Three Paintings in the Life of an Art Critic

One can remember his life by imagining it painted, and, depending on the content of each frame, render himself either the proudest or the most ashamed of its public witnesses.

My own existence can be divided into three distinct pictures, but doubtless their number shall increase as the years go by. Within the first, a small, smug boy sits at the bottom of a garden playing with an old dog, while friends and enemies stand conversing behind a series of hedges, more dark than vernal, and the ground beneath them all perennially shifts from grass to tarmac. A bell rings occasionally from the rafters of the house, or school, and summons desks upon the patio which, never put to use, are as quickly dissolved into the background of that happy frame as any brittle creature of imagination rises to the forefront. There is little hesitation in the long, healing rays of the sun and the only difficulty one has regarding their composition is the thought they might permeate from the rise and not the fall of that celestial object through the trees. This is an era of visible plenty but harboured misunderstanding, of much happiness but little appreciation. I glance on it daily expecting that a more adult eye will be able to trace into its features a hidden figure, willing to console my failings in the present tense, although concocted of the past; and so it makes me murmur.

The next in the tryptic is more stone than yard, and I would have little to say about it if it did not portray the most formative part of my development. A young man with a red face is absorbed into a series of unfurling corridors and, so much so, that had he begun to cover his head in his hands before the artist loosed a dripping brush, there would not be anything scarcely recognisable as human on that very abstract canvass. Each part of the boy is composed of a document, which, scowling, merges into the frown of a wall. Sheets glaciate him with the rest of the building, yet cannot dull his cheek as white as their paint. I glance this image weekly, racked with the guilt that I have not a shroud of his endurance.

The final canvass is no less a portrait, though not one figure dwells within its midst. An empty bed and bath combine upon a floor comprised of wine-stained suits alone. There is a sign above them on a mantelpiece that reads, ‘Here’s to your success!’. I never mean to look on it again.

As should the ever decreasing length of these paragraphs reveal, I much prefer to think of the bygone years contained in the earliest image. Whether for love of the simple style of living it represents or hate that I am bound to use another, I cannot help but try, each night and morning, to impart some of my mind within its form. For many times over the past seven years, I have crawled out from my duvet with one hand trying to grasp at a dog, or a friend, or a birch tree left behind its fading scene. But this is not reserved to dream alone. Long have I spied the contents of its frame on the moss-less highways of a busy town and, for all the logic in me, stared in awe at the self-same house of a childhood fantasy.

So, by means of comparison with the other paintings of my life, I have determined to answer how and why I developed feelings of such affection for this one.

My immediate impression is governed by a half-finished essay titled ‘The Fiction of Meaning and The Meaning of Fiction’. It essentially made the point that, without an idea of God, men will deify the more tolerable years of boyhood to compensate for an unfulfilled need of submission. We can shorten this sentence by calling that need nostalgia.

There are few who will debate their childhood permitted them access to a plain of reality in which truth and falsehood freely intermingled. The ignorance of any boy or girl as to what exists and what does not, as well as the vibrant imagination which their minds have in common, naturally makes the world seem to them a thing too large for scepticism. After all, so many of their most immediate presumptions will have already been put into a realm of uncertainty once they have learned a suitable number of phrases to express themselves. As soon as the apparent flatness of the Earth, the disappearance of the sun at night and the organic separation between child and adult have been assimilated into that uncertain, green landscape in which nothing is real, the existence of those young philosophers becomes one of constant transformation, where the simplest of conceits are vanquished by the low whisper of an adult and the strangest of absurdities are proven directly by the loudest of experiences. Even among the scientific infants, angels and dragons exist in the periphery for this very reason. Who is to say that one day their mother or father shall not appear before them with a fossilised egg or feather to show such beasts do or once did exist?

I maintain if a school can teach a child anything it is the difference between fact and fiction, and the ability to ascertain this difference by themselves. Inevitably, there arises a place for truths and a place for lies in the mind of the growing girl or boy, and that strange realm where once they dwelled with so many inseparable realities and dreams in their past-time is emptied out, but for the common unknowns of the universe. For questions like  ‘what happened before I was born?’ or ‘what will happen after I die?’ have no answers that are at once convenient and logical, they are allowed to be the last citizens of that unresolved landscape. Only by indulging in abstract uncertainties, in possible falsehoods otherwise deigned useless, can the individual find peace with these queries; only by leaping into that first painting can he return to that curious place.

