A Minor Threat

While sitting with a woman I know this week, I complimented her on her nails which were perfectly shaped and pillar box red. She thanked me and looked at my nails in turn, before averting her eyes and complimenting my runners instead.

My hands are dry with paint in the cracks around the nails: I have been working diligently on a small painting for days. I realise I can be difficult to live with at these times. Distracted, absent, both mentally and physically, when I keep slipping away to the box room where I work. I imagine this is why some artists, those who are able, get studios away from their homes. How to live with the work otherwise, when it can be so obsessive? And then you finish, or decide you’re finished, and the obsession lifts like a cloud. It makes me think of one of my favorite books, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. The main character is always aware of the painting’s presence, wherever he goes.

This painting started with an idea which felt increasingly distant as I worked. I painted in layers, working from two photographs, one from the past of me as an infant and one recently developed of my son. I wanted to combine these photographs on one picture plane, to play with scale in a slightly absurd and crude way, to think of childhood as a landscape we continually navigate. I have always loved Japanese ‘flat’ paintings where compositional elements don’t follow typical conventions. The Aspen trees came in at the end. Partly because I imagined I saw one in the background of Eden’s photograph but also because these trees are often described as ‘trembling.’ They are, coincidently, native to both Ireland and the UK.

The painting is just a small thing (25 x 30 cm), a minor threat to perfect nails and daily routine. Nevertheless, we sat together in close proximity for several days. If anyone sees it in the flesh, I would like them to hold its compact frame in their hands, to feel its lightness, to run their fingers over the layers of paint, and to wonder at its strangeness.