I can use my fingers to count the number of times visual art has moved me. Not because its mediums are inexpressive or because its practitioners aren’t innovative. Often the art is fresh and transcendent. Usually the artists are brave and revolutionary. But I struggle to grasp the visual, to let its colors and images sit with me, because I do not understand it. I never learned to paint. I lack the patience needed to draw. I’ve spent the last eight years taking photographs, but without any formal training, I feel undeserving of a formal title and would only call myself a photographer after identifying as a fraud. Each time I stand before a painting, I stand before a wall. Years of inexperience stack themselves upon each other, and I hide behind them, refusing to connect. And yet sometimes art grabs me with so much force that I’m pulled through the wall and into the work’s world. Such a pulling began on the top floor of the Murray Art Gallery when, on a breath-chilling Sunday, I walked in, unwrapped my scarf, and came face-to-face with a wet floor sign.
It was a yellow sign with a rectangular canvas, painted with a palette’s worth of different blues, attached to each side. The blues’ swirls moved in and around each other, individual entities but without beginnings or ends. Arriving, I looked at them, trying to figure out what this meant. I felt a pang of sadness when—after thirty seconds of examining the two-foot board—I realized that I was totally unequipped to do so, that I’d have to make something up.
Lillian Broeksmit and Lizzie Conklin’s Picture in Picture was a collaborative series of paintings conceived by the two artists over the course of a semester. They worked on four canvases, rendering a series of figures in motion, before trimming out the negative space. The first panel depicted a human-like figure resting against a tree. Sitting, with its hands on the tree’s base and one leg crossed over the other, the figure looked down into the literal empty space. The figure had no face, no fingers, no toes, and few definable features. It was an outline with skin that blent between light and dark pink, pressed against a tree comprising various greens. From the moment I looked at it, I felt I understood its pain. Yet the root of this pain remained elusive to me. I couldn’t work out how the form became the feeling.
I took a step back, giving myself a moment to think about the room’s layout. Each of the panels was suspended in the middle of the room by thin pieces of wire attached to its top two corners. Standing before the first, one could see the other three through it. I looked at the back of the room, at the black plexi-glass with grey branches painted over it, and then brought my eyes back to the front. I found the faded figure.
Thinking I looked silly in my silence, I struck up a conversation about the artists’ subjects. Lizzie’s interests lie in the human world and Lillian’s in the natural one. When making the series, they worked on the same canvas at the same time, painting around each other. Lizzie would paint the figures and Lillian would paint the settings. When a part of the piece looked too much like one of their particular styles, the other artist would have a go at it, balancing things out.
It was a marvelous feat from the front wall to the back, with painted leaves that looked like real ones and trees that looked like humans, soaked in a consistency that would be impressive from one artist but felt miraculous from two. I imagined them painting, lost in a dance, twisting around each other, creating in silence, completely buried in the art. Standing in the middle of the hallway, between the panels, I too was in the art—but using the guise of criticism to keep myself removed from it.
Lillian said that she likes trees because of the silence that they hold. They were around before us and they’ll be around after, and she said she’s sure they know something we don’t. I smiled softly as she spoke, maintaining my coolness, feeling that this was my way in. I could write a piece comparing Lillian’s understanding of trees to my understanding of painting; dissecting the impenetrability of the two, how while there is beauty in both, meaning inherent to them, a separation between the viewer and view means that the viewing is about admiration not emotion. With this, I felt I could call it a day. But Lillian went on, saying that the moment you introduce a human subject, the work becomes psychological. Lizzie added that she likes to paint human figures because they give people a way into the painting. She enjoys when people come to her with particular interpretations of her paintings, opening the pieces up by grasping things that even she had missed. She comes to art with a total openness. I came to see hers with my blinders on.
Psychological. A way into the painting. Opening the pieces up. I ran the words through my mind and resolved to try again. I am not a frigid person. I cry everytime I hear Maggot Brain. The wall was an excuse to ignore my wordless thoughts. Standing before the paintings once more, I worked to knock it down.
Again, the figure: this time I thought about what it’s like to be at your lowest, searching for the strength to carry on. To be down, out, wrapped around yourself, pressed against the earth as the world moves on. What it’s like to share the weight. To let the natural world support you as you support yourself. To cut out the noise.
I looked through the frame at the second panel, what I took to be human-looking foliage dancing in the wind. I felt that there was freedom after rest.
I moved further forward to look at a panel with a man, seated, leaning over a lake. He stared into the water, and I stared at him. No grand idea found me, no totalising narrative or theory of aesthetics, but the painting moved into me without a thought. Its blues flooded through me, scrubbing my insides and washing my head clean, so that after the painting had left, after that feverish moment characterised by empathy for the figure and love for the world, I felt completely calm.
As Lizzie and Lillian took the panels down, I stood content in my clarity. The exhibit was being put away around me. I had stood in the middle of their world. Lillian laid out a large piece of thick paper, and Lizzie rolled the panels into it. I wanted to say something sentimental like, It’s all art, but thought felt like enough.
After saying my goodbyes, I walked up the stairs, ready to return to the unremarkable. Exiting, I caught a glimpse of the wet floor sign and slowed down my walk before remembering that it was part of the show. I stood by the door and looked back at the sign, losing myself in the blues while I could.
