ManicWorld Magazine

Dragging the canvas to the flyover when it was just plain and grey and flimsy was not the kind of traipsing that left traces in the mud. It never once touched the ground, considering that it was carried at waist height. The wind blew into it and turned it into a sail. The feeling of being dragged was inside the body, the walk being harder than usual because of this giant, empty thing. People in cars  stared like people in cars do when they see something unusual. Each second or two of staring eyeballs made my belly churn a little and cling to the promise of the corner that took me off the road and into the mudpath between the houses. Then, at least, while no less awkward, the baggage of intent was unseen by anyone else. I could struggle alone as it snagged in brambles and the soft hooks of high ferns. Once free of unintended audience, the possibilities of what this thing might become in the next hours started to emerge. Kind of. 

Really, what was taking over in this pre-dawn meander was the sky coloured bruise purple and dark blue, and in the east, over the wind turbines, a pale blue light that said sun. That said nothing really, that felt sun. Sensations of promise had forced the drag from shed to flyover in the not-yet-light morning. Something inside that wanted bird song and breeze beneath that thumping of invisible traffic.  And the river, that was important. The river down there is the one thing that seems eternal, or at least seems to have lasted despite all the mess of the world around it. The energy of the river was enough to find the energy in me and never once that fall into a bemoaning of the lazy, those wired-in voices angry at falling productivity. There is a shudder at the memory of those BBC radio phone-ins, designed for those of us not at work. No matter what the subject they start with, each of those calls grows more irate, a rage at those they see as not doing enough. That crackling misery, if I am not careful, becomes a grumbling human chorus that can ruin the whole day. Thatcher’s spawn, small business desires for no tax, and the end of minimum wage. Seeping into the soul via ear, signalling the end of the canvas as escape.  Their dreary selfish misery lathering deep in the paint before it even leaves the tube. 

F*** productivity.  That’s what I often think on these meanders to the underneath. Not entirely sure what it means, even. What has started to emerge is the sky, the sense of the sky, and the colours it communicates. These skies are temporary, and I had to stop a while, hang the canvas on a barb wire fence pole, rummage through the bag and select some tubes that might help me make that splodgy lilac and purple wonder above and around me. Pocket them. Renewed vigour and step sprung through dewy grasses and past bull rushes and Alder. All of it starts tumbling now. Thoughts that are fresh. A new day, unencumbered. Sort of unencumbered.  Clouds come often enough, what art looks like elsewhere, what things should mean, and colour wheels and theories of colour and clashes and contrasts and shadows and light and good brushes and bad and rules of thirds and rules of composition and…ah f*** all of that. I know they exist, that’s enough. I have started to read them sometimes, but end up looking at the pictures, and get drawn into the worlds the paint creates. 

Pockets of paint to make a bruised sky. That’s all I need.

Mainly, strangely, the paintings of others never inform the paint of mine. They are other world visions.  Books though, words, they riddle me like Bonny and Clyde bullets. They leave me plastered against the landscape, bleeding ideas through parts of the body that don’t easily seem affected by language. Words, they go in through the eyes and the ears, but that’s hardly ever where they stay. Words, belly sore with them, heart racing, tears fall, laughter from guts, guts spun like washing machines by them. Words.  You don’t tend to get far without words, and you really need to find the wild ones. Words are always at risk of the tamers, the word jailers, those that would strip them bare and tie them to stakes in word zoos. Try to be one of the word whisperers, the chain snappers, if you can.

This day, dragging a canvas day, words included those from Chtcheglov that ‘the Hacienda must be built’. It always chimes that, I came to it through the situationists and was mainly thinking how impossible it was to make his name sound in my head, and it would never get to my tongue because of its difficulty and my lack of concern with productivity. Thinking also that building is the problem.  He, a Parisian in the 1950s, was concerned with new urban futures. He was a young man in a devastated city, so that makes sense. I am an old man in a world that has been building for way too long and built far too much. Or built badly. I wanted, I was thinking, a hacienda that could be grown. A new world that walked away from the ugliness of productivity and BBC radio phone-ins and disgruntled restaurateurs and small businessmen, of the cleaned-up smoke stacks of the city that wallowed in the grime they had blasted with photographs of the same. 

A world that the river would welcome. 

That’s how the canvas started. A few words from a man who tried to blow up the Eiffel Tower because it lit up his bedroom and bugged his sleep. And a pocketful of bruise paint. 

Another word I had was Kintsugi. Shouted at me, because I had misheard its first use. The art of correction, of fixing with gold, she said. All part of a process of renewal, it seems. The end of a relationship, the cup thrown at his head and that bounced off the kitchen wall instead, and at that very second of fractured pot, stopped being a cup and became a symbol. It was a fleeting visit, too raw a moment, but this ancient art of the Japanese was promising future calm. It was still in bits when I was there, the sticky-fingered alchemist was still perfecting a concoction of Polyfilla and airfix paint when I left. Yet I was taken by the strands of yellow and the way they seemed to be a different level of life on that kitchen table.  Threads of not-gold across a tablecloth of Daily Mirror headlines. That’s how new worlds can be grown, lives emerging from each dribbled yellow track. I thought of Henri Bergson, of his concept of petrification. In that view, the fluidity of life is always heading toward a crystallisation, a becoming solid, turning to stone. Medusa moments that immediately reflected to those who would turn words and thoughts into things that are simple and linear. Basic histories for basic beliefs. This tacky not-gold attempt to reframe that past, it was kind of beautiful without the cup being fixed. Words and actions, still fluid. 

Painting by the river, the use of colour and of form is as much a process of these words and the thoughts around them as it is of brush and paint. I am not sure where it started, I think the sky. The sky by now was obscured by the flyover but the memory of it was still in the chest and the hands. The city was next, and done initially in charcoal. I liked the grittiness of it, and then later dipped the clunky sticks in the river to get a pencil smoothness. It was never a real city, but it was northern. Not my memories, but the collective vision of a city before now. Imagined histories we trust to be real. The Hacienda itself was a big top at first, like a travelling circus that could not last and was never meant to. It came at the same time as my Kintsugi inspired threads of yellow, and in each a lifeform emerging that was not quite human. Like me and you. This seemed alchemy too. 

I remembered another partly imagined history of the raves and the rabble that we were, in cars and vans and clubs and warehouses and factories and, and, and. It always felt incredible, not of this world, and the people there not the people. They were a few days before, or a few days after. It was the thread of gold between the broken crockery of life. It was the past too, and this was a painting of what is yet to come.  What must be grown. And it was grown then. Not the stories of the makers, nor the owners, nor the people who wrote the books after. It was how, from the chaos of the new star-making system of productivity and enterprise, of individualism and future phone-in conservatism, from all that came something else. A breathing collection of people that were alive to each other and moved as a single mass of body and not-body belonging. It was beautiful.  It can be beautiful again.  It also had nothing to do with words. This is something I knew then and have thought of a lot since. Every attempt to turn into words the experiences of then, they lose the lot. Throbbing, churning, elevated, golden experiences of the moment are beyond anything but the thing itself. 

Words can do many things. They cannot do that. 

Maybe that’s why this was always a painting. Not a poem or anything sketched out in lyrical form. It may need to be sounds, or maybe – and I think this most of all – it can be nothing at all because that is gone now.  That time, that moment. Growing a hacienda is about what comes next and being alive to it as a possibility so that it can emerge as actuality. Petrification may well be inevitable, the experiences of other times and places will become solid as river pebbles. But we can remember to look to the river for the real source of what life can be. And treat the pebbles for what they are, just the solidification of a past that holds no more meaning than the water that rushes above them.