Life, Stand Still Here!

So, why do we do it? We wrestle with paint, clay or poetry to create that perfect design, that shape, that collage of textures and colours, or that perfect orchestration of words and phrases - why? What is it that drives us to agonise, to cudgel our poor overworked brains, to polish, to draft and redraft until we have achieved something as close as we can manage to the vision that lies before us, taunting us and drawing us on to create. We are artists, all of us, in our different ways. We create. It is in our nature. But why?

 

In her novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf grappled with this question of what it is that drives us to take disparate objects, colours, shapes or even people and bring them together into order, to create a thing of beauty. For Woolf, it is the bringing together of words that drives her. Mrs Ramsay, modelled on the author's mother, brings people together in the novel in a series of unforgettable moments and strives to create harmony out of the chaos of everyday life.

For Lily Briscoe moments must be made permanent on canvas. Paint is Lily's medium with which she transforms the fluidity of life to the fixity and permanence of art. Deeply aware of the struggles of her sex to count for something in the world that is more than the inevitability of romance, marriage, child-bearing and domesticity, Lily's work is her art. It is her reason for being. She knows that her efforts to master artistic form 'roused one to perpetual combat, challenged one to a fight in which one was bound to be worsted'. Nevertheless, she persisted. 'Why then did she do it?' she asked herself.

Walking along the wooded shores of one of our local estuaries, fascinated by the wintry outline of the trees, the colours, the misty quality of the hills and the loneliness of the landscape, I ask myself a similar question. Why do I feel this continual urge to write what I see around me? What am I trying to achieve? What am I trying to prove to myself? What is it that drives me? The more one looks, with the eyes of an artist, at the world around us, the more one sees out there. Every day brings new discoveries to the artist. The trees are no longer just 'brown and green'. The lacy patterns of their outlines in winter are no longer dull and depressing, but infinitely varied, as they stretch up their branches against the subtle colours of a winter's sunset.

Painter, sculptor, wordsmith alike, we are all the same in our painstaking search for that elusive design which will make life stand still. Life moves too fast. Each moment, for the artist, brings fresh cornucopias of impressions, fresh bounty, a superfluity of beautiful moments to record. We are desperate to fix them on canvas, paper, stone, or whatever medium we choose, lest they escape. "Slow down!" we cry. "Life, stand still here!" But the infinite escapes us once more, finite mortals that we are, and we are forced to try again.