Faye Wei Wei: thoughts on poetry and painting

“Father! Father! Where are you going?

O do not walk so fast. 

Speak, father, speak to your little boy,

Or else I shall be lost.”

The night was dark, no father was there;

The child was wet with dew;

The mire was deep and the child did weep

And away the vapour flew. 

—William Blake

Or perhaps to say, my painting alien—“I’m lost, I’m lost, come find me, I’ll find you”—a searching through the picture plane, a mis-maze chalk city residue—“I’ll find you, don’t worry, to tear to tears—my puddle, that’s it now bristles to the wet, disobedient mud—get it on that hard ground. Oh you think BLUE is your answer— in your dreams you have another thing coming, that’s right spend the next 2 hours scrubbing it off, knuckles bare to bone—but the stain may be the answer to the question you’re not sure you asked, you daren’t ask”—the vapour flew—the surface a flurry of feathers grasped by hands in an attempt to fill a duvet full of feathers. The cotton sheet, sheaf—balloons, bulbous, the movement choreography, dance, one—two—goes—

grasp, 

shove, 

pucker and 

pinch, 

grasp a handful of feathers, 

grasp

shove, 

pucker and 

pinch. 

What a lovely dance! What a way to spend a day! 

Half the feathers lost to the air like an amused Santa Clause deity trimming his beard onto a micro world—that is how snow is made!—sublimity/infinity—all plumed like ostriches—the feathers tickle my nostrils, it’s uncomfortable. Whimsy held in a moment in exchange for a desired outcome—to cosy—to cocoon. To lasso the feeling back to earth, the painting holds a transference of feeling. To bind the ineffable to an object. That is the goal, and they score! Two scuffed up bruised shins and metal football boot bottom bullet things—cleats, they’re called, “oh I don’t know”—is—grumbled into the mouth, and your teeth grate to metal—tingling sensations, sometimes the brain feels metallic wouldn’t you agree—the taste of licking your MacBook, that electric current that sometimes—hummmms. Total treelight—everlight! Everlight! electricity we ached out of the moonlight. 

Imagine the honey we could make, if only we could get our hives up there onto the moon! Start my moon honey business, keep it unlocalised, dislocated, disjointed, foreign. On the moon the bees are iridescent, they don’t buzzzzz they whimper to a glow, it’s different up there on that portal world, sonic isn’t king, just vision, pure eyeballs up there—arrested in pure silence—duvet moon, oh to view a painting in pure moon-silence, silver mercury filling your ears, liquid moonlight, your eardrum a miniature trampoline that holds the doll house moon. 

“Now no cry, no sword 

Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge, 

Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight

loved

And changed… “There’s 

Nothing like this in the world,” you say,

Knowing I cannot touch your hand and 

look

Too, into that godless cleft of sky

Where nothing turns but dead sands

flashing.”

—Hart Crane

Because of my naivety and unabashed love for love, I read these words by Hart Crane, again and again to lick the ache of fairytale love, ““There’s/ Nothing like this in the world,” you say,” and held them as truth in that GODLESS CLEFT OF SKY. But then I felt the chasm, the fissure, the caesura revealing hesitation, heartbreak, a swelling of the feeling only to be lost to torment. I am often accused of making romantic paintings, I love these accusations, they stick to me like moon honey, but I’m searching for tension, metallic, mercury, mmmm to sleep the long way home or to be present in an un-sleep wakefulness, the solitary reality of painting, but my intense love for the making of the thing, the obsessive suffocating, can’t sleep, can’t breathe without you, need to touch you at all times, at least some part of me, just my toe on your toe is enough—mortality–heart matter.

After all, 

Once upon a time, 

painting is a tree as I am a tree, as all vessels are the most efficient way to hold water, as the underworld reflects the overworld, just as my lungs look tree like,  just as sap is sweet and blood is bitter, the painting surface is a tree, and its roots are full of feeling. 

Full of feathers. 

grasp, 

shove,

 pucker and 

pinch, 

grasp a handful of feathers, shove, pucker and pinch. 

grasp, 

shove,

 pucker and 

pinch. 

And one day we ride our bicycles all the way to the sea—to the end of the earth—and pause to find—

 “ A tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars” 

—William Blake