A Gift

Talking about "Superwomen", as I was a few Blogs back, I am reading a book at the moment called Eye Rhymes, Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual. Having bought several collections of her poetry and a publication of her journals, I got one of those “You may also like” messages from Amazon suggesting it. It gives a fascinating insight into Plath's prolific creativity and by all accounts she was an extraordinarily gifted young artist, seriously devoted to the visual arts from a very early age, moving “between art-making and writing constantly, integrating their elements with ease and pleasure.”

Reading through the excerpts of her diaries it’s hard not to feel envious of her absolute conviction of her own talents as both an artist and a writer. She seems never to have been in any doubt of her success either as one or the other. They say one should have the courage of ones convictions (whoever They are) but I am often lacking in both when it comes to my art. I have just put the finishing touches to a new painting. It’s a bit of a breakaway from my usual style and format and a few days ago I was feeling relatively pleased with it and looking forward to hanging it in my new gallery. Then yesterday the doubt crept in and I began to add in elements of previous paintings as a sort of safety net, lacking the courage to do something different and take a risk. By the end of play today I’m trying to decide whether or not it is a great painting or a “crock of shite” as one of my daughter’s student friends from up North used to say. (Always made me laugh – I love people who speak their mind.) Such is the measure of my conviction, and I would do well to remind myself when I step into the studio of what Rothko & Gottlieb said in 1943 in a joint statement:

“To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take risks.”

This belief has served me well previously. When embarking on my final MA project my tutors were not convinced that I could bring together painting and poetry, reminding me I was a painter, not a writer and asking me what I wanted to be assessed on. Our theory modules had been centred around the very idea of crossing artistic borders, so I was slightly confused at their reluctance to encourage me in embracing this concept. I came home from my presentation totally deflated, sick to the stomach with disappointment, and went to sleep worrying about what the hell I was going to produce. The next morning brought a new determination to plough on with my idea and to fly in the face of their advice. In the end, the external assessor told me it was a remarkable achievement and my exhibition was received well by its audience. But there was no critical feedback at all from the college (which I could never quite believe) so to this day I have no idea what my tutors thought of my work or how they felt it could be improved upon or developed. I got my Masters with Merit and almost all of the series I produced has been sold, but to this day, because I did not get the approval of the academics, there is a seed of doubt about its value, and I continue to question my abilities, always feeling slightly uncomfortable when people credit me with talent or having a gift. Indeed, I am acquainted with artists whose work I can objectively observe as not being superior in any way to mine, yet whose conviction in their ability and the value of their work leaves me breathless with envy. They are doing well and I am convinced that part of their success is that belief in themselves and their art. It generates an excitement in their audience which makes them want to have a share in it.

Do I then need to cultivate some of Plath’s certitude, and adopt Lewis Hyde’s philosophy that “a work of art is a gift, not a commodity”? He believes that as an artist works, intuition or inspiration comes as a gift: an idea pops into his head, a colour falls into place on the canvas, and that this gift is then passed on in the outer life of the creation, to the work after it has left its maker’s hands. In his book, "The Gift – How the creative spirit transforms the world", he contends “That art that matters to us – which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience – that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price.”

Maybe Plath was aware of this too. In one of her Journals, she questions how much of her brain is wilfully her own? How much is not a rubber stamp of what she has read, and heard and lived. Did she see these experiences as a gift which through her own practice and creativity evolved into a new entity that she could pass on as a gift to others?

As I vacillate about the value of my own creativity, I am reminded of that other great writer Goethe who said, "Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it." And so, as I sign off, I am taking a deep breath and stepping boldly up to my next canvas, trusting that Goethe is right.

And it is with boldness and conviction that I shall hang yesterday’s finished painting.

Another Level

For as long as I can remember, that is up to a few years ago, I have had dreams in which I am flying. Not the kind of Superman flying, up with the clouds whizzing along at great speed, more a kind of balletic floating above the ground. Sometimes, I am in a wide open park, my legs at right angles to my body spinning like an upside down helicopter, or at other times, more elegantly, dancing across a sandy beach at the shoreline, my feet not quite touching the ground. Frequently I have been indoors, floating repeatedly, just by willing it, from the floor to the ceiling. This is usually accompanied by feelings of exhilaration and I love it when it happens. In my poem Listening to Lilac, I describe skimming the surface of a coastline. This is not just something from my imagination, but a memory of a dream, or many like like it.

