Like Two Lovers in Conversation

The Making and Naming of a Painting

I’ve been writing more than painting these last few years, but I was reminded of the pleasures of painting recently when reading Michael Fell’s stack on making music and art:

Keeping it real is the most honest thing an artist can do. Embracing your curiosity and imagination while allowing yourself the grace to make mistakes and experience unexpected creative adventures is essential. As you navigate the journey and trust the process, clarity always emerges in the spaces you explore. The conversation you engage in will also eventually make sense, helping you discover your artistic voice and the creative direction you are meant to follow. —The Tremolo Of Your Mind, Space rituals and sonic, somatic & visual journeys.

It reminded me of the conversation I was engaged in when creating one of my favorite abstract paintings. It now occupies a privileged spot in the room where I write, on the wall above me as I type this, one of several paintings scattered about the room.

This painting in particular was pleasure to make as I worked with two very different mediums (oil pastel and water color) and two different colors (scarlet and gold) to see what they had to say to each other.

“Warm and rich, rich and warm, which is which?”

These words, like a mantra, echoed through my mind as I stared at the painting when completed, trying to discover its name.

I’ve hardly bothered naming other paintings. They seemed content with brief descriptive titles: “Sea Cave as Seen from Highway 1,” “Blue Bowl with Dancing Poppies,” “Landfall, the Marquesas.” Some I never named at all or, having scribbled something on the back of the painting before framing, have since forgotten.

But this abstract painting wanted more. Or maybe it was me who wanted more. We have a complicated relationship.

The painting came into being with a playful intent, the desire to enrich myself with color, to see what these two vibrant colors in juxtaposition had to say to each other, and how they made me feel as they danced across the page and spilled down the edges.

I started with oil pastel, a ribbon of red, a ribbon of yellow, swirling across a blank page. Then a line divided them, not evenly, but generously. Each color sat side by side, like lovers in conversation. First one spoke and then the other, as I swirled water color around them, crossing lines, and mirroring each other. Each crossing enriched, lighting up and warming the other. They seem separate and distinct, yet the swirls of pastel beneath them, the patterns that splayed across the line, united them.

They seemed two but are many. On one side, first vermillion, then scarlet, then crimson, each layer texturing and deepening the other. On the other side, cadmium yellow, quinacridone gold, drips of vermillion. Streaks of French ultramarine blue on the left, then a swathe of it at the center which I washed away. More gold on top of that. A glittering of yellow oil pastel at the center creates a single, subtle eye.

The whole process was like a conversation between myself and the painting that emerged on the page. The paint and brushstrokes, were like words we used to speak to each other. Do you like this? Not so much. How about that? Better, but I need something more. No, not that. Yes, this. I love, love love this! Big smiles all around.

Making, erasing, dripping, glacing, washing away. On and on it goes, not knowing when to stop, where to stop. Then stopping.

Once I stopped, the question came: How do I know it’s done? What makes it complete? Is there simply a sense of resolution? Of satisfaction? Or the sense that any new mark-making will be its unmaking? A made-thing would be undone, so therefore, no more making? I did not know. The painting itself seemed to tell me it was done, and I cannot translate the words.

But now the naming. How do you name such a thing? Can it go unnamed, untitled, a mere number? Why not? In truth is, it is nothing. Paint, paper, play. Not even art. Who is to say it’s art? Who can proclaim with absolute authority, this is art, this is not?

There is but one creator. One I. It spills through each of us, every day, every moment, each time we pick up a pen, a brush. Each time we walk into the kitchen and pour a cup of tea, a cup of coffee. What is this? A new thing.

It came from me, or at least through me. It swirled around me as I painted it. All that crimson and gold, warm and rich, rich and warm, but which is which?

All that spilling together, washing through me even now as I view it: A part of me, speaking to me. Creation to creator. What is it saying?

It speaks and I complete its thought, I speak and it completes me.

And so we name it: Like Two Lovers in Conversation.

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