Vibrations beneath the surface

Artists over the years have often been torn between spending time looking at and appreciating other artists’ work and time avoiding it. Some speak of the importance of art history in order to fully understand their part in the lineage of art practice and practitioners, while others find the influence of past and future artists an impediment or distraction from their own desire for creative integrity and originality.

Comparison is the thief of joy.

(Attributed to Theodore Roosevelt)

Being something of a creative magpie, I recognise my studio work is an uneasy composite of shiny influences and stolen references that occasionally borders on plagiarism, albeit carefully disguised. External ideas feed internal dialogues, often as a result of something read or seen that relates to my painting and sculpture.

I’m not unduly worried though, as it's fairly evident that plagiarism has rarely stopped visual artists from achieving notable success. For example, it could be argued that the remarkable landscape paintings of the Group of 7, a collective of Canadian painters from the 1920s were of fundamental importance to the developing work of the renowned contemporary British painter Peter Doig who was raised in Canada from the age of 7 to 19. His monumental landscapes from the 1990s owe the Group of 7 everything, yet the sale of one of his paintings would likely have eclipsed the entire art related earnings of all Group 7 artists put together, even when inflation is taken into account. Peter Doig’s highest auction price is currently $39.9 million (£30 million) paid in 2021 for the 1990 painting Swamped.

Doig has never sought to deny the Group of 7 influence, perhaps even traded on it initially as he built an international audience. His comprehensive show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1998 blew me away, but it wasn’t until a decade later that I started to make the obvious connections with the Group of 7 and how much Doig had ‘borrowed’ from their oeuvre. Nonetheless, I am grateful to have found the Doig progenitors and the paintings of Tom Thomson in particular. Comparatively, Thomson’s 1916 painting Ragged Oaks sold at auction in 2021 for $1.5 million. Hardly a snip of course but for anyone who might be interested, my own work sells for significantly less and I am currently quite happy to consider offers for paintings under the $1 million mark. Bargain.

My magpie art practice hovers between acknowledging my modest place in the relatively recent cultural phenomenon of art being inseparable from the artist as personality (arguably fully birthed in the Italian Renaissance, 14th to 16th centuries) and my inherent, impersonal connection with generic creative activity: the evolutionary lineage of life itself. The shiny stuff lining my studio nest is the stuff nicked from my artistic forebears and peers; the nest in which that fluff collects is built of something more enduring.

To genetic evolution, the human lineage has added the parallel track of cultural evolution.

(E. O. Wilson)

A creative night out

Occasionally I get invited to attend arts events and most recently the cultural editor of a national newspaper asked me to join him at a music concert in the Barbican Centre, London. I hadn’t previously heard of the artist but my friend kindly thought it might interest me. The Barbican is among my favourite London music venues for clarity of sound so accepting the invitation was a no-brainer. It turned out the artist, Oneohtrix Point Never¹ (the working name of American music producer and composer Daniel Lopatin) is signed to Warp Records, a label I have been buying music from since I discovered the album Amber by Autechre² in Piccadilly Records, Manchester, in the early 90s.

As it transpired, the electronica music genre doesn’t appear to have moved on appreciably from my ‘Madchester’ days and I could hear the prominent echoes of Autechre’s masterpiece throughout Lopatin’s performance. Even the associated visuals projected onto the stage backdrop were something of a throwback, themselves a digital facsimile of the genuinely innovative film projection backdrops of Sheffield bands Cabaret Voltaire³ and 23 Skidoo⁴ back in the day.

I enjoyed the gig without at any point being emotionally moved by proceedings, as I sometimes am during really great live performances. One can appear a curmudgeonly purist, wistfully lamenting the ongoing demise of analogue musical instruments played live in an auditorium, as compared to the now ubiquitous ‘producer’ standing behind a big table, ostensibly twiddling a series of desktop knobs to ‘live mix’ a soundtrack that has already been recorded. Perhaps a sense of jeopardy in the live performance has been lost but personally, I don’t have a problem with it. Ultimately, sound is sound to me. The authenticity of noise is irrefutably real regardless of the medium through which it is delivered.

