Given a page, a poem is found by letting words jump out to meet the eyes.
Then moving up and down the page, adding words or omitting them to let a new text take shape.
A different text that echoes with the original. Forged from metaphors. Allowing the richness of multiple and implied meanings.
Isolating the words out of the page and attending to the shape of the found poem.
Adding form and colour to re-connect the words into the new whole.
how the physical space of the studio makes a difference, what’s on the walls, the materials, my tables and easel
my use of images, sketchbooks, photos
how my practice is about the intangible too: commitment, values, intention, life choices
how rituals and routines support making art
the daily practice of journal writing, reading, intuitive painting, and time in the studio space
how the practice is nourished with gallery visits, books, talks
influences on my work of other painters and philosophers
After reflecting on their own work, we discussed aspects of the physical space in which conflict transformation happens, the meeting rooms people sit in, the food offered. Every aspect incorporates a message to participants and contributes to the conditions in which dialogue happens.
We talked about visualising ideas to simplify and to adjust thinking.
And arising as perhaps most important was the question of how time and space for creative, non-linear thinking might be incorporated in the pressurised processes of conflict transformation and peace-building.
I labelled this idea ‘the imaginal space’ and next time, I’ll share our deeper dive into what happens there.
In the middle week of the residency we dived a little deeper into the idea of the imaginal space and what can happen there. Taking space literally, we held an in-person Studio Interlude and set up a table with materials for art-making in the canteen. But the term imaginal space is powerful as a metaphor to characterise creative thinking in project teams and by individuals.
The imaginal space is where
• creative thinking happens
• we catch whispers of possibility
• unknowing is welcomed
• opposites are held in creative tension
• sparks fly
• intuition speaks
• we attend / listen / look
• multiple ways forward reveal themselves and enter into creative tension with what is
If you were to watch me painting in the studio, you would see me in a physical space with resources that support my artwork. You would also notice that the work is marked by pauses and ponderings, periods of sitting and looking, of walking around the room, of doodling on scraps of paper and writing in notebooks. What’s going on in these times is all of the above – I take the painting in progress into my own imaginal space in order to find the next steps. These come out of letting new possibilities arise and holding them in creative tension with what is already on the canvas.
It was interesting for me throughout my stay to hear about the creative activities of Berghof staff and how creativity inhabits people’s lives. I came with my painting practice and poetry; other people had experience in, and love for other art forms: theatre, photography, music. In our conversation, we talked about the performative arts and how they might offer ways of working with others to reframe situations and emotions.
Painting can be performative and collaborative, but is often a more private and silent activity. It is non-verbal, and there’s a power, I find, in losing oneself in colour, line and form. While busy with the material and mixing of paint with water, the body occupied with brushing and looking, the mind is quietened for a time and returns to some kind of equilibrium. From the time ‘lost in painting’, we can emerge invigorated and somehow more balanced. The activity is, in itself, restorative; the end result of the painting serves as a reminder of process and is not required to be more than that.
An edited summary of our conversation can be found here
https://berghof-foundation.org/news/transformation-through-art-talk-with-lynne-cameron
Several years ago, I gathered a set of questions to support people looking at paintings. The power of attention and noticing has been important in all my work, academic and art. Visual attention as a painter is different from the aural and analytic attention I needed in my research into spoken metaphor.
These questions are an introduction to attending to paintings, particularly abstract painting. I’ve recently developed new questions that go more deeply into the theoretical aspects of painting – I’ll share these soon. Meanwhile here are my initial deep looking questions. They’ve been trialled in several gallery / artist talks – viewers are invited to sit with a painting for at least 5 minutes and then to respond to the questions on paper, through writing or mark-making. I am always amazed by what people find..
We found the leaves pressed between two pieces of kitchen roll inside a book that I left here in NZ in October 2020. I have no memory of their collecting, pressing, laying aside.
Refound, they are making new memories as she turns 6, as she creates and owns her artwork.
I spent a long coffee break going through my turquoise notebook – that’s the one where I write notes about my reading. In my mind that day was how to think about some ‘self-portraits’ I’d been painting, how to tie them in to my practice. I re-read notes from poetry workshops to see what spoke to me now. Notes from zoom calls with my friend. Notes about ideas and notes to self. Sometimes screams of agony. Notes and connections. More of an on-going conversation than notes.
The notebook’s timespan included encounters with Laurie Anderson’s Norton Lectures , Jane Hirshfield workshop at Coffee House Poetry, Bracha Ettinger on matrixial theory, Griselda Pollock on Charlotte Salomon, Gabriel Josopovici on Modernism, and the Weird Studies podcast. Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil on attention, on ‘unselfing’, linger in the background always.
