Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
A reading life, a writing life, with writer and teacher Sally Bailey. I've been haunted by that sound for a long time. I associate that sound with the sound of a paintbrush being tapped against a glass jar filled with water and paint, mixed, watery paint, coloured paint, blue, shooting through the surface of the water like jets.
And I'm reminded of how when we painted at school, we were given one small, narrow paintbrush, like a lean finger pointing up towards the sky, and we were asked to paint with that lean brush to make our mark upon the canvas. And I've been thinking this week about the relationship between the pen and the brush, and the painting body and the writing body. And recently, I went on a visit
to a village outside of Oxford to meet my friend Emma Neuberg. Emma Neuberg, a painter, an artist who works with paint shooting through space. Lances of colours that she projects from her body from plastic bottles filled with water and paint, diluted paint. Pools of colour that land on her canvas and glisten
like tiny, watery planets. Emma Newberg, she's also a textile artist and I think those watery globules or planets arrive on her cloth, her decorator's cloth, for it is that which she paints upon. They arrive like small buttons of water and I look at the shape of her body as she
projects that paint upon the white rough surface of the decorator's cloth and her body seems to me to be circling and circling through space like a Catherine wheel and that is always the shape I return to when I think of the painter or the artist or the sculptor or the writer and it has something to do with the internal evolution of our mind's eye
like a snail shell spiraling inwards, inwards. And it is that shape I long to attach to when I start to write. It is a moving shape and it is moving inwards, involuting, moving down. And the most basic shape, the most basic shape I believe a human body can make is that of a man or a woman with his rake,
or scythe leaning forward into the sun across the soil and when I watched my friend leaning across her painter's table and her white decorator's drop cloth I saw my character, Pondman with his rake or scythe leaning forward into the sun across the soil leaving behind his toil. His toil?
And the most essential movement an artist can make is across her canvas as she leans west, still dreaming, dreaming. Soon she will leave and fly over this white space like an arrow being launched and leave behind the marks of her existence, her body on the shore, behind on the floor, her breathing.
Those spots upon her canvas are now glistening with water, globules, planets of blue running. She is watering her paint. She is following their progress. See how they run, how they take her away from herself on the ground, her square feet. See how they run, how they take her away, those white glistening
globules, those tiny planets spreading outwards across space. And the body in motion you know leads us away from ourselves. And the hand in motion attached to the pen or the pencil or the paintbrush leads us away from ourselves towards another place and time. But we pull back, we pull back
We pull back with the rake and the brush and the scythe and the handle and the pole and the bar and the broom and the mop and the spoon and the implement I carry in my hand. Now I tap with the spoon, the paintbrush, that small, slender digit or finger they told us to make a tree from as a child's implement.
the tool that carries the weight of our satisfaction as we lean into the distance between here and now. All that is past and all that is to come still so unreckoned across the white space of the page or the canvas or the drop cloth. And this is art, you see, the distance between
us and what we can see in front of us, the white table laid out with her cloth, untouched, still rough and wrinkled, hands have not quite smoothed it out, my friend Emma Newberg, the artist, the distance between us and what we can see in front of us, the drop cloth, she told me it was drop cloth she used, decorator's cloth,
and the opacity and the uncertainty of not knowing where we are going when first we lift our brush into the air, our body leaning forward as we begin to dream westwards through space and time as the water arrives with the blue paint and mixes itself into small glistening globulars, globulars.
Yules, globules, arriving, arriving in white space, now blue and bleary and blurry and we do not know where we go. And this, this is art. The distance between what you can see in front of you and the opaque space as you dream of going west.
Writing is a kind of transposition. It's a carrying over of your body and your mind to another place. And you do not know where you are going when you first start out across that line. On the white page, the white canvas, and I ask my friend, Emma, the artist, where are you going with your long-handled brush? And she says...
To that studio I dream of in Paris where a stylish woman hangs loosely from a high wired balcony smoking. Her waist is small, her waist is small and she dresses in a cerise pink dress. Dresses in a cerise pink tinged with purple, the colour of fuchsias, the colour of fireworks in a dark
Sky, fuchsias in a dark sky. She is from the world of fashion. She from the world of fashion in her studio in Paris. And we are not. We are left behind in this rural space. Inhabited by farmers and wandering sheep. Which not even the icy fog can touch.
through the white space which is opaque and uncertain and lies ahead of us. See, their woolly tails are dirty at the back, so dirty from being caught up in mud and metal. I cannot see them through the fog. The sheep in the fog. We are so isolated one from another. Not even the road can hold us as we walk or drive down it, my friend and I.
