My eye was caught by a newspaper headline on 16 August: “I will have to burn all I have achieved”, an unnamed woman in Kabul, speaking as the Taliban came closer to the city.
This cry pierced me, straight to an imagining of the precious achievements of a woman’s life becoming a danger to hold on to. What might need to be burnt? I imagined her paintings, her diaries, her writing, her certificates, all the evidence of an active life. Looking at what these things have meant in my own life, I was angry and sad.
I took all these feelings to the easel that day to make a painting. I took the hot colours of burning, of my compassionate anger, and realised that this was to be applied, not with a brush, but with my hands. I needed to feel the paint meeting the paper, to move it and mix it with my fingers into an intense core of energy, with three smaller bursts elsewhere on the surface. When that first impulse was spent, I wrote the quote on to the paper so that it would be integrated. There was a need for ultramarine blue drops – the paint was mixed to the right consistency, the painting placed horizontally, and the blue dropped across the white paper.
The embryonic painting sat like this on the easel for several days, as if its energy were so strong and self-contained, it would have nothing added. Eventually viridian green was required, in paths made by broad brush strokes. Followed by narrower, orange gestures that moved across and around, dividing the white space and beginning to structure the painting as a whole.
Several sessions were spent painting two tones of pale yellow and then grey into the forms created by the gestures. The grey paint suggested a blocking in of the three small bursts of colour, taking me back to work about memory made 9 years ago. Three abstract ‘flowers’ arrived, vitally alive.
One late afternoon as I passed the painting, it seemed to ask for a section of the burning core to be displaced. I cut out a section, stuck it elsewhere on the painting, and filled the space with card painted black. Blankness and displacement, loss and the echoing reminder of what had to be burnt.
Another day brought another kind of energy for this project, and I heard a request for indigo, very wet paint brushed and sprayed all over the painted surface, moved around, removed to reveal and retain under-layers as part of the emergence of the final composition. The finishing touches of paint brought back colours that had been covered, so that something of each stage remains active in the finished painting.