Saturday Morning in Siglap

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’re sitting in a corner room in the empty ground-floor apartment we’ve borrowed from a friend; out of both windows, palms, villas, bougainvillea. It’s strange being in the wealthy East Coast and in this enclosed and privatised urban environment after the communality of HDB life. I went for a stroll the first evening, down avenues of luxury attended with flowering trees of astounding exuberance. One old mansion on a corner plot is surrounded by a vast lawn, lined with great, distorted bonsais which are watered via a fine mist system; across the grass stalk flamingos and parrots of every hue shriek into suburbia. Later we walked down to the beach, where the wind was high and the seas rough; all along the coast hordes of holiday crowds moved through the darkness, and as we walked along Fei told me about what Descartes was all about.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday was searingly hot, everyone in Singapore mopping their brows and wilting under the ferocious solar waves; I went into the studio and worked really hard against the hammering heat and a head cold.

My unformed thoughts, or rather questions about different kinds of working – well, they really are unformed, but here goes, here they are. They are to do with subject matter, what we look at, and what we paint. If I’m making work about the immediate, external world around me, and am responding directly to the visual stimuli that world gives me, then does that direct relationship change not only how I make work – and what the making process feels like – but also, how I am in the world?

In a sense I think I am really talking about delight. Think of the delight, trudging through a vast collection, the National Gallery say, or the Louvre, past acres of Rubens and you come across a Chardin still life, or a clump of pine trees by Cezanne, or the corner of some Italian Renaissance painting, where your eyes fall with sheer relief on the blue-tinted landscape behind a Madonna’s shoulder, or the flat North European vistas in a Ruisdael, where you are taken into a specific, long-lost, blustery and lonely autumnal day in 17th Century Holland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

All these images use art, or artifice  of course – Cezanne his waxed fruits and abstraction, Ruisdael his solitary disposition affecting his view of man in nature, the Italian painter’s vision perhaps tinted by dreams of cooler mountain air. I’m not talking either solely about directly observed work – Constable restructured and re-ordered his cloud studies back in his studio. But they all take you to a place, with a delight – what is this delight? It’s the delight of recognition, and also it’s the transport of delight back into memory, our mind’s storeroom of events and sensations and images.

So, my question is a simple, naive one; if you are in a  state of delight with the natural world – by delight, I mean more specifically an interested engagement, or an intentional looking, and  if your work is then an activity of making visible that delight, then does that make you more in the world? Is the process a circular one? If I were to paint the tree outside the window here, in which a bird is singing noisily right now, I would feel differently about the tree, see it differently, for evermore. I would feel more directly connected with it. Painting Singapore earlier this year made me more here, more in the experience.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Working from photos of elsewhere – of unvisited places, or images seen on screens – I am turning my back on the world outside the studio window. Dealing with these different sources I can explore and describe emotions beyond pure visual delight, such as love, or loss, distance, fear, or ideas stemming from concepts or theory or history, and there is a delight in all of this too.

But what I am missing, working in this second way, is pure, visual pleasure. There is something that gets under my skin about this urban landscape, and it keeps tugging at my sleeve and won’t let me go. It’s an almost physical sensation, like an inner rhythm or Gestalt – the dark square of an apartment window broken by the arc  of a palm, shadows on cement. And above all, light, simultaneously radiant and melancholy, light of tristes tropiques.

Summer Return: Looking and Perception

Singapore, August 9th, 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

I hadn’t intended to add to this blog when I came back to Singapore this summer, but, here again and after two and a half weeks, I’ve thought about how writing last time helped to shape and make sense of and communicate my experience here (and to enrich it), and I find myself wanting to write again, to try to work some things out, chiefly as you’ll see to do with questions of looking and experience. I’ve been bombarding friends with long emails rambling on about these unformed thoughts, so perhaps it’s fairer to write them out here, even if I don’t know who, if anyone, will be reading them.

We had a few days in Java as soon as I arrived, and then I settled down to work, back in the studio in Paya Lebar. I had to move fast to complete two paintings for the group show I’m participating in here:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/123025

I’d decided to paint two images from still photo images of the skype conversations Fei and I have when I’m in London and he’s here in Singapore – a central pillar of our dealing with being together apart. It’s a pretty literal interpretation; two head shots, Fei in the HDB  flat we shared together at West Coast, me in my house in Walthamstow. As I began to paint from them I began to think about what the skype experience is like. Of course in some ways it’s a distanced kind of looking, the other turned into a pixel mirage, without touch, or smell, or body heat. And yet at the same time imagination launches me through the laptop screen and into that space, seven thousand miles away and I project myself into not just being in the room with him – fan whirring, tropical evening heat, familiar noises in the gardens outside, children running across the pubic spaces, the calling bird, traffic on the  dock road – but also in a strange way, out of the desire to imagine, and then understand more clearly his separate experience,  into being him.

Of course, the transaction that takes place when I look at the photographic still Fei took of me for the companion piece is similarly complex – I see me, and also speculate about what he sees when he sees me. I use the image to try to  re-imagine, and so see more clearly, my experience of  living apart in London:  I imagine myself into being me. Mediation is not just what the medium does, but is also what our imagination performs.

So – these two paintings are now done; the making of them raised more problems (like those delineated above) than they were able to answer. However, these aren’t the ideas I really wanted to talk about when I said I wished to explore issues of looking and experience. My real question is this: how is it different to paint directly from or about the visual experience around you daily? I mean different not only in how you paint,but also in how you move through that space, how you encounter what your eyes scan; how are you in the world when you are simultaneously painting that world? Head down, working in a stifling studio in a factory in Paya Lebar from photographic images of a mediated conversation originally experienced in East London,  I cut out the view through the window. But in the end it’s just impossible to resist; when I walk home at the end of the day, gorgeous juxtaposition on juxtaposition of geometry and foliage, shadow and concrete poetry, hammer blows of beauty grab my eyes and seduce me all over again. This what I want to work out, what’s pre-occupying me, and this is the question I will try to map out here next time.