Melancholy Happy
Process is endlessly fascinating.
What is
is because
and includes its was not.
By which, in the case of art, I mean that what we see in a ‘finished’ piece is a product of choices — erasure being one, rejection another. An idea forms, is played with, is subject to the limits of an artist’s technique, is rarely (never) fully realised.
And this is good. It pushes us on.
Melancholy Happy. 22.5 x 15 cm linocut on Somerset Satin paper.
Melancholy Happy, my latest print, is nothing if not process, and the print itself but an artefact of that process. In archaeological terms we might think of it as an Iron Age roundhouse or a bone — it is that which remains of the process that formed it, of what was before. And in remaining, its possibilities continue to be, for each time we see the same work of art, we see it differently. Moreover, as long as the artist who created it lives (or indeed anyone lives), the roundhouse has the potential to be rebuilt, lived in, and the bone, so to speak, continues to grow.
The print itself is the second in a series that I continue to work on and which draws upon a conversation with Amandine Robaey and which is called The Happy Tree. Happiness roots in varied streams, and melancholia, on the face of it, would not seem to be one. To be sadly happy, happily sad, happy in sadness — it’s all rather counterintuitive. Yet the music that I listen to when I work makes me happy and that music might best be described as melancholy. Think Arvo Pärt, for example, or the work of Hania Rani and Dobrawa Czocher, and much of the ECM Record catalogue. For me, melancholy happiness is a thing akin to freedom.
In wondering how I might represent melancholy happiness visually, the image that came to me was of a fish swimming through the branches of a tree (see the gallery below). The fish should not be there, but it is there, and it finds itself strangely at home in the waves that branches and leaves make of the wind. Wind and sea are, in the end, sisters: both current. I played with the idea of the fish, made a preliminary sketch for a 15 x 15 cm linocut (with three fish and not just the one), and then decided to work with some lino to see how I might realise the fish. Just the one fish. A quick thing. And then the lino took over. As it usually does.
Moving from pencil and paper to gouge and lino changes the eye, and what started as an attempt simply to cut one fish grew into a journey through its surroundings. This first study gave me then a sense of what I might do, but it didn’t yet capture the concept. Then a bird flew into the picture. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because of the tree, perhaps because in the study there are fish in the sky so why not a finch in the sea; perhaps because I wanted to test my technique — to engrave something I hadn’t tried to engrave before. And so I made a few quick sketches of a goldfinch and then, wondering how I would fashion its feathers and how much detail would come out in print, I made another study in linocut. And yes, the lino took over again.
There is something in the movement of the gouge which of itself creates. Call it rhythm. In the second study I had, like the first, intended to make the sky all sea, but as I got part-way through the piece, the rhythm said stop. It had seen the possibility of negative space (black beneath the sea, the sea become a stream). It is because of happenings like this - the arrival of new ideas - that I consider myself unable to produce multicoloured prints. I like to see what emerges through the act of cutting, and colour in linocut requires clear planning on paper; the work is done before the act of cutting, and the cutting itself becomes an act of translation. My plans are more like whispers. The quiet lets in rhythm.
And so, where once there was a 15 x 15 cm skeleton of a linocut waiting to be cut, there then were two studies and no finished print. Some might call this procrastination. I call it process. The working out of things. And working things out I am left holding two pieces of a jigsaw: a finch in a tree, and two fish in a tree. The question then, should they be joined together? If so, how?
I sketched out a few compositions and then decided on a shortcut: I took a photo of one of the fish that I had engraved then scaled it and printed it multiple times so that I had lots of fish to play with. Ditto with the finch, which I scaled larger than the fish as I knew that I wanted it to sit in the foreground. I cut card for the bough of the tree and its main branches and then arranged the fish into countless compositions alongside the finch. One fish, two fish, a shoal; fish falling from the sky, fish swimming left, swimming right, fish sucked down a dizzying whirlpool. When finally I had settled upon one of the compositions, I copied it onto the lino — my intention being then to shape the sky into sea as in my first study. And then the lino took over. Again.
The penultimate photo in the gallery shows the lino block from which I pressed Melancholy Happy. I cut the finch first, then the fish, the branches and leaves, and then started upon the sea. I worked the sea from the bottom up. Had I worked it from the top down as in the study of the finch, the print would have turned out very differently. Such is chance.
You’ll see that other than the outline of the fish, the bird and the tree, little is marked out on the lino. There are no markings to dictate how I will carve the sea as I know that it will flow organically from the gouge. And it did so. As the sea rose towards the breast of the finch, I felt it tighten and curl. I went with it as I sensed what it was doing — arcing up to meet the branch that hangs over the head of the finch, much as Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa rises from the belly of the sea and as so too rises the wave in my linocut Where the wave breaks. I used pencil to tease out where the curve rose, and felt in a sweep for its arc, and for where it broke. It broke in a shower of leaves above the finch. The leaves which spill into the print from the left join with a branch from the right to form an intentional curve above which I knew the print would be black (as is the case in Two Happies, the other print in the series). I wasn’t aware though that a great wave was hiding in the darkness; the rhythm of the gouge worked out that it was and so I stopped cutting sea and instead did what I rarely do and cleared a large area of lino in order that it would print white.
The fish remain in the air and I think the print works. The white makes things clearer, and though the sea may now appear as a river, it remains sea to me. That said, I ached a little when I first sensed the potential of the wave, for had I seen it when I framed the composition I would perhaps have included more of it in the print. But then the ache knows that waves build from the rhythm of sea and it is for me to find them in the lino.
End of story.
Or so I thought.
After I had editioned Melancholy Happy, I looked back through my journal to start thinking about the next print in the series and I chanced upon the little sketch that I had made when first imagining Melancholy Happy. And so I was driven to make another study — just to see how that sketch might itself have appeared as a print. And, yes, as you can see from the final photo in the gallery, the sea once again did its own thing and became stream.
