the Hopeless task

There are things about another person that can never be known.

Stephen Nolan describes his interior life as an accumulation of thoughts, images and imagined conversations so extensive that there could never be enough time to communicate them all. These invisible events are not incidental to who a person is. To Stephen, they are precisely what creates the self. Yet most of them will never be spoken, recorded or encountered by anyone else.

Painting is one attempt to cross that distance.

Stephen speaks of it as an effort not only to communicate but to record and organise. A thought becomes an image, an observation becomes paint, something private acquires a material existence outside the person who experienced it.

But the translation can never be complete.

Every painting records something, yet while one thing is being recorded, countless others remain unrecorded. However many paintings exist, there could always be another.

No selection is definitive. No arrangement is final. What we encounter is always a work in progress, a moment in an ongoing process, the material traces of a life spent making ‘a mere biological tool evolved to serve the irrational will to live’ It is a hopeless task.