now

1

Now that it is nearly summer, I am glad. It has been a difficult winter. For weeks everything in sight was frozen. In front of my studio, the canal was covered in ice. When I slept there, I would wake early, would look down onto the opaque surface, over the lines, the cracks and fissures from the previous day, the patterns in which they had refrozen during the night. As the sky cleared, the pavement reappearing in the morning light, pale and frosty, the exposed branches of the trees were often covered in a crystal-like layer of white.

Now that I can see green, that the parks appear thicker, that I can sense the brush of pollen in my nose, hear the stir of leaves in the breeze, I feel different. The evenings have stretched out and the light does not die before I feel the day is finished. And when it rains, there is a softness, a quality to the air I find appealing. It brings a smile to my lips.

Not every winter is so difficult. Some winters it is simply wet and raw. It rains and rains and the city is enclosed in a clinging, cold fog that seeps into everything. There are some when it seems the intense cold threatens, but never arrives. And then there are those when the days are mild, when it is almost warm and I have to tell myself it is the middle of a December or a January, that the summer is as long behind as it is still in front.

This winter has reminded me. It has brought back my first winter here. The night I arrived; when I stepped out onto the square in front of the station, a stranger, the cold cutting straight into my body, the temperature minus fourteen. That night I had a sensation of transition. I had a sensation of crossing a point, arriving at a harbour from which I could examine the map, take provisions, step from one thing to another.

Now, when I think back, I realise how that time is already part of a distant past, a past that is purely personal. Here I have taken root. I have grown, have gradually flowered. I have come to a deeper understanding of myself.

I remember, for example, looking out a cafe window one morning at the yellow and black tug boats, the stripe of fluorescent orange across their top, the crunch of their reinforced bows as they attempted to cut a way through the packed ice of the harbours. Or the strange colour of the sky, a glassy, stinging blue, like a jar of mint sweets that once stood on a wooden shelf in a kitchen when I was a child. It is strange to contemplate the time that has already passed. It is peculiar to grasp the way in which weeks have slipped into months and months into years.

Now I cannot see myself as anywhere else but here. This is the city in which I have accrued an anatomy of experience. It is the city in which a life has grown around me like a second skin, has marked me as part of what I have become, who I am.



2

I look at the colours on the canvas. I wonder. Perhaps in the transition from winter to spring this year, I feel I have crossed something.

I stand back and turn the painting toward the light. I position it under the overhead window so I can better see its colours. I am still not sure about the particular quality of the red. The yellow, its position, the almost saffron tone it imparts is correct. It contrasts with the flecks of white, the fade to the green, sets them off. I am satisfied with the thin line of brown across the bottom. There is a hint of both sienna and ochre in it. It is the brown I sense in the earth after it has rained.

The colours are not strictly positioned, they blend and they bleed, they touch and they have space. Simple representation, is not what I am after. Feeling, vitality is what I want, the energy of the soil living, the sense of spring returning, an invisible intensity, something not only seen but felt.

It came upon the sensation while walking through the park. An April afternoon with the weather cool and showery. The sun shone brightly but then would be swallowed up by quick moving fields of dark, grey cloud, rain abruptly falling. A number of times I was caught and had to find shelter, running for a clump of trees, or one of the scattered cafes along the pathways.

Initially, I thought of conveying the sensation in shape, in form. Then I considered suggesting the drive of its energy by actually working the paint directly and quickly onto the canvas, mixing it straight in. Eventually I decided on a different approach, something simpler. Why not let the colour alone determine where I would start, where I would stop, let it randomly suggest the nature and method of work?

For some months, I have felt this change. All I need to say, all I want to say, lies in the colour itself.

Once I was walking along a street and I stopped to look in a shop window. There was a row of faceless mannequins. The display was incomplete. It was as if it had been stopped halfway through, had been left for some other time, postponed, an idea still waiting to be brought to life. One of the mannequins lay on its side. Part of it had been wrapped in plastic. Examining it, I noticed that an arm was missing, that one leg was twisted sideways. Under it was a roll of velvet material, a strange shade of red, a ruby or maroon. It had a mysterious quality. Something about it reminded me of blood, of a time I had once been in a hospital. There it was in a test tube held to the light. I saw this strange red, liquid, its viscosity, its evidence of the fragility of life.

