Patricia Cain is known for ambitious paintings which explore artistic perception through drawing. Her process is bold and intuitive; and to express it she has written a poem. Sometimes that is just what is needed.
Strange Wood
by Patricia Cain
In Self versus other
the routine is never square-on.
It’s more of a side-on thing.
That’s just how it is.
Inte/exte, a hint, a glimpse. A feeling that
slips out of sight again, whilst making way
for continuous re-approach.
…and then to start putting down:
Swab the decks and
establish a foundation
for self-awareness to disappear.
Faith before action - a probable gift -
underpins the bravado of engagement.
Down with the brisket and mulch and we’re away.
Balancing up means to remain askew,
out of kilter. So, I tip,
hang, suspend via the continuum.
Shiftings, triggers, betterments, pauses,
siftings.
Chalkiness versus the full fat of colour.
Unflowery and quite unimaginative.
E-merging
Me-merging
Salt-laying
Truth-saying
Pack-handling – no,
mercury-scooping
so that when I breathe in,
what is breathed out
is my balance.
Is that how I think?
Transfixed, transposed, trance-(un)aware.
I never should have started
carving out the artistic, autistic
in this absence with focussed intent.
In the mid-sense of togetherness,
many’s the level of speaking.
Many’s a reel of the circumferences
that fuels the tremor of my arc.
It makes my belly hurt,
being re-made through action.
Slips out of sight again.
Reconnecting through that sideways glance -
correlating, berating, syncopating.
Truth-sayer when I don’t want to be,
alone-ness that I don’t want to feel,
expression of high-brow when it unbecomes me.
Some palette of life to be born with.
Humping this cartel of actions,
the eventual detritus might be the killer-of-all.
So outwardly, outer-worldly,
it gives the sidelong squint a handsome face
by suffocating the part played by
‘not knowing what is beyond you’.
My own brand of heroism.
For God’s sake keep the explanation
routed in the act, because
that which is real finds
permanence in the act.
My treatise on obje/subje-ctivity
emerges through bounty and ritual.
No one can tell me what’s right
including me, because it is
what it is, was, happened.
Tell-a-viva. Muddle-headed.
Wide of the mark.
Curiously familiar.
Pitching usually.
All triptych, connected. Slighted,
parted. Thwarted. And still perched.
So, to snare others is chance: a miracle.
A conflux of circumstance: a meeting
outside my ken,
in a strange wood.
Independent of the place of origin.
Patricia Cain RGI NEAC ARWS PS PhD
April 2018
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| Languages that are made to die | pastel | 122cm x 147cm |
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