DOING TIME

I cannot really say that I live in hope and that these paintings might be the means of gaining recognition. Anyway, why should such thoughts occur? If I lived my life in civil society, then I would go to work each day and then watch TV in the evening. That would be my life, nothing more really. I am not really certain about the questions that we might lend to how we find our reality and the judgements about the qualities that goes with such differences. I must admit to having little by way of a philosophy of life, nor do I have much sense about painting. I simply partake in things and with this time passes, one day after another. In my circumstances it might be seen that painting is my one true expression, my only substantial gesture, something that keeps my soul alive and thus reminds me of states of freedom that are otherwise so evidently missing. Obviously I have thought quite a bit about the idea of freedom because on sentence you are instructed that this dimension of life is to be stripped away. I have come to think that freedom is more like a gap or space, even an abyss, and as such is ambiguous, because it might be our means of savouring an edge of terror. Don’t ask me to explain this though; it is not with my means to do so. It is the law that decrees that I am in this space and it is another kind of law that has opened out the space of painting for me. Each day I paint, but there is no good reason for this other than it reflecting a status gained through the ambiguities of my case. I never really look at my paintings on the wall because they will never be exhibited as such and so they simply pile up. In a way they are their own support, simple accumulations if you like of time expanded and if pushed I would have to admit a pure form of waste. All I know is that paintings follow paintings and that in this respect they are slight in the sense that they only hold themselves onto an edge of what has passed before. Generally I would describe my life in this space as being endlessly dull, infiltrated by a seeming grey mist that circulates within the heart of things. Painting appears in part to push back the ubiquity of such a feeling, but at other times, is the feeling that governs the space of painting. I have come to realise through this that there is no inside or outside of painting. The best thing that has happened to me because of painting day after day is that I have learned to stop thinking about meaning. After all this time it might be supposed that I would have a lot to say about painting, the way in which it might elevate life but in a way all of that has departed from me and I am left with the absence of any claim. It is not that my painting is better or worse because of this but they sit better with themselves when they are bereft of all the gravity that words might foster upon them. Ultimately I think that my paintings are fostered out of an impulse toward oblivion more than memory or even that curious space in-between the two that plays across both conditions without being distinctly either

I know that such a situation is unusual, even exceptional but that is how it is. All I can say is that such circumstances can be imagined. For some this might be close to the ideal condition for painting: no interruptions, no TV, little by way of a rhythm of everyday life, but I must say that I am not of such persuasion. Yes it is possible to believe that such a bare life brings with it a clarity and simplicity. Life in this space is sparse but it imposes other realities that are hard to describe. Painting made me feel progressively more useless but useless in ways that I had never really considered before. This might be a good reason to stop, but rather it became my reason to continue. Isolation can work like this, for it opens out forms of moral inversion that others might find difficult to comprehend. So each day I paint, firstly to pass away time but ultimately to escape the condition of time as something that exercises dominion over existence. Time appeared, not only to empty, but in turn lost its grip over the condition of painting and with this change opened out other conditions of painting. It is not that time ceases to be in some way corrosive but that this corrosive aspect is so purely ingrained into passage that it ceases to be experienced as something to be endured. I know that I am just going round in circles, that each painting follows the next, and that this simply describes the impossibility of ever really stepping outside the pre-conditions with which I act. It is never a case of being bodily imprisoned whilst the mind might roam freely of its own accord. Anyway I would doubt the fact that I have ever been free but in my present situation I live with the definite knowledge that I am not free. Painting is a way of dealing with this because it is meant, in ways I have never really comprehended, to be a medium that finds its accord with the very idea of freedom. I cannot entertain such dualities about my life, the paradox of being imprisoned and yet free is a stupid delusion or the worst excess of an over indulgent mind. All I can claim is that I have painted without any sense of it taking me elsewhere other than the space in which I produce. This is why I like my paintings in piles. In a strange way it is a form of truth for they stand as withdrawals from social scrutiny and judgement. The judgement that placed me into this situation is enough for me. In my head I live in a circular universe in which everything makes sense but is empty of purpose. Painting is one of those things that come to us stripped of purpose. In some ways it simply presents its own condition and surrenders itself thus. In my better moments I sometimes think that painting is noble because it can embrace the slightest of all things and lend to them a dignity. If you are in a cell alone such thoughts are necessary because otherwise everything else is unremitting repetition, which envelops like a dull fog.

