THE WATER SOUND

On Friday, September 4, 2015, Martin Law <martin.rainbowmaker@gmail.com> wrote:

Prime time to coat a small canvas taut like a drum to the touch. Lavishing layer upon layer, white on white with a fine flat brush. Patterning ghost-white dabs in the substance, organically organized in light relief. Hand-held by fire heat to steam, stretch and dry to a texture firm as crunched white snow.

Having scrutinized and scanned the surface as to its tactile touch, and on an impulse with a perfectly pared pencil proceed to apportion positions perceived in perspective. Lightly the lines implicit in the process elucidating in shorthand language, shading in where shadows go.

By contrast with the oriental adept an occidental western way of avoiding accident, by only then making meaningful marks with a brush. Not necessary but for the interesting interplay of pencil and paint. Improvising a duet of differing instruments augmenting an implied melodic line.

Sometimes with sepia but this time with black, which flashes me back to a past part of the path. Something to revive and revitalize, being in early experience a formative link between Blake, Palmer’s sepia earthly visions, Chinese landscapes, and the darkly delineated richness of stained glass, and resurfacing in bold contours through Van Gogh, all of which and more i assimilated simultaneously.

There’s a hybrid mix of marks in there, between the formalizing east and formless west but they blend their diverse languages in the same psychic soup , and to say so is itself just a form of shorthand.

Spontaneously discovering in my teens the interplay between black line and colour, where each alternately encroaches on the other until integrated, and i called it ‘overpainting.’

This painted piece, ‘The Water Sound’ was completed in two distinct sessions. The first being, the random black shorthand, the second, the overlay of individuated colour.

By progressively alternating between the two they become integrated and densities of random richness of texture can accumulate, refined down to microcosmic precision.

So it’s not just a ‘picture portraying something’, it’s a visual equation resolved and equalized. Integration exists on the level of exactness of subtle feeling, when random marks align organically, becoming evocative.

If it needed a name, which it doesn’t, how about, ‘earth-based organically hallucinatory impressionism’? That’s a truthful description, simply for whoever may argue that any ‘picture’ is just a picture, having never created one. What comes naturally doesn’t need a name.

The morning after completion i returned to add just three tiny dabs of colour, subtly eliminating a remaining ambiguity. Only then was the experiment complete, like a soft tapestry.

This brief exercise in descriptive language may at first sound abstract or obscure. Only because words barely approximate the subtle actuality of perception. Being just a pattern of pointers or a road map for imagination.

Art is a kind of alchemical experiment involving feeling, intuition, imagination. Best not approached with a rational conclusion. A ration is a limitation and a conclusion is the end of further enquiry. Imagination is the road to endless creation, and this is a signpost. Imagine that. ~

~~~ ~~~ ~~~ ~~~

Martin Rainbowmaker.