On Ageing

Letter

“To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable.”

I’ve been thinking about aging. Not only human aging, but the way that paint and paintings age. Jan, do you remember when I visited you last summer? I had the small prints I did at Crown Point Press with me and we looked at them by the light of the moon. The way the moonlight transformed the prints took me by surprise – suddenly I saw how the moonlight changed the color of the trees, the grass, your house, our faces and I started thinking about how moonlight affects our minds; images enter us and become part of our thoughts and emotions. It’s really more radical than you’d imagine.

Where I grew up in the Danish countryside there was very little artificial light outdoors in the evenings and plenty of time to wonder about the universe, extraterrestrials and the meaning of infinity. Star-gazing makes you think about time: the distance covered by the rays of light from each star, is it as old as cave-paintings, older than cavepeople? I can easily recall the night skies of my childhood. And despite the nasty and disorienting business of growing up, the sky still looks itself to me. It’s reassuring, a kind of North Star in and of itself. It’s literally universal.

One way of looking at time is as a line from birth to death with life squeezed in between. Linear thinking is standard in the Western world. It governs our communication and our schedules. I’m told that Eastern cultures, where time is perceived as cyclic rather than linear, newborns are considered the oldest in a family. The Australian Aboriginals consider time a question of being awake or dreaming, giving rise to thoughts of the concept of dreamtime and connecting with other species via our dreams. The Indian Vedas describe time as an endless string of unique moments and as an awareness of a constant flux governed collectively. No yesterday or tomorrow.

What does this have to do with making art? Interrelatedness and infinity. Time and space are elements of painting. They are intrinsic parts of the method and the motivation and they are part of the product. They are part of how a painting affects us. Paintings are passed on from generation to generation under the constancy of the night sky and someday, the paintings we’re painting now, in 2010, will be relics from the dark ages. There are so many possible directions to investigate when it comes to the abstract realms of space and time, but I’ll try to stay close to the ground.

Materials change over time. Solid grows brittle, moist dries out, pliable becomes stiff, potency diminishes. Some material changes rapidly, others change slowly, over the course of decades or centuries. An oil painting can easily outlast a human being, even if the painting is hanging on the branch of an apple tree, subjected to the harsh Norwegian weather and with birds crapping on the canvas as target-practice (a technique famously utilized by Edvard Munch). If they’re well-constructed and taken care of, paintings can last centuries and even millenia. Physical objects themselves, paintings touch on our own physicality. In a way, the inevitable slow decay of paintings makes us face the speed of our own decay. Paradoxically, the paintings from an artist’s early career are those on which s/he is most likely to witness the aging process. The aging of later paintings is entrusted to future generations. For this reason, thorough, honest and detailed documentation is essential; information about how a painting has been constructed allows optimal maintenance, restoration and repairs, should they be necessary. Detailing methods is also a service to future generations. A lot of techniques have gone lost in the history of painting, a lot of painters have safeguarded their methods from their peers and competitors, but personally I advocate generosity to serve many and further personal and collective development rather than selfishness to serve few.

The materials a painter chooses can reflect her understanding of time. Acrylics age differently than oils, temperas, emulsions and waxes and the choices made in the studio reveal your personal frequency, and the wavelength on which you choose to work probably resonates with that frequency. Our frequency is a unique tone in space and time, but it is not limited to a single individual. This might be a blow to the ego, but it is also very reassuring that there are others out there who will pick up the tone you emit. Paintings can let your personal rhythms reverberate long after you are gone.

Producing ephemeral works of art is the exact opposite of trying to make lasting artworks. Work rendering the ephemeral essence of gestures, moments, awareness, states of mind, uniqueness and the intimacy of personal experiences and our emotional lives occupies a small, but far from insignificant place in the art world and is honorable, poetic – even heroic. Experimental use of materials and the investigation of life’s nuances is one way to express the delicate balance between the ephemeral and the everlasting; time and space and the eternality of every single moment.

Notions like these prod painters to acknowledge the aging of paint. In my own experience, my youthful ambitions to upend the world and revolutionize painting have slowly dissipated with my increasing involvement in my work. I have become conservative and traditional, one of those deadbeats I once despised, but secretly admired for their enduring devotion to their work. I have come to understand that devotion is rewarding and sparks renewal itself, rather than feeling that I’ve sacrificed originality and innovation in my work. Reading about older painters has become stimulating for me. As I mature, I understand what the painters I admire have been saying, and what I don’t understand intrigues me.

I find that the less I intellectualize, the more ’connected’ the images I produce seem to be. I am conscious and determined when it comes to my methods. The images come as a surprise, which I find energizes the process. I find this rewarding. When certain values are cultivated and incorporate into the work, the work succeeds. It may seem ahead of me from time to time, as I struggle to catch up with the expressions. Perhaps, we learn to understand ourselves not only through reflections, but through our actions too. It reminds me of a saying I once heard about luck: Luck is when alacrity meets the right opportunity. In a way, a painting is at once a cumulative record of a series of gestures performed over a period of time and a record of choices, dating all the way back to your first childhood drawing. Just like newborns in the East are considered the oldest in a family. In a way, then, your life connects with all lives lived; everything we do makes up a collection of recorded actions and thoughts and a personal library of private references, which in turn belongs to a universal library. Using these references gives actions a purpose and as a result we experience the past as meaningful for the present moment. Just like the Indian Vedas describe time. When we are aware of this system it also gives a sense of meaning to future events. Just like linear thinking is standard in the Western world. We become visionaries. Dreamers who are awake.