dry grass singing

on the fringe

"Did you like art lessons when you were in secondary school?"
"We drew lots of chillies..."
"You mean you didn't do O Level Art?"
"No. But i've always had friends who were artists."
"Maybe that's because you find you can relate to them."

(a snatch of a conversation with an artist colleague)


This is partly an elegy to the art education i never had.

At the age of 10, i bought myself a sketchbook. Its pages danced in bright pastels - cool turquoise, sunshine yellow, tropical-palm-green - and i used it to draw pencil sketches, painstakingly copied from beginners' How-To books. i can still remember the woody scent of the blue 2B pencils and the textured feel of drawing quick short pencil-lines against the barely-there grain of the sketchbook paper. With a child's earnestness i taught myself to vary the depth of the shadows cast by the mugs, pots, vases and bowls that marked my first tentative efforts. i learnt how to create (what i thought were) subtle gradations of light and shade with the flat of my thumb, developed a connoisseur's taste for the different brands of pencils and erasers, found a real (though undoubtedly childish) pleasure in reproducing the shapes of the objects i chose to portray.

This brief childhood affair with Serious Art ended when i tried, in a bout of artistic hubris, to draw a sketch of Denmark's famous 'Little Mermaid'. It was done on paper the colour of an impossibly aquamarine sea. After carefully detailing each ebony curve, each strand of jet-black hair, i showed the drawing proudly to my mother, expecting nothing less than fulsome praise for my most ambitious piece of work thus far. She took one look at it, and laughed. "The breasts are wrong." i was so humiliated i immediately tore out the drawing and balled it into the wastepaper basket, together with whatever artistic aspirations i'd harboured up till then.

But childhood dreams never die - they just metamorphose into private enthusiasms whose roots may or may not be remembered as time does its daily work of erasing the incidents that don't matter and colouring over those we'd rather forget or want to preserve. So it was with a start that i realised, almost two decades later, how art, and the people who make it, have sounded an ever-present groundbass in my life, one no less significant, though less conspicuously audible, than that formed by music. Unbelievable that i'd never noticed this before. After all, the evidence was there for all to see: my early acquaintance with the Renaissance Greats (at the age of 10, i was one of the few among my classmates who knew that Leonardo, Raphael, Donatello and Michaelangelo were more than just heroes in a half-shell wielding weapons with vaguely sinister Japanese names); the string of artist-type close friends who've walked in and out of my life; the happy afternoons spent wandering alone through art galleries in London; even (and this really blew my mind away, because i'd never seen the resemblance) my art-collector father with his cabinets full of paintings by various Old School Singaporean and Chinese artists.

Since September last year i've once again been skirting the fringes of the floating world. This time, though, in the company of a bona fide Artist who knows the ins and outs, whos and wheres, of the art circle in Singapore. It's a fascinating, fantastic, frightening place where people never seem to grow old and where, it seems, anything really goes. Electronic noise, performance art with imaginary toilet bowls and white cotton knickers, crystalline landscapes drilled in perspex... Sometimes i wonder, To what end? What does all of this have to do with anything that really matters? i think of the art world as analogous to the Land of Faerie so beloved of writers like Keats and Neil Gaiman (both Romantics with a Dark Side). Both are worlds where beauty matters deeply, but where that beauty can be, as Yeats put it in another context, a terrible beauty - one that exacts a terrible cost. And like the Land of Faerie, the art world can be dangerously beguiling, drawing our attention away from the real world of real problems that require real solutions.

So i stay on the edge, taking tentative little forays into this strange place where i feel strangely at home, yet never staying for long. And i look at the people who inhabit this world, and admire their courage. Zai, his wiry boyish frame belying the dark origins of his art; Dawn, bubbly leaper-over-of-auditorium-seats; Victor, his eyes blind behind his RayBan shades; Charmaine, who was late for school because she was picking mushrooms; Donna, braving red-tape and bureaucratic bullshit for the sake of what she believes in. All these people have shown me different ways to be, hitherto unimagined in workaday Singapore. And though i know i'll probably never have the guts to choose as they've chosen, do what they're doing, it is good to know that they are there, carving out spaces for themselves and for all those who need them.

posted by eothen @ 11:14 PM