lodestone

When I was eighteen, I left art college, disappointed with the world of abstract art and conceptual discussion, and went to live in Edinburgh. Swinging back to the other pole of a binary dance that had begun for me at the age of twelve (when I had to choose between doing art or being in the orchestra), I went back to music, picking up my violin for the first time in about six years. The gap between playing at twelve and starting again at eighteen seemed like a lifetime. I found I could hardly play a note. I used to stay behind in the cafe where I worked to practice, so I could play without worrying about the terrible noises I was making.

At that time, most of my friends were musicians. I can remember stealing into the Netherbow Theatre after two of them had had a concert there, finding a guitar, and singing in to the microphone -  only able to do it because I was sure that no-one could hear me. I also remember countless evenings with groups of people who would sit around jamming until the early hours, while I sat on the sofa beside them, almost drowning in the longing to be doing it too. There was one time when we loaded up the cars with food and drink and instruments and drove off to some remote cottage on the West coast of Scotland somewhere. The playing  went on day after day, night after night, while the wind and the rain lashed outside, and the wood burned in the grate.... As the years passed by, I forgot most of the things I had done. But for some reason I never forgot that weekend.

It seemed utterly impossible for me to even think about getting to a point where I could do such things. I had missed my boat; not continued to play through my teens, hadn't done my grades, and now had no chance of  'catching up'. I was convinced that to play the wild improvisational fiddle I could hear in my head, the only way had been to do my grades, all the way up to grade 8, by the age of eighteen. I had no idea how to go about studying something on my own, and within about eighteen months, I was off travelling with no violin, leaving all my tortuous music-playing dreams behind me.

There were strange moments, like the time I got a friend of mine, an Omani prince, to agree to go to my mother's house during a trip to Scotland, and collect my violin for me. Despite the impossibility of it all, it just didn't feel right not to have it with me. I've talked about my various attempts to start playing again here before. Things inched forward for a little while, but then everything stopped completely in my late twenties. Music was finished. Art was finished. Life was travel, working abroad, exploring, and getting out of various troubles.

I'm writing this post to celebrate two recent moments in my life. The first was in April, doing my improvisation workshop with Mairi Campbell on the island of Lismore. The Saturday night found me sitting on the edge of a big sofa, surrounded by musicians, in front of a huge coal fire, playing my socks off, in a lovely quite, relaxed way. It was dark and cold outside. And I was playing. Without any manic excitement or drama, I knew that I was sitting in the middle of what had once been an impossible dream.

The second moment was the yesterday, when my niece, Mairi Britton, came over to spend the day with me to play music. In the morning we explored all sorts of combinations of piano, clarsarch, viola, voice, harmony, violin and mandolin. And in the evening, we sat around the kitchen table, here, in my house, with my partner, the three of us playing our little socks off once again.

For those of you who had the sense/capacity to follow your lodestone, who've been sitting in kitchens and front rooms playing with friends all of your life, this will seem so normal as to hardly merit a mention. But me, I'm just quietly basking here in a sea of quiet satisfaction....

watching process

An interesting couple of videos about the process of working on a painting by a painter in Melbourne, Rod McRae. Have a look.


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go into the arts

Go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practising an art no matter now well or badly is a way to make your soul grow for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get enormous reward. You will have created something.

Kurt Vonnegut

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how much looking

This might sound like rather an obvious thing to say, but sometimes I'm amazed at how much simple looking goes on in the practice of making paintings. If you timed the amount of time I spent with a brush in my hand for a painting like this one, for example, you might see that the overall time spent literally painting was about 45 minutes. Compared to someone making a 6 foot oil painting over as many weeks, this seems trivial, and perhaps as if I should be 'churning them out'.

Ha! It would indeed be churning if I spent a day putting a number of those 45 minute sessions together and just kept painting most of the time. And, I've learnt, the paintings I would end up with at the end of the day would be completely different. Sometimes the first stage, like the first picture here, might sit in my room looking at me for a week, or even a month. It's as if the thing gets started, and then it says, well, you could just carry on without stopping, or you could stop and see what I have to say. I think I used to carry on without stopping much more than I do now. Now, I let the first stage sit there, and I look at it for days. I wait for it to say something to me, suggest to me what, of many possibilities, is most suited to happening next.

