Why I Paint

Time & space

When I paint I look at shapes of colour and tone. To my eye, a tree and its background, or a meadow, are more or less a range of qualities, colours, tones and shapes. But something about it will usually stir up a range of feelings and bring emotion into the experience; it may be beautiful, cold and bleak or have something interesting about its colour range.

It may be beautiful

When a botanist rather than an artist looks at a meadow her thoughts are more likely about how the plants there function, about flowers as organisms, about photosynthesis and so on. A farmer surveying it in his worn-out wellies might think about the yield if he lets his sheep graze on it. An ecologist, about the interactions between the plants there and their environment. My thoughts about it aren’t thoughts at all in the moment but active reactions to the things I see out there. I am also aware the meadow exists in space and time whether I am there to see it or not.

A bold sweep

As I try to make sense of it and take a step back to get a wider view; I am aware that others think about our meadow in greater clumps of time and concern themselves, for example, how the land beneath it came to be there, of the enormous forces that were part of its genesis. Their thoughts might be about time and pressure and the processes that shaped its geology. If I zoom much further away I see that the tiny meadow, with its flowers and grasses rippling in an early evening breeze, becomes just a dot. I let my awareness take a bold sweep across the earth and see the small field is inseparably connected to the same land that forms countries and continents.

How far do I choose to go to understand all there is to know about the meadow? If I can fly up and away from the land and out into the atmosphere, then, on my simple quest, I must zoom even further into the space between the planets and the solar system. My desire to know as fully as possible what the meadow is, now includes the sun and the light which helped to bring the meadow into being and constantly sustains the life to be found there. As I trace the causes that brought the meadow on its little spinning planet and its pastures into being, I see the light-bringing sun is one of 100 billion stars and beyond them, immeasurably billions more. I also know that as the grasses in the meadow live and die, so do the stars live and die, and that it’s just a question of scale. How can I conceive what it meant for the coming into existence of the meadow in space and time, that out of the cataclysmic detonations of ancient stars, the elements were formed that created the possibility of a flower that will someday live and grow in a meadow on a tiny planet in a future, slowly forming, star system?

The humming of a great mystery

So much for the little meadow and its origin. As someone who wants to paint it, I’m not thinking of any of that. As a painter, I don’t map my impressions of it onto anything other than here is a lovely little field, curved down towards its edges and surrounded by others which fade into the distance. There are great oaks and prickly hedges, randomly scattered wildflowers, and the hum of life there slowly quiets as the early evening closes in.

I’m aware that what I see, the information coming into my awareness through the senses is bringing me news about its nature.  Painting is about revelation, a desire to say something about my experience so others might see what I see there, in their own way.

As I try to bring the fullness of my knowing to bear onto what I’m doing, in the background but usually out of reach, is always the humming of a great mystery. It passes between the leaves and the wind that rustles them. It stalks among the shadows, the flowers and the grasses like a conspiratorial whisper. It is there in the glistening distant eye of a Heron that reflects back in the wet curve of its eye the presence of the life and force that sustains it.

Can I find a connection to that great mystery, and help others to share it.