Painting as a Democratic Act

Time and Relative Dimensions on the High Street

Rosemary Lawrey, December 2023.

Hurrying up Ryde High Street, I noticed out the corner of my eye a neon pink splash up the glass of the Arch Window Gallery, the Aspire shop artists’ community showcase.  I instantly recognised the style. No other artist I know is that generous with her paint.  I don’t mean that Kathy Williams uses a lot of paint.  This artist is a minimalist.  I mean that she gives the paint permission to do what paint does best – make a mark and add colour and shape to space.  Then she stands back and waits for the response.  In this too she is generous – For Kathy “Painting is a democratic process”.  She hopes that the public response will take the form of involvement – she is sharing her artwork with everyone saying not just “Look what I can do!” but “See what you can do!”.  In a world of artistic protectionism and egos, Kathy wants people to take photos of her work from their own perspectives, to be creative and involved in their own photographic process, capturing new aspects of the work as they do so and sometimes seizing a brush for themselves and adding their own marks to the original work. “Everyone uses paint” says Kathy – “it’s in all our homes – on the walls and the skirting boards – paint is everywhere.  It’s for everyone to use” and she wants everyone to experience the feeling of capturing a mood or a moment in this extraordinary medium.

Kathy calls her exhibition in the Arch Window Gallery a “3D painting” I think because the marks she has made on transparent acrylic sheets curve and wiggle through the air. They hang suspended, so they can physically come forward and recede in the space.  In this way, Kathy has enabled paint spots and streaks to do so much more than they would if they were on a canvas or paper surface.  We can actually walk around these marks, look at them from the front, back and the sides. The paint itself has become sculpture. 

At the same time, the artist has immortalised her own fleeting gestures, her brushstrokes.  Three fat and three thin upwardly undulating lines of neon green paint diminish gradually, each eventually petering out into a spike, then thin air.  Darker green spatters are held aloft in suspension under a corner of the ceiling, never to drop to the ground, arrested by and just resting on the transparent material.   Those three fat and three thin neon green brushstrokes reminded me of a swaying line of green mambas, dangerously beautiful in their vivarium, escapees, maybe, from Wight Vipers a few doors up the High Street.   

Architectural and interior design features of the space itself, as well as those of the buildings opposite in reflection, become part of the artwork.  Kathy sometimes adds to, moves around within and removes from the exhibition work that has been contributed by passers-by.  A piece of acrylic, painted with streaks of yellow and coiled into a tubular shape stands on top of a red painted oblong, the shapes interact with one another and an extension socket poking through the gallery back wall links these shapes with those three serpentine neon green painted lines, echoing them.   The bold simplicity of Kathy’s painted marks are a relief from the contrasting complex layers of enticements in the discount store opposite. A dribbling powder pink arch painted onto the front window, when viewed through the gallery, frames the ornate arched moulding above the window of a Georgian upper- storey façade opposite, the straight pink paint dribbles interacting with and echoing to some extent the peeling lines of paint on the Georgian building and emphasising its perpendicular architecture.  The natural world is reflected too.  A jagged crack of clouded blue sky, slicing between facing shop buildings and into Kathy’s 3D sculpture, reaches down as those neon green stripes in suspension wobble upwards to meet it.

I too, as the viewer, am given permission to play, to add to the piece, to become part of the sculpture.  I doodle around the outline of my own body mirrored mistily in the glass, using the edit function on my smart phone – around the hands that hold the phone as it took the photo, extending the line I’d drawn around my own blurred body shape to frame a suspended circle of turquoise paint. In the extra dimensions lent by my new lines, the neon green serpentine prongs appeared to jab through the circle in a new dimensional plane This cartoon stick-version of myself has become another layer in this never-ending story.  So what’s new?  People take photos and selfies all over the place every day.  Different here, I think, is that Kathy succeeds in making us think about marks, lines and colour, and how they affect us and reflect us.  Other participants uploaded their own perspectives on the work - photographs angled to form beautiful new original compositions out of Kathy’s own.  This is a painting of endless possibilities. 

Being so generous isn’t at all easy. It means that, as an artist who believes passionately in the power of a painted mark for its own sake, Kathy must relinquish her own artistic vision and a large degree of control. For her, it is the process of painting and making that is important, with the image being “of secondary importance”.  Although not having complete control even over her own process is part of the thrill of discovery for Kathy, I sense in her a degree of disappointment as she watches the inevitable red hearts, yellow flowers, faces and well-worn words being added to her own abstract work when she invites the public to “come and make your own mark”.  Kathy accepts though that even these are a valuable barometer of the mood and preoccupations of the community at a given time.  “Make love, not war” is indeed, sadly still poignantly topical after all this time.  But both the unpredictability and the predictability of the marks contributed by members of the public to Kathy’s work is no doubt a challenge for her.  A group of teenage schoolgirls willingly made the kind of abstract gestures in paint Kathy was hoping for.  They understood that paint could be used to mirror a feeling or a moment in time just by the action of applying it to the surface.   Their engagement was brief, but confident. 

