As told to Patricia Mohammed

 

 

“He found the original sheet of paper and scored the couplet out with thick lines. And in doing this there was a sense of achievement, of time not wasted, as though the destruction of much labor were in some way an act of creation.”

 – George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, 1936

 

These paintings are about word or image association with songs I have listened to, or a poem I have read that stays in my mind, or a book that I have read and sometimes reread, or an autobiographical situation recalled, or experiences that I have had – all of these remembered could comprise the constituent  parts of a painting.

However, the initial stages of painting are always gestural and non-associative. Often, there is an element of play between hard-edged geometrical elements against the free-standing marks. And the perimeters of the canvas are often marked out in order to pin these images against the wall. Once these are established, the association begins usually with one concept, which is then built upon with other textual associations: words run right to left or upside down; numbers are in or out of sequence; or clockwise; or in a kind of countdown; and arrows point, but in the wrong direction. I have been doing these marks for a long time, perhaps in a less obvious way. When I lived and painted in Jamaica, at times there would be letters appearing in an abstract impressionist network, like an A or U.  Why do I do this? It’s really a question of disassociating the viewer from the image.

There is a long history of this in painting. Rene Magritte is a good example. And that treachery of image with text in Magritte, started since 1928, was directly challenging the viewer’s visual intelligence as a word can betray the image. In his famous Ceci n’est  pas une pipe, against a graphic painting of a pipe, he intended to highlight that the painting of the pipe was a representation of the object, not the real thing. The conundrum is, of course, the resultant question: does the text not make it a pipe?

Why does a painter want to challenge the viewer who stands in front a painting? I ask this because text incorporation often, when it is most interesting, does not explain what is happening in an image. There must be a dissociation of logic and linearity, because logic and linearity lead to war, disease and death. Contemporary painting has wanted to disrupt the viewer from an easy assimilation of what the image tells us. The viewer needs to work at the looking and allow their own interpretations to be at the forefront, to challenge them to think and ponder on connections that the artist has left open to them. The artist’s interpretation is never the same as the viewer’s – there is nothing wrong with this and, in fact, all great art invites the viewer to continue the narrative based on their own experience or psychological response to the artwork.

In ‘Soothsayer’, a children’s stuffed toy abandoned on the bedroom floor revives an image I drew fifty years ago in a sketch book and provided the main stimulus for the painting. This sense of easy domesticity led to mixed metaphors: primary drawings of nature, a bird and fish – Blind fish swimming juxtaposed against the violent gestural marks that signal the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Perhaps it’s the mood of our current times, where the innocence of childhood and desire for preservation of nature are no longer protection against the will of those who are determining our future.

‘Song for Icarus’ references Jimmy Hendrix’s song ‘Purple Haze’, with its famous lyric “excuse me while I kiss the sky,” and displayed in the painting are the words Hendrix rules. Further, the parallel between the Greek myth of Icarus falling from the sky and Jimmy Hendrix, who fell away at his peak is obvious. Blake, because he saw angels in the sky at Peckham Rye.

None of these paintings are imagined as a whole before or composed as a complete image. They emerge organically after the first stroke or drawing and are continued by word or image association.

For instance, in my painting ‘Gravity,’ I was reading a biography of Isaac Newton and started to think about him looking at the sky. The text at the left side and bottom of the painting reads Newton studied stars in the sky, fallen apple made him cry. In the centre of the canvas there is a big antelope falling out of a hard-edged feature with my made-up rhyming text – An antelope in a wooden boat won’t float, again associating this with gravity. Newton’s biography recorded how he slept and died in a crimson bed so again my rhyming text emerges adding to the fluidity of the painting: Crimson curtain by a crimson bed hung by his head when he lay dead. Newton died in London in 1727. He never left a will, but he left behind an enormous collection of papers. Notably, thousands of drawings and diagrams were discovered years after his death and, apparently, they were sold as a job lot to a discerning American collector who picked them up for a song. Another story talks about how some of the papers ended up in the hands of John Maynard Keynes at an auction in 1936.

On the canvas, dots or stars are often used to fill up space in the painting to emphasize its flatness. The painting is not a window to look through into space. The text, numbers and shapes all work against this illusion. Some of these ideas are expressed more fully in my wife Patricia Mohammed’s film As I Was Going to St Ives, which includes my work and which you can watch online. I highly recommend it, but, of course, I’m slightly biased.

Of all my recent works shown here in this essay, ‘Namibia Dreaming’ is the most indirectly autobiographical, although all of the others have strains of personal experience. This one is a painting about previous paintings; it alludes to two older works which were inspired by a visit to Namibia. One was a piece I did in Jamaica after returning from my first trip to Africa in 1998, ‘The Wildbeast we never saw in Namibia’.  The second, made shortly after, was ‘The Reluctant Tourist’. The new piece is filled with place names that, when etched into the canvas, become their own personal mementos: Windhoek, Ondangwa and Angola; the Safari Lodge. Coming back to me in the piece are the images of a pink moon over purple skies and the yellow of the sand dunes that possess a magnificent beauty like shifting pyramids; are color associations that signify blood and race, Red, White and Black – all bringing back a memory, so vivid to me, of grappling with the history of a place while being transient through it. But the painting, years after my journeying, also perhaps reinforces my reluctance to travel or inhabit locations as the cliché of the pleasure-seeking tourist; there is irony in its ambivalent hues.

Word, text and image association can be nothing if not autobiographical at any given moment in time, including when it unfolds within the sanctuary of a quiet studio, making room for the recalling of memories and geographies and connections. My use of this process is fluid rather than rigidly planned, playing with this free-association method as it is used in the discipline of psychology or in postmodernist stream-of-consciousness writing. I am toying with the ways in which paintings can both conceal and reveal hidden emotions, mental images and unconscious complexes and impulses. But most of all, my method wants to gift the viewer with a chance to draw their own mind maps.

 

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Rex Dixon is a world citizen: an artist who has moved from England to Northern Ireland and to Jamaica and then Trinidad and Tobago, where he has resided for several decades. His paintings are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Caribbean Development Bank, The University of the West Indies and in numerous other private collections. He is represented by the James Wray Gallery in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and Softbox Gallery in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and he has exhibited all over the world, including at the National Museum and Art Gallery, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago. With his wife, the feminist scholar and film-maker Patricia Mohammed, he is the co-author of the hybrid memoir Travels with a Husband (2016). This piece was written in close collaboration with her.