It’s a mistake that is easy to make. At the moment I’m compelled to ask this question of myself.
I do enjoy writing, although I find that for some reason it is absolutely antithetical to painting. These activities appear to demand quite incompatible metal habits and orientations. Having rediscovered an interest recently in the Faust story and its various interpretations, I began to ask myself whether there might be some specifically visual interpretation I could fasten onto. So, I reread Christopher Marlowe’s play and began to swim around in various other interpretations of the story …. particularly the musical ones in operas by Gounod, Berlioz and Boito. It is all fascinating stuff, but suddenly I feel that my feet are no longer touching the bottom and I’m wondering whether I am being carried by currents in a direction which is not longer my original intention.
It is all fascinating stuff, and particularly so because of the multitude of questions and problems that are raised, ranging from the difficulty of finding our way into the religious mind-set of somebody in the seventeenth century to the huge question of what we might understand by “romanticism”. So far, I have to admit, none of this crystallises into anything remotely like a visual form.
There is a remarkable series of films on British TV entitled Saving Lives at Sea, which covers the work of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. A frequently encountered problem in the series is the predicament of the person who has been swept out to sea by a rip tide, but believes that if only they keep on swimming they will be able to regain the shore. Of course, they never can, and only survive because they are rescued by the life-boat. It has crossed my mind today that I might be in a similar predicament. If I keep reading (and consequently writing) I will break through to the point at which the visual potential of the Faust story becomes clear. I feel that at the moment I’m still at the point of “waving”, but fear that I might soon be “drowning”. Perhaps I’m fooling myself. I wonder what form the life-boat might take in this instance.