What do you get if you cross a love of all things bright and colourful and maximalist with an acute awareness of the evils of overconsumption and a need to budget and stop buying so much stuff?
Here are some of the paintings I have painted the past couple of months instead of buying fast fashion homewares
I feel like we have a real need for beauty and novelty and so often, at least in my life, it seems so easy to find yourself buying things to fulfil that need, but, I know, I really can’t keep buying and buying. In August I challenged myself to paint once a day everyday. I have always painted, as well as writing poetry and other things, but I hadn’t been painting consistently for a very long time.
I have an intense need to put pen to paper, paintbrush to canvas and I really do believe it’s something a lot of us (if not all of us) feel, but we get sold this idea that we can buy that feeling, that we can express our creativity through merely choosing what we consume, and I don’t think this is true.
Saying that, I do still recognise the importance of remembering to enjoy the material world, I think a lot about this quote from Karl Marx:
“The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save — the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour — your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
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Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844
Painting and writing and music, they feel so interconnected to me, different ways of saying the same things. All inextricable from what I think and feel, I believe art is an expression of ideas and an exploration of those ideas.
I believe art is a conversation. I feel like, when we write or paint or when we look at art or read a poem or hear a piece of music, we are in conversation. There’s this sense of reaching across time and place and saying: ‘I see you, do you see me?’
I hope I’m able to convey what intend to convey, but I suppose that is the risk we take when we make art. We do open ourselves up to misinterpretation. But then again, how often can our words be misinterpreted? Are there ideas that are better understood through images? Through music?
The paintings here are inspired by the poem Bread and Roses by James Oppenheim (1911). As well as the Wages for Housework movement. I am listening to Caliban And The Witch by Silvia Federici as I paint today. I am drawn to images combining labour and the ‘roses’ in particular whether literal or symbolic.
I also want to explore this sense of history and modernity, this link between the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the heretics, enclosures, the Luddites, to technofeudalism and AI.
This is what I have been working on.
