of pedestrians.  Everyone that saw these  temporal rainbow spheres smiled and commented. I overheard a man we passed talking on his mobile phone telling someone that:

 “ There are these kids blowing bubbles.  They are filling the whole street.”

 It was a beautiful thing.  Just for a moment, my children brought a little magic into the hearts of strangers.

For now, I don’t need Sydney, New York or Roma.  Brunswick Heads is just right.