Long before there were museums, people built whole rooms they called cabinets of curiosities, and filled them with every wonder they could lay hands on. Things grown in nature and things made by hand, the familiar and the carried-back-from-far-away, art and animal and instrument and oddity, all crowded in together in a single room. Nothing in them was tidily filed. A thing earned its place by being rare, or strange, or beautiful, and nobody told you how to read it. They were rooms you wandered in, free roam for the mind, a whole world gathered into one place so that a person could stand in the middle of it and try, for a moment, to hold all of it at once.
That is exactly the kind of room I make, and I make one for every year of my life. I call them the Cabinet of Small Worlds, and each is a small world built to keep a single year, with its memories and its colours, the events and the jokes and the lines I did not want to forget, and an enormous amount of slow, dedicated time. Making one is how I remember a year, and reflect on it, and keep it, and when it is finished the whole year sits in front of me, small enough to hang on a wall and deep enough to fall into.
A diary you can fall into
Because each cabinet is a diary of its year, it quietly holds the paintings I made that year, shrunk right down and set inside it, so my whole shop is in there if you look, hung small in little frames or standing among the bottles like objects you could lift off a shelf, some no bigger than a fingernail. And it is not only the paintings. Every colour means something, every leaf, the labels on the bottles, the titles of the books, the pictures tucked inside the pictures, each one an actual memory or an actual feeling I set down on purpose. It is an entire book of stories on a single wall, and I still find new things in my own every day, because I am the one who painted them.
There are details I will never point out to you, because finding them is the whole pleasure. My favourite of all is in Green Cabinet. Two children, no taller than a few millimetres, are walking up a path toward a bright opening in the dark, going in to find a garden. It is the secret garden as I have always felt it, the hidden place children push into to see what is waiting there, and of everything I have ever painted those few millimetres are the ones I love most. Most people stand in front of that cabinet for an hour and never see them. You might.
Two years, and two ways in
There are four of them in the shop, and they do not all work the same way. Two are whole years. Invictus is the first, and it is painted on black. The black behind everything is a single pigment, an ivory black made from charred bone, one of the oldest still made the old way, and it dries so matte it reads like a hole in the wall. That darkness is the bed the colour detonates against, and the whole painting is really about exactly that, the way you need both sides, the dark to let you see the colour and the colour to make the dark sing. I wrote the poem I lived in that year straight into the shelves, and I painted the whole thing in a single month of December, with the first honey watercolours I ever owned, so it is the festival of those.
Green Cabinet is the other year, made about two years later, and it is the green one, a cabinet that nature has taken over, full of life. Green is life. You can watch it happen inside the painting. Low down the shelves are still neat and labelled and in order, and then the green climbs in from above and takes everything, until the cabinet all but disappears under it. There is one shelf where you can see the exact moment I stopped outlining and let the whole thing go wild, a plant copied from a pillow I love. I carried that painting from February to November, at the happiest I have been.
The other two are not new years at all. Green Lush and After Rain are a pair, made side by side, and both are ways of climbing right inside Green Cabinet and looking closer. Green Lush is a zoom into its overgrown top, opened up and entered until there are no shelves left, the cabinet still under there somewhere but grown clean over, and I love not knowing what is under there. It hangs like an evergreen kept next to you, alive and never quite finished, and some days I think it might live on its own at night and grow, and be a little different in the morning. After Rain is its twin, a second zoom, this time into the shelf of mushrooms, because mushrooms come up best after rain. This is the one you step inside, where the leaves close over you and hide you and you become part of it. It is the lightest thing I have made and it carries none of my life in it, these are just mushrooms, full of small things that are precious for no reason except that you found them, the way a rock you pick up as a child is the most valuable thing in the whole year and comes home in your pocket. A single warm peach-red flower sits at the centre of Green Lush, the place the whole painting takes a breath, and I painted that same flower into After Rain, so the twins speak to each other across the wall.
Why I keep the old room
The old rooms of wonder did not last. As the world fell in love with patterns and systems, the strange and the rare were demoted to mere vulgar exceptions to the order of nature, things to glance past on the way to the rule. I think that is exactly the wrong way round. The detail that refuses to fit is the one worth looking at hardest, and it is the one I will always paint. The whole of Wildcabinet is my own room of that kind, an ever-growing one, where I keep everything I find worth keeping, to understand it, or to love it, or only to have it near, and my way of keeping a thing has always been to paint it.
Living with one
To hang one on your wall is to keep a small piece of that old room, a whole world of your own to disappear into whenever you like. I still get lost in mine, turning up a reference I had half-forgotten I hid, and a cabinet never gives itself up in a single look, which is the whole pleasure of it.
Each one is the original watercolour, and an archival fine art print on Hahnemühle German Etching, square, anywhere from twenty to sixty centimetres across. Come and look closely. Start in the black of Invictus, walk into the green through Green Lush and After Rain, or stand back and take in all four together in the Cabinet of Small Worlds. Then keep looking, because there is always more in there than you found the first time.