The scene with the mannequins, despite its apparent innocence, seemed to contain some concealed element of violence. I stared until I realised it was the colour that was holding me, the colour that was working on my feelings, bringing up associations.

I remember autumn when I was young. Walking along a lane, the scattering of fallen leaves, the trees looking wounded in the tops of their branches. This is where I grew up. The streets, the houses, the wooden telegraph poles, their black wires stretched in the evening against the fall of the sun.

I hear the cry of the crows as they fly over the fields on silent afternoons, smell the mixing, the sweetness of the last bloom of flowers, the odour of decay, the summer dying as the autumn comes on. Faces come back to me. In particular one face. Back and back I go until I se her. She has crossed my mind before. My first awkward love.

We face each other in profile. Her ebony hair sweeps back off her face, the straight line of her nose, her dark eyes, a quiet smile on her mouth. All contrast me. The youthful hunger in the way my head leans from my body; the uncombed hair, the unsure, questioning line of my mouth.

Behind us, is a background hazy and diffuse. Around our heads, the colour lightens. There is almost a violet quality to where we meet. It is as though there were an energy between us that mitigated against the association of autumn, against how I remember the streets subdued at night, the provincial facades of the buildings, the resonance of footsteps as the city succumbed to darkness. Some of that energy is contained in the rattle through the city of the train that links us to the capital. The sound of its engine running away out over the still, sleeping land.

I put the canvas down. Perhaps I will choose another red. Lines of soft-drink bottles stand against the wall. Now I have nearly seventy of them. The labels have been steamed off and they have all been numbered. The combination, the mixture, of each colour, I have written on a list. Everywhere I go, I keep a photocopy of it stuffed in the inside pocket of my jacket. This is a form of definition. If ever anything happened to me I would have it with me. Without my colours my canvases would be nothing.

Days have colours. There are blue days or lemon days or mixtures and contrasts. Some days stimulate me, hold one colour as their line, their theme, the whole way through. Then there are the days that are grey, days when I feel alone. These are the days when I struggle, the days when I feel empty, when I find myself fighting just to keep working. On these days it is difficult to stand in front of the canvas, I must push myself to lift the brushes. It is on these days I understand what is meant by choice, what is meant by putting one foot in front of the other.

What is colour, really, but light? Everything around me is the result of this light. How would this change if I were to travel at the speed of light?
On one level, the world would cease to exist. The world my eyes create, would be no more. Because my knowledge of the world is so tied up with perception, seeing, would I not experience this as a form of death? Would it not seem that a part of me had died, that many things, I associated with life had disappeared?
Perhaps colours are more than light. Colours are energy. Energy that transmits feeling and sensation. And feeling is also energy. Is the energy of feeling as strong as the energy of light?
The energy of feeling is as tied up with my experience of the world, as the energy of light. Without the energy of feeling, much of the world around me would also cease to exist. Would I feel myself to be nothing more than a shadow then, an incomplete person in a world of other incomplete people?

One time as I sat in a cafe, I tried to imagine how it must look. This journey I have made.
It was a late winter evening and through the window people moved past. Bicycles rattled along the canal side. The fog that had lain above the city all day, began to lift.
The moon appeared, the moon that earlier was just a vague white disc. Rising slowly over the gables of the buildings, it framed itself in the tangle of branches leaning out over the water. In the sky were stars and it seemed as if suddenly there was a sky behind the sky, as if something had revealed itself after a long absence.
I imagined I could fly. I imagined I was far above in the air and I could see down, not only on the city, but on the land, on the countries, the continent. I imagined how it would appear. A map without frontiers, a map that showed only the topography, only the relief of mountains, of rivers, the flat lowland of deltas. Fronts of cloud, some thick, some thin, their edges, their definition changing, moved, drifted in off the sea. They wove their way in over or up from the heart of the continent.

Each colour is the outcome of its interaction with other colours. Each colour is the result of the weight of its motion with other colours. It is seasoned with other colours, continually in a state of flux. Always there is potentiality, always movement.
The purity of colours, the originality of colours, is an illusion. There is no one red that defines all reds. All reds are a form of light and all light is a form of energy.

