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.