‘I know where you are coming from’.

If I hear this is a group therapy context, I’m expecting it to be followed up either by a version of – let me tell you about my own experience – or – but I think you’ve got it wrong here. It’s a statement of solidarity and a permission to disagree at the same time, which could be seen as another version of family: People who know the most about you, who can be on your side and also oppose you.

Our language is awash with geographical metaphors used to convey often complex emotions and interactions. I’m increasingly pondering the “geographical’ in that sentence, having spent years of talking and writing about internal landscapes. I’ve always been focused on the emotional content, but now I’m taking the actual physical terrain more seriously.

I’m wondering about our earliest experiences of place, and the ways in which we attach to/detach from this place. There’s no easy correlation, as in people born by the sea always want to get to the coast, or those whose first years were spent in high rise flats love climbing mountains. But I believe that there are influences; that the impact of place is never erased, however subtle or hidden. Perhaps rather than attach to a location that can be described in terms of contours and features, we resonate with the mood of a place? So how  do we ascribe a mood to a place ?

Colour and light immediately come to mind. Beyond any simplistic associations – cheerful yellows, angry reds, gloomy greys and so forth – colour plays upon, expresses and creates emotion. In a recent tribute to Howard Hodgkin, Colm Toibin writes,

 ‘There was no colour in his work, he emphasised, for its own sake; he was not involved in making decoration. Nor did he allow colour to stand for some generalised set of emotions or experiences. He always thought of himself as a representational painter. The paintings arose from precise occasions, precise emotions, from a memory, something very specific and personal.’ (The Guardian 11.03.17 )

 Colour is for serious artists.  I describe myself as someone who is ‘not good with colour’, but that is a sentence, like the one that precedes it, which is too glib for comfort. I like greys – and blue-greys, green- greys, brown-greys and even yellow-greys. Why?

There are many possible factors, but the one that I am thinking about here is childhood landscapes of the Thames estuary. I remember it as muted, overcast, and yes, mainly grey! I’m not sure if it is a landscape that I am ‘attached’ to, but I do feel that its colours have seeped into me somehow. In my sketches I have periods where I consciously try to use vibrant, noisy colour – but I always either blot it away or just don’t like the end result. Colour and place are entwined. I’m not at home in hot vibrant noisy places any more than I am drawn to hot vibrant colour.

Psychotherapy enables us to go beyond our early programming, but reminds us that certain aspects of ourselves are foundational. I’m thinking that also applies to the way we respond to and use colour. It can connect us to the geography of our lives and that of our preceding generations, and it can introduce us to new ways of appreciating the current places that we and others inhabit. So to challenge the idea that I am forever entranced by greys, here are a few of my latest lino prints. You may know where I’m coming from, but look where I’ve got to!