And everything else is literature…
Growing up, I was a pretty bookish child: I spent a big part of my childhood with my nose in a book. Children books at first, but from my early teens onwards, I was devouring books way beyond my years. At that time I read a lot of classic French literature, and contemporary British and American authors, but I was also really into poetry, reading it, talking about it, and occasionally writing it (very badly).
My love of drawing was also a constant through this time. I drew at home, I drew at school, in art class of course, but also during other lessons, to the great annoyance of my teachers, who thought I wasn’t paying attention. I am not sure when this obsession with drawing turned into a love of visual art (beyond admiring the technical skills of painters or photographers). I think it gradually seeped in through my teenage years, partly as I honed my own technical skills and developd my knowledge, and partly under the influence of my literature and music heroes. By the time I had to choose a subject for university, art had won over: I pushed aside childhood dreams of becoming a doctor and applied to go to art school.
The other great passion of my teenage years, overwhelming, destabilising, but also intensely satisfying was music. I built myself up through the musical crushes that I developed in my teenage years, and through the friendships I made with other music fans.
As I moved into my grown-up life, music remained the constant in my life. I still went to gigs regularly (but less frequently than before) and music remained an important way of connecting with old and new friends, even if I devoted less time to learning about it and discovering new artists. My interest in visual arts, however, took a step back. I still loved it, and still went to exhibitions and read art books occasionally, but for many years my own creativity was dormant. As for literature, it ebbed and flowed. Poetry was the first casualty of this (although my interest in song lyrics probably stemmed from the same part of me for whom poetry had meant so much?), and I went through phases of reading many novels, and then phases of not reading at all.
When art crashed back into my life a few years ago, it was through a hole created by some personal events, but it also followed a period where my musical world started to change and expand again. As if, by opening up to new artists in one discipline, I opened the door wide for other disciplines to come back to the fore too, and in turn this reawakened my own creativity. A few years into this new life, and all these teenage interests are reactivated. I read more than I have in years ( and recently, poetry a lot more than novels), I absorb art every day, I am still obsessional about music…
And my own practice feeds on all of these art forms in different ways. The more narrative mediums, like novels or films, feed the stories of my imagination, and certain song lyrics do too. The imaginary landscapes and stories in my mind were all kindled in the universes of others and the stories they tell.
But there is something else, another dimension to it: Visual art, poetry and music sometimes reach a different place, and feed into something very different, much more primal and instinctive. They break me down, they capsize and captivate me, like an arrow to the heart or an obsessive thought. This punctum is still what I look for in all the art I consume, and the motivation behind the art I create: this flaw, this accident, the detail that can change everything.
Sometimes the stage is set for dancing…