Bloodlines

I can still taste her when I remember

Waking up amidst a tangle of limbs and red swathes across my legs, oozing out of her, where I'd felt her, where I could smell her on my fingers, where my thighs rubbed against her, where her nocturnal frictions had left an exquisite trace over my very happy flesh.

Later, I washed myself and went wandering into the Rothgo room at the Tate Modern. I'd sauntered past Herman Nitsches hysterical red gashes on canvas, to immerse myself in the unbearable intensity of the long dead Marc. Superficially it seems almost monochrome, diachromatic stains spread across stretched canvases. I stood and stared. Raised my fingers to my nose and inhaled. Somehow in the subdued light I could see or sense the tracery of his brushes, blotting across each patch of colour and where they bleed into each other. I heard my own blood in my ears, I could smell hers again, taste mine where she'd bitten my lip and i felt myself swoon, felt tears in my eyes for this strange sad melancholic miracle - I felt like I was inside Marc's body and inside my own. I fell in love with him again, prayed silent whispers of gratitude to some imaginary deity that he'd picked up a brush and sticky pigment and done this......

I must have looked like a total wanker sitting down to send an SMS. I was texting my friend in Finland - who'd sent me a desperate message the night before, finishing off her body of work - pushing herself beyond reason - hating herself, hating her work, hating her life and loving it in equal measure. In reduced txtage I tried to remind her of the brilliance, beauty, sheer life affirming agonizing wonder of what she was doing.... doesn't it make sense? you see Rothgo, text a painter.....

So, a fortnight later, I trudged across some European mud. ice had melted and the fields were gashed with furrows, interspersed with bits of brown and patches of green. Walking through this closely worked earth of stone and moss and mud to my friend's studio. arriving and seeing the same gestures, the same marks of earth scratching swathes re-enacted across her canvases - cut by images of dipossessed - framed in their own strange aporias or aphasias or both......

We looked at her work - stepped back, paced around, stares out the window. I suggested we go for a wander outside, feel the earth under our feet, breathe some air. and then back, laughing after hugging and dancing around outside in late evening sunlight, we looked at the paintings again.

I gave some suggestions for the last 6hours of working the pieces - what she could resolve or why she mightn't. she asked how I could know so much, see so much. I said i'd had 9 years of knowing her work - seeing her move to plant gestures of paint, to scrape back, what she did with her neck and legs as she mixed up each colour.... and then walking through the landscape she'd painted, the place she'd worked through - the same place viewed and ploughed and cut and worked by 4 generations of her family - I could taste her body, her blood, her very being in the work....

The intimacy between a painting and the viewer, the intimacy between artists who know each other's work is as intense as that between two lovers. Maybe that's why i shied away from ever hitting on to anyone at art school - It seems like we're too close already. sacredly brilliantly close - but also scarily so.

Maybe that's why I think of the painter friends as family - because there's such an intense embodied connection to each other, to each others work. At art school watching the first agonized gestures as we do stupid tonal exercises- working up to something else - less important but so loaded with our dreams our ideas of who we are... until alone in our studios, texting each other, remembering each others words as we feel our selves disintegrate and all we have left is the paint, the marking, the mad trudging dance through the world.....

God how I have hated Griselda Pollocks comment about painting being the expression of a subjectivity that is masculine - or some such binarised scary shit. I hated it then and hate it now - not only because of it's violence against the female painters i know - but it's violence against paint - against the sheer joyous terror of looking at stuff that is so profoundly indeterminate - so anti-subjective - that it did and does make me want to scream....

On my first day back i went out to see the work of 2 dear very close friends. the first, a former lover, delighted me, surprised me so deeply. Strangeness of intimate gestures, bits of her body trapped in glistening coloured cream, modelling into furlicues - and then other surprises, at her finesse, her subtlety, things I'd never seen before. the strangeness of an old lovers body - remade, moving on - well beyond me and our past.

smiling, I went to another gallery and saw a large strange work of another friend. such finesse again, brought into play with a much stranger assurance of the impossibility of his existence, or stillness or something. I entered the piece, heard planes in the distance, sat staring and smiling for half an hour. what did I see? movement, play, strange strange slowness of time, mixing, feeling spinning, divine madness hushing quietly in the corner.

Still jetlagged, yesterday I sat for an old art school friend, meditating silently as he mixed up his pallette. years or portrait modelling taught me well - that someone isn't ever painting ME - and what they want from me as a sitter is to be a strange absent presence - so they can paint - the paint - so the shapes and colours and light reflecting off my face and hair and thick glasses, provide a structure so they can go into their own experience of paint, how it mixes, oozes, slides under their brush. It's not about objectification at all - but a very intimate desubjectification - a movement by both parties out of ourselves into something else.

My friend the portrait painter is my age - and his stack of CD's were a nineties grunge kid's dream. I put on one I hadn't heard for nearly a decade - the favourite CD of my first girlfriend, the one we'd made love to again and again, and listening to it, inside i went back into myself, into my memories of being inside her, feeling unbearable close. Mazzy Star's five stringed serenade, my fingers like strings playing inside, strumming, worshipping adoring, until then I had no idea how wonderfully vaginas could extend themselves and how terrifyingly strange blood that wasn't menstrual could be. The first time I drew her blood with my poorly cut nails I pannicked.....eve now long nails make me gag.

Yesterday, sitting quietly immobilised, feeling myself somewhere else and yet profoundly present - a delightful dysphasia - slipping between many presents, many states, many bodies.....