My conversation with the notebook turned itself into a list of questions. I realised as I listed them that these were the questions I needed to ask of the portraits.
I gave each portrait half a day to answer the questions. By writing in response to the paintings, I wanted to lead myself deeper into the labyrinth, to explore the mystery while retaining the mystery. Not to ‘unpack’ or explain – impossible – to notice more. The answers became a starting text, to be worked into something more poetic until it fitted, resonated, joined forces, with the painting.
I’m still working out how to best present these hybrid artworks, exhibition or book or … Meanwhile, here are the questions. Perhaps they would work for you? Or perhaps you could find your own set from your notebook?
What can be seen in the painting?
What happens with attention?
where is attention drawn on looking at the painting?
what was my attention drawn to when I was painting?
How does the painting gesture to beauty and goodness and tenderness? and to the shadow?
What’s being amplified?
Where’s the uncertainty?
What’s the weirdness?
What’s oscillating? What dynamics are in action?
Any collaborations going on? e.g. with ideas, with other painters
What has returned in a new way?
What transformation has occurred / is offered?
What possibilities are being held in creative tension?
This contingent emergence of form and colour fascinates me. I prepare the surface, allow the conditions, then the ink does its thing. I can adjust the process to a limited degree by tilting, adding or subtracting water.
As I get to understand what a new material can do, a dialogue starts with earlier work as I think back to past paintings and processes for possible new ways to work. I wondered what would happen on a disrupted surface, and over handwriting. AT the top of this post is the outcome. I wrote out the opening words from and Iris Murdoch’s text (The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts, 1967) on to thick watercolour paper, ripped them and glued them randomly to construct an almost 3d surface. Then I experimented with Midnight Blue ink spreading on this disrupted surface. This step draws on the word-collaging technique I developed 6 years ago in Berlin Notes in the Dark. That technique was used on a larger scale in the series Other People. In those paintings, pairs or groups of people engaged in unheard dialogue, their individual stance and the space between them conveying something of their relationship. You can see both series on this page by scrolling down.
The final step was reducing the insistence of the words with a layer of white paint on some sections..
This question lies at the core of the work of John Berger, according to Nikos Papastergiadis in an essay Forest (A Jar of Wild Flowers: Essays in celebration of John Berger, 2023, p.83.)
Such a profound question ~
It’s a question that helps me think about my painting in general – how I want to share something of my experience in the world as an older woman – and about how I can develop it through the particular and specific.
Currently I’m working on a series of abstract paintings that arise from walking the canal path in Oxford on my way to my new studio. Houses and gardens back on to the canal, some humble and some grand. Each meeting of garden and canal is different. What people do with their 3 or 4 metre stretch of bank is fascinating to me. Each has some way of holding up the small bank, while often including a step down to the water. There are old trees in random positions along the canal that have been built around. Some board their canal edge and place chairs there. Some keep canoes. Some incorporate it into the garden. Some keep it very trim; others let it grow wild. Many have little sheds there, some turned into offices. And from my vantage point across the water, I see what’s happening at canal level – broken steps, weeds, shadows, and ducks.
On sunny mornings, the low English sun strims through buildings and branches on to the green water. Sometimes the brightness lies beyond the dark bank, pulling the eye up into the garden. Sometimes patches of sky lie on the water.
My paintings take from the experience of walking and looking. They take the random patches of light and shade, the horizontals and verticals of planks and steps and sheds, the secret tangles below the bank and the overhanging tangles of branches and brambles.
In choosing colour and combining forms, I am speaking of how I belong to this world –committed still to the practice of attention and noticing, starting over in a new studio, priced out of houses backing on to water, privileged to walk on this path, while slightly wary as a woman alone.
Half a world away in New Zealand, I transform this particular, specific belonging into little studies on paper, in preparation for big paintings on canvas.
Abstract painter Willem de Kooning, talking about his practice:
Each new glimpse is determined by many,
Many glimpses before.
It’s this glimpse which inspires you — like an occurrence.
And I notice those are always my moment of having an idea
That maybe I could start a painting.
….
Y’know the real world, this so-called the real world,
Is just something you put up with, like everybody else.
I’m in my element when I am a little bit out of this world:
then I’m in the real world — I’m on the beam.
Because when I’m falling, I’m doing all right;
When I’m slipping, I say, hey, this is interesting!
It’s when I’m standing upright that bothers me:
I’m not doing so good; I’m stiff.
As a matter of fact, I’m really slipping, most of the time,
into that glimpse. I’m like a slipping glimpser.
(Sketchbook 1: Three Americans, 1960)