Thoughts on flourishing

Thoughts on ‘flourishing’ by Gavin Blench

Louise asked me to reflect on ‘flourishing’, and write some words and show some images that unpack what that concept has meant in my own lived experience and artistic practice. To tackle this, I thought it best to choose a couple of paintings or drawings and talk about my practice through them as a lens through which to view the theme.

My practice is born out of a hard-won determination to change the dialogue that could define my journey with my disease, (even the word ‘disease’ speaks of something that’s not right. I have to reaffirm that I am alright). That change has certainly been a journey into and an expression of, flourishing.

When I first got my diagnosis I was introduced properly to the dancing partners of ‘loss’ and ‘pain’ and the notion of decline. My condition was progressive right from the start. Knowing one day it would kill me, suddenly made me face my mortality but more specifically, it was the inevitable road that would lead toward that reality that also impacted. It could be in months or years that I would be bed-bound, there was not a clear prognosis.

What was clear, was that my form of MS is comparatively rare (about 10% of people who have MS) and there were no disease modifying treatments. So, it was up to me to impact the speed and nature of that journey onward. At this moment of diagnosis there was a choice that life presented me: as a life form, will I flourish? or will I diminish? Art and creativity have been the tools I have used to navigate that journey, and that have given me the means to flourish.

What also became clear to me was that this would be the last chapter of my working life. It’s a place that each one of us will come to at some point. And what is more, many of us will be disabled at some point. If you are reading this, I hope that for you it will be in your old age; decline is just a reality we will all face. Probably we will all be injured, we will all deal with hurt. So, the question for me is “what do I want to do with the time that I have left?”. If my day-to-day activity has definition, what will that look like? what is it fashioned with? Things flourish not outside of the conditions that they exist in, but out of them, out of the s**t that through careful attention becomes the compost from which new life grows.

My art making, my painting comes through the movements of my physical body. A declaration that I am here. I live in a flawed body, we all do to some point, on a spectrum that we call “health” that we call “well-being”. My paintings and my drawings come from the intention that comes from that broken vessel we all sail in. Time does that to all physical things, at different rates, that erosion. Until it can no longer hold that spark of life we all carry.

Starting to live with MS felt like being punched into a corner, but there was an opening that I found there, the choice to forge intention with the rest of the time I had left. Part of not being knocked to the ground is having something to fight back with, but also an honest acceptance of my condition, not a toleration.

To look at a painting is to look at a record of activity that happened in a chunk of time, the trail of which is a presence of a person’s proximity. I want my paintings to reflect that ‘making in time’. There is an interplay between flourishing and diminishing that takes place in front of a canvas. There is a beautiful physicality in holding a brush and laying down ‘stuff’, that stuff of paint, carries with it a flavour of colour, texture and light.

I see my artistic practice as my body translating to the viewer the places I have absorbed through my body. Some of which is expressed as direct movement as a response to a landscape. The first image is from a series of drawings I made as recording my attempts to stand upright. I built an extension that came out from my torso that held a brush pen that could make the marks of the movements of my body as I stood, until I could stand no more, until it buckled beneath me.

So, in some ways the drawing represents a failure; part of my lived experience has been to be more comfortable with the concept of failure. I can never walk as far as I want to, I often fall over, struggle with the physical environment around my body. I sometimes p**s myself in public; none of these things are comfortable and could easily create shame, trauma and a huge erosion of “well-being”.

What I do in the studio stands as a record of my ability to go way beyond this trauma and shame. In the present moment, when I am painting and drawing, I am thinking of nothing else, I am immersed in the movements and images that result.