On a visit to San Francisco I stood before small paintings in the city’s Museum of Modern Art. The gallery was quiet and I became so too. Each painting had an energy, one stroked into it by the artist’s brushwork. For hours they had sat before it in an act of creation, dipping their brushes into paint, connected to some creative force and focusing it down. Paint gathered into a fusion of abstraction and meaning. They watched it grow, spurred to add a little here and there. And they sat back. They studied the work, perhaps listening to it. Is it complete? Is the work its own coherent whole? Does it need more attention or is it now its own being?
Eventually tension leaves the artist’s body. Brushes are set aside. The paint dries. The artist returns, stays quiet, and takes in what they have done.
The picture is a step in their passage through life - a necessary step. They were someone before they painted it, and someone slightly different afterward. That period of their existence, between the before and after, is captured in the painting.
In time they will break away and leave the picture to live its own life. The act of its creation was their quest for purity, for understanding, for healing, for beauty, and all was possible while it was being made. The painting was a refinement of their lives, all the muddled confusion of being human filtered down to the tips of slender brushes.
They moved on, went back to being human and the next blank canvas.
And left their work behind. It hangs on walls and lets us enter quietly into this moment when the artist made something that was complete.
This was new to me, pausing between each painting in a gallery to stand inside its pool of quietness. Because they are in a major gallery, each work is deemed to be outstanding art and worth multiple thousands of dollars. Very likely the artists themselves were poor or had known poverty. These works were a step backward from life viewed in commercial terms. They are quiet as against loud, still as against busy, focused as against distracted, coherent as against mad, studied as against fleeting, refined as against overburdened.
My own art is writing. When I started, that act of creation was always with a pen, a line moving across paper till it formed a letter then a word. Then gaps between words, dots and dashes of punctuation, blocks of words and spaces left blank to let the pages breathe. ‘Let it breathe,’ I used to say to students and now say the same to typesetters, for a work is composed in the span of human breaths. Blank spaces on the page are a visualization of necessary silence.
Books are a mass of words funnelled down into a coherent shape that then sits silent on a page, before being reformed by the reader into a combination of sound and silence. The sound is the writer’s words and the silence is the space where they are shared, and where readers take up the writer’s creativity in creative acts of their own, a work now resonating with their own life.
Last week needed a burst of activity from me. My upcoming book My Head For A Tree was returned from a legal reading in India. Part of the legal concerns related to an ongoing court case so a chapter needed some rewriting to make it secure. It took extra research and a page of citations. The real effort was of hauling myself back into a book that had felt complete. Now it feels stronger for it; more understanding was reached by me and set down for others.
And since that enforced writing stint it’s back to silence.
How many books do I have left in me?
There are some, but perhaps none I haven’t already started.
I like the tale that on his deathbed Beethoven was studying the manuscripts of the later quartets of Haydn, ‘because there’s so much to learn’.
We don’t finish.
A creative life ends in wonder.