Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.
Pablo Picasso
It’s been 12 years since I finished a painting.
When you haven’t done something you love for that long there have to be strategies that you use to keep it that way. For me, these strategies existed in the form of excuses.
My favourite excuse is that painting requires so much more space than my writing. There is truth in this on multiple levels of what you would even call ‘space’.
When I’m talking about space in terms of time, I find that can block off an hour for writing and get something done, while an hour is hardly enough time for me to even set up for a painting session. Working full-time and having kids makes it so that my time is at a premium and I have told myself that the afternoon I would need for a painting session just isn’t logistically possible.
Complaining about set up time would also lead me to another definition of ‘space.’ Everything in the apartments and homes where I have lived has, of necessity, been multipurpose. I don’t have a studio and therefore don’t have a dedicated space to work.
Beyond the chore of setting up some corner of my home for a painting session I would then bemoan the lack of distance I was able to get from the canvas. In the classrooms of the College of the Bahamas (COB) where I really fell into my work, most of the time I spent painting was actually spent a few meters away, on the other end of the room, just staring at what I had done, trying to intuit what I needed to do next.
But likely the space that I really needed was mental. My art practice carries so much family baggage that once I lost momentum each paintbrush began to weigh a thousand pounds. In the end the internal voices and self-sabotage were too much.
And so a decade passed by.
1.
I have been thinking about a version of this project for a very long time and no matter which way I turned it over in my mind, I felt that to make the kind of statement that I wanted, that the subject matter demanded, I had to have a painting component to go along with it. It was the only way.
The old excuses were still there, but this time, out of desperation, I tried something new. Following the lead of a good friend I went digital.
Using digital tools eliminated a lot of my excuses about space. I no longer needed set up or even to clean up afterwards. My canvas was the same screen I peered into daily.
With those obstacles cleared I made time in my schedule and found that I was able to make notable progress on a piece in the same time constraints that I had with writing.
In terms of mental space – this project was in many ways the thing that stood in my way all along. Looking back now, I believe it was what I needed to get out of my system so I could move on.
As I worked, I became more free, more animated. The digital paintbrush became lighter as the baggage began to fall away. I began to hear my voice again over all the old background radiation.
This is not to say that I am cured, that backsliding into doubt for another ten years isn’t possible. That possibility is always there, lurking.
I only know that today I did what needed to be done.
2.
I am committed to have a painting go along with every major post in this limited series. That could either be an earlier work of mine, if it fits with an episode, or a new work that pulls directly from ideas, phrases or themes in the piece.
The work that I have created for this project is essentially a continuation of visual ideas that I had started when I was studying art at COB in 2003. Back then I exhibited this work at the “Colour of Harmony” show. I called this series “Inner Journey.” Any earlier work that is displayed in this project comes from that series.
At the time, I was still nominally one of Jehovah’s Witnesses, but I was well on my way out. While the series was my way of working through my doubts when it felt as if my world and my head were imploding, it was also a last attempt to show, to explain to my family what I was going through.
I was hoping that they would see what I was trying to say, but when I asked what they thought of the dark and depressing images I had created, they claimed to see nothing unusual.
I still don’t believe them.
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