Things I learnt in April

I sat down to write a list. I wrote this instead.

In 1980, the artist Agnes Martin cancelled her retrospective at The Whitney in New York because the museum insisted on a catalogue.

Martin believed art wasn’t made to be read, but to be felt.

The paintings were the thing.

The paintings, and the emotional response they stirred in the viewer.

They needed no explanation.

Reading this, in Olivia Laing’s Funny Weather, I couldn’t help but smile.

Because I’ve always hated explaining my art.

I hate the question, What kind of art do you make?

I hate writing the ‘about’ section of a new collection.

I even hate having to title a piece Untitled.

For years, I struggled with it. The describing, the captioning, the justifying.

But I accepted it as part of the job. Something that just had to be done, even if it took me a month to write one paragraph.

But reading about Agnes Martin, I felt a tingle of recognition.

And I realised—maybe it doesn’t have to be done.

Looking back, I think I’ve spent years wrestling my instincts.

Trying to do things the way I thought I should.

I think that’s where the struggle often lives.

The fighting against yourself.

I think that’s why I love reading about artists, like Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Because they seem so unashamedly themselves.

Georgia O’Keeffe became fixated on a door in a wall in a farmhouse in New Mexico. She spent a decade trying to buy the farmhouse.

And once she did, she painted that same door over and over again, on canvas.

‘I’m always trying to paint that door – I never quite get it,’ she said. ‘It’s a curse the way I feel – I must continually go on with that door.’

Today, I sat down to write Things I Learnt in April.

Instead, I wrote this.

Maybe what I’m learning is that instinct isn’t something to fight.

It’s something to follow.

JYK 🤍