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| The painter, the observant “I”, stands at the threshold between two vast and mutually reflective worlds, one outer, the other inner, and his painting marks the border. Externally, the endless inventions of the “ten thousand things”: a patch of sunlight on a wall, a new-born lamb shivering in the wind off the cold sea, golden fields in the evening light reflected on the surface of a pond and punctuated by the dark diacritics of waterlilies. Autumn’s black earth seen through a veil of lavender air. The odd crosshatchings of the tasseled barley, green and golden, or the pale green of ripening wheat: all the subtle relationships of color and light with which the gods imprint their alphabet of desire. Or the strangely impersonal forms of the human figure and its wordless gestures. Within: fragments of myth, inner figures, persistent obsessions as urgent as they are obscure, dreams, whispers, banalities, frailties, lusts, the flaws and birth marks of the soul. Between the two the painter stands as between two mirrors, each reflecting endlessly the other, and seeks to fix the characters of his own indecipherable need, his alphabet of desire. The outer image awakens echoes in the soul, while the soul seeks its proper shapes in the world. The wish to relate the inner and outer underlies and drives this game of hide-and-seek. Interwoven with one’s personal memories are moments of a singular and painful sweetness, when living myth displaced the waking world. Then one reached for something more than human and in the tasting lost it, to be forever haunted by its memory. This obscure and relentless longing for that which never was, for god knows what, which the Welsh call “hiraeth”, is what makes me paint, ultimately. Painting is a desperate kind of sympathetic magic: often blind, sometimes hopeless, but in the end what else will do? Through the fiction of art we may (re)capture the lost thing that never was, and that moment savors strangely of a fresh creation and a new beginning. Why? To recapture that which never was creates something new. The landscape is always |
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