There is an expression that going to prison is a way of serving time, or even doing time. Obviously I have had to think about this idea quite a lot. Rather than being something that does time, I think it might be the other way around, that time does us. It has certainly done all kind of things to me. That is part of the sentence really, the sentence to the thing we call time, and we are isolated and segregated by it in ways that make is vulnerable in new ways. If prison was an invention capable of reforming us then it would open us to new orders of time and thus bring about an expansion of our being but instead we are compressed, almost made mean by virtue of having to face this special kind of duration. This is at the heart of the punishment, time’s corrosive power. I wish I could find ways of escaping this power and perhaps this is the reason for painting because for small passages it is easy to imagine being outside of time. Such thoughts though are a folly because this only amplifies in turn this experience. I should really have much by way of insight into the relationship of time and painting but as yet I have only the most flimsy ideas on the subject. I’m in prison so I can hardly invest in the idea that painting might introduce an ecstatic dimension to my life. There is no gateway from the daily rhythm of my life, which is minimal in all ways other than when I get to daub on paint. I keep my paintings on the floor in piles because I do not really think that any of my paintings are worthy on being placed on a wall, let alone exhibited in such a way. I also paint on the floor so I am always thinking about painting as I see it appearing on the floor. If I have a hope it is firstly to be released but then it might be to paint a painting that might find itself hung on a wall because it is worthy of such a position. Perhaps I don’t really think enough about painting and this in turn limits the way I paint. I guess I go round and round in circles but then this is my experience and I do not wish to use thought as a means of being otherwise then this experience. What I might say instead is that I have a sense and I simply follow it. Some would say that my sense condemns me but I have little way of judging this. My work communicates nothing in the end, in a way of do not even regard it purely as my own because in here we own nothing. That is the point really, not having anything other than the duration we endure. I would like this to be a better story, or at least the kind of story dreamed up by the reformer who might have thought that such an experiment might change the way we think about prisoners. I do not even think that I will leave this place as a proper painter and anyway there are too many other things that might amuse me more. All I can say is that painting as made me empty, aligned me more closely with my condition. There is nothing grim about this but it is a realistic way of thinking about it.

Simply put, a sentence was passed. “For the foreseeable future you will be stripped of your freedom and left to mediate on a life stripped of this most essential of all dimensions given to us by civil society. You will spend your time in isolation and you will be granted only one privilege due to the circumstances of your case and your behaviour within the course of the due processes of the trail.” I can still hear these words now. I guess that they function like an echo. There are a lot of words like this which function like echoes. Somehow words like this are like the wall that issues the echo effect itself. Many might imagine that a life in isolation comes to be filled with fantasy images. For me this is not at all true rather it is words that reverberate. They say that in the beginning is the word and I come to the idea that this is true in part except in my case they are echoes of words. I do not really have much by way of communication: little conversation, no TV, no newspapers that makes me highly attuned to sound. There is always a sound in your head so true silence is not really possible, maybe true silence only comes with death. Anyway I have painting, which in turn means that I have a relationship to colour and form. This is my privilege that I choose over writing. I thought that I would never be able to free myself from all those echoes that continue to spook me so painting was an automatic choice. I hoped that it would function like a kind of pillow that I could rest my head upon and dream but I must say I have found out otherwise. In my darker moments I even think that I am a bit of a prisoner to it and that is really a bleak thought. Certainly I have never entertained the feeling that it might free me up let alone allow me to touch the true sense of freedom. I have heard people in the past talk about art and freedom, things like this and I cannot understand what they are pointing toward. It does help me pass time but I know that I will always return back to myself in the same way. I have come to accept the small things in life and this is why my paintings are slight. I would like to paint about bigger things but then it is hardly realistic because I live such a restricted life. If you live a bare life then this is what we might reflect upon. My paintings pile up because they are close to the way that my life might be understood as wasting away. I am sorry if this disappoints the judge and the head of the experimental prison I am in but I do not see why I should act out an image they might imagine emerging from such an experiment. For sure I would always choose this situation over others because at least it grants me a relationship to something but having said this it is still a mean existence. I have always hated the way that politicians and judges talk of freedom, as if it is something that they grant, regulate and remove at their discretion. Powerful people always have this conceit about freedom and sometimes I wonder why the world isn’t even more like a prison. To be really honest freedom frightens me quite a lot, so it would be something that I would not really talk about too much. It is certainly not like a possession. I once saw a configuration of light dancing on the wall of my cell and for a few moments it mesmerised me and afterwards I thought that this was the closest I had been to a feeling of being free because I was absorbed into the light itself. I like the idea that freedom might be so transient, without a ground, and if I could capture this sense in my painting then it might start to feel that I am capable of achieving something. The fact that this hasn’t occurred is perhaps just another torment.

