Liquid Twilight: Painting Stories in the Gray
What any true painting touches is an absence — an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss. — John Berger
Time envies what’s left behind. Through every brushstroke, the painter brings a little of the past along with her, impasto yesterdays and watercolors of the half-forgotten. Oil paints bottle up the light, but it’s the darkness that brings it out. Goya knew this darkness, all too well. Painters capture solitude through an absence of themselves, in a world without a witness, only the brush and the essence it delivers from another kind of darkness. An eternal night follows everything, especially words. Writers often write as fast as they can just to keep that night away, but one letter always follows another, just like seconds build into centuries, while songs of the cosmos sing on, without skipping a single beat, since everything that ever happens, is. But things are always missing, since moments are limited by nature. Listen and sacrifice the sight, feel and forget about all the rest… The only thing missing from a painting is everything else. What paint holds is what words hold, a moment of lost time. There is no capturing the light of the present, not even a sliver of it. We can only live it. The rest is gray, always.
Everything… In its right place… There are two colors in my head What, what is that you tried to say? — Radiohead: Everything in Its Right Place
Nothing emerges from the past without decay. Lost songs find their notes through ochre paint colored by rust, heavy metal giving way to grunge. Imagined worlds are haunted by voices from the writer’s youth, even if every one of those voices has changed through the damp acoustics of the mind. The alchemical process called creating is nothing without absence, just as immortality is meaningless without the presence of Death. Dutch paintings never hold the storm, but the oil-whipped sea remembers it, as much as the terror on the faces frozen in timelessness. No painting ever finds a proper place to hang, since all paintings are misplaced in Time. We look at a work of art like we look at the stars, through limited organs, in a world far, far away, no matter where we might be standing. Just as our field of vision is limited by a focal point — both worldly and imaginatively — so every picture is an atomic particle of the past. Unlike the atoms of existent things, these pictures are the seeds that can grow into pasts that were never there, but still hold a truth that lost time can never regain.
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the half-light… — W.B. Yeats
Paint is liquid twilight. The light of the present demands to be lived, or it’s nothing. To delve into a moment is like the mole vanishing into the hidden tunnels beneath the earth. Through eyes that only see into the half-light, the mole seeks the darkness in the narrows of the unknown, where she can smell her way into knowing. Creation is an inherent retreat from the moment, in order to resurrect moments past, through channels without beginnings or ends. Light plays games with paint, but it’s the night of the past’s background that makes the silver of the oyster’s gutted shell sing. Into the gray is where all light goes, the moment the present becomes the past for the one trying to catch it, through paint or words. Swim through the sea and feel the current of its presence. But the moment the paintbrush begins to depict that same sea, those waters shift into a twilight of themselves, this wave giving way to a calm, while a past calm becomes a tsunami. In the night, all cats are gray, but through the act of creation, so is everything else. Like the mole, colors emerge later.
Hayden Moore