Attentive readers will have noticed that I don’t actually appear to be painting anything at the moment. It only occurred to me just now that there could be good reasons for that.
The first, and I suspect the minor, reason has to do with my domestic situation. My wife and I have decided that it would be a good idea if we move house. The home in which we live is not a place in which to grow old with convenience. It makes sense to move while we still have the energy and enthusiasm to go through that kind of upheaval. This is a situation I find immensely distracting, largely because it is clear that we both need to do a good deal of clearing out of old stuff before making the move. I am sure, even so, that my current lack of productivity has relatively little to do with that.
It is a curious fact that the majority of my regular readers are not from Britain. Even so, I am sure that you will all be at least peripherally aware of the political crisis through which we are passing at the moment because of the debate that is raging over the future relationship between the UK and the EU. A referendum that was called by former Prime Minister David Cameron with the intention of uniting the country around a result that indicated clearly the “will of the people” has created divisions that are deeper and more intensely felt than at any time during my own lifetime.
As a former social scientist I do find it interesting at one level to see clearly demonstrated the fact that people’s basic political orientations are not based on any rational calculation of interest, but deeply-rooted predispositions based upon temperament. The level of antagonism that can be provoked by this issue at the moment is, on occasions, quite disturbing. This can be amusing in some situations. Early in the debate it became very clear that my regular climbing partner and I are quite radically opposed to each other on this issue, to the extent that if we were to engage in debate about it our friendship might be jeopardised. After just one tentative, sparring conversation on the subject we agreed that our friendship was to important to put at risk, and we have never mentioned the matter again.
This is not the occasion on which to explore the reasons why I believe that the problem we now face in Britain is both serious and indeed potentially dangerous for our political system. The word “crisis”, for once, is not an exaggeration of the situation. I feel it to be immensely disturbing, indeed threatening. What, I ask myself, might be my response to this as an artist? I feel that in some respect I should be able to crystallise in image form something of this state of affairs, and in particular the emotional tone of it all. As a painter who thinks habitually in terms of metaphors and symbols it should be possible for me to express or illuminate some aspect of our predicament. Surely this is what artists are supposed to do.
A recurring theme of my painting has been fractures and cleavages in the natural world. (See especially the “gallery” entitled Beyond.) The “Forest Giant” pictures (and other tree images that recur in my work) could also be seen as making some reference to the agonies of our predicament. And yet I feel that somehow I am failing really to put my finger on anything that captures clearly the essence of what it feels like to be here at the moment, lest alone that suggests any kind of understanding of its causes. So: in the search for something that says anything significant about the world, I remain (pictorially-speaking) tongue-tied.