Right now I need someone to fuck me hard up the arse. I need to really feel something, really feel something. The very thought of this makes me shiver. It something to do with being able to receive in a physical way, I need sensation to take me away from this state of drifting indifference. I do not really have an image of the ‘someone’ who might steal his way into me. I think it must be a thief as sorts but I do not really mind as long as quickens the beat of my heart. Painting is not really enough for me. I would hate it if it was taken away from me but other things are more important to my life. Part of me wants to be animal, whereas they want us to be properly human, well disempowered human. What’s the point of painting if you are merely a disempowered human? Each day I get up only to lose myself ready for the next day. That is all. For sure painting helps with the passing of time, makes it more tolerable but I need intensity to make me feel alive otherwise it is just the dimming of oblivion. I had my moments with painting but in the end they are just stacks of stuff sharing my confinement. Mostly I cannot even bare to look at them because the disappointment is just too unbearable. When I was at school we went on a visit to the National Gallery and I must admit to being transfixed by some of the paintings I saw. They appeared to be so much outside my life; I guess it is a different scale of life; great sweeps of history, blood and sacrifice, extravagant gestures, tender observation, palpitations of flesh and swollen features. I wonder why such visions now longer appear possible so for me to paint is like a humiliation born out of not being able to measure myself against such potentiality. This is why my paintings stay on the floor. When it comes to painting I am not really upright, I paint on the floor, look at them on the floor and stack them on the floor. I can never imagine having the impulse to truly hang a painting and this is not an outcome of low self-esteem but instead a sober assessment of what it is before me. Perhaps our way of life is incredibly flat, uneventful in ways that suggest that we are afraid to really live. Maybe that was always my sense and that ultimately it leads me into trouble. Who knows? I hate the way that people in power always talk about saving you from yourself. I do not think that I need saving even though I have finished up in this place. It’s just a price really. My fault is that I lack the level of cunning to stop such things from happening. Initially when I had to talk to a therapist he asked me if I felt that I needed to be caught. I always think that these people are just too tricky so I keep away from them. When I was young someone once said that I thought too much and that it would complicate my life. At least that is no longer my problem now. This is one thing that painting is good at doing; it stops you thinking too much. In the end thinking is like a form of heaviness. I like the floating feeling that comes with painting instead. I am sure that serious painters would hate this opposition of thought and painting but that is how it is for me. Maybe it is because I never have to talk to critics or collectors about such matters. If I had to I am sure I would change my story, or at least be more cunning for the sake of what I do.

