The Quiet Practice

I found these photographs by accident. They were taken in an apartment I lived in many years ago, where I painted almost every evening under a single lamp.

I did not go looking for them. They surfaced the way old things do, sideways, while I was searching for something else entirely, and for a moment I did not recognise the woman in them as myself. Bent over a low table in a bowler hat, brush in hand, gold leaf catching the lamp light. It took a second look to understand that this was not a stranger's archive. It was mine.

The apartment would become very quiet at night. That quiet was not incidental. It was the condition the work needed in order to happen. I was not painting toward an exhibition, or a body of work, or anything with a name yet. I was painting the way some people write in a private journal, without an audience in mind, without much plan beyond the evening in front of me.

The room itself was part of the process, though I did not think of it that way at the time. Books stacked along the shelves. Plants reaching toward the one window. A small Guanyin statue watching from the radiator top. Candles, fruit left out on the table, the particular warmth of tungsten light on old wood. Hours would pass without my noticing them pass, which is, I think, the only reliable sign that something real is happening.

I thought I was making paintings, but perhaps I was learning how to pay attention.

The gold leaf surprises me most, looking back. I did not think of it as a technique I was developing. It simply felt like the right material whenever something in the painting needed to be marked as luminous, as remembered, as slightly sacred. A halo. A robe. The edge of a face I was inventing without a model. I reached for gold to indicate that this particular passage carried more weight than the ones around it.

I am only now able to see how much of what I am doing today was already present in that small quiet room. Sacred figures. Halos. Feminine archetypes I could not yet have named. Ritual gestures I did not know were rituals. A search for presence that I would have described, if asked, as simply enjoying painting on a Tuesday evening.

A seated figure wrapped in gold. A mother holding something I never fully resolved into a shape. A small standing figure, unfinished, that I never returned to and now cannot remember the intention behind. I look at her now and feel no urge to finish her. She is complete in her incompleteness, the way a sentence can sometimes be complete without a full stop.

Seeing these photographs now, after building a digital ancestral sanctuary that did not exist in any conscious plan of mine twenty years ago, I do not want to claim a straight line between that room and this one. I do not think creativity works that way, in a line, moving tidily forward from one stage to the next. It moves more like water finds a path downhill, circling back on itself, returning to the same low points from slightly different angles each time. The paintings, the music, the films, the ancestral work, I suspect they are not stages in a development. They may simply be different rooms the same underlying practice has been allowed to occupy.

I do not know what that younger woman, bent over her table with a bowler hat and a paintbrush, imagined she was working toward. I doubt she imagined toward anything at all. But I recognise the attention in her posture. I recognise the gold. I recognise, even now, the particular quiet a room needs to hold before something honest can happen inside it.

These paintings are unfinished conversations. They belong to a younger self, and I do not think she is finished speaking.