October 2007, Montreal
Notman House: 51 Sherbrooke West
Drawn from an interview with Marie-Douce St. Jacques
Paint. I often bring up painting as something that defers suicide. In constant contemplation of my own death and its intricacies suicide is the most easily imagined. This contemplation has a trajectory and meaning of its own beyond the psychological implications. I am not an unhappy person, or suicidal. I do not own a gun and have not chosen a spot on my wooden floor to press my head against.
Painting gets me thinking about death a lot, and my practice’s main venue, the studio and the work I do there, suspends this death narrative. Occupying myself there with the specifics of each painting’s creation narrative, while marching it toward its own end, I can position this narrative and all the sicknesses along the way outside of myself. Of course it isn’t really, there is no one there but me.
The trigger is never pulled, it is deferred to some point so far in the future that it is unimaginable. From this, the ritual of contemplation must be started again from its beginning. Much like addiction, the whole process worships sickness in lieu of death. While the disease is not terminal, it does not inoculate me against actual death.
Shapes, colors, inspiration. I’ve often said that I am very likely to be hit by a car when crossing the street outside my studio after working for hours painting. When looking both ways for oncoming cars, I am tracking and assessing things I am seeing as if I were still painting. This simple, process of crossing the street is still performed as always. I still look both ways. But it is monitored with constant eyes to its rhythms, ordering, duration, ends, deviations, mutations. Am I trying to step out and proceed to meet the car? Avoid the car? Speed up? Slow down? Stop?
Paintings are not made in some ascetic space. I do not dictate the material aspects of what paint is, but only how I will make it perform. I am not stripped bare in the studio. Just as I still look both ways on the street, I still perform the mundane rituals of painting in the studio, an action usually so banal its specifics go unnoticed.
Perception. I find my role very confusing once a painting is finished, the point at which anyone could be counted on to perceive what I’ve done. Being the bag of water next to the work is both luxurious and terrifying. I foist on the work solidity and finality and on me limpness and weakness.
People’s perception of the work is fascinating, but always falls short of what I want from them. Just as a painting cannot speak the hours through which it sat not being worked on, a viewer’s words cannot describe the minutes or hours now lost and then wordless when they were just looking. Their words are indicative of how they speak about what they see, or where they want to start speaking, but minimally indicative of what they see or how.
This makes my assessment of any mis-perception really difficult. I sometimes react very strongly to, or am dismayed by, people’s readings. When they see faces I am annoyed or delighted, depending on who is seeing them. Much like the old “it matches the couch” horse beaten near to death, the “it looks like” game is about someone wanting to talk to me and using the language available to them. The language they are comfortable with and want to use when they talk to me, the artist. It is a charged power relationship that I am more often on the opposite end of. |
