Images for This Lockdown Publication: ‘I Feel Therefore I am

Mr E F J Twohig (CR, Head of Art)

‘I Feel Therefore I Am’ (Ego Sentio Ergosum) is a playful series of intimate scale works that blend painterly watercolour and the pastel lines of drawing, a sort of violin and piano parallel to music. This body of work took one full day to physically create and over eight months to plan. Just beforehand, I created nine one-metre-by-onemetre paintings as a warm-up. It was in the middle of the half-term break of Lent Term and I remember beginning just after 6am with Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony playing loudly, very fortissimo. I was ready. The day flowed. The suite of work flowed. Music by Philip Glass, in particular, his Metamorphosis (1988), followed Strauss, Elgar, Ravel, Delius and Debussy. Each symbiotically helped the flow of my creativity in the making of this suite. The visual and auditory intertwined.

What was the background?

Time and place were the background in essence. Essentially visually autobiographical, I desired to chart the process of the positivity that lockdown presented: how it felt to slow down, not to be in the hurly-burly of what we have complacently become accustomed to across Western contemporary existence. I delight in being surrounded by nature here in Wiltshire by day and night. I wished to amplify and celebrate this across my creative work and like the structure of Strauss’s Alpine Symphony, cogently charting the day, from before dawn to night, my ‘I Feel Therefore I Am’ begins right at the beginning of the lockdown. Actually, I began this suite retrospectively leading to the beginning, the beginning as the end.

What are the influences?

Art, poetry, writing and music go hand in hand for me, a rich stream of thought, complicity and perpetual interplay. Each help enhance life and experience. I have loved Gustave Moreau’s soulful and subtle watercolours since I first visited this French artist’s house/museum in Paris aged 20. Later I discovered that the French composer Maurice Ravel liked visiting this enchanting museum as well – and George Rouault, another great influence, was its first curator. Each time I return, I learn more.

Lately, I have enjoyed contrasting the earlier work of WB Yeats with his later poetry, which I find enthralling. A battered book of his poetry is always left open on my dining table. Clare-Louise Bennett, a contemporary writer who was born in Wiltshire and who now lives in Galway, Ireland, has become a wonderful source of nourishment. Here are just two examples of many thousands as to why: ‘I have a fancy for a rather more dappled conflation of vagueness and exactitude, flippancy and earnestness, aplomb and disquietude, scintilla and shadow’. And ‘the intensely fertile meditation on dramatic space disclosed the interior life of our immediate surroundings, recasting the home as ‘an embodiment of dreams’ where the assembly of chairs, tables, drawers and wardrobes encompasses profound cosmic potential.’ We can all relate to this. Similar subtle contrasts and journeys abound in my ‘I Feel therefore I Am’.

Parallel to Clare-Louise Bennett, Helen Marten’s collage-like physical gatherings, as she terms her instillations, resonate strongly, especially as Helen Marten says she aims to portray situations and feelings ‘husked down to essences’ that can be remodelled to give rise to new and unexpected creative thoughts or ideas. The double creativity of Beatrix Wavell Grant is another source. How this artist employs imagery to portray a sense of identity-self within space through moving image and word encourages her viewer-readers to look very closely at whatever terrain we occupy and shape, the seasonal time in which we occupy this space or spaces as well as images and objects with which we surround ourselves or leave in micro-macro surroundings.

What infuses each of these creative spirits whose thoughts and work help fuel my creativity is how they forge newness in expression, each connected to tradition, but not bound by it. Inspiring.

First, I would like viewers to enjoy my work on aesthetic grounds, to get to know the work, to delight in its colour and rhythm. On a deeper level and with growing awareness, to allow my work to speak and influence so that the next time a viewer goes for a walk in nature, she or he can open themselves to the wonder and bounty of the perpetually changing natural surroundings which can be found everywhere, even within the urban. Ultimately, I would like the viewer to learn about themselves though the visual.

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