The painter and the writer - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 8: People like Us
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Frank Moorhouse
ONE OF THE GREAT SIMILARITIES BETWEEN LOGUE'S AND MY CREATIVE CYCLES, say when she is working on a series of paintings for a show or when I am writing a book, is the pattern of what I describe as latency / accumulation / embarkation / engagement / fatigue / latency / critical distance / return to engagement / latency.
The embarkation on a project usually comes after a period of rest and diversion – a time of latency (which could be mistaken for idleness by our mothers) but which is also a time of conscious or subconscious accumulation of random impressions and note taking.
Although there is no actual writing or painting being done during the latency period there seems to be some evidence of unconscious creative cooking.
The conception – that is, the coalescing of these random impressions and notes into an idea for the next project, usually arrives as a fairly vague set of notions that have risen to the consciousness as a sense of "what to do next".
Then begins the period of intense engagement with the canvas (or, in my case, word processor) – six or more days at a stretch – in Logue's case often six– to nine-hour days, in my case, about four hours of writing followed by research and revision of the day's work with a martini. I find I do indirect revision that a painter can't do – that is, making changes to my work on the laptop when they occur to me, say, while watching television or reading after the day's work is done.
This intensely engaged period is usually brought to a grinding halt by fatigue and I do not use the words "grinding halt" loosely. Sometimes this fatigue manifests as an inability to go on, a sense of disengagement with the world, a distaste for all the good things – food, companionship and so on. I read a description of this condition in the diaries of the painter Donald Friend: "I am in an irritated and nervy state and find little satisfaction in any companions, though at the pub of an evening I smile and chat away." This driven state of depletion has resulted in physical illness for both of us.
We both find that there's a milder, daily pattern during this intensive phase that resembles the fatigue-crash of the longer pattern and is characterised by a high end-of-day tension where little energy is left for the evening, to prepare food, to participate in social life – something that people in other jobs, of course, also find. As with other people, we try to find release from this tension by the same techniques – workouts, yoga, therapy, reading, medication, alcohol and so on.
But there are, too, many days of elation, euphoria, gratification and wonder as well.
I have tried over the years to keep a daily work record so that I can alert myself to the need to stop work and take a break before I reach absolute depletion, but it rarely works. I need a program on the computer that says in a commanding voice, "STOP – DO NOT PASS GO – GO DIRECTLY TO THE BUSH" (my best method of recovery is to go trekking in the bush) and then shuts down the computer. The compulsion to continue working is usually overriding and almost impossible to defy – the voice inside that tells you to just do another day, just finish the next chapter and so on. It is related to work ethic but it is more than that – it is a driven state. It gives the work an imperative, which in extreme situations causes us neurotically to deny the needs of intimates and the demands of the usual life duties.
Once forced to stop by profound depletion, there follows a period of latency where, in Logue's case, gardening might be the answer, or watching movies, or reading, or coming down to the city.
When the desire and capacity to re-engage with the work returns, we both find that the time of detachment from the work has given us critical distance and we see the work with increased clarity and the process begins again.
We both have difficulty in managing our creative health. She says she has learned about managing creative energy from me: I haven't.
THE SIMILARITY BETWEEN LOGUE THE PAINTER WITH HER CREATION OF HER EXHIBITIONS, painting by painting, each suggesting the next, each resonating back on the others, each new canvas causing her to revisit the earlier canvases, parallels the interaction that I find in writing chapters of a novel or short-story cycle. I was interested to realise that in some ways each painting in one of her shows is a chapter or part of a connected, unverbalised "narrative".
Ambleside is an assemblage of panels designed to stay complete and together indefinitely into the future.
This is in radical contrast to her shows, which, while they have a cohesion of their own – Logue takes great pains with the hanging arrangement of her work in exhibitions – are destined and doomed to exist only for the short time of public exhibition, after which the cohesion is forever fractured as the paintings are bought and dispersed to live as single works (maybe a painter's retrospective creates a new temporary assemblage).
The creative demand with Ambleside was to find a permanent cohesion, what she talked of as "a shimmering interplay" among the panels. Again, as with all her work, the paintings communicate at two viewing distances, at least, for the viewer – close – say at a metre and then at about three metres. A painting should engage the viewer at a distance but should also work on an intimate level.
The Ambleside commission had to work mostly at the three-metre distancing because its placing on the foyer wall meant that it could not really be viewed up close.
KNOWING WHEN THE WORK IS FINISHED IS ONE OF THE MOST DELICATE AND, at times, agonising of the creative decisions, both for the writer and the painter. Many writers love to use a quotation, which they attribute to a painter (I can't discover which painter it was who ever said it): "Painters say that they never finish a painting: they simply give up."
I don't think this is really right. After a while you know – or hope you know – that to do more would be to lose the work or would leech away the spontaneity of the work and this knowing when it is time to put down the brush or to type "The End" is sometimes vividly and convincing clear. Sometimes it comes unstuck later and creates dilemmas for me.
