There's an art, accidental or otherwise, to having a really good day, writes Steev Peyroux.
I sit back with a coffee, take a deep breath and exhale slowly. I surrender to a sense of timelessness and consider the problems of the canvas before me. I take up a brush charged with ochre-tinted white paint and start trying to establish a hazy atmospheric effect over textural rock forms. I'm attempting to transform something normal and static into something more spacious and mysterious.
It's not happening. I'm failing to represent the world as I see it, failing to achieve my goal. So I scrape the work back to its basic skeleton. Anxiety threatens to overwhelm me. I don't know what I'm doing.
I try to remember the calm inner state I created earlier and listen to the silence surrounding me. I start on the painting again, attempting to bring something into being out of the faint tones on the canvas. Try to coax it out.
Waiting for that first little sign of presence. Then, amidst my distracted thoughts, a happy accident happens. The way the paint begins to go on while I am thinking of something else makes the painting start to work, and suddenly it's happening. It is not what I intended, but here it comes. The hazy atmosphere rises effervescently to join with the tonal gradations of the cloud.
The haze falls like particles of light, veiling the contours of the rock. Forms emerge from the misty background like people in a dream. The outlines of the visual world begin to melt away and the language of painting becomes an end in itself, and that is the painting's unashamed and magnificent reason for being.
I'm alone. In the charged atmosphere of my studio sanctuary I make daubs, smudges and flecks. Just a faint shuffling in my ears, the rushing of my blood, as I work at peak intensity.
What I'm doing on the canvas is completely new and unexpected and yet it feels effortless, like I've always known it. It's the trace of myself. It's a powerful drug and suddenly I'm light-headed and light-hearted. I'm happy. I've surprised myself.
The following day I do the same thing again in the hope that I can get the ingredients right for the best day of my life to be repeated over and over again.
- Steev Peyroux is a Dunedin artist.
Tell us about your best day. Write to odt.features@odt.co.nz or ODT Features, PO Box 181 Dunedin. We ask correspondents not to nominate weddings or births - of course they were the best days.