Dreams are so real aren’t they? I have often contemplated the idea that we travel to a parallel world when we sleep and our dreams are a window into our activities there. Of course this notion only amuses me when the dreams are pleasant and I’m engaged in some exciting adventure, or enjoying a sell out exhibition in Cork Street and being hailed by Charles Saatchi as the next big thing, or being seduced by some gorgeous bronzed Adonis. It’s quite different when something terrifying or disturbing is happening to me and it's always a huge relief to land back in reality where I can gratefully embrace my very ordinary life. Worryingly, on a number of occasions I have dreamed of burying a body (or once bundling one into the boot of a car) and wake up alarmed and deeply anxious that it might have really happened, or it’s a premonition of some future atrocity I’m going to commit. I have always been racked with guilt if I even swat a fly or kill a wasp, imagining as a child that giant cousins of the murdered creatures would come back to eat me, so the mystery buried body haunts me irrationally even in my rational conscious mind.

Some of my dreams have been so vivid and the storylines so riveting that for a few minutes after waking, I have lain there unsuccessfully willing myself back to my astral film set, and being dismayed that almost immediately it starts to unravel and fade from memory. I’m convinced they’d make brilliant dramas if only I could capture and document them. Sadly my waking mind never seems able to come up with anything anywhere near as compelling. I’m sure this is true for most of us, unlike the brilliant Max Ernst whose dreams were a rich source of inspiration. One of the founding members of the Surrealists, he first experienced hallucinations as a child and claimed when he became an artist that he was able to fix them as a faithful images in his conscious mind, like a camera, and transform them into works of art.

Believing as Freud and The Surrealists did that dreams are a disguised expression of unconscious wish, I have been wondering why for a long period I haven’t been flying in my dreams, and what has changed in my psyche to clip my wings, metaphorically speaking. A quick Google search of flying in dreams revealed that they are

“. . . very often a precursor for lucid dreaming, a dream state in which we are aware we are dreaming and can manipulate the outcome of the dream and is a sign that something is generally going right in our lives! Freely flying as high or as low as you wish using your arms or feet for direction, often with the ability to do acrobatics in the air is an indication that you feel really good about something in your life, feeling very proud of an achievement at work or at home, and life is good. We feel on top of the world and are soaring to great heights in our minds when we fly.” (www.mysticalblaze.com)

Ha! Well three years of frustration on the work and home front and not being in control of my own life might well explain it then, and I can now look forward to discarding my shackles and once again gliding serenely and effortlessly through my subconscious sojourns.

I like the idea of being able to choose our dreams before sleeping, like selecting a movie on Sky and replacing the actors with whichever character we wished to play in whatever scenario we needed to act out. In one of the aforementioned epic dramas I get involved in when I’m sleeping, I find it hard to believe that they have only lasted for a few seconds, or do they say it's just a few minutes? But then I also have my own notions about time and our existence in it. The first time I read Jesus’ statement “Before Abraham was, I am” it was like a light bulb going on. I had some instinctive realisation, though I couldn’t articulate it, that there was some truth in this, that time was relative to our perception of it, or our existence in it, almost like circles within circles, and it was possible to move in and out of time zones or planes. I understood this as his being outside of time as we knew it, that for him there was no past or future only an ever-present existence. This is just a feeling, not very well expressed. I haven’t the brain for understanding mathematics and physics (Grade 6 in both); it’s more a deep-rooted suspicion that we exist on different levels and it is maybe through our dreams that we see glimpses of our other selves and travel through different time zones. Pure nonsense of course, but I like to play with random thoughts and hypotheses.

Now, just to satisfy my curiosity, I’m going to Google the meaning of burying bodies in one’s dreams and hope I’m not too disturbed by what I find.