I am not really sure about the process of being here. I was in different kinds of trouble from quite an early age, anyway the usual thing. I wasn’t very good with words but I had a lot of energy. Maybe that goes together. I was always acting out so my life was full of movement even though it might have been the wrong type of movement. My teachers always said that I needed something through which I might channel myself but this was not my idea. I wanted to be out there, a happening kind of person. I felt that if I was lucky I would be able to live two lives at the same time, so I developed two different kinds of persona, one that lived in the shadows and the other that lived in the light. It takes a lot to live like this because others are always checking you out to see if you are real or not. I felt that I was real though but it was hard to stay with it. Eventually I got involved in things that I would have been better to avoid. I had ducked and dived for a time but then there is that raw moment when it falls in around you. After that you are marked in some way. When you are named in a certain way then it is hard to escape, like a branding system but a bit more subtle. I think that the term ‘throwing the book at you’ is related to all of this. At a certain point you can no longer act like an idiot, because, you are no longer being faced by idiots, even though you call them that. Invariably, that type of idiot always seems to come out on top. Anyway here I am, the third time around, facing time yet again for all the things that I have done and even more for the things I would I liked to have done. The judge seemed to think that I might benefit from this special programme someone had come up with for persistent offenders, so I am serving time but allowed to paint each day. It’s funny how you get into things the wrong way round because it was the one thing I liked at school because I thought that it had some style to it. I have started to be quite serious about it even though I know that it is hard to get really good. The trouble with being here is that you can’t act out over what you do; no one is really interested in that type of thing. Instead you just get on with it and it is in the end just between the surface of whom you are and the surface of the canvas. To begin with it is really hard to get going but after a time you start to accept whatever it is going to be and with this ease starts to occur. It feels like I have mountains of paintings around me, all in neat piles. I like to look at these piles, maybe more than the paintings placed out across the floor. I am not really sure if they feel like an achievement or not. In a way it is just what I do. I have started to play around with my two kinds of selves with painting, as if I have a choice in front of each painting. Painting is flexible if you can be flexible, so now I understand that I can play around a lot. I start to think that all types of invention are possible and this has lead me to feel that maybe I have missed something before. I would never want to discuss this kind of stuff with anyone because it might appear dumb. Anyway how should I know what goes down in this art college places? I sure they play all kinds of games there but then I wonder how they would deal with my kind of stuff. At least I am not being pressed into discussing painting because that it a bit of a waste of time as far as I am concerned.

Most of the time I am just living in this fuzzy, muddled type of headspace. It is like there is no escape. I often have a ringing tone in my ear that I just want to switch off in order to experience silence. You would imagine with all this sense of empty time that it is possible to enter into a more meditative state of mind but almost the contrary state of this is what is evident to me. The doctor tells me that I am depressed and that medication would help but I don’t want that stuff. My best spells occur when I get deep enough into painting but it is hard to stay there all the time. Sometimes you just get stuck and then everything else falls in around this mood. My life has little by way of clarity really, mostly it is a day-by-day affair, and I guess I am trying simply to get by. I sometimes think that I need painting to give me a shape but if I am in a curious mood I might also think that painting needs me to give it shape as well. Put in another way we are bound together in the way that we both add and subtract things from the other. I feel as if I am barely adequate and in turn I think that my paintings are a little bit the same. Sometimes I might be asked if painting is the means through which I might escape but I think that although I know what is meant by this, it might be entirely the opposite because for once in my life I have had to face something about myself. Well even that is not true because it might imply some kind of completion or union but I think that what I am pointing towards is being pushed to the outside edges of what you might be in ways that introduce a movement or intensification. The feeling I get is that something as moved, but it might be in the in-between of the painting and myself, a strange animation if you like, rather than simple completion. I have this strange feeling that I listen to paintings more than see them. It is not that I hear voices, that paintings can speak but something that is not really obvious. Perhaps this is an outcome I spending so much time alone in a cell, all your senses start to get messed up. I feel as if I can’t really have proper conversations anymore because I am taking the wrong information in, like mid sentence I will suddenly be stuck on some visual detail and then words just stop and the other just thinks that you are losing it. Painting is the only thing that I have found able to process this ‘losing it’ thing. After all if we are not ready to deal with the risk of not getting things then you should really do something like painting. That’s why you get stuck really, its just not obvious. Mostly I am going round and round in circles with my stuff, the same stuff seems to keep coming up again and again, but then from this moment to the next something just changes and you land in this place that is utterly strange. Maybe this is like having all your memories suspended for a time so you are not being pushed back but are in a zone called the future even though you are still on the same cold floor as before. I wish I able started painting earlier in my life so I could have become good at it, like a proper painter but at least I have had a taste for what it can do. I am not really into things like beauty as much as trying to be with painting and occasionally moving somewhere. My life has been incredibly flat and restricted so I need to go places now but given my present situation only painting offers me that chance. I would be embarrassed to show my stuff but could imagine talking about painting eventually. It’s funny just watch them pile up around me; there is no reason for them except to keep me a little bit sane. I like them on the floor next to me, each in stacks representing different groups and periods. I think of them as my archive of a life withdrawn from itself.