Recently I have had an interesting email exchange with the daughter of a friend of mine who died recently. When she contacted me to tell me the sad news of her father’s death, I replied by telling her the background to a picture I had painted and presented to him. it recorded an incident many years ago, when he and I had been members of a group of friends who enjoyed alpine walking, and had made many trips together. On the occasion in question my friend had arrived at the summit, evidently very tired, and he confided in me that he thought that he had just ascended his last alpine peak. My picture was a simple landscape of the Picos de Europa viewed from the summit of Pico Jano. The significant detail I had included was the shadow of a large bird passing over the rocky surface. It was a memorable and an intimate moment for both of us, as we had climbed together for many years. I counted it a privilege to be able to make a gift of my picture to him, and I believe that he welcomed it as such.
When his daughter wrote to me she told me that the picture was still on the wall of her mother’s house, but she was surprised to read the account of its origin, which was actually new to her. My understanding of the situation is that it was simply a memento of her husband. She herself had never been an outdoor type, so the detail of the location and situation had never really registered with her. What the picture meant had undergone a change of emphasis …. one might even say a transformation.
I expect that this is the fate (or fortune) of most paintings. When I look around my home at the various pieces on the walls, by other artists as well as myself, it is clear that each of them has been (and no doubt still is) on a journey. A small watercolour of the interior of a Norfolk farmhouse, by my late great aunt, was probably a recollection of her childhood. I have never seen the interior of the place, and so to me it is just an affirmation of my paternal family’s links with that county. We have two pieces by well-known artists from Yorkshire, but to me they are much more than “investments”, and they figure in my scale of values far more as signals of my identification with the county which has been my home since 1968, and where I now feel that I belong more than anywhere else. My sons each have items I have painted, and I am pretty certain that whatever it was that prompted my decision to paint them they are now valued mainly because their father made them.
When each of these pictures embarks on the next stage of its journey, when I can no longer appreciate them, they will acquire other meanings, and will matter to their owners for quite different reasons. Paintings never contain a single, uncontested and irreducible meaning or value. It doesn’t make sense to ask what a picture “means”, as if that can be stated with authority and incontrovertibly. Pictures only live, and only matter, at the moment of dialogue with whoever is viewing them.
Food for thought.