I always felt like I lived around art my whole life, and then I became a painter and – oh, you’re in the art world and it’s like, no, I’m in the world and the world is full of art.

This is what grace is – Alvaro Barrington at Tate

Art lets us be subjective without asking us to commit medieval surgery on the vocabulary of our impressions. Art asks us to meet it with our particular-ness exposed and open. Art changes. It cannot be pinned down. It is un-located. Unreasoned. Unproven.

Meanings change when we receive them through different lenses. Ask any room of people to describe what a Magritte painting means to them and each person will have a different take. Start back at the beginning and yet another set of meaningful observations will arise. We are allowed to move in art. The ecology of our ideas and epistemological limitations is permitted another sort of oxygen altogether when art is the subject.

Art is free to move through culture and time, to reverberate the outlines of a particular moment in history against others that are unmentioned. Art pulls perception toward the differences between light, notes, colour, subjects, framings, ideas, emotions, and stories. Art speaks in relationships. It is relationships. And we are in relationship to it and each other. All this relatedness is a mess of entanglement, shifting impressions and associations. It is, in that sense, alive, much like a pond or a forest. Art is a system of systems, which we enter with our additional systems – our perceptions, our sense, our thoughts and histories, our personal injuries, our educations, our willingness, and maybe our sense of humour.

Small Arcs of Larger Circles: Framing Through Other Patterns, 2016

.. the aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow the soul.

The arts allow us to contemplate our experiences and therefore invite soul into the picture. They sustain the emotions the soul feeds on and retain the complexity of meaning that is proper to its realm. The mind appreciates the reduction of meaning to logic and classification, but the soul finds more to chew on in diversity, density, and subtlety…if we see ourselves as a puzzle to be solved, then we will be satisfied with rational explanations, but if we see ourselves as made up of unfathomable mysteries, then we will need images that are not excessively reductive. A good artistic presentation may well lead us deeper into confusion and help us feel the chaos of life more vividly than ever. The truth is art is diffuse and largely ineffable, but at the same time it offers a degree of honesty and certainty not found elsewhere.

The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life.

Book forms created for Artists Book Festival, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, March 2024 as part of the Central Fife Artists Collective.

Music takes time to listen to and ends, writing takes time and ends, movies end, ideas and even sculpture take time. Painting does not. It never ends; it is the only thing that is both continuous and still.

Seph Rodney quoting Mitchell in his essay Why Joan Mitchell’s Paintings Can Never Die, March 2022, Hyperallergic

I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for us – citizens gestating in modern demise – to think along with the monstrous, to think along with the edges, to map out new realities.

Sporulation: a ten gifting experiment

I consider music to be a tool in my studio.

Fred Tomaselli, in conversation with Joe Figg, Inside the Painter’s Studio, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009

Why do I need music while I’m painting? There’s something about the act of entering which I find in each. I find the temporality of music to be similar painting. I don’t know if paintings are like music – yes I think it probably is. Music for me is a way to directly tap into a particular body mind situation, feeling, mood or memory, and so I have specific musicians and albums and pieces of music that I use, quite a wide repertoire, although I often get into one thing for a period of time and listen to it over and over again. I take this so seriously that I often won’t listen to the music I’m using to paint at other times of the day.

Music adds temporality to paintings because it reflects the physical actions of painting, which happen over time. There are the actions which occur at the time, the ‘push-pull’ of paint passages against each other, and the gaps between episodes, which are in effect between layers. When you look at a painting, it can go on forever because the painting act is embodied in the paint, in pigment, and especially in the fluidity of the carrier, ie water or medium. A painting has ‘passages’, which I’ve always imagined to be music, to be temporal like music rather than some other, purely visual, sense.

For the artist, and for the audience if they are informed, the memory of doing the work can be reanimated over and over again by listening to the same music as was playing when it was made. 

Really I just often think of how I want to paint pictures like how music feels to me. It’s difficult to express verbally, because of course that is the point – both music and painting can express what can’t be said in language, they are their own languages for showing emotions and experiences, which can tap into the actual feeling. Or rather, I suppose, if you experience memory as a set of physical emotions. Maybe not everyone experiences memory like that, or emotion either.

I think it is important to recognise if you are artist or not. Build a life and a career that accommodates your being an artist instead of trying to be an artist. It’s either something that’s in you or it’s not, and you cannot fake it. I would say to not worry about being an artist or trying to make art, just kind of make whatever you have to make, and then build a life around that. I think that one of the biggest breakthroughs for me, just realising….because I went through a period where I was just trying to make art, and consequently I made things that were really imitative. There was no real model or precedent for what I liked to do, but when you realise that you just have to do what you do and not worry about whether or not it fits the mold or model of what art is, then you’re truly making innovative or breakthrough – and at the very least honest – work.

Inside the Painter’s Studio, Joe Fig, Princeton Architectural Press, 2009