If one is told that the man next door has been poisoned, or that someone has been run over in the street, one tries to behave decently but the real instinct is to get back to the studio and the brushes to make sense of these events.
Frank Auerbach, 1987
For a writer, substitute keyboard for brushes …
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I guess it’s what we’re all about, poets, painters, composers, sculptors, dancers: processing experience and making sense of life. I’ll never forget the Jackson Pollock ‘Blind Spots’ exhibition at the Tate Liverpool last summer. I thought I knew Pollock from his drip paintings. So did my partner Maureen. How wrong we were! The paintings from his black period seemed to shriek a tortured narrative, ring discordant, jarring notes. It was almost too much to take in. Almost a sort of artistic synaesthesia.
Best,
Paul
Yes, the Pollock show was interesting; another side of a sometimes conflicted man.