There's always the worry that whatever it is you like about the early stage will be obliterated as you proceed. That happened pretty much with this one. If I'd stopped at the lines around the dark blue centre, it would  have been a more interesting painting. I almost did. But I wasn't sure. So I decided to take the risk of screwing up what I liked, and went ahead. And screwed up what I liked. That happens all the time. And then I think, ok sit with it some more, or do some more, it's screwed up now, so what the hell (this is a particular feature of watercolour, I guess, there's not a lot you can do to take lines or colours back...). Often it never really becomes more satisfying, but even if it doesn't, I usually learn about something I would never have decided to do. Like put so many black lines over a light area. I would never have decided to do that.

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trying to sing

watch how the spring

still comes

despite the cold  wind

despite the rain

how apple blossoms

break out into cold air

how horsechestnut leaves

unfurl

despite the absence

of sun

the birds are trying to sing
through the rain

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every spring

and every spring

the sun shines more brightly

the colours are sharper

the shapes more delicate

the air floods into my lungs

I gasp, I blink

in this life

still here

still here
against so many odds

after so much fire

so much burning

and flooding

so much parching

and wringing out

still here

still here
blood moving

gases bubbling

ions charging

heart beating

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flame or fire?

When I talk to other people, sometimes to other artists, I realise that there are as many ways of working as there are people. A lot of people seem to feel that they need more discipline. They get distracted from what they want to be doing, sometimes calling themselves lazy, though I always think it's more likely that there's something challenging about what it is that they want to do and that they're being unfair on themselves, labelling themselves like that... Whatever you call it, their default seems to be to avoid and to potter and to not get on with the things they really want to do.

I seem to have an opposite kind of psychology. I have to call in a psychology because, although I think it's very weird that emotions are classed as things of the mind, and I also hate the pathologising of the human condition that therapeutic approaches so often seem to indulge in, I nonetheless have to recognise that my patterns of engagement have deep 'psychological' roots. But that doesn't actually matter. Whatever the reasons, my default is to engage, to the point of becoming somewhat transfixed. The word 'flow' has been invented to designate a desirable state of creative immersion, which some people talk about as if it's an almost mystical state, a fleeting, often unattainable goal. But I fall into flow states at the smell of an oily rag, particularly if there's some kind of deadline involved. Which might seem to make sense, but actually isn't necessarily inevitable -  some people seem to respond to a deadline by putting their head even deeper into the sand, until the very last minute, when they become suddenly crazed.

One of the reasons for my approach, I think, is that, having started life as an disengaged kid who left school early and partied from far too young an age, I eventually discovered the fruits of immersive activity. It was amazing what wonders seemed to result from a bit of application, first in the field of language teaching, then as a student, then as an academic. But I took it too far, for too long, and, most importantly, I immersed and concentrated and burned in response to things that I wasn't really interested in, apart from there being people involved (I like people), and latterly a lot of stuff that made me angry. A bad cocktail for the body - endless deadline-driven application, fuelled by anger and irritation. 

Now that I'm out the other side of my body's finally putting an end to all that, I find that any kind of return to ideas of discipline, of list-making, of sitting working for hours, or of telling myself that I must do X,Y and Z, simply don't work. Where others are trying to discipline themselves into better routines, longer periods of work, setting goals and trying to push things into a new shape, my discipline is to learn to let go, to learn undiscipline; to continually take myself 'off the hook', and try to understand how I keep hanging myself up on that hook in the first place. To try to learn enjoyment and exploration, freedom and wandering, space and non-doing. 

I think of this when I hear people in the creative world talking about the fire (that's a link!) that burns within them. It's a very common image for what motivates us to create, even when we get no recognition, no money, no applause. Something is pushing, something needs to be attended to, responded to. As fire, though, this pushing can also burn, as many creative lives bear witness to. 

I nearly consumed myself in the flames of my desperation to respond creatively to the world. Now I can see that the consuming was at least partly the result of the call not being heard; of staying in the wrong place, creating and creating in response to constraints that I believed were freely chosen, but which actually were held in place by fear and insecurity. 

My proper, right, creative life has finally claimed me. But fire doesn't work as an image for what motivates and feeds me now. It's more like a flame, a flame that was lit a long, long time ago, which I carried around in some sheltered space within me all of those years. I have an image now of my hands cupped around a small blue flame, like an oil lamp in cave, always there. 

His soul is a lamp

Whose light is steady

For it burns in a shelter

Where no winds come

Bhagavad Gita

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