The Ocean Painting 2

I am with a middle-aged woman, we are guests in someone else’s house: she is quite large, motherly, but insecure too and seeks my advice.

She tells me she paints: it is something she does on “her own, unrecognised” and has “no outlet for her work”. I remember she has shown me a painting the day before - a colourful abstract piece it was ok but not amazing.

She pulls out another recently completed painting; it is morning time and we are outside, I feel fresh and bright in the early light. Her husband is there too and he watches us mutely.

I hold her painting and look into it: a small picture of a grey stormy ocean, oil on canvass board. I find myself becoming absorbed in the tumultuous sea, rolling with the waves and cast about by the wind. I sense and see rocks rising up out of the water, jagged primal forms: I become the beginning of time, the emergence of land.

I recognise in the work a memory of my own work, a picture that I painted when I first returned to college as a mature student in 1996. My painting was huge: a blue and red sea crashing against rocks, a giant orange globe spinning and throbbing in a psychedelic sky. It was quite abstract and dramatic and it tried to express the beginning of time.

What impresses me with her painting is that it doesn’t try to do anything – it simply is.

I tell the woman how much I like the picture, because it is so real. She is pleased but tells me she is frustrated: she wants to know how can she get her work ‘out there’, how can she earn a living from this. I sense that this question has something to do with her pride.

I start to tell her of the things she can do – she can buy the Artists and Writers Yearbook, which lists greetings card manufacturers who will print her work. Or she can subscribe to the arts magazine ‘a-n’ which has lots of opportunities for exhibiting.

But as I tell her all this I wonder in my soul ‘how would this beautiful painting translate into a greetings card? Wouldn’t it’s magic be lost?’ I feel uncertain about the opportunities that I am trying to ‘sell’ to her and my voice sounds hollow as I speak.

Is it possible I wonder to translate her beautiful painting into a commercial product without losing its essence?

I climb into a car with her and the (still silent) husband. We begin the journey home though I realise as I gaze at the scenery passing by that I don’t know where this is.