Sam Stothard 

another mind 'Part of you…

I sit. I am sat. More accurately, I have been sat. Placed in the same way as that blue ceramic pot and custard picture frame have been angled against each other. As though the interlocutions of their rigid bodies reflect some divine geometry. We are in order here, we have been ordered. Dictated by the harmony of his eye. I am located here in the present but will be moved again. Shifted as he has already shifted me before, so that some placement of mine will better align with his delicacies. 

In his image, I am revealed. Splayed totally beyond the clothes in which I am painted. I cannot say where this feeling of being undressed comes from, whether it is the clarity of seeing his eyes reflect or some deep ancestor of that sense which tells us when we’re being watched in the woods. His attention is locked onto me lazily and without affection. The sort of gaze that makes you want to flinch. That flinch tries to jerk out of me and in an attempt to contain it I sink deeper into my own thoughts. Using this diatribe to try and untangle myself from his gaze. The awareness of being looked upon intensifies my own seeing, his gaze reflecting within me as if it were possible for a stare to make me feel the sensation of my own looking out. What I mean to say is that in being seen I see my own seeing acutely. Despite this sharpened self awareness I do not flinch. I sit still because I have been sat still. In this reconstruction of myself I will be presented as sitting and people who I have never known or ever will know will see me and think that I was a sedentary man. Perhaps they will think it was my choice to be sat or perhaps they will not think about how I am being conveyed at all. Either way, the unknown viewer will take me into their world. In that sitting man, who is not even a reflection of me, they will think that they know me and they will understand this “me” by making him familiar through some supplementation of myself with an obscure corner cleft from their own shape.

I first met him on the tube. Less that we met and more that I noticed he was drawing me. A sketch darted on to cream pages in a brown covered notebook. Just the realisation that I was being copied in this way was exhilarating. My heart beat a little faster and I liked its rush. There was no consequence to being viewed and recorded by him. Whatever that fast hand was overlaying with shaded pencil strokes was a sole perception, a passing conception of me that could have no bearing on my own reality. He saw that I had looked at him and knew what he was doing and he smiled, almost apologetically. He then looked back at his notepad and continued drawing. He exuded a strange magnetism and almost unknowingly I walked over and introduced myself to him. Although I made the move it was him who said the first word. I think I just stood before him in some kind of stunned silence. That sort of behaviour isn’t normal for me but I felt compelled by his act of creation and waited as though the coming into being of that sketch held some innate value that demanded patience. The platform arrived and he said ‘Let’s get off here.’ 

We stood talking for about five minutes. The brief conversation enough to exchange names and for me to learn that he was not any nobody but actually well established within his artistic world. It came out fairly quickly that he wanted to paint me. Not just a minor piece either, something about a retrospective of his needing a crowning jewel, evidence of his modern style that would emphasise the progression of his ability. And I, for my part, wanted to be painted. I wanted to be shown myself, not as I am but as his mind perceived me to be. I wanted more of that feeling, that thrill, when I realised I was being sketched but I was yet to understand that even in this brief interaction, the security of mine and his estrangedness had already begun to wear. That’s how little it can take. Even simple things build up momentum and meaning all on their own. Before you know it a drop empties the bottle, and the taste for wind in your hair tears at the soles of your feet. Against such flurries all that can be done is to sit back and observe how these forces contort the images cast in your daily weave. 

And so I am here, being seen by him and masking my vulnerability of that seeing. Because with him, right here, it is different from the hypothetical idea of how observers in a gallery will see me. It is different to be seen by someone who knows you, someone who’s seeing is immediate. Only through his present gaze do I get the feeling I need to mask something, an awkward and giggling internal shyness. Through this feeling, this opening of the wound, he reminds me of her. How it felt to be seen by her. Although it was different with her again, that intimate seeing came with a joyful weight. With him this whole thing is transactional. This relationship has a perimeter. I don’t mean that I wanted to keep her at arms length, but that in showing her the wound I never intended she would clamber inside it.

