All of my senses at once

I came out of the Art Gallery of New South Wales this afternoon with all of my senses full.

I went in thinking I knew what art was. Oil paintings. Canvas. The kinds of things I had seen in the Louvre when I visited Paris alone, that particular experience of standing in front of something famous and trying to feel the right thing. I went in as a person who was beginning to educate herself in a field she was about to build in, which meant going in honestly, without pretending to know more than I do, without performing familiarity I have not earned.

What I found was so much larger and stranger and more varied than what I had assumed that I almost did not know how to process it.

Sculptures. Ceramics that looked like products you could eat. Videos. Fabrics. Mobiles. Sound. Things made from scraps that had been transformed into something I could not look away from. Textures that caught light in ways that made me want to reach out and touch the surface. Shadows that were part of the work. Colours so specific they seemed to have been chosen not just for what they were but for what they did to everything around them.

I have forgotten that art arrives in this many forms. That the word covers this much territory. That a ceramic bowl and a video installation and a greyhound painted in oils with a pink base layer bleeding through are all in the same conversation.

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I also felt out of my depth. I want to say that plainly, because it is part of the honest record of this beginning.

There were works I stood in front of for several minutes and genuinely did not understand. Not in the way where the meaning is just beneath the surface and a little patience brings it forward. In the way where I lacked the education to access what was being offered, where I could see that something was happening in the work but could not yet read the language it was written in.

That feeling of discomfort, of encountering something you do not yet have the tools to appreciate, is one I have felt at the beginning of every significant thing I have built. It is not a signal to retreat. It is the signal that you are in the right place. That there is something real here to learn, something that will take time and attention and the particular patience of staying in the unfamiliar until it becomes familiar.

I stayed. I went into the corners. I went at my own pace, which is one of the specific gifts of going alone, something I had forgotten since Paris. No negotiation about what to look at or for how long. Just me and the work, in whatever order made sense to me, for as long as each thing deserved.

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In the Sulman Prize room I found my favourite thing of the afternoon.

A painting of a greyhound on a chair. Large, confident, warm. But what stopped me was not the subject, it was the pink. The base layer of the painting, a warm, specific pink, had not been fully covered by the colours painted over it. It bled through. In the flowers, in the shadows, in the places where the paint was thinnest, the pink was still there, present underneath everything, giving the whole painting a quality of warmth I could not quite name but could absolutely feel.

I stood in front of it for a long time. And then I read the label and discovered it had won the Sulman Prize. I had chosen it on my own, without knowing. Something in the way it was made had reached me before I understood what I was looking at.

I keep thinking about why. About what the pink underneath was doing, not as a technical question but as an intuition about making things. 

I realised that the base layer matters even when it is not fully visible. That what you build on top of something is shaped by what was there first, showing through in the places where the later work is thinnest.

I think that might be the most useful thing I learned today. And I was not looking for it.

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I walked through the young artists' section of the Archibald competition on the way out. Children's work, made with the specific confidence of people who have not yet learned to doubt their own creative instincts. Bright, direct, full of colour, completely unself-conscious about the choices they made.

It reminded me of what I am trying to recover. Not the skill (I am building that) but the relationship to making. The willingness to put something down without knowing in advance whether it is right. The trust that the act of making is worth doing before the outcome is certain.

Day One of self-education. I went to a watercolour class this morning and a gallery this afternoon. I came home full; of colour, of texture, of ideas I have not finished thinking about yet, of the particular feeling of a person who has walked into a new territory and found it larger and more interesting than expected.

I am going back.

— Sabrina

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