As a painter, Logue's view on the question of "completion" is this: "There are formal frameworks used when it comes to resolving or finishing a painting, such as considering colour, tone, style and composition, but ultimately the work is complete when it speaks of the essence of the place or subject depicted. I can sense when this point is reached."
But she falters into contradiction when she reminds me that painters have been known to buy their work back and to change it.
There is the wonderful story of Matisse being caught in the Louvre on a chair with his palette changing part of his painting – the guards and curators were in a quandary whether to stop him or not.
Un poème n'est jamais achevé; c'est toujours un accident qui le termine, c'est-à-dire qui le donne au public – Paul Valéry, French poet and critic. A poem is never finished; it's always a decision that puts a stop to it, that is to say, the decision made when the poet gives it to the public. Writers do sometimes have the opportunity to change the work after it has gone into the public domain as a book (I have) – in future editions and in series editions revised by the authors at the end of their writing lives.
Some writers make significant changes when they read their work at proof stage. The American writer Grace Paley expressed this sort of late creative surge in a story titled, "Enormous Changes at the Last Moment".
Publishers live in dread of this impulse.
LOGUE FOUND THAT THE PLACEMENT OF AMBLESIDE IN THE PUBLIC SPACE of the foyer posed further creative questions. Although the architects had their vision when drawing up their plans and had given her size specifications in their brief, in reality, the work needed to be reconsidered when actually assembled and put into position by her on the cherry picker.
This placement brought into play creative decisions relating to the scale and positioning of the work in the space.
And there is the tantalising possibility that there are, in fact, a few optional arrangements of the panels, each equally valid.
Logue realised that this public installation was the final stage of the creative act. She says that with a large public artwork, the hanging becomes problematic and that new aesthetic questions arise involving method of attachment to the surface of the wall, angle of viewing, lighting and spacing, the solving of which was Logue's final aesthetic phase.
These questions cannot ever be foreseen and can only be confronted when the work is manoeuvred into place.
There is no real equivalent in the work of a writer.
I HAVE NOT HAD A PERMANENT WORKING SPACE FOR SOME YEARS NOW and consequently have learned to work wherever I find myself – hotel rooms, living in the Royal Automobile Club, at times at Essington Park, at times in institutional settings such as a university. It is not so easy for a painter to set up shop.
I once described it this way: "I do tend to cart around some familiar objects for my writing desk wherever it may be. I have a small brass-cast sleeping dog, which was made for me by sculptor Ester Bellis to mark the death of a dog I once had named DG. I have a hip flask that has been with me a long time, engraved by a friend as a now-forgotten joke, "Surfer's Paradise Short Story Writing Championships 1980". I have feathers from two pet hens I once owned, Blackstone and Whitestone. There is, what I fancy to be, a petrified frog from a trek I did in the Kimberley. I have a stone from the Clyde River, which I consider to be the heart of the heart of my country (a seer stone, perhaps). Oh yes, there's a fox fur from my time in France that goes over my writing chair. I like the feel of the fur against my skin, which probably makes up a little for the absence of an animal in my life.
"I have noticed that when I am in a place for a time, say most recently in Texas, I gather on my writing desk, found-feathers of the native birds, a snail shell, nuts and seeds from local plants, and a sun-whitened animal bone from my trekking in Texas.
"Bone, feather, shells, seed, the seer stone, fur. The ghost of a dog. Sounds like witchcraft. Writing and witchcraft might not be that far apart.
"In contrast to these elemental things, my laptop has become a deeply personal and vast, portable environment, containing as it does, journals, letters, financial records, manuscripts, projects in development, notes, and speculations, dreams, plans, a library (online), music, even pictures, and website bookmarks such as newspapers, which are familiar places to visit wherever I am in the world. And email as the everyday link with my friends wherever we all are."
While working, I listen to classical music on radio or CD and drink sparkling mineral water.
Logue's studio is a large, steel, farm-barn heated with a potbelly stove and with a paved floor, with some rugs, set in the grounds of the heritage house, Essington Park. On the walls are photographs of her animals, her friends, former lovers, her relatives, invitations from her contemporaries, loved postcards and photographs of objects. She has copies of topographical maps of the surrounding district from which she draws titles for her work. Each day she brings her tea, soy milk and thermos in a wicker basket.
While working she plays an eclectic range of music – Dylan, Pärt, Eno.
Snakes have been known to pass through the studio.
For the Ambleside project she had a young neighbour construct a wall similar in dimensions to the World Square foyer in her studio.
She works long hours, usually living in semi-seclusion for months on end, seeing very few people and with occasional visits to the city, where she lives it up with cocktails and grand dining, films, visits to the current art shows and to bookshops – where she loads up with novels, mainly contemporary fiction and serious journals – and her favourite CD shop.
While I was writing this essay, Logue came across a quotation by Henry James that she thought summed up some of her feelings about her working methods and life as a painter: "It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance. And I know of no substitution for the force and beauty of its process."
Then she adds with a laugh, "but there are too many contradictions to any quotation about art". ♦