I don’t know when my walls came tumbling down. What aspect of her eroded my supports. Her words, her eyes, her movements snuck beneath my membrane and I found them when it was already too late. She coagulated within me and the first I knew of it my heart was already beating in sync with hers. Even here, I can’t put my finger on a particular moment. Only a gentle groundswell. An intoxicating procession where the ties wrapping tighter and tighter round each other are only seen in dizzy retrospect. And then you look at someone and you love them. All of a sudden. Over and over again, all of a sudden. Her beauty became all encompassing and her words fell like honey while my hands, my eyes, my being became sticky and sweet. Feeling somehow that I was trespassing until my hand was in hers, our lips touching and it turns out we were both in on the conceit. That feeling eats everything.

Love like that is a sort of seeing, a private knowledge that only you hold of the other. I have come to understand this symbiotic act of painting and being painted as an attempt to re-create and display that personal knowing. With each sitting we get closer to my total exposure while I have not revealed a thing. He actually requested that I keep myself secret from him and, to the best of my ability, I have entombed myself, made myself plain. His brush, his angular composition of summer sky ceramic and yellow quadrangle are to be the tools of my excavation. I am sat, have been sat just so, each part of me exacted in order for my remaking to betray the true original. From my crypt, I will have my unknown truth revealed to me. This artificial construction so exact in its driving intention that the paint does not deny its own artifice, instead elevating its authority above and outside of that reality which it sneers at as merely “truth”.

I will be revealed through a re-making so disingenuous that set after set of subjective eyes will all see the conclusion of my essence while I am sat here, have been sat here, blissfully unaware of who I am that they will decide me to be.

I cannot worry about those who will see me, they are unknowable. It is impossible to know whether an onlooker sees at all, let alone what they see or how they see it. Our blotted, half-perception is the only reality that we can be sure of. Even that is slippery. Present moment becomes present moment and all that was solid is lost to the constant ever presence. Each thing’s true value equal only to that of its terminus. I will be dead, this painting rotted and all who ever will see it alongside those who never shall will all have decomposed entirely. Which means that all of this is redundant, already irrelevant and cusping at the verge of a new conclusion. Any moment of being is separated from that vast nothing only by the distracted and feverish reality of the mind. The clamour of thought demands our attention for its incessant proliferation lest we look away and forget it all to eternity. Yet even this observation shows that we are beyond the mind, that we are able to see it as it enables us to see out. Our essence cannot therefore be locked behind the mind’s bars but is instead the very substance of which those bars consist.

‘Stop daydreaming.’ He says, ‘I need your eyes up here’ and he signals with the brush establishing some point in the vague space above his right shoulder. With that small motion, I have not stopped thinking about the precision of his creation. His vision and the exactitude of his brush. To already know what it is so clearly, is he really painting me, or moulding my body into the key that reifies his imaginations? For example, in their blinkless staring, my eyes have collected a small deposit of moisture glistening above their pink rims. Will this emerging drop be clear for all to see? And if not all, perhaps only those onlookers with a sensitive eye or a less than uncommon belief in their own unique sensitivity. Perhaps only they will notice what no doubt will appear as a burgeoning tear. I don’t want to know what decisions these alien viewers will make of me, affirmed by their steadfast belief in their acute perception. Probably he has already decided that he won’t even include this drop of moisture in his casting of me. Either way I don’t mind. The thought of their judgements creates no vulnerability in me. Funny that. It is easier, and by that I mean less riddled with anxiety, to expose myself completely in front of a stranger than those that I love. Or even, in this case, the painter. 

