As an artist, as a fool, there is a moment when you realise what it is you want to achieve, what you want to paint. You might not realise it at the time. It might not make sense. It might not resonate with meaning or strike you with some profound significance, but in retrospect, you can find that point, as you peel back the layers of who you believe yourself to be, and reach in to that black emptiness you call a self, that point that defines you, the informs you and from which you’ve grown.
In 2008 I’d lost my way, I was coming to the end of my degree, I had a dissertation to write, I had a massive project to finish and it was seemingly going nowhere.
Breach.
The winds had annihilated my garden fence. I live next to a common and so the outside world had begun to encroach upon my garden. Barriers collapse. This seemed to me a fitting metaphor. My degree was coming to an end and perhaps more prophetically, the relationship that had held me together for the previous three years was coming to an end. The walls that surrounded me lay in ruins, and there I stood, waiting, ready to step into this breach.
I had been struggling for so long. I began my degree a ruined and broken man. I’d barely made it this far, scraping passes, barely maintaining an acceptable grade thanks to my overly complex essays subsidising the awful design work I couldn’t motivate myself to complete.
What was the fucking point of me? I’d been destroyed. We wont go into the specifics here, that’s a tale for another day. But here I was, on the brink of death, ready to begin a new life.
For a period of two months, whilst I wrote my dissertation and worked on Breach I did nearly nothing else. I read philosophy, I wrote, I painted, I would walk occasionally and sleep when I could. But I focussed like I’d never focussed before. I lost myself and neglected everything in my life. I began to lose weight, again. I began to drink heavily, smoke furiously and make sense of who I was. These were my first true steps toward letting go.
I was dealing with the breach, with the garden fence in the initial weeks, but my partner offered me something more – a photo. Completely unusable in and of itself, blurred, indistinct, but remembered as a painting? Little did I realise at the time, but this was what I needed. This was my future, glowing through the fog.
It all becomes metaphor, the breach, the lights in the mist, in the night, a blur, a memory of how things might have been. I can only see it now that I’m writing this story. I’d tasted darkness, taken a long look at that void in myself, but I’d never accepted, never fully comprehended what that meant. That was to come. Here I stood, at the breach in my garden fence, looking out into the fog, remembering lights shining in a night I’d never seen.
Little did I know, these things have a tend to recrudesce.