Who owns the work?

I put the brush down on my latest piece for Portals Divine a few days ago. It was going to be the last piece in the series, but even as I started painting it, I had the feeling something was still missing. Another masculine piece, perhaps…it’s still crystallising in my thoughts.

The latest work itself was intended to be something quite different. It started with multiple faces, which turned into a single face and multiple masks, and then, as I wrestled with the concept, became one man and one mask.

And then I watched a TikTok video.

The creator said, “Where did Pegasus go?” with an image on screen, and I thought: Oh. That’s what’s missing…A giant pair of wings.

I’ve been seeing a lot of religious art on TikTok lately and, I’m not going to lie, even though I’m quite possibly the biggest heretic on the planet, I love it. Most of it is pretty epic, and I’m seriously jealous of the artists producing the work. The sheer scale and luminosity of those paintings has totally pinged my radar. There are so many painters I greatly admire, and it seems bizarre that, in the grand scheme of things, very few people will ever have heard of them. Their paintings often contain stories that are immediately recognisable, whether it’s Archangel Michael kicking Lucifer’s arse or one of the many representations of the crucifixion.

My current body of work certainly borrows from what could be considered religious iconography. I’m not averse to the odd golden halo, as you may have noticed. But the addition of wings to the figure in this latest piece has, for me, a more divine than biblical meaning.

And that distinction matters…for me.

Already I’ve had comments on the new piece such as ‘Fallen Angel?’ and ‘Icarus?’ and that made me think about the range of potential meanings in art. I’ve seen a number of posts lately suggesting that artists should be explaining their work, and I’m reluctant to do that. Sure, I can give some context about what I was thinking or experiencing when I was working on a painting. What I don’t want to do is colonise someone else’s experience of encountering it. In fact, I think that is vital to the whole premise of Portals Divine. Yes, it’s a series. Each painting could quite easily stand on its own too. But it isn’t a neat narrative arc. There may be a beginning point and possibly even an end point of sorts, but what happens in the middle is messy…just as the journey towards the divine itself tends to be.

I can tell you there are two distinct strands running through it…a feminine one and a masculine one. I could probably hint at some kind of spiritual journey. But I’m not going to leave a set of instructions telling the viewer what they should, or indeed shouldn’t, get from each piece. Symbolism doesn’t have to come from a textbook to have meaning for the individual. Some symbols may carry an almost universally accepted narrative, but that doesn’t mean the narrative belongs to everyone.

Which raises another question…Who do we create art for?

I’m not talking about a commissioned piece with a tight brief and agreed parameters. I’m talking about what happens after an artist stands in front of a canvas…or whatever medium they choose…and creates from that part of themselves that seems to draw from the well of universal experience, then presents it to the world.

Who ‘owns’ the work then?

Is it still the artist? Or, for a few moments in time, does it belong to the person standing in front of it? Because if the artist has already explained what the work means, prescribed the symbolism and supplied the ‘correct’ interpretation, does the encounter simply become an intellectual exercise for both parties?

And then there is something else, and I suspect other artists will recognise this too. Sometimes we just paint an idea without delving deep into a concept, simply because we think it will look really fucking cool...And that’s it.

It may acquire a symbolic reading in the process and there may still be a clear visual language running through it. But someone may stand in front of it and find a meaning that I never consciously put there at all.

So sometimes the bottom line really is no more complicated than…

I made this. It’s cool…And now feel free to have your own encounter with it.

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