Drifting

In the south of France, we arrive in the touristy seaside town of Argelès-sur-Mer. The heat is constant and cloying. It kind of feels soothing in an immersive way. I haven’t brought anything with me, art-wise, except a small sketchbook and a kid’s pencil case with the basics we can share. I left a painting in progress in my box-room studio. The base layer is completed with wet-on-wet in dark/mid tones. It floats around in my head like a cloud, except there are no clouds here. So I am to be in this place for a time, not elsewhere in a painting.

We don’t visit art galleries or museums. We move from pool to sea to market to restaurant, or we cook in our cabin’s kitchen, which resembles an airplane cockpit. I have brought Anita Brookner’s last novel, Strangers, with me, which I dip into half-heartedly. It is not escapist enough for this place, even with its front cover depicting Venice.

My mind drifts. The sketches I make are of profiles, feet, patio chairs, and kids jumping in pools from memory. I’m flirting with the idea of incorporating words or letters into paintings, as I’m interested in how my six-year-old is starting to acquire written language phonetically: N-E-M for them, or D-A-T for that. He says to me, “Mummy, what does this say?” And I have to make sounds in my mind to read the words out loud. For a moment, I’m alert to a child’s learning process. He draws a portrait of me with boob-like shoulders and an extra row of teeth.

Distance is good for the studio work, isn’t it? A break and a fresh perspective. I tell myself this in windows of time when I find myself feeling antsy and restless. Does thinking about painting count as painting?

I try to fill my camera roll with many potential sources and prompts. The light is different here, after all, and we show more skin. In fact, there is skin on display everywhere. I love people-watching, and at the poolside I can get away without seeming leery with my sunglasses on. I, in turn, feel more aware of my own body in this hot climate.

Three out of five of us get a gastro bug. My eldest son and I are miraculously spared. One morning I stay in the cabin with my youngest as he rests after a night of vomiting. I pace around sweeping needlessly.

I Google the painter who has been allocated as my Turps mentor for next year. I know this is a bad idea, but I do it anyway. Covadonga Valdés. I look at her Instagram and website. I feel ridiculously like an undercover detective or a peeping Tom. London–Madrid. The John Moores Painting Prize 2003. I am seduced by her understated, mysterious work and muted palettes. I read some of the texts on her website and find I’m transfixed by a series of Bridge paintings from 2021. I promptly end the search.

It would have been better to enter the correspondence as a clean slate. I know it, but the temptation was too great.

I sidestep to an interview with painter Kimberly Brooks on Hyperallergic, titled Painting Faded Memories. More seduction, but this time by a title. In the interview, Brooks describes how, in the series of paintings she refers to, the word ‘disappear’ became an important verb. I search my head, a verb: an action, an occurrence, a state of being. More childish relearning. The interview sparks many ideas in waiting, particularly her reference to clouds, which brings my own cloud in progress floating again into view.

Imagine looking at a picture of a cloud and seeing a face or a woman chasing a balloon. Now imagine deciding to draw out that picture, pulling it into view, and then pushing it back again. (Brooks, K.)

I find on the final day I am looking forward to getting back to work. I have paintings in mind and a materials list to check off.

I recently read a short Frieze piece about an artist called Rykeyn Bailey. The writer responds to the artist’s natural impetus to create, his lack of concern for his place within the canon. His paintings are interesting, text poking through clouds, paintings made on stretched bed sheets.

I have been planning for a while to paint on unstretched canvas, to let the size of the painting be decided in the process rather than by a predetermined frame. I can buy stretcher frames later, cropping the paintings after completion. Hopefully this will encourage some surprises, marks moving off the edges.

But bedsheets? I have at least one that might work.

The night before we fly, I don’t sleep. The woman next door has a smoker’s cough and the campsite music ends at midnight. I think about the afternoon my eldest son and I cycled to a nearby nature reserve, which farms cacti. It was officially opened the month before I was born: July 1984.

On the beach, my son makes a shelter out of driftwood and dried bamboo. He firmly beds the sticks with large rocks and covers them with sand, working with focus in the wind and sun. It stands. We hold a towel against the wind and let it go. It snaps against the frame, a DIY windbreaker we can huddle behind.

Part of the beach is a nudist area, which has us in fits of giggles. We leave, and he has to part with his frame.

“Maybe we can come back and see if it is still here tomorrow,” he says.

“Maybe someone else will use it,” I say.

Ephemeral acts of making and effort.

We walk back to our bikes through a desert-like landscape. In bed, I think of Camus’s first story in Exile and the Kingdom, the wife who becomes bewitched by the desert. It prompts her to question her whole life, particularly her marriage. How a change of landscape can dramatically alter our sense of self, testing our sense of steadfastness. Like the wind against my son’s frame, which may have now become driftwood again.

I lie awake. What will I write in my first letter to my Turps mentor?

Covadonga, I read, is a traditional Spanish name meaning Cave of Our Lady. I think of another Latin name, Constance. To be constant, steadfast, loyal, and persistent. Unlike a cloud, that drifts.

I will write about paintings from my past, the present, or the potential future. When I get on the plane the next day, I don’t look back. The idea of being a drifter, or slacker, has always appealed to me but in reality, I’m too obsessive. I have just a few weeks until my first upload. The break has created a hunger in me: less drifting around and distractions. There’s work to do.