22 September 2022

seven small syllables to shake one's perspective




22 April 2022
                                                                 

I was watching a film the other night wherein two characters seemed interested in one another. Speaking on the telephone, split screen, the woman, at one point, says to the man, “I have been thinking of you”. Then the screen fills with an empty pause and silent desire.


Just seven small syllables, like a Haiku marking a time and place that press this moment, out of all the 

others, into someone’s startled heart. This tiny set of words for any man or woman can either set them 

sailing, or shipwreck them both. And chaste like a pearl necklace it is the most restrained string of words in the whole wild world of Romance.

                                                                                                            

It is a poignant space, this place, where two people meet weightless, without gravity or expectations beyond their earthly hopes and dreams. 

                                                                                                                       

I began to think about the sudden desire that lives within this small set of words as if they were precious stones inlaid upon the clasp of a fragile necklace. They are uttered at the very onset of a love affair at the front door, but sometimes much later on too, if a couple is both thoughtful and lucky.


But in each case it’s an invitation to engage intimately, for it’s a clean and embossed calling card that needs a quick reply.


Hopefully, everyone has either received these small words or delivered them softly themselves, maybe whispered in a chapel, or on a card from Paris, or maybe just from the other side of the bed.


And though we might seem to live in a world of busy and false expectations, Hi-Fi, Wi-Fi or Hi-Five, there is promise in every busy signal for Cupid has all our numbers.  


Like a love story at its dark end, dusk too, at the close of each day, seems to poison the light with regretful refrain. 


These seven images, all painted within weeks of one another, share the barest of necessities, they speak to me of those seven syllables that place an intimate bookmark of time tracing my own appearance into this 

fragile part of the day when I come out to paint. And like desire, they possess an uncertainty too, but not without an idea concrete enough to live within their own brushstrokes. 


And though I did not set out with an idea of making such evocative paintings, these come the closest to any love letters I’ve ever written.


10 September 2021


22 December 2021


21 April 2022


21 April 2022


16 July 2022


29 July 2022


30 January 2022


13 January 2020


11 May 2021


20 August 2018



No comments:

Post a Comment