I stand by the lines of bottles against the wall. I look around me. It is still early evening. Should I start working now or leave it till later? Experience has taught me that it is often better to wait.
For two years this studio has been my second home. Sunlight falls across its far end, rests in patterns on the walls, lighting the area where I sometimes sleep, where I eat.
The children to which I am father, two, a boy and a girl, cross my mind. I have watched them grow, watched them feel their way out into the world, been amazed at their will, their determination to assimilate, to learn. It is the simple things, the things adults take for granted that have impressed me most.
Learning a language, learning to communicate. When I compare their ease to my own clumsy attempts to master new words, to make sounds strange to my mouth, my own, I am amazed. Now they negotiate the world around them in two vocabularies, switching from one to the other with ease.

When I first came to this city, I was raw, new, felt vulnerable, in a way, like a child again. In my memory is the musty smell of my first apartment. I remember the almost paper-thin walls, the tight, shabby buildings in the south of the city. I remember the narrow street that ran at right angles to the river. Clearly I recall my first weeks, my first months, the struggle to get settled in, the struggle to find my bearings.
There are some things that seem to be forever etched in memory. Small things maybe. The taste of vanilla yoghurt. The view from the kitchen onto the small patio below. The first hesitant days of spring. The afternoon when from a tram, I saw a field of crocuses where the week before there were only tufts of tenacious winter grass.
I remember the blustery March weather, the wind and squalls of rain, that at night swung the streetlamps suspended from pavement to pavement, eerily.

At first I worked as a baggage handler in the airport. It was numbing work, repetitious. Sitting at a table in the canteen, I would try to understand what those around me were saying. I would examine their faces, looking for signs of interest or friendliness. They did not talk much, just sat silently rolling cigarettes, staring into space, reading newspapers.
Every lunch-break I lost myself in a book or scribbled on the pad of cheap paper I always carried with me. And each day I looked out the window, gazed at the clouds floating above me. I puzzled at the sense of exposure the landscape gave.
Each day I waited for three thirty. Then I would walk hurriedly to the station, wait for the train to take me back to the city, pull relieved on the sharpness of a cigarette.
Once as I came in through the periphery of the city, the track rising above other tracks, skirting a small park and lake, I saw the sun like a huge red ball in the turquoise air. I imagined I could see it move. I could its atoms, its electrons and neutrons, its hydrogen and helium turned energy driving inwards, driving down into the city-line. Then I wondered how long it would take me to become part of the city, how long it would take me to bring my energy down into it like that.

The experience of being outside this city is as much part of it as being in it. This is a city of interchangeable modes, of belonging and not belonging. For me, being a stranger, a person with a different past, a person encountering something new, has been replaced by something else. I am both familiar and strange in two worlds. In this world I am still marked by my difference. In the world I left behind I am marked by the sense of an acquired otherness.

What is left of the world I came from is only the constellation of private memory; the faces, the events, the personal experiences that formed me as I grew up.
Occasionally I see that world as a spot in the spread of the world, a spot over which I hold a magnifying glass.

I am standing on the platform of a rail station holding my mother’s hand one winter afternoon. The lights of the train in the tight air stand out. The old man we are waiting for, steps off. His thin, grey hair is combed across his forehead. In his old, wrinkled hand is a worn but polished suitcase. It exudes a presence of some past time. And I watch him greet my mother, wonder if he has done as I once did when going to the city with my father.

Did he go into the toilet and lock the door behind him. Then push his foot sharply down on the pedal that worked the flush, look through the open space, watch the tracks rushing past below him, see the swaying, silver lines of rail, the blur of the stones between the sleepers?

Did he feel the acceleration of the train through space. Did he feel its movement in the roll, in the sudden lurches from side to side? If he looked through the window, did he see the landscape move by, see the grey, cloudy sky press down over the fields, over the rise of hills, of forest, the scattering of towns, and wonder where this country ended and where it started?

I listen as my mother greets her father in German. I watch them as they embrace, as they look at each other for a moment, sadness swimming up into their eyes.

Later that night before I sleep I carefully place the crumpled stumps of the tickets my grandfather has given me under the pillow. In the pale, yellow light of the lamp splashing across the room, I read again and again the words. Leipzig - Praha.