In most gigs I find the visual aspects of the performance a distraction from the music so often choose to close my eyes and retreat into my own receptive world of sensory awe and wonder. This aurally inspired world is almost entirely abstract and nourishes my perception of musical artists ‘painting’ with sound. I am weightless, formless while listening, and the connections in space between my auditory, sensory experience and the carefully arranged vibrations of sound often lead to simultaneous ‘paintings’ emerging in my own consciousness as the music unfolds. On rare occasions, a music concert can feel like a creative provocation, an awakening into a hyper sensitive creative state where possibility appears infinite, and I never want the ecstatic sensations coursing up and down my spine to stop.

This concert did end, after two and a half hours. It had gone in a timeless flash. As the second composition of the final encore closed I realised I was in danger of missing my last train home. My companion very kindly accompanied me to the lobby, curtailing his own enjoyment of what were likely to be the ‘big hits’ at the end of the show. We made our goodbyes while the music continued in the auditorium. I wandered alone, slightly lightheaded, to the nearest tube and caught the last train out of Waterloo without concern. I crept into bed at around 1 in the morning.

I slept incredibly well, a deep untroubled sleep without dreams that I could recall, and woke rejuvenated, invigorated yet calm despite the late night out. My beloved turned to me on her pillow in an early morning daze and enquired how the concert had gone. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t been moved. The music had been neither innovative in a genre that prides itself on innovation, nor emotive; the projected images had been distracting and largely forgettable; the artist didn’t really engage with the audience but overall the evening had been a pleasant one.

And yet, I mused, there appeared to be a delayed response to the previous night’s entertainment. The fall out, the living evidence of my bodily experience as I lay stock still in the bed beside her, was an unusually tangible sense of well-being, not consciously felt for some while. I felt wonderful, irrefutably alive to my embodied presence, physically, mentally and spiritually. There was a becalming flavour to the heightened awareness, perhaps in collusion with the tail end of a frenetic week that sunny Saturday morning, but I gradually attributed the unmistakably joyous state to something else.

It dawned on me that the concert had provided, for the first time in over a year, an opportunity to sit still for a period of two and a half hours and do nothing—nothing other than listen. The music had seemed largely incidental while nonetheless being a central focus for the intensity of my listening. On reflection, I felt as if in listening, in opening my physicality to that interplay of vibrating air, I had opened every cell of my body to a new frequency. It felt as if there had been a cleansing, that every part of my physical vessel and being had been permeated, oscillating in time and tune to every sound received. I should give Danny ONP his dues, under his diligent musical guidance some kind of realignment seemed to have happened, a healing in some measure.

The gentle, luxuriously bedbound post-gig analysis reminded me once again of the immense value of sitting still and listening intently to sound, engaging sensorially with something tangibly real. The Saturday morning sense of well-being hung around for a while and inevitably passed (as all things must) but I resolved to listen without extraneous distraction more regularly in all subsequent health and happiness regimes.

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer's day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

(John Lubbock)

Listening in the dark

This year, both the Pagan festival of Beltane⁵ and Scorpio Full Moon fall on the first day of May. In astrological circles, Scorpio is considered to have a darker, mysterious side cloaked in silent vigilance. While the northern hemisphere begins its ascent into the lush, sensory abundance of spring and early summer, this particular lunation acts as a psychological counterweight, hinting at the need to look beneath the flowering surface at the roots that sustain it. Scorpio isn’t great at dealing in pleasantries or the superficial; it is the sign of the hidden, the transformative, and the regenerative.

In the Scorpionic realm, listening is recalibrated from a passive intake of data into a profound act of feeling into the shadows. This moon invites us to move beyond the literal - the mere vibration of air against the eardrum—and attend to the subtext of the unsaid or unheard. It is a time to witness the often neglected shifts of emotion that move beneath words and actions, recognizing that our best communication regularly begins where language falters.

God speaks to us every day, only we don't know how to listen.

(Mahatma Gandhi)

Practicing this wider understanding of listening during such a fertile lunar window probably requires some shedding of the ego's defensive armor in order to find ways to be truly receptive, open to experience and available for learning. Heaven knows, to be open to each other, whether friend or foe in the challenging commonality of human experience, might be a good start.

In allowing ourselves to be receptive, to truly listen with our heart, soul and cellular structure, our skin and bones, our intuition and shared history over and above our intellect, we might yet reclaim the boundaried, barren battlefields of fear and suffering to cultivate new pastures of understanding where the fruit of joy can thrive for the benefit of All.