The Interview

(I am a painter. People often ask me 'what kind of painting' I do. So I interviewed myself to find out...)

Q: What is your work about?

A: It's difficult to describe. I suppose all my painting is self-referential. On an impersonal level, it’s an exploration into the difficult business of being human.

Q: What medium do you work in?

A: Mostly in oil paint, on canvas. The way I work, I discard far more than I retain, so I need a forgiving sort of medium. Oil paint is very forgiving, and I love its subtleties too, and the different finishes; the delicacy or the roughness of the surface. I use other tools as well as brushes: rags, sharp implements to score the surface, cotton buds, rollers, cardboard, paper etc. The process is embedded in the work, not only in its textures but in the ghostly presence of images which have been painted out and lost. I imagine all the lost figures, particularly, inhabiting a kind of subterranean layer: continuing to affect the painting invisibly but powerfully.

Q: Do you see the elements which you've painted out as mistakes?

A: No. My paintings often go through radical changes, because I don’t plan ahead: I evolve as they evolve. There may be fruitless cul de sacs, and you could call these mistakes, but I see them as unavoidable detours: sometimes the only way to provide the information the painting needs. My intellect may call them wrong turnings and wasted time, but the painting is assembling itself in a way my intellect can’t grasp. This process is very instinctual, it isn’t something to be manipulated - you just have to follow and keep up, and trust the part of you which can see round corners. As much as possible I try to put my thoughts on hold. It’s taking me a lifetime to learn to work in this way - my ego would much rather be in charge, come up with something guaranteed to get me approval. But for me that’s not what painting’s about. Ideally, I’d like to disappear and allow my work to speak for itself.

Q: Yet you said earlier that your work is self-referential. Doesn’t that mean that it's about you, your personal concerns?

A: Well, it is self-referential – but I am using myself, perhaps even dramatising myself, as a kind of Everyperson: a universal human; so my own issues are not really what my work is about. They supply the raw material, but I’m using them in a dispassionate way, turning them into an impersonal narrative. Although it's actually a more unconscious undertaking than this suggests.

Q: Do you work quickly or slowly?

A: I work quite slowly and, because oil paint dries slowly, I always have several paintings on the go at once, and work on them in rotation. When a painting is drying but not finished, I might catch sight of it in passing and make unexpected and usually useful connections. When I come back to that painting I then have some extra information. Working on several paintings in rotation can mean they reflect a shared theme – although this isn't something I impose. I don't set out to paint anything in particular - if I try to, the painting ends up as something entirely different! But if I work in a semi-conscious, non-directional way, certain themes gradually come to the surface.

Q: Can you describe any of these themes?

A: I’m reluctant to be specific about anything current, because putting a painting into words while it's still happening stops it developing. It's like dreaming. You don't want to wake up and interpret the dream before it's finished. However, I can say that recently a bound and dormant figure, clearly in a pupating state, has appeared in a number of paintings. I’m just following this wherever it takes me.

Q: How do you interpret this 'pupating figure'?

A: There are obvious ways of looking at it, but I prefer to leave my interpretation in flux. Anyway, what the figure means to me, the many different things it means to me, won't necessarily be what it means to anyone else. There is no absolute meaning - or if there is, the painting has died. If you're asking what my intentions are in painting a pupating figure, I could connect this figure to what's going on in my own life, but I'm much more interested in the universality of life, especially the large experiences like death and transformation. To explore these enormous things you have to immerse yourself; you have to permit yourself to be lost. And because of that, you can't tidy everything up and stick labels on it, you can't pretend to be in charge, and to have grasped all the implications. Many of my paintings are ambiguous because I don't yet understand what's going on, but it’s exactly that fluid ambiguity which excites me. I try to keep the painting in an unresolved state for as long as possible. The best paintings are never wholly resolved, but leave room for doubt.

Q: You've emphasised that you paint intuitively. How does that work in practice?

