As the Samhain banners unfurl, and as winter approaches, thoughts of painting crunch with the leaves and unseen snow. One becomes thoughtful before the fire, burrows inwards, carves out an imaginative hinterland where the cold and the rain cannot enter. Paintings and prints hover as marvellous worlds upon the walls; companionable apparitions which call for more: more of the magic, more of the miracle, where time is suspended and all appears as gateway, enchantment.
I feel the enchantment of many; some I’ve managed to collect, others, I dream of doing so. A small Michael McSwiney lights my morning, its infinitesimal shifts between turquoise, silver and amber on a crumbling bed of tar, evoking a world. The etchings of Roman Sustov also hover in my vision: steam punk apparitions which conjure stories beyond words. I would love a Tom Climent: those searing crystalline peaks breathing a purity of colour, which surely refracts the colours of the artist’s soul. I could also live well with a work by Carol Hodder, whose Turneresque paintings bloom fire and light out of sumptuous impasto. They are the magicians who spark my own fire. None of it comes with ease: the artist must dig, must enter the flow, is not content until a certain feeling is recognised, a certain arrangement felt.
Inchoate and inexplicable is the world of art; a language of substances and non-verbal nuances, which draw us without us knowing why. The artist plays a chord upon the hinterland, between what is known and unknown. One chord beckons another, the artist drawn and enchanted, curious and enlivened. What is this form, this colour, this feeling?
When it comes to figuration, one enters a stage, where the actors are all frozen mid flight. The best of the New Masters conjure their figures with as much bravura, presence and subtlety as the old, painting archetypes, respelling ancient stories, providing continuity in the Grand Tradition. Jannik Hosel from Germany, the Italians: Arrivabene, Sicoldr, Samori; Kaja Norum in Norway, Ireland’s own Molly Judd. They are but a few who come to mind, and each of them brilliant in their way. They call to the conjurer in me, to the story teller, a very different persona to the intuitive forger of colour-scapes.
We are all feeling our way, and autumn is a good time to trust in our own instincts, to turn off the screens, to awaken to our own inner world. There is an occasional tapping on the roof of my new studio, an inquisitive bird, I imagine, pecking at the roof tiles. I’ve heard them in the trees, pecking at wood, no doubt looking for insects. It is a reminder to tap, with whatever tools we have, on the roof of our consciousness, with curiosity and openness. Perhaps a window will open? Or an echo will inspire?
Words can be slow to come, and that is fine. The works of so many painters drift over me, each of them focused, each of them possessed with the courage to evoke the mystery. All I can do today is let them drift. My new studio awaits, and I wonder what might be conjured in that space? Thoughts of the new studio beckon memories of another, the student studio at the Nerdrum School in Norway, where I studied for two months in 2017. Below are diary entries from August 15 and 16 of that year:
“‘Tis a cold and stormy night by the north sea. I can feel the walls shaking in the wind. Masterpieces lurk in the darkness below, oblivious to the storm. How quickly they have become objects to navigate on the way to elsewhere.”
“The morning after the storm the skies are washed clear as a white milky blue. The grasses are heavy with the remnants of frost and the rocks sit like seals which have basked in the sun, the moon, the waves and the ice for millennia. Roedvik Gaard is the name of this place, fingers of stone trailing into the sea, knuckles of sandstone and marble littering the shore. And further back a tower, tucked into the trees. There a dreamer wanders, from canvas to canvas, from shadow to shadow, from light to light.”
The dreamer, in that case, was the master, Odd Nerdrum, who has inspired and guided many of the figurative painters mentioned above. But it is also, by extension, every artist and every person who dreams and creates, in whatever space they can carve out. So, to the breaches, to the roof tops: it is time to tap like the bird, to listen, to tap again.
