Assorted Short Pieces
“The Going Out” Series and the
Mayo Drawings November 2004
When the paint goes down it pulls at the body. Painting
at its most expansive has always been centered in the body. The
physical tactile substance of paint silences us. It is the same
tangible, pleasurable silence we find in our response to nature.
It creates room for the imagination to travel and for the mind
to turn fluid and to wander.
At the heart of this encounter between the body
centered nature of paint and vast space that permeates the silence
it brings up, is a huge sense of possibility – that our
creativity is limitless and our human potential is fluid and open
to ongoing exploration. That we are still forming ourselves, finding
ourselves, perhaps only touching the edge of ourselves.
In Ireland the weather moves fast and so does consciousness.
This is the landscape I know and it rules my imagination. In the
fluidity there is a tension between the ground and the sky –
between the tangible and the intangible. It is here off the coast
of Co. Mayo that I see the passage of the dead from war. It is
here that I hold a prayer for my old Arab heart. It is here that
I see my own death as simple and easy. These paintings –
these moments of breath – are an opening of the heart, a
return and dissolution.
2002
When a painting goes well, it is easy; it has a life of its own.
Its quality and its conviction come from its naturalness. It appears
effortless because it is. The work, the struggle, is getting to
that place of effortlessness with enough knowledge and experience
so that it will cohere into the language of painting. The other
challenge is not messing with that effortlessness: letting it
be; not letting the conscious mind mess with the wonderful lightness
of those moments.
October 1998
Katy Maguire was perfect except for the back legs which
scraped the ground going down hill. It was a kind of loss of faith.
She feared that her legs would give out. She refused to trust
the rhythmic movements passed down in her genes. Fear and stubbornness
ruled. It was a fear fed by a rampant imagination. A swooping
bird, a rustle of leaves, a passing shadow, everything reduced
her to a trembling nervous excitement. “Shy” was the
word we used: she would ”shy” from anything that moved.
I grew up with her and I grew up like her.
After she died I started to imagine her journey
through horse history. This was the starting point. Katy provoked
the memories and the connections to make these drawings. However,
once started her presence is submerged in the process: a backdrop
to the making and unmaking of the images.
Now the ideas come and go quickly, carrying the
same weight as a twitch or a scratch. Thought becomes physical
movement, like an athlete. It is this submersion in the process
of making that I trust: where I am most myself; most free. It
is a place where the conscious mind is made fluid and where, as
John Keats said, we “trust in the integrity of the senses
and the truth of the imagination.” Here, fully charged,
and grounded in the physical materials of drawing, I thrash around
looking for that moment when an unexpected clarity shows itself
and the hair on the back of my neck starts to rise. It is a moment
when evidence of Katy comes back at me out of the drawing transformed
from memory, into the unforeseen marks, into “Hero Horse,
”into “ Traveler.”
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