A: I think there's a part of me which leads the process, and that part operates outside the frame, as it were - it goes beyond what I consciously know. I have to trust it completely. It's necessary to be on the alert all the time for nudges from this intuitive part of myself. My conscious mind might want to emphasise something in the painting, point it up a bit, because I'm proud of having achieved a certain effect, a bit of painterly cleverness; and then the intuitive part has me paint it out altogether - and it always turns out to be the right thing to do. Sacrificing that element propels the painting towards something I couldn't have anticipated consciously. There can be a lot of resistance in me to ditching something I've spent weeks, even months, painting. But however good an image is, however well realised, if it doesn't resonate with the rest of the painting then it's holding everything back. Painting is a very ruthless process!

Q: Is it important to you that others see your work?

A: I suppose so, though it depends on the person. An intelligent observer will always add something to the work by engaging with it - even if they say nothing at all. If they are painters, hopefully my work will ignite their enthusiasm and inspire their own work. But even if nobody ever saw my paintings, I would still continue to work. I'm driven to do so. And along with age has come this much greater emotional investment. I'm aware that I might have no more than a couple of decades left to paint - if I'm lucky, and can keep on working to the end. But I'm also enjoying it so much more: painting seems as miraculous to me now as it did when I was five years old! It seems amazing that I can make marks, and those marks will persist and outlast me. They may be all I leave behind.

Q: What would you say to yourself, if you were just starting out again?

A: I’d say what several people said to me when I was young – don’t get sidetracked. Choose your medium, and if it’s painting then don’t write, don’t perform, don’t do anything else at all - even if you can. Make painting your only focus and it will have power. But of course I ignored them! I wanted to try everything. Every kind of creativity. I was very prolific, too. Now I use fewer creative outlets, but I work more intensively, and with a wider understanding of what really matters to me.

Q: Where might you be now, if you'd taken their advice and not got sidetracked into different media?

A: I suppose I might have had more years to develop as a painter. But instead I think I developed as a person. It’s always a balancing act - but it gave me a lot of satisfaction at the time, to put my energies into other forms of expression. I've come to regard everything I do as one continuing work, really. My writing and painting, even my photography, are just its different voices.

Q: Would you like to be commercially successful?

A: No, I don't think so. I'm sure the disadvantages would outweigh the advantages: Unless you’re very strong, even obsessed, the pressure of others’ opinions must affect the way you work. Often the most successful artists are those who can negotiate a place for themselves in the world. But they aren’t necessarily the best artists. To be that, you have to retain a kind of innocence; and you need to be someone who responds to a much deeper call than the need for worldly success.

Q: So a painter should be self-reliant, self-directing?

A: To a large extent, I think so, yes. Painting is an alchemical process, and it can’t happen in full view – it needs privacy, enclosure, to develop. It takes so long for a painter to nurture their vision into something with substance. You need solitude and a huge amount of patience. For me, it’s a very precarious process: one which can be capsized easily by the wrong kind of attention.

Q: What would be the wrong kind of attention?

A: Something which feels like intrusion. Someone coming out with an interpretation before I'm ready to see the painting in that way. Someone giving technical advice, which would feel like they're trying to take over. Or if someone says they like one painting more than another: that can be quite damaging. I'm very thin-skinned! Ideally I prefer to have finished a painting before I let anyone else see it. But I do allow a few people, those I really trust, into the studio to see what's going on. It's rare, but it happens!

Q: Finally, how do you think you might be remembered?

A: I suppose as someone very creative, but perhaps too reclusive for her own good! But I'd like my work to be remembered, not me.

THE PERILOUS QUESTION

I wrote this seven years ago. It still seems relevant now. It is about illusion and passion and the danger of asking the Perilous Question.


Last night I had a dream in which I was giving a talk to a roomful of people. We sat together on the floor, almost in darkness. I felt vaguely discomfited at being the one chosen to speak: I was among people whose perceptions were at least as acute as mine.

I began to talk about the way I used to feel when I first came here: to Glastonbury, a place of visions and enchantment - before the wine soured. Then someone in the room interrupted me. I found it very hard to make out what she was saying. There was chattering and laughing in the room beyond. I asked her to repeat her words, and she did, and again I could make out nothing. At last I understood her. She was saying that enchantment was not the same as passion. I replied that I was coming to that, but I hadn't been. My theme had been dualistic: enchantment versus disenchantment. She had placed passion beyond both. How was it connected?

