A message to the viewer from the studio
I’m sitting in my studio and the screen of my iPhone fills my vision like a Rothko.
You’re supposed to look into the distance for 20 seconds every 20 minutes when you’re working on the computer to protect yourself from eyestrain, but I don’t think I was supposed to interpret that as “look at your painting for at least 20 seconds after 20 minutes of browsing on your phone”.
I’m not even sure I could tell you what I do when I’m on my phone…
I’m reviewing my camera reel to shortlist compositions for my next painting,
I’m scrutinising the photo I took of my painting 20 minutes ago,
the photo I took 22 minutes ago,
27 minutes ago.
I’m on Instagram, trying to understand the artworld through photos in a grid,
viewing my friends’ ‘stories’ to see which exhibitions to visit,
I’m on Facebook looking at photos of a wedding I wasn’t invited to,
I’m watching a video about how to turn tofu into chicken.
I’m reading the recipe,
I’m on Google looking at where to buy vital wheat gluten.
I’m not even vegan.
I suddenly become aware that I’m standing in the kitchenette, making a cup of tea.
My motivation comes and goes throughout the day with an embarrassingly predictable rhythm. There’s tea, then there’s painting, then there’s tea again and lunch and some painting and then tea and then, at 3.30pm, I realise that I hate painting.
Painting, smoking, eating… but I don’t smoke, and sometimes I don’t paint.
I’m building a relationship with my painting by being present with it, even if some days I am so tangled up in my mind that I have drunk the requisite three cups of tea but barely touched the painting all day. Like an employee with a serious case of presenteeism, every day I go to the place where work happens with the hope that if I spend the whole day there, and I just try to paint for an hour or two out of an entire working day, that my paintings will make themselves. And somehow, they do.
So, when you take a break from the omnipresence of screens to stand in front of one of my paintings, and you look into the oddly shallow distance of the void I have constructed, for a minute there you can feel like you’re doing something, even though I worry that I have done nothing.
And maybe you like the painting and you take out your phone and you snap a picture. Now the irony is that my painting, which was based on a photo that I took is now a photo again. It uploads itself to your cloud storage automatically and seals itself in a digital archive. So, there is no way I can offer you more than a minute or two of my antidote to the digital, to the online, to your hyper-connected state of being, because if I’ve done my job well enough – and that’s to say I’ve created a painting that gave you pause for thought enough that you wanted to capture that moment forever – we have come full circle.
You won’t look at the photo again. Or you won’t look at it in the same way. It slides through your vision as you upload it to Instagram. It flickers across your screen when you check who liked your ‘story’. Even now, as you stand bleary eyed in the gallery space, eyes readjusting from the closeness of the paper to the distance of the room, looking at the painting again won’t bring back that feeling that you had before you took the photo.