After reconnecting with Ria through her new Substack, I found myself reminiscing on her Instagram profile and tapped on an image I remembered her posting. Turns out it was from 2018 and I had commented “ey cool” on it. Pretty innocuous, sure, but seeing my name attached to a version of myself that I don’t remember sent a bit of a shiver down my spine.
I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon a lot this week as I’ve been battling through my annual immune system failure—lots of time to ruminate when you’re stuck horizontal. Mostly about how I really don’t feel like I was conscious in the years before I committed to my art practice.
Kali and I talked about something similar on the phone the other day after he mentioned that he was working through some postpartum gloom while polishing his first album. I empathized with reference to my experience of making paintings. There’s not a more womblike state of mind than when your train is latched to the tracks of a project and you’re picking up speed—the hours of the day become sacred. The morning shower might bring clarity to color, the journal might grab a few sound bites from the bus to the studio, the friend-recommended album might throw you a new tone, a face in the bar might send your imagination cycling into a white picket future.
I’m currently reading Dylan’s Chronicles. There’s a bit where he talks about starting out in coffee houses with thousands of other folk hopefuls having just moved to New York. He explains the importance of getting the song across rather than yourself, which for me is a big part of what makes the whole creative process so cathartic. As an idea appears, it ideally separates itself from the ego and floats in the brain with a postcard from the ether. And it becomes our job as artists to welcome it, bring it offerings, distract it, and sometimes ignore it as we attempt to teach it how to exist on Earth. A mode of gathering and giving, inhaling and exhaling that has nothing and everything to do with us.
So when it’s time to let it run free, gray skies are only natural. Being in service of the work means an attention to detail, to energy, to love, to life itself. The few times that I’ve been able to revisit a painting after a significant amount of time, (which is rare since I’ve only been doing this for a little while), the flood of past sensations that arrives is almost unbearably dense. But they’re there in luminous high-definition. It’s a mirror to a mirror, a self-reflexive miracle. Something to remind me that I was and will be as alive as I am today.