Ingrid Kerma

Blushing Brides

The Brides Stripped Bare

‘I worry that it’s hardly there…’

It’s a common concern of ours. We begin with nothing, which is close to our goal but this first nothing is unbidden, unmade. In fact it’s only superficially nothing, we’re already on our way towards something by virtue of our longing. So where does the longing come from? It has its source in our profoundest sense of who we are and the something at which it is aimed, if it is indeed anything, is the possibility of housing this sense beyond ourselves.

We only know that to get there, even to approach there, means relinquishing our familiar ways of knowing. Thoughts crop up, images appear, concepts form - the whorls and eddies of our workaday consciousness. It can’t be helped and they shouldn’t necessarily be resisted. But nor should they be mistaken for what we seek. But for our purposes we feel like stripping them and when you strip you run the risk of having nothing to show. That is painful, painful and a little embarrassing.

So the stripping must be careful, skilful. It’s more peeling back than flagrant exhibitionism. That said, it is hoped that we will have something to exhibit for all our efforts. Even the skill is something that can’t be fully known, though its purpose may be intuited - the deliberate obscuring of the phenomenal whilst preserving something of the truth to which it points. Sounds like a faith-based axiom. Pointing in painting and prayer – the will to send out sharp arrows of longing, darts to pierce what the medieval mystic has called the ‘cloud of unknowing’.

When I look at “Large Glass” for any length of time I think I can see a cloud. The painting is simple; single wide overlapping brushstrokes made in a white of different thicknesses upon a black canvas. It gives the sense of something piling up, and yet what piles up is almost nothing. It hints at a geometry of progression and recession, of freeze-frame and dance, like scans of breath or thought. And while nothing is yielded, nothing is erased, the brushstrokes render every nuance of the canvas and vice versa. But this doesn’t begin to account for the experience, namely that, together and over time these regular rhythmic bars seem to devolve into something with the illusory half-felt presence of a cloud.

There’s technique of course, as with any act of contemplation, but it’s humbly applied. There is discipline, formal at times, more speculative at others and a wisdom to move between the two. There are accidents, events beyond her control, wanted or otherwise. An older tradition might speak instead of grace. In “Large Glass” black scraped back turns to a blue that was never on the palette. The process is shrouded not so much in mystery as uncertainty. Once applied, the paint has its own laws, things happen to it in spite of her. But the paint couldn’t have been applied in the way it was without the surrendering of some attachment to desired outcomes. Acceptance in the first instance and acceptance at the last; the ability to call it a painting, to say ‘This is it.’

Above all persistence. Day after day after day. We know that the searching will take all the time we have to give to it and more…

It may be a million attempts at the same route like Mondrian, like Pollock, like the monk and a lifetime’s worth of repeated devotions. It may just as easily be a million different routes to the same thing. In the world of Art, she tells me that the latter is less fashionable, less promotable because less signatory. But I feel it has an ecumenism that introduces breadth to her enquiry…

Different paths, the same question. Like “Large Glass”, “Pearl Whispers” is composed of a series of single vertical strokes, though here the bars are spaced. Again variations in the thickness of the paint are used to promote the phenomenology of presence. Here the thicker outer bars become increasingly faint at the painting’s centre. We’re left wondering whether the central bars are really there or whether they’re just an optical after effect created by the impression of the peripheral bars. So, presuming that these central strokes are there, albeit vestigially, just how close are they to not being there? How much does their existence depend on what is near to them in space or time? As with “Large Glass”, we’re conscious of an abstract scaffolding, a prison-house for something – be it an idea or a sensual percept – but we’re increasingly concerned that the scaffold is not holding anything up, that the prison is empty.

Different routes, different targets, ultimately different epistemologies, equally prone to the illusion of something being grasped and fastened down, of something being present. Whatever the way we must pass through doubt, and at doubt’s core is the fear that there’s no core at all, that we’ve got nothing on underneath. What drives us on is our faith in the process and what we have to show for it.

Br Andrew Mitchell OSB Cam

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