There was a small window set high in the wall. Framed by it I saw something I assumed was the sun; but such a pale, wintry sun, such a feeble disc. Then everything turned around - I knew it wasn't the sun but the full moon. Not a weak sun but a strong moon. I woke up saying this, greatly moved, not knowing why I was moved, why it should matter.

Not knowing, also, whether to interpret this dream as encouragement or warning. Perhaps it was both. On the brink of a long overdue disenchantment I hesitate to abandon ways which have sustained me for so long. But how to wake up? Why not sleep on, and wait for an obliging Prince to battle through the briars? Yet his kiss would only wake me from one dream into another. The beauty that sleeps within demands much more: it has a feral nature - its proper place is beyond the bounds. The Prince, thrown down from Rapunzel's tower, wanders blind in the wilderness for three years before he is fit to be reunited with her. The Beast languishes unseen and castle-bound until the wilderness grows up inside his walls. Only then can his beauty return to him. Even within walls, passion can flourish, but only if the wilderness has got there first.

"Oh I've been faithful to the wall. I haven't left its side at all. Only, when my heart grew sore, I traced the outline of a door." Lines from a recent song, despite my belief that my songwriting belongs back in the enchanted time. I used to sing my heart out. Now my heart is walled up, waiting. For the door to become more distinct? The wilderness lies beyond that door - and with it a part of myself that seeks reunion. Beauty roams the moonlit moors, calling to Heathcliff in the storm's voice.

It seems time to ask the Perilous Question. Perilous because illusion is dispelled.

The Perilous Question is "What purpose does this serve?"

It has always been the root question. "What's this all about?" The question expands us beyond any safe context. It dangerously reveals that where we stand is always at an edge. The question itself could well take us over the edge.

As a painter I make form, set limits, work within the four straight sides of my canvas. I enclose, define and create a self-consistent world. A world of deliberate illusion that seems more enduring, less subject to brokenness, bleeding and decay, than 'reality'. I welcome the limited context. Within that playful space I can widen the bounds just enough to discover - and demonstrate - something new. Yet I must allow the wilderness in, or what I do is without passion. I do so by not knowing where to begin, not knowing what I'm doing, and not knowing where I'm going. In my work there is wilderness enough. In my heart?

The Fool comes to an enchanted castle where everyone seems to know what's going on except him. At last - not at first - he asks the bleeding, broken King, "What's the matter?" Why are you, who matters, wounded? Why is matter always wounded? Why is the true Fool, whatever perilous leap into the unknown he takes, never wounded? Why is it the Ruler, who draws the line at going beyond the bounds, who tries to keep the four walls of reason standing, the one who in the end is lying there in his own blood? Attempting to make things matter, to redeem this impossible mystery of existence, the King has been felled. Only a Fool would ask why.

The Perilous Question dissolves make-believe and opens the way for redemption. Rapunzel at last finds the blind Prince and washes his eyes with her tears. Clarity dissolves the enchantment veiling the Prince's sight. Beauty eventually kisses the Beast without repugnance. A beauty deeper than appearances dispels the self-disgust that disfigures him. The Fool finally asks the King, "What's this all for? Who benefits?" The Fool's uncompromising question resolves the enchantment that holds the wasted land in thrall. Attention, exploration, curiosity, are necessary solvents: the Prince's blindness, the Beast's delusion, the Fisher King's impotence - all such suffering goes untransformed if it remains unrecognised.

In the dream I was reminded that passion isn't the same as enchantment, that it doesn't belong in the same place. Passion, colour of King's blood, comes at a price. The Perilous Question, which delves beneath appearances, is not intended to substitute one enchantment for another. Its power is to move the action forward, out of bounds - into the wilderness, where anything can happen. The wilderness and the wasteland are not at all the same. In the enchanted wasteland the possibilities have almost been exhausted. Passion's growing ground is among tumbled walls and broken illusions - the debris of disenchantment. With passion, the wilderness can become fruitful.

Now I measure my progress by the moments when I have been Fool enough to ask the Perilous Question. When tears have renewed my vision, when compassion has healed my self-hatred, and when I have knelt beside my own broken King and raged at such profound woundedness, which seems perpetual and inescapable in us all. "Why must it be this way? What purpose does it serve?"

And felt the question rock the ground under my feet, dissolve the make-believe and bare the moonlit illusion - where I had supposed there to be reality and sunshine.