I am grateful to the mechanical workings of bone, tendon and muscle that enable me to move my head and look up at the world. I am in awe of the way my eyes can process a scene and it's interesting to see that biologists and physicists can explain, so competently, how this is possible. Looking up, however, isn’t just an accomplishment of moving parts. My body is not a machine, it is unpredictable, soft and restless.  My eyes don’t collect data like a camera, for a specified outcome or project; the purpose is mysterious, the process chaotic, messy – and it is a wonder.

 

All the disciplined artistry of the most talented filmmakers are obliged to filter their visions through a hard lens. And then, all the tilting angles, all the sweeping vistas and collaged perspectives must, in the end, endure the constraints imposed by the fixed view of a static, rectangular screen. This is second-hand, compromised vision, but my eyes get the virgin view, the ‘live feed’; an uncut, 360-degree, surround-sound spectacle.

 

In an essay a few years ago I noted: ‘Perception and the imagination attend to the vertical, visual field with hope, anticipation and curiosity. The rewards (and disappointments) can be immense, and consequently, looking down isn’t half so exciting as looking up.’ 1

 

I am reminded that when I wrote that, I was musing on the idea that Painting is an inevitable consequence of being alive, of being human. I reasoned that if looking up is as functionally inseparable from being, as my foot feels functionally inseparable from my leg, then paintings will get made, just as steps will get taken.

 

I might look up on a whim or because of a need; sometimes there is no reason I can truthfully provide, and once the decision is made, there‘s a distinct lack of awareness of a plan for how to go about it. A lot is hidden by instinct and the speed at which things occur.

 

What I do know, is that I am built to look up/down/around/in - choose your own adverbial preposition. I most willingly absorb the panoramas and the peripherals, the foci and all the haze there is to be had. Human ‘on-auto’, I suppose, but a dispassionate experience is inconceivable. As long as I have this moving, feeling, thinking body, all my senses will collaborate to explore a material and labyrinthine world. The never-ending task of calculating it, making sense of it, is made more difficult by the inheritances of culture and convention, of habit and personal judgement.

 

It seems inevitable that looking up will generate yet more reason to look up. New ‘objects’ for our attention will get made, whether we profit from the bounty or not. Look up and you might speak to a stranger on the bus. Look up and you may have a fight with your boss, give money to a busker, perhaps, make a baby... Sometimes looking up results in the making of a painting.

 

When making anything in the material sense, it is worth remembering that the Earth weighs exactly the same as it always did (minus the space-station and all the satellites; plus the odd meteorite and the moon rocks collected in the 60’s) so our only option is to re-arrange what is already here. It is therefore quite a striking thought that Tess Jaray has re-arranged paint, wood and canvas to make ‘One Hundred Years Purple’ (page 23) and that Morrissey & Hancock re-arranged what is already here, to make such a thing as ‘Rotational Drawing’ (page 21). These paintings don’t cause the Earth to be heavier, but our world is enlarged none-the-less.