These days I must be driven through the fog. Whereas my friend knows, my friend who is an artist, who is called Emma Newberg, knows how important it is to make a connection with the places traveling ahead of us. The white canvas she makes from her decorator's drop cloth still wrinkled as she runs her hands over it like folded skin.
you might call it an apprehending consciousness. Our imagination, it is moving through that white space in front of us, the canvas, the field, perhaps it is the field ahead of us now on the road, or the ocean we long to see, or the sky
Attached to our unsunned wintry limbs, Our wavering arms, our cold, chill, lean hands, Hoping to reap a lover, a mother, a father, A child, a newborn infant, Kept waiting, hanging on the other side of this white abyss, Now being filled with blue, purple and pink cerise,
running towards the slight waste, holding her on the far side of the studio space by the window where she stands, loosely smoking. Writing is breathing too, you know. My friend is holding the brush. She is holding the brush now and she is looking very girlish and when I look at her again, I see eons.
Eons of a girlish past running from her soft face. She is soft like a lamb, my friend, and she laughs easily, and nothing about her is affected. Nothing at all. She wears no make-up and I can see her clearly. And I imagine, and I imagine, she does not even brush her hair before she starts to paint only... Towelsles. Towelsles. With her fingers.
And I think this is why she is an artist, because she is thinking most and only of her canvas and how she will get there. How she will get there. And I watch her dip small squares of seeded bread into her coffee cup, which by now is quite chilly because she has left it alone for some time in the fog, the white fog of her imagination.
And I laugh inside. I laugh at how different we are. Because everything I drink must be scalding. And her cup is still. It is still with coal. A very long cup with a long-handled spoon. And I note that everything she does has a method. A very exacting method.
Even the way she carries herself is quite unselfconscious because her method is on her canvas, that white space running ahead of her. Where will she go? I do not know. But I see that her paint is drawing her inwards. Her darting, flying, lancing paint. And I know, I know that people like this are easy to love.
And artists like this are easy to like. And I think to myself, quietly and in turn, that she is a version of Pondman, my character. Pondman, who is nothing more than an original gesture, a shape, very ancient and very simple, so untold.
Because you do not need to tell of the old ways of leaning into the soil or across the canvas. Because it is the most ancient gesture of all to make shapes from colour and movement. The brown soil turning over in the sun, lifting those globules of mud towards the warmth.
And I watch, my friend, I watch her wrists flicking back and forth. The paint from the bottle where it sits mixed with water, which she holds in her right hand and flicks gently outwards, westwards across the unforeseen horizon. She knows and she desires, but she is not quite sure yet where it is yet.
she will land. My friend tells me, my artist friend tells me, in California she works with larger pieces of material, decorator's cloth, the sort of plain cloth you throw down to protect your floor from splattering paint. Because in California there is the desert and the flowers can hold the light more congenially than
And so they will hold my friend's body as she throws herself forward towards an unforeseen future. Leaving behind, leaving behind the cold, dark January rain and the fog through which you cannot even see the sheep peaking. And her pretty thatched cottage muzzled by rain to a more relaxed body and a more relaxed shape.
where the time of day is known by the sharpness of the light as it meets with the end of her fingers, slender and lean, throwing a lance of colour blue upon the floor. Because the paint dries more quickly in Santa Monica, California,
And so the end of her dance can be seen immediately and the reconciliation of the place where she holds her toes to the floor balancing delicately. And the place where the paint lands is easier to follow and I know the plane will land there. There. There. Through that line of feeling.
That dart of thought which only blue and purple and pink mixed with globules of water can tell her where she is. And she will only know. She will know only when she lands in California, Santa Monica and looks at the tone of the sky. What she truly is. What she truly is. She will only know
When she lands, blue and pink and cerise, opening into a flower. Thank you for listening to A Reading Life, A Writing Life. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please like it, give us a review, or mention us to friends or on social media. Thank you.