A few years ago, at Walthamstow’s E17 Art Trail, I bought some paintings. “Fantastic”, I thought when I saw them. “Records spinning on a deck.” There were dozens of them. I laid the ones I liked most out on the floor and, after much umming and ahhing, chose the three in the picture above.
While I was deliberating, I got talking to the artist. “Oh yes,” she said. “I was commissioned by an environmental charity. They chose the ones they wanted and I’m selling the rest.” “An environmental charity?” I asked, puzzled. What could be their interest in vinyl? “Yes, they’re based on photos taken of an oil slick off Western Australia”. “I see,” I said. But it wasn’t what I’d seen at all.
A similar thing happens when I write. Some time back, I wrote a blog about how mum and I, after many years of unspoken conflict, became close just before she died. Someone wrote to me afterwards. He said that what I’d written had reminded him of when he’d lost his mum. Which he went on to describe as a painful experience. To me, my blog had been about gaining, rather than losing, someone. But that wasn’t what he’d seen at all.
Why did I see records when the artist had been painting an oil slick? Why did the reader see loss when I’d been writing about gain? When we see a painting, read a blog or engage with any other form of art, we bring our own experiences, preferences and concerns to it. And interpret it accordingly. I saw records because music is my passion. My reader saw loss because that’s how his experience of losing a parent had felt.
As viewers or readers we add something of our own to the thing the artist or writer created. And turn it into something new. Something that is meaningful for us.
I was at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition one year, standing in front of “Untitled IV”, a title that didn’t help me give meaning to the chaos of red, white and black paint in front of me. War, I decided. I stood there a little longer trying to puzzle it out. And then I saw it! It was a storm. With random bits of debris (including half a car number plate) floating down a street.
A man approached me. “Mine,” he said. Making me wonder if artists often hang out in galleries waiting for people to look at their paintings (rather as I’ve been known to do on my Facebook page after I’ve posted a blog). “Do you see?” asked the artist. “It’s the aftermath of a car accident in Oxford Street”. I didn’t see at all. But he was very keen to persuade me.
Although I was interested in the painting’s origins, I was enjoying it more as a storm by now. And, rather like when you look at one of those ambiguous images (the old/young woman, the two vases that reverse out into two profiles), I was finding it hard to make the switch from the thing I’d seen first. In a sense, he couldn’t really claim it as “mine” anymore at all. It had become “ours”. I’d brought something to it too.
I too have been guilty of wanting to call things I’ve written “mine”. Like the car crash artist, I’ve wanted to explain the point I intended to make when someone has interpreted it differently. Or simply talked about the aspect of the blog that’s interested them rather than the one I saw as most important.
But the oil slicks hanging on my wall are records to me. The car crash painting is a storm. And the Turning 60 blogs are yours just as much as they are mine.