After painting the word “HELP!” in large letters, one woman, having confessed that she was “not an artist”, returned half an hour later to become completely absorbed at length in her own brushstrokes as she painted a blue face reminiscent of Munch’s “The Scream” on the window.  When I asked her about it afterwards, she said “Sometimes you just have to feel the paint and feel the moment.  We need a break from being automatons, walking on by and off into the distance.  Something like this forces us to connect with something”.  Other people were more reluctant, responding to Kathy’s invitation with a vehement “No!” Others were very willing, declaring themselves to be familiar with the process of abstract mark-making in the privacy of their own homes, but when asked to perform the same act on a busy High Street, simply making any mark induced quite visceral panic.  I observed one passer-by of mature age, approached by Kathy, eagerly take up brush and paint, hesitate, then start to move the brush slowly round, as if guided by an unseen hand – two semicircles and a banana shape – the archetypal graffiti mark of rebellion, found on bus shelters throughout the land.  I watched Kathy’s eyes widen in surprise.  The unexpected crude visual inuendo was completely unintentional – but there it was for all to see!  And there it stayed.  Stepping back and surveying what she had drawn, the culprit burst into laughter.  “An orchid, perhaps?” I volunteered.  “Well, you might think it’s an orchid, but I know what I think it looks like!” The woman made her way chuckling with embarrassed hilarity up the street.  What had brought forth that particular shape at that particular moment?  Awkwardness at being put on the spot, or the sheer orgasmic appeal of being set free to paint on a window?

Wary of the impact she might be making, Kathy admitted she was in fact still recovering from a stinging response from one man; “Why should I want to deface the High Street?” This led me to wonder about the difference between the garish corporate colours of chain stores opposite and the mark making in Kathy’s window.  Which mark is the greater public good on the High Street? The mass-produced sweep of a logo made safe and corporate by digitisation and ensconced in signage, or the individual? 

“I would never make overlapping marks like this myself” said Kathy, clearly somewhat disappointed by the public’s reluctance to engage with the abstract.  She resolved to work on the wording she would use the next time she attempted to “open up the language of painting” to people and “fine-tune” her process “towards the abstract”.   Perhaps the very colours of paint she offered the public to use would make a difference to as to what marks people would make, Kathy pondered.  Primary colours, red, yellow and blue perhaps took people back subconsciously to primary school.  Allowing the inner child to express itself even for a moment is more challenging to some than others. 

On a sunnier day, this project, as it has in the past, would have sparked greater enthusiasm and curiosity among passers-by who would have included more carefree visitors to our island resort in holiday mood.  The day I met Kathy was bitterly cold with Christmas fast approaching and the worries of the world showing in the faces of those out on the street.  “The mood was wrong – shouldn’t have gone out today” Kathy muttered.  A roadworks lorry had parked in the way, partially obscuring the Arch Window project.  “I wasn’t feeling it and people are giving us a wide berth.”  But actually, the day was indeed auspicious.  It was the eve of the 60th anniversary of the showing of the very first episode of Dr Who.  The first member of the public to accept Kathy’s invitation to contribute to her 3D painting had chosen dark blue – “Because I know that if my son were with me right now he would want me to paint in dark blue, and he would want me to paint this”.  His first line of paint formed the left-hand side of The Tardis and soon the entire time machine had appeared, right in the middle of the Arch Window Gallery.  How appropriate!  TARDIS is an acronym for Time And Relative Dimensions in Space.  The Tardis itself is famously bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

One could argue that it would have been great if that first painter had accepted the invitation to paint on his own behalf, for his own sake and just for the sake of seeing what paint can do, but that blue Tardis he had made in the middle of the front window of the arch window gallery surely represented a doorway into infinite dimensions and spaces.  As Kathy aims to capture a mood and a moment, the cuboid window gallery in which she has encased her work is surely bigger on the inside than its measured dimensions would ordinarily allow it to be.  To me, what Kathy calls her “3D painting” is more than 3D.  It is multi-dimensional, even infinitely-dimensional.  The neon stripes of paint Kathy has used are complemented and echoed by the green neon warning flashes on the tailgates of work lorries, the orange helmets and outfits of the workers themselves, their red cones and neon green striped plastic fences.  A scene moves before the window and is mirrored in the glass front and side of the gallery itself and the reflective transparent painted surfaces inside it.  This is an exhibition that embraces the world into itself.  In such a shop showcase situation, not quite outside, but not quite inside either, this painting can never be static. There are fleeting night-time shadows and lights, snatches of text from shop signs, fire alarms and vehicles come and go, interrupt and are interrupted by our view of the painting in the gallery space and reflections of passers-by disappearing into its angles.  A mysterious message in mirror-writing “So Yummy! !ymmuY oS”, remaining evidence of what was once a cake café opposite the Arch Window gallery has become part of the artwork, and – to my mind – an appreciative endorsement not only of the deliciousness of paint for paint’s sake, but that all this exhibition has to offer, filled to bursting as this gallery currently is with an ever-changing, never-static play of light and shadow, reflection, disappearance and distortion.  The more you look at it, the more challenging and exciting it becomes - life in all its infinite dimensions, transporting us through time and space in a way that little else but paint can do.