#2

On comprehending grief and oil painting

“Oh, to be a girl of thirty-six dressed in black satin and a string of pearls!”

Joan Fontaine as the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca (1940) dir. Alfred Hitchcock.

Things are beginning to percolate, baby, ever so slowly. Something is bubbling in the underbelly. A fire is burning at my core - a pertinent anger, and a desire to keep going. To quote Dana Scully (Season 1, Episode 3), “Oh my god Mulder, I think it smells like… I think its bile.” I don’t know whether I’m over sitting in sadness just yet. Meandering in and out of hyper-productivity, I’m feeling restless. Anxious, even.

Recently, I’d attended an online talk with a wonderful artist and writer who produces work, coincidently, about grief. Making it up as I’m going along, I begin to politely detail my recent experiences and the ways in which grief, loss and heartache - the whole shebang - sit tightly nestled at the core of my practice, rotting away. I feel immense loss and listlessness (cue: Existential Nihilism), which tends to greet me quite abruptly with a hard shove when I’m least expecting it.

During the online discussion, I’d divulged a very trivial analogy:

You’re on a train, and you are the only living soul within the carriage. This rickety, unreliable hunk of British steel is hurtling backwards. The yellowed brightness of the fluorescent tube lights overhead are waning and flickering intermittently. At the other end of the carriage, stretching out as far as the eye may see, is the person you have lost, seated, and every single memory attached to them. There is a humming glow around that person.

As the journey continues at a frenetic speed, the figure at the end of that carriage becomes foggier and foggier and foggier. You are being pulled away against your will. You cannot control the pace of the train and somehow, against all reason, must come to peace with the carriage breaking apart in two.

How are you, dearest reader?

I have acquired fine linens. Many reams of wonderful satin (truthfully, polyester), blushed baby pink and milky white. I’m working on something. No, not Final Girl - something else. I’m still waiting for that costume to arrive on my doorstep. I enjoy words immensely, and for a long, long time now have felt that more often than not, words hold more spiritual presence than images. Images tell you what to see, how to feel, providing a very succinct and controlled depiction of the event taking place. Words, however, are expansive and unlimited in their power, their scope, their imagination.

Words are visceral. How would you feel if I told you to wrap your hand around my guts and pull?

Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face (1957) dir. Stanley Donen.

On satin, I’m currently painting I CAN FEEL A BIG CRY COMING ON. This statement, this feeling, could have very easily manifested itself in a photographic image. Myself, clad in lace and latex, a blonde beehive emulating Dusty Springfield, red hot tears rolling freshly down my cheeks. Why exploit myself? Why contribute to torture porn?

I’d like to be Ed Ruscha. Big juicy words standing ten feet tall and singing to you. Words that aren’t telling you what to see but granting you permission, my love, to conjure an image in your mind of the last time you started welling up. Sniffling, blubbering… the pipes have burst and the waterworks are flooding to the surface uncontrollably. Erupting through oak like a lightening strike!

When was the last time you cried? Did you feel better afterwards?

I contradict myself, for Final Girl will contain an image. Bare feet heavily laden with wet soil, bastardised druidic robes soaked and sodden with dirt. I have risen from the dead. In my right palm, my dominant palm, I tightly grasp a trio of lilies - their floral heads downturned in sorrow. I levitate. Do you think I could pull this off, my rusty photographic skills and I? We'll come to find out, soon enough. I’ve been looking at red corn syrup online, too, big containers of the stuff. I do feel a little hesitant to ruin my wigs though.

Anyway, I should probably be going now. If I don’t see you through the week, I’ll see you through the window.

X