Suddenly I understand the look of resignation in eyes, the sense of something withering at the roots, the sense of an energy pressed too far down on itself, an energy eating away at itself from within.

I place the canvas against the wall and stand back. Putting my hand to my unshaven chin, my fingers running over the stubble, I squint a little, lean to one side. I want to see the contrast of the colours in another light.

There is the accumulation of work, the roughs, the false starts, the unforeseen successes. Each picture is a mark on the long list of marks I have kept to record the passing of time here. There have been times when I have felt like a man crossing a wilderness. With every step, the need to continue has strengthened. Every canvas has brought me deeper to myself.

Slowly, I have learnt to recover the ground beneath my feet, to detect the life sustaining streams, the rivers, the places where there is shelter. I have determined the way the land lies. I have understood that destination, the other side, the yet to be attained side, is nothing but a variation of where I started from. As if departing and arriving were really one and the same thing.

What I experience as my first point of reference, is only so because of my lack of other points of reference. As my reference points increase, so what appears complex becomes simple. Choosing threads or strands of experience is not about choosing one thing over another. It is about various ways of looking at the same journey. Familiar and unfamiliar are contingent.

If the canvas defines me between these two points, then am I defined by the energy of my experience? Are my paintings, my memories, my loves, my losses, everything that falls between these two points, all that I am? And if so, what happens to this energy, this experience, after I am no longer living? Why do I feel compelled to explore. Why do I feel my experience of the world is something other than the arbitrary experience of me as a random part of this life, this universe?

In summer I like to open all the windows of my studio while I work. Often I paint late into the night.

It is good to listen to the city around me. Hearing the sound of the trams, the way they rattle over the streets, the way they sometimes grate against the rails as they round a corner I feel at home. I like to listen to footsteps on the pavement, voices, raised and laughing. Or music drifting in from other buildings. The sound of a radio. The sound of someone singing to themselves perhaps as they stand in a kitchen preparing to go out.

If it rains the drops patter on the leaves of the lines of linden trees. They fall and run across the roof above me.

There are times when the night around me mixes with the smell of my studio, or the smells of the street. Times when the smell of the acrylic, of the medium is the smell of the city. When it mingles with the perfume of plants and trees, or the beer from a cafe, its doors open because of the warmth.

Sometimes I bring the children around and let them run in the space, let them simply play, sit and watch.

The sticky feel of the paint beneath my fingers, the spring of the brush off the canvas, gives me pleasure. Mixing the colours I watch, enjoy. I see the slow blending, the one starting point becoming multiple.

It is in summer in front of the canvas I come closest to the echo, the energy that drove me out of where I was born, drove me like the train along the silver lines of the rails, drove me to let the blurred hard stones between the sleepers sink into memory.

On my map of colour and relief there are no borders. The lines of rail connections, the tangle of motorways, the winding course of rivers, are only channels of ever changing and ever moving variations of colour. The geography through which I travel is my canvas. This delta in which I find myself is the slow converging of land and sea. And the city in which I live, is the last outpost before land is consumed by sea. City and canvas are the points where the solidity of land subsumes the fluidity of sea.



3

I walk across the floor to the window and open it. I lean over the ledge and feel the breeze around my head. The sun is suspended, compressed into the evening sky. On the small gravel plein below me, the trees are obscured by movement; they bend and sway. The air is full of the blown remnants of blossom, blossom fragile and filament-like, its small petals falling in favour of the stronger leaves of summer. They drift and flutter, their oval, transparent shapes eddying through the air, forming and reforming in myriad patterns where they land in the flow of the canal.

Over the harbours, the water quivers and sparkles. A small ship cuts its way through the shining surface, the white surge of its bow moving ahead, catching the burn of the evening light. Down streets, shadows, still short, still sharp, run, or lie against the warm colour of the brickwork.

Now that it is nearly summer, I look back on the winter, think of transition, of the way in which I move on, move out. I re-encounter the energy contained in each spring. And now that it is nearly summer, I stain the canvas again and map my way, cross this delta, this confluence of expectation. I watch each painting emerge from the darkness, watch it become another mark on the journey I have started here.

Copyright (C) Peter Millington. June 1996.