Monday, 17th July.
‘improvisation is essentially an act of acute vulnerability. But it is also a path to creative freedom, to wild adventure, in which the things of true value can often emerge through musical misunderstandings.’
- Faith, Hope and Carnage, Nick Cave.
I’m coming up to the halfway point of my time here in Prenzlauer and the sun is back with a vengeance after the tyrannous reign of rain. I’ll laugh when I read this back in a couple months and curse the temporary nature of everything! The sun hasn’t been too distracting as I’m building the walls on my sketches that I included in the last instalment of this shopping list and I’ve been feeling inspired with a sense of ease and a surrender to both conscious and unconscious improvisation.
Last week I stumbled across a Louis Theroux interview with Nick Cave, via the Louis Theroux Podcast, where Nick delved into his relationship with organised religion, his profound personal grief and his epic creative process. I’m not a Theroux fanatic really, as much of a cult icon he has esteemed to be over recent decades, but Nick, a timeless hierophantic*, darkly light, magician, I am! I left engaging with this podcast with questions of my own practice and the similarities in the operation of making art, him making aural images and I painting songs.
The similarities struck me, perhaps obvious to most as the process of making transcends all paths of creative expressions, but the introspective process of relaying an experience or tale was the most dominant principle I could resonate with. The act of adding to the lore of this planet or timeline, whether externally or internally profound.
When contemplating these similitudes* and adopting a different lens, a painting not necessarily being a whole song but perhaps a bridge or a chorus followed by another verse, a diary of multidimensionality appeared. The hooks and lyrics that reemerge, of underlying melodies and tableau; I could see my recent works as a visual protest songs, songs of sorrow, of grief, of self-contained intricate beauty as I comprehend my surroundings and equally recognise my process as I critique during every phase post-spawn.
With this idea of ad lib, I began to challenge the stagnant elements or lyrics of my practice, one being my battle with landscapes that I’ve mulled over for a few months. Not quite understanding what it was that was skewing me away from what I tried to convey and how the literal was drowning the dreamscape I was curating. From discussions in a studio crit with my co-resident at Takt, Isabel Monti, she provided the fact that the literal landscapes provided more of a novel-like quality rather than championing the art of story-telling. Folklore, in its most ancient form, was never meant to be transcribed but its purpose was an ongoing dialogue between mouth and ear, where details change every so slightly, and one has the freedom to adapt the told topography from one individual to another. This ritual being a strong heartbeat intertwined within communities, regardless of planetary location, and a parallel purpose can be seen in sharing and digesting music and song. The magic of exploring an internal surrealscape or autonomous, liminal realm where improvisation and creative freedom flourish and fester whilst recounting that space for another to totally evolve in another’s inner alltar*.
*(the Irish word for the other side, the afterlife or otherworld.)
With this successful method of self critique, and through viewing my process as song writing, another question appeared to me:
Why do I paint the figures I do?
There are obvious themes of marine life and odes to the sea within most, if not all, of my recent works, recent being the past 2.5 years, and after brief deliberation I decided the following:
I get asked why I paint fish but fish is actually irrelevant to the core of my practice. I’m not really painting fish at all. Similar to a repeated song lyric, its motif or hook grabs people and curates possibilities of my beastial hybrids belonging in our world, whether pre-historic, future or hidden within the modern day. Fish have become a lens for me or a symbol to open conversation of common characters or fables within different dialects and cultures, from the Chinese Koi, to the vast culture spanning tale of The Fish and the Gold Ring to An Bradán Feasa (The Salmon of Knowledge). The abilities of these stories to approach life’s moralistic questions through the lens of surrealism is enticing to me as they can be enormously cruel yet virtuous with endless possibilities for the fantastical. The symbol of the fish commonly personifies an otherworldly messenger whether untouched & literal or metamorphosising* ghosts. Such ambiguity appeals to me as a liminal space in itself where what I say and what I mean can be open to interpretation.
The act of metamorphosis, of rebirth, is staggeringly powerful and that is a mutual magic we have all subscribed to for millions of sun laps and moon turns. A complex way of viewing the world as life is merely love and suffering and the meaning in that when you eventually shake hands with death is a beautiful, delicate thing. You will in turn metmorphosise in next realm, whether stardust or gas. My practice will most certainly continue to transfigure in terms of subject and tempo and that be the beauty of life!
Maybe I’ll walk away from aquatic symbols and that’s bloody ok because who cares.
Thanks for everything Nick Cave.
Also curse the rules of italics. I think they look fun and pretty.
