Resolutions and Surrealisms

George: Dear Father in heaven, I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there, (starts crying) show me the way…show me the way.

I know…I know…It is January 4th and I appear to be hung up on my resolutions for 2009.

Truth is I really don’t much like this time of year and it takes a couple of weeks to get me over it. It’s that glass half empty/glass half full thing and resolutions appear to be one way that I use to help to give me direction. Perhaps I should stop calling them resolutions and start calling them objectives because that’s what they really are; things that I want to achieve in the forthcoming year. Me things.

One of my ‘me things’ will be to try paint more. It’s always on the list and I always try, but painting is hard. You have to do it an awful lot to be even half good, so I’m not. I love the history of Art. When I walk around galleries I get a real kick from being able to look at a painting and know who painted it, or when, and what went before to influence it. Don’t get me wrong I’m no art historian but (to paraphrase a much quoted art cliché) I know what I know. Holly gave me a great book for Christmas It’s simply called Art: and then not so simply, The Definitive Visual Guide by Andrew Graham-Dixon. It’s large, thick and luxurious in full colour big illustration detail. It’s a really great present. I’ve only had time to flick through it between meals over Christmas but as I was doing so I happened across a section on the Surrealists. I loved the Surrealists when I was at school. It was the Surrealists who got me hooked I guess. I find them a bit calculated these days but you have to admire the technique. They take you to another place, another world, Dali’s world, Dorothea Tanning’s world, Bosch’s and Breugel’s, (I would argue), and of course there’s Magritte.

I’m not sure where I stand on Magritte. There’s no doubt that he had skill; he started out as a graphic artist (who didn’t?), and his simple idea of moving the ordinary to the extraordinary is clever. The illustration of the pipe with “this is not a pipe” written beneath it is even cleverer, maybe too clever, and it kind of leaves me cold.

More often than not, Magritte painted ordinary, everyday, familiar things - trees, chairs, tables, doors, windows, shoes, shelves, landscapes, people; but he’d take them out of the everyday and place them into the extraordinary. There’s a mystery to his work, but the mystery is around the juxtaposition of everyday objects in landscape and situations that are out of kilter (there I go sounding like an Art historian again).

Magritte once said that his paintings were visible images that concealed nothing; that evoked mystery and that when you first saw one of his pictures, you’d asked yourself this simple question 'What does that mean'? I’m not sure that they mean anything. A bit like my beach animals, they are there, they are out of place, but they don’t have any real meaning. His pictures are explainable because of their everyday ordinariness. And is the explainable mysterious? Perhaps that was his point, perhaps his pictures didn’t mean anything and perhaps mystery means nothing either, perhaps by it’s very nature mystery is unknowable. Yes I know I’m rambling, but if you think this is torture just wait until you read the story.

More simply put I find his paintings at best oppressive and at worst a little boring; men in bowler hats, burning tubas, half statue - half woman things, floating chairs. I know he’s trying to say something, I just don’t know what it is; and if I’m honest I’m not sure that he does either. I think that at the end of the day he’s an illustrator with some cleverish ideas, a good craftsman, but not a great artist, like me really, except an awful lot better.

On the other hand if I wanted to analyse his pictures in a deeper way I might say that they are a way of getting to another reality, like my flotsam creatures could be from another world. But I won’t do that here, well not now anyway.

Another of my resolutions, objectives, me-things, should be to write more. I enjoy writing and this blog will help with that; and I have some other plans.

My final me-thing has to be to find one hour a day that is just me-time. No distractions, no interruptions, and if I can manage to do that I can probably paint and write more anyway, even get to the beach. Well, I can try, there’s always the early hours.

There’s a painting by Magritte that shows a steam train coming out of a living room fireplace. He calls it ‘Time Transfixed’. I wrote this very short story about it a little while back. It’s quite surreal and part of a much bigger whole but it works in this shortened form (at least it does for me but I’m not sure what my sometime editor GeeKay will make of it).

Good luck.

