If I were to create a soundscape of me walking through most of the exhibitions we go to it would go something like this:
- Hmm
- OK? (rising note on the K)
- Yes but
- Why?
- WTF?
- Hmm
The silences are usually punctuated by the sound of shoes on wooden floors and the rustle of prayer books, or should I say catalogues? Darkened rooms and silent introspection could suggest some sort of meditative process going on but (aside from the Rothko room in the Tate) it seems more often to occupy the empty space between two coffees.
Yesterday we went to the Royal West of England Academy with our friends Tony and Glen to see a couple of shows which were untypically given space to breathe. Madame was especially taken by some drawings by Denny Long. I wandered among some very late sculptural works by John Hoyland which seemed to me to be 3D maquettes for paintings. Then Madame disappeared for a minute and came back through the glass door of a darkened room which I’d concluded led to nowhere in particular. “You’ve got to come and see this!”
The four of us have been friends for more than 50 years. We met on what might have been known as a happening back in the day, and nowadays – in the era of curators and gallerists who, like half assed bodhisattvas sacrifice their own meagre creative gifts to help the rest of us to understand stuff properly – would be known possibly as an intervention; you know – the kind of thing where a scouring pad is accompanied by a three page artist’s statement. When we get together we all too easily slip into geriatric misbehaviour. Yesterday we found a box of dressing up clothes in the gallery and felt obliged to try the tiaras out.
One of the great benefits of being old is getting away with misbehaviour that would have you thrown out if you were thirty. Anyway, we went through the glass door into the darkened room and there it was; a large painting by John Hoyland called “Voyage to now”.
It’s very hard to describe what’s happening when you fall in love with a painting. I’ve seen John Hoyland’s work over the years and found it interesting, bright, colourful and all the other lukewarm adjectives you could apply to a painting. But this was very different. This one spoke, or rather sang! – and the song was full of joy as well as full of echoes. The first thought that came into my mind was of lying on a real Freudian style couch with my psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Robin, sitting silently behind me as I spoke and re-arranged the furniture in my house of memories. Robin was the master of silences which were never in the least hostile, but warm and safe silences that seemed to be saying “go on, don’t be scared”. Then came echoes of more paintings remembered from previous encounters. These resonances, of Van Gogh’s Starry Night; Samuel Palmer; the 20th century British ruralist movement; Paul Nash; Turner – the list of artists goes on; all of them lyrical.
I must have encountered the phrase “music of the spheres” when I was very young, and having no idea of its mathematical connotations I thought that if, at night, I listened intently enough I’d be able to hear it. I had unconsciously turned a theory into a physical manifestation. Many years later I discovered that this is what artists do; gifted ones at any rate. There’s no crime or failing in references and quotations. One of the great gifts of modernism was to set artists free from the doctrine of absolute hardcore originality. I’m thinking of poets like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and others like Basil Bunting. Full of quotations and remembrances of half sung ancient rhymes and mysteries. I’m thinking of musicians and weavers and potters. The untalented have their theories and then illustrate them, but the greatest artists think with their fingers and eyes and bring the intangible showings within their minds into plastic, tangible life. If any piece of art needs an artist’s statement to work, it’s a wrong’un!
And so I couldn’t tear myself away from this painting. I jokingly asked the attendant if he’d mind if I nicked it. I even offered him the £2 coin in my pocket if he’d just look away. He thought this was vastly amusing but said his lowest price was more than £2 – so I got Madame to take a photo instead, and now it’s in my head glowing with life and inspiring connections and thoughts as a fruiting fungus might shed spores.
Maybe, just maybe, this was just the beginning of the Chinese Year of the Dragon for me too. As we walked up to the Gallery we passed the most enormous queue outside the Museum. It snaked up the road and around the corner, some of its members in fancy dress – we saw at least one panda. In total around 4,500 people apparently went to celebrate the festival yesterday and they were by no means all Chinese. This year is said to be highly auspicious for births and standing in front of John Hoyland’s painting, being infused with its joyful light I could faintly understand what it was saying. Maybe I’d never really got Hoyland’s painting before because I just wasn’t ready. There’s an ancient Chinese proverb that goes like this:
To teach someone who is not ready is a waste of breath
not to teach someone who is ready is the waste of a person.
Maybe it was just my time.