Discovering the mind simply ‘turns on’ when a baby develops a brain or ‘shuts-off’ when that brain has died will not aid one’s sleep, nor prepare him any better for his own death. Lo, if men and women are expected never to visit that vernal world of yesterday but when considering birth and death, they will not be able to ascertain north, let alone follow one of its more complicated paths. Man must learn to visit his psyche regularly if he desires to endure the flood that it will visit upon his regular life: the dirty bathwater of my third canvas.

And so, re-entering the garden of childhood, the first canvas, would seem to open out the thoughts of the individual and expose him to the same conditions in which the great fantasises had visited him as they bore physical presences. This might be why it is so tempting. Rather than a remembrance of things past replacing the comforts of a God figure, it may be God himself we create in order to imagine the dilemmas of olden times completed for us.

But this is too soft for divinity. I will not forget the advice of the Old Testament that Jehovah ‘is a jealous God’, nor will I his destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, nor his most disgraceful of punishments against Job: the ruination of his family and body purely as a test of faith. We might as well consult the torments endured by Isaac. There are many more I have forgotten that prove the Judeo-Christian God a cruel judge. It is evident, when read allegorically, that his narratives were intended to provide adults with some reason for the injustices of the world or larger plan by which evil and good would eventually receive what they deserved. We are to gaze on the unsettling second and third canvases in my life and say, ‘There is a masterful stroke present here. Perhaps the artist shall use it to paint a prettier scene in future.’

To consult that first painting only, however, is to deny the same artist painted its counterparts. It is to refuse, not that life changes, but must change, as one’s progress into a painful adulthood were the deliberate inconveniencing of the universe, as though some may well have lived in their childish ways forever and ever in the periods of old antiquity. Our romantics are particularly obsessed with this idea:

I have no name

I am but two days old.—

What shall I call thee?

I happy am

Joy is my name,—

Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!

Sweet joy but two days old,

Sweet joy I call thee;

Thou dost smile.

I sing the while

Sweet joy befall thee.

Of note here is not only the inherent happiness which the child is perceived to bear, but the joy of the second voice, its mother. On seeing the infant, her song is fantasised to become ‘Sweet joy’, also as if the two were made into one. Blake dreams that eternal youth might transfer to a grown adult if it were jolly enough, but he likewise dreams joy out of his own mature form into the babe in question.

Babies are terrified after leaving the womb, governed by instinctive needs they do not understand and surrounded by faces they do not comprehend. That a baby of two days old should know ‘Joy’, should speak of ‘Joy’, confounds us because we know it is that which the mother, the author and ourselves have transplanted onto it. We accept the babe is jolly because we have a need to preserve that first canvas where it appears.

If that painting is synonymous with our own present feelings, and not merely a retainer for past perfect wonder, then we might recapture its sentiments by progressing in our lives. But, despicably, this bypasses the question of what actually was in the child’s head to begin with, what was in our own heads as children if all our memories are but transplantations of our current moods into theirs, what, if anything, composed the first canvas before we looked upon it?

Memory is as much a constructive act as a reconstructive act. Reconstructive, because it intends to piece the time that we have lost back into a recognisable shape; constructive, because if that shape is forgotten entirely, we shall add pieces of our own invention to make it appear recognised. The older one grows, the more he forgets; and so the more he must replace the memory of youth, which is not anything more honest than that first painting which I constructed.

The nostalgia worshipper is infinitely troubled compared to the man of faith. His age continuously destroys the object of his affection, his past, while he himself fabricates it in order to distance himself from the present day, which he believes he can only view with disgust. At least the man of God allows himself to interpret and reinterpret the gospels as he ages. One can grow into the semantics of the Bible to greater and greater extents as he weakens. Parts are revealed to the old reader that were concealed to him in his early days.

Remembrance of things in the distant past is, in the end, personally destructive. It may for a while open up the green realm of questioning that a man requires to cogitate his existential fears, but no more than a while. A helpful vision must last for a man’s whole life, it cannot be reserved purely to one period and accommodate him in every other.

If I may read into the second and third paintings using a constant mode of interpretation, like that of the ancient Theologians, I will find a purpose equivalent in those to that I discovered on my own in the first. Even if illogical, such impositions of script must provide the impression of meaning, which is after all a sensation and not an answer, if I am to accept that I will not be able to step back into the first picture frame and reside there, with any degree of permanence, besides a temporary sleep or memory.

Should I learn to regard the second and third images with the seriousness that I approach the first, I will learn to enter that forest of consideration without it. Yet still, my hopes suggest at sometime other things. One cannot love the frame he’s living in till long enough it has passed him by as to join with the mythology of his boyhood.

Edward McLaren is a first year reading English at Keble College