Gaps

Recently a subplot of a novel I was reading caught my attention and filtered into the work.  The female protagonist has a child with a man whom she loves but doesn’t fully understand.  He tends to be melancholic, and it frustrates her.  When she learns of his affair, she moves away with the child, but as the child grows, she watches them closely.  The child later shows signs of melancholia, despite never having contact with or knowledge of the father.  The mother questions, did she not save the child by moving away? Did she not do enough? 

Sometimes I walk my son home from school, and he starts to cry.  He tells me he is feeling desperate and doesn’t know the reason; there is nothing wrong.  It terrifies me that there is nothing obvious to fix.  We talk and talk and find some lightness.  But what happens if he stops talking?  I think with the painting process I try to make peace with these uncertainties: the gaps in knowing. 

‘Mind the gap’ enters my head after years going back and forth on the London underground.  When working as a gallery invigilator in my twenties, a friend and fellow painter asked me as we patrolled the top floor of the National Portrait Gallery: how is your work going?  It wasn’t, was my response, I was stuck.  He told me whenever he was in a rut he would make little painting books, just out of scraps of paper.  This conversation stayed with me as I loved the simplicity of it – it felt like an invitation to play. 

For the last two years of correspondence courses, I felt like I’ve been running uphill, trying to make up for ‘lost’ time.  It was only over the Christmas break that I realised how this sense of urgency had created gaps in my practice.  This was not through fault of my mentors, but my own eschewed idea of being productive.  I’ve been working straight onto canvas, instead of drawing out compositions or allowing more of a pause before diving straight in.  This meant often pushing through paintings which I sensed weren’t working. I’m resolving myself to draw and write more now, and to explore territories between mediums, albeit in what might be tenuous and awkward ways.   

I have no wish to solve riddles, fill gaps, re-establish truth or innocence.  I have an aversion to explanations.  I want to leave the questions unanswered because it is in those gaps, those black holes, that I find the material that suits my soul.  It is there that I weave my canvas, that I invent spaces for freedom and for lies – which are, in my eyes, one and the same thing. 

Leila Slimani, The Scent of Flowers at Night (2021) 

Oh, look the poison root 

Dug it up from the poison tree  

Crushed it up and boiled my tea 

Now I know everything 

Now I know everything 

(Alex G, Lyric ‘Poison Root’)