The Ghosts are all there…

Whether in the music I listen to while I paint, or the thoughts that filter through my mind, or the images, fleeting yet powerful, the ghosts rummage in my mind. They are colours, ideas, textures, feelings, stories, touches, words and rhythms brought to life by my painting practice. 

I read theories, in my now intellectual period, Julie Kristeva, Mira Schor, and they float around my head while I sit before the canvas  listening to Bruce Cockburn “burning, all night long, burning at the gates of dawn, singing…near and far…singing to raise the morning star.”

I struggle with them in a way, trying to catch up, never thinking I know enough and wondering how so many people are so well versed in these theories and able to dialogue and write in these various discourses.

Discourse, a word quite here and everywhere, yet I never heard it until I returned to University in 2007. Now even on the radio, interviewers use this seemingly common word. Where did it come from? 1980’s, 1990’s, this last decade?

I feel the weight of lengthy study to really understand the discourses.

I like painting form. It somehow gives me pleasure to follow the contours, around the object and give sculptural weight with colour and brush. It is an illusion, a picture, playing with pictorial space, telling a story, a narrative that gives a spectator, a moment to ponder.

I want the faces, to come out of the space, to arrest the viewer, to engage and with eyes that follow and speak.

 

 

 

 

 

 

But what about the viscosity of paint?I used to feel it more, the squishy, thick, wet colour.

 

Now, it’s dry brush, a thin, heightened light and dark reality. Sometimes I don’t want to feel any more.