With him, it is only the search. The severe look of his eye defined by the gravity behind it. Those hollow pits are deceptive. I must be careful not to mistakenly talk of them as some sort of access towards what is within him, each depth nothing more in fact than the portal out. Carnivores, their arched brow and tight-lipped expression reflects the satisfaction with which they dine. That perceived hunger a coda for hidden mind’s attention paid. Yet their gaze landing upon me is not the bite of a maw, more alike sleek and honest touch. His fleshless searching felt all over, all at once. On canvas, his brush creates me, while his eyes spur a thought within me as if from another mind ‘Part of you recognises that you are being seen.’ I am laid bare. Some deep mollusc of identity within winces under the spotlight. More true for its submerged silence, yet abstract and foreign to I that am it. This exposure silences the constant rush that continually whispers, forcing it to take a breath from exciting itself into existence. Behind the noise I am starkly plunged into echoless depths. I am seen. What I am if I let go of all that I have been hiding under. In this expanse there can only be pause. Pause that I hold against, for I have no choice. To surrender to this silence now would be an acceptance of such totality that it would obliterate the idea’s idea of even having been at all. So I push back. What has been looked at in me begins to callous. As always, I adapt. But under such stares as his, this searing revelation happens again and again. With eyebrows, furrows and lids that shift in vague imitations of each other. Suddenly they pierce. That part of me knows again that it is being seen.

Yet, sitting here I do not feel the same raw sense that she brought out of me, that cutting and honest gaze which understands the anxiety behind the reaching. That is what it was like with her. An eternal unlocking. The freshness of each moment felt in her eyes. I will never be looked at like that again.

People would say that we are fortunate to have had what we had. Fortunate, literally to have good luck. The good luck of feeling spitting coals searing my intestines met with the cooling balm of her requital. But can it be good luck when these familiar anxious nerves that she brings up in me are tainted with horror? I am torn by the want to hide my secrets while simultaneously needing to shout them. To scream at him whether it is good fortune to have been dragged across the rocks and drowned? To have reached for that serenity, that sweet happiness that only flows from the blood of two hearts connected, and to have lost? For I have lost. But for a chance to reach at that, I would lose again and again and again. So I do not shout, I keep quiet because I have answered my own question. This is what good fortune is, to have seen your skin glow gold in the sunlight, to have felt your hand upon my chest and to have told you that I love you. Fading worlds, remembered in glimpses. 

But these intervals of intense sensation, of rooted and abysmal nakedness, share their existence with great fogs of dissociation. These fogs are numb shrouds that leak in like the blood slowly draining down my arm as I sit, posed. What begins at first as discomfort niggling on the verge of noticeability gradually seeps into a dull pain that can only be described as the desire to move. The arm sits propped but grows heavier and heavier, stillness now masking its struggle as its own weight becomes almost totally unbearable. Now the pain rings of inevitable end, that driving pain has surely been the one true onus preventing our species from suffocating under home grown malaise. It is an alarm that warns collapse is coming from the simple inability to keep ourselves upright without momentum. In these shrouds, I forget myself. I become distended from my current surroundings and left to wander the murky patterns of thought and memory. These are vapid and intransient transports diverging down impossible routes to lead me around and around. The dog gets sicker, the tail stays sickeningly out of reach. Then, just as a thought appears most familiar, it shifts to jar and offend in some new way. Like this, those tastes you savoured the most become cutting and bitter while the gloomiest mirrors of reality are brought to life as bright and dancing rays in the pools of your subjectivity. I cannot help but float, unmoored in this eternal lagoon. Lost in a moment that has tricked me into believing it is the real thing. It sings of truth better than reality itself and I have bought its song until I am lost amongst the sirens, not even sodden jetsam to keep me afloat.

Sitting on the train. Watching our reflections plunge into bright brick landscapes, soaring above congested streets. Then we surface, painted clearly by the plastic train light against the dark immediacy of black tunnels. Your arm linked in mine and head on my shoulder. We watch each other’s eyes in the glass until our spectres are drowned again against domestic edifices. We watch each other's eyes and regenerate in our shared silence. 

Then the brush is down. I rest my arm for a minute. Blood flows back, hot and full of life all the way to the tips of my fingers, and with it some threads of pain burn away any remnants of what are but dreams of moments past forever left behind.