Awhile ago I painted a small figure inside a lightbulb. Her eyes are closed and her arms are open, and from the waist down she is coming apart into a slow fall of gold and black that drifts down through the glass. And the whole bulb is held, cradled from below in a pair of hands that carry all of it, the figure and her coming-apart together. I showed the painting to people with no title and no word about what it meant, only to see what they would do with it on their own, and they did something I still think about. They gave it a dozen names. One saw hope. One wrote the single word incandescent. Somebody wrote remember to recharge your light. Somebody else read it as being a woman in 2026, an idea squeezed for its credit while she is caged. One simply wrote we all shine on. Not one of those was the reason I painted it, and every single one of them was true.
That is the whole of what I want from these. I call them the Small Narratives, and I do not explain them, because the moment I tell you what one is about I have taken it away from you. I would rather set a scene, get everything just quiet enough, and then hand it over. What you find in it is yours, and it is allowed to be nothing like mine.
Not one of those was the reason I painted it, and every single one of them was true.
Small enough to hold in one hand
The originals are small, about ten centimetres by six, the size of a card you could close your hand around, and I have never thought of them as nine separate pictures so much as one storybook with its pages scattered. Many of them began as a game, a strange dreamlike image dealt out on a card and the little story I found waiting inside it, painted down before it could get away. Most of them sit on black, though the black in them was never darkness or sadness to me. It is only contrast, the held breath that lets a colour finally be seen.
The ones people give
Because I leave them open, they end up belonging to whoever holds them, and that, more than anything, is why they have quietly become the paintings people give to one another, a small world a person can walk their own life into. I made Spoor for a baby who was being born. It is a single black footprint, a real small foot, held in the middle of a whole galaxy of colour, thousands of little hand-dropped dots in every pink and orange and blue there is. The footprint is the one dark shape in all of it, the space she has come to fill, and the painting is only trying to tell her that everything is already here and everything is possible, and she has only to take a step to have it. Learn, but lead.
And then there is Still Falling, which came from a harder place, and about that I will say only what the painting says. Coloured drops fall through the dark, dozens of them, each one crackled like a piece of broken glass with the light caught in its fractures, and not one of them ever lands. It is always falling and it will never stop falling, and that, to me, is the beauty of it, because the thing that is gone is still moving, still here in the fall.
A feeling, and the rest is yours
The others each hold a single feeling and leave the rest to you. In The Watcher a tiny figure stands at the edge of a cliff under an enormous white moon, the whole world laid out below in dense blue and silver pattern, hills of dots and chevrons and scales with one pale road winding away through them, doing the thing you do when you finally stop and simply look, until the quiet arrives. What are they watching? That is for you to decide. In Our Life Pictured two small figures sit close together on a bench on a hilltop, a little house behind them with smoke rising from the chimney and the moon huge and white at their backs, the roads forking away in pale ribbons through fields of teal and green and plum. Its other name was Somebody's Home, and the feeling of it is trust.
And in Making Light, the first of all of them, a girl lifts a camera to her eye in the dark while pale eyes watch her from the corners of it, and the only light in the whole painting is the light she is making herself, a warm starry beam thrown out of the lens toward something worth seeing. She is not looking at the eyes. She is looking at the beauty, and making just enough light to see it by.
There are more of them still. A grey bowl cracked and mended along every seam with gold, spilling over with glossy coloured spheres that lift up out of it into the dark while a few dull grey ones sit forgotten on the table. A temple at night at the top of a long white stair, monks climbing it in robes speckled like galaxies, each face caught at a different moment of waking, all of them in the held breath before the bell. A sorceress with her eyes closed among shelves of glowing bottles, each one cracked like old glass, and a single small label on one of them that reads, simply, now. Each waits the same way, holding its feeling out to you, letting you decide what it is about.
A storybook that never closes
They were always meant to be read together, a storybook you assemble a page at a time, and I have noticed that one of them on a wall has a way of becoming three, the pages finding each other. And this book will never close, any more than the cabinets will. The Small Narratives come straight out of my sketchbooks and my sudden feelings, and I mean to keep setting them down on paper for as long as I am here, so the story only ever grows. Each begins as an original watercolour barely bigger than a playing card, and comes to you as an archival fine art print on Hahnemühle German Etching, in a few sizes to fit the wall you have in mind. Come and read them, in whatever order you like, in the Small Narratives, and see which one turns out, in the end, to be about you.