After some soul searching, I have realised that what interests me most deeply about the commute isn’t the shapes and the repetition of it, but the emotions of it. Repetition touched on the painfulness of the commute for some and alternatively a comfort for others. The shapes and observation touched on the anxieties of the commute, those who are unobservant are docile, scrolling through their phones because they have ‘better’ ways to spend their time. Those who are attentive in some way or another are anxious. It could be the physical attributes of double decker busses, I still cant sit on the top deck and go around corners without reassuring myself with the words “Sticky, Sticky.”* However, it could be an anxiousness to take in your surroundings and consume every crumb of the route for days when its dark and is harder to see, or an anxiety about making sure you get off art the right place. Either way, I believe that my old work and thinking was only scratching the surface of what I was actually trying to articulate and in the ongoing weeks through my work I want to be refining my techniques of communicating these feelings. As I wrote in an RD class with Janine:
“I hope to capture in my work the liminal, echoing, timelessness of an empty bus station at night when you’ve missed the bus. I want to bottle up the mellow waiting, the anxious waiting, the anticipation of something, and the commonly felt emotions, or lack of, that comes with people’s interactions with transport in the city and use it as the paint that I soak my works in.”
This piece of writing was a light switch for me. I didn’t really understand that thats what I was trying to do with my work until then. It reminded me of falling in love with Edward Hopper’s eerie paintings of a post-war American zeitgeist as a young art history student in school, and not knowing quite how or why these paintings haunted me. I felt the same for Mark Rothko’s work and how people would break down and cry in front of them, confronted with their own pain. Even the idea of the chapel as not just a gallery space but an entire context in which to view the works. Realising what it really was that I love about painting and have loved all this time is the raw affect that paintings can have. Thats what I want, and that’s what I’m now trying to do.
*”Sticky” is a shortening of the phrase “Sticky when fast” which is an oversimplification of how when things go quicker the force and the gravity get stronger and pull them closer to the ground and things wont slip out from under you, hence how motorcyclists can be centimetres from the ground going round a corner and still be fine. A friend who took science explained it to me properly and thats about all I understood of it, anyways its enough to calm me down on a double decker bus.
becks ireland 