Time Transfixed

It was almost a quarter to one. We were waiting for the train to arrive at the empty marble fireplace. It would be here in a minute or two: they had said that it was running on time. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to go with him to that place where there was no television and the toilet was at the end of the garden. A bee flew past and settled on his upper arm. I wanted to go home, home to my mum, home to his Rose, ill in her room, and filling the room with her sickly self. A room full of Rose.

I stood looking around. Everything I saw hid another thing, and what I wanted to see was hidden by what I saw. I was standing on the long brown wooden platform at the station with my Grandfather. I was in a room filled with a rose looking at a marble fireplace waiting for the train to arrive. My Grandfather was angry with me. He knew that I didn’t want to go back with him; he knew that I wanted to stay home, wanted to stay with my Mum.

“You’re nothing but a Mom’s boy”, he spat at me in anger. He shook his head still shouting. The bee was on his shoulder crawling towards his collar. I watched it in my dream, a translation of my waking life, my waking life a translation of the dream I was dreaming. The bee was on his shoulder crawling towards his collar. It buzzed and buzzed and buzzed.

The buzzing soothed me and I stepped through; consciously or unconsciously, I don’t know. But I was there in the landscape, and the train was coming. He didn’t see it, and he didn’t see it in me. It was there but he chose to ignore its true nature, my true nature. He couldn’t see my meaning, and seemed to be hunting around for a meaning that he could understand to get himself out of a quandary, but because he didn’t understand, he couldn’t confront the truth. He needed something to lean on, so that he could be comfortable. He wanted something secure to hang on to, so that he could save himself from the void that was closing in on him. But there was nothing for him to hang on to, there was no security.

I was in the void already, it was my landscape; but he couldn’t see and failed to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of it.

And to ice the cake he didn’t see the bee.

I think that he sensed the mystery, could smell it a little, but he wanted to get rid of it; get rid of my landscape by shouting at me. He crouched down in front of me; his face inches from my face and sprayed my face with spit. I could see his fear, he was afraid; I saw his eyes asking ‘what does this mean?’ and I saw his need for everything to be understandable, for everything to be on his terms. He couldn’t understand that only my terms counted in my landscape and you could see by his fear that he knew I understood the mystery, and that I was going to show him what I understood, and that I wasn’t going to reject it. He could see that I embraced it, that I would let ‘it’ in and ‘me’ out. He was afraid; so he shouted even louder.

I smiled at him. He was a pathetic old man who had had his chance and waved it away simply because he couldn’t understand. I could hear the train coming and the bee buzzing. I could hear him shouting and see him kneeling in front of me spitting. I could feel the coolness of the white marble fireplace and smell the brown smoothness of the floorboards under his old, tired feet. He hadn’t realised that if a dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of a dream, but at that split-second moment, that final triumphant moment, it flashed and he saw and heard it too.

And just that little bit too late he heard the buzz and sensed the train.

The bee climbed inside the worn collar of his shirt and stung him. He cried out in pain falling backwards as he entered my dream screaming and still shouting. He fell from the platform and disappeared into the fireplace as the rushing train thundered over him. It felt good. This was the first time I dreamt my landscape but since then I often dream it, and each time I dream I hear his scream one second before being awakened by the buzzing of a bee and then there is some quiet for me at last.

It had been such a little push. I looked down at my open hand at the small round, brown leather jacket button; smooth as a petal from a rose. A few frayed threads hung from it. They fluttered in the wind as the speeding train braked very hard to stop. It didn’t stop.

Up the platform a woman screamed; people ran towards me, and I carefully slipped the button into my pocket and began to cry. The tears came easily. I wasn’t surprised. Looking down at the platform I noticed the bee. It was crawling around on the dirty concrete, wounded by the loss of its sting. Carefully, gently, I lifted my foot from the platform and crushed it, taking its life as a mercy.

So my me-things for 2009:
1. Paint more
2. Write more
3. Take an hour a day out
4. And try to get to the beach and make six sculptures in 2009.

Of course I will have to put some ‘sensible’ resolutions in there about not leaving shoes in the hall, getting on with DIY, listening, not answering abruptly and not complaining about the spotty lad at McDonalds calling me ‘mate’; but I’ll try for those four.

Let’s see how I do over the next twelve months.

Here goes.