From Gardens Where We Feel Secure

…Is a hauntingly beautiful set of musical interludes by Virginia Astley I was introduced to by a friend whom I would have never known to enjoy such athmospherics. I was never one to judge a book by it’s cover but Luís Augusto Cid, or alferes Augusto as he was known to his friends - a young man who had been in the famous Portuguese Commando regiment and whom we all suspected of having joined the ranks of a foreign-legion type outfit and later found murdered in the streets of Algiers – caught me off-guard with that one. You can never be too sure where and how inspiration will find you.

Faced with the lethargy and the void that I felt around me in those early days in Brunei I stuck to the garden, tending to the trees and flowers if something took longer to dry or whenever I felt the need to distance myself from what I was working on to take a fresh look before moving on. It was not procrastination. After Berlin, where we had lived for one year before coming here and where it had not been possible for me to paint, I had no inclination towards procrastination. There were too many things I wanted to get off my chest and the way I usually solve such things is through painting.

Berlin – East Berlin – was still a dark place when we passed through, and Lichtenberg, where our meagre budget found us a flat while waiting to find out where we would be sent next, was still years away from getting the face-lift Mitte was undergoing or even becoming trendy. Weitlingstrasse, we discovered, was only a few blocks away - the infamous street where the Neo-Nazi movement had an HQ at number 122 and which was barricaded in the late 90’s to prevent the ‘Aussländer’ from getting back in.

Shaved heads in bomber-jackets and paratrooper boots patrolled the streets with their pitt-bull terriers and rotweilers, and I swear that I could feel the baseball bats tucked underneath their jackets. In the first few weeks after we arrived a little girl was abducted on her way home from school and another was mauled to death while playing in the park. That set the tone for me. Angst breathed down my neck. I could handle being bumped off my course in the street or being told ‘Verpiss Dich du Arschloch’, all I had to do was keep my head low and walk-on hoping for the better – this was no place for exalted egos – but I wasn’t about to let that spill onto my daughters.

There are worse predicaments in life, I'm not complaining. We had a home, the children were at school and my wife had a job. But I found it difficult to find the inner space and Time to even think of painting*. For a year I forgot that I was a painter. I didn’t feel like one. Not even when I visited the galleries on my walks around Friedrichstrasse and Oranienburgerstrasse or when I went in to see what was happening in Tacheles was I able to voice out loud that I was an artist – because I was unable to make myself paint I just couldn’t say it. This was what scared me most, not the surrounding conditions, but this unexpected feeling of impotence and of loss... 

In hindsight [I couldn’t quite see it while I was painting them] this may explain why the first set of paintings to emerge from my studio in Borneo were darker than usual, and anyone watching me go at them would be excused for not understanding where they were coming from or how they related to the seemingly peaceful surroundings of my garden studio. It was only when I had exorcized the demons and completed the series that they started to make sense and that, understanding where they belonged, I found titles for them.

The first of those paintings is titled ‘Berlin X [the sound of a neighbour shot dead – somewhere I heard but could not see]’. For many months before we left for Borneo this one particular image left a deep imprint in my mind: a bottle with a flower and a note (a new letter and a new flower each week) placed on the pavement in front of the house next-door where it all happened.

Beauty jumps at you from the most unexpected corners.

Berlin was a very creative place... all I needed was the time and the space to connect all the pieces. 

___________________________________________________

*At this time, too, other worries in other forms reached me from Portugal.

Heaven is a Place...

...a place where nothing, nothing ever happens.

I had heard it repeatedly said that nothing happened here and that it would be difficult to get anything afoot or sell my work. I could feel the void - I had no doubts about that - but I had difficulty accepting the notion that nothing could be done, that there was no Art, no artists or living cultural dimension to the place. I insisted in believing that maybe they just weren’t visible, or that the people telling me such tales simply didn’t have an appetite for these kind of things and therefore hadn’t looked in the right places, or for the right things.

I had never really given much thought to the effect absurd amounts of money can have on a society as a whole – I had never been this close to absurd amounts of money. Here, in the land of unexpected treasures, there are reminders of the absurdity of the amounts of money at hand at every street corner. Here, too, one more of my naïve preconceptions was brushed aside: absurd amounts of money do not necessarily promote a happy and more productive society with a greater focus on culture and the arts.

Money alone doesn’t do the trick, it merely lulls you to sleep. If there is no deep-rooted motivation for the appreciation of aesthetics or the joy of creation and what it can bring about, money only goes two ways – it either slips between your fingers or finds ways to multiply itself even further, but it will not, in and of itself, motivate higher culture. This was the biggest and most difficult paradox to accept – that I really had reached a cultural black-hole: a beautiful place which I had believed to be culturally rich but where, in spite of all its riches, nothing ever happened. It felt very much like Heaven in the Talking Heads song.

My first steps away from the studio in an attempt to assess the situation and devise a strategy, or at least a workable course of action, took me to the local framers. My framers have often been key allies and Michael Lim at Alley Framemakers in Kiulap was one of the most enthusiastic and supporting I ever came across. Most of the work one could see being taken to Alley’s were prints and posters brought back from weekend trips to London or NY, the odd photograph, mostly landscape, and an abundance of portraits of Royal-Family members waiting to be hung in households and shops throughout the land. There was very little in the way of what one might call Art - a few, very few, watercolours and the odd sketch or etching surrounded by members of the Royal family in various combinations, nothing more.

It was at the framers that I came face to face with the facts. I learnt that there was indeed no commercial art gallery in town and that the Brunei Arts Society was long since inactive, if not altogether extinct. There was a museum down by the river with a gallery but very little happened there aside from a biennial selection exhibition for the ASEAN Art Awards for which a handful of Bruneian artists showed up for the prize-money and the opportunity to travel beyond the enclave. But most of the time these circumstantial artists were happy to hang on to their government jobs at the museum or as teachers in local schools - the perks were too good to pass on and no one in their right mind could afford or would even contemplate living off their art, there simply wasn’t a market or any other sort of incentive. The combined Malay-Moslem mindset and the security of a government job do away with the desire to create art for the sake of art – of wishing to fly the trapeze without a safety net. Money stifles the creative spark and if you ever do get too close to absurd amounts, as I did here, you must discipline yourself not to march to the beat of its drum.

The information gathered was a starting point, not the brightest of perspectives, but information I could chew on nonetheless. In the meantime, and after a luckless first visit to the museum where I found very little happening and where the artists were nowhere to be found there was little else I could do except concentrate on my work.

Day in and day out I sat outside trying to capture the rain, waiting for inspiration to trickle down.

A Piece of the Puzzle

It is all very well that I should tell you about all this, but in your minds you probably still haven’t found the answers to the whys and the hows you’ve been asking yourself. Why is he here in the first place? How did he get here? A piece of the puzzle is missing.

In the 90’s, between ourselves, my wife and I juggled six jobs as life sped onwards in fast-forward, our babies growing quickly into not-so-little girls and the dreams we had for them decidedly not agreeing with the bills that had to be paid. My wife got the harder end of the deal, she worked half-days at a local school, half-days as a tourist rep and somehow managed to fit in an extra half-day working for Expo 98 during the six months that it went on. I was more fortunate - I translated books for a few Lisbon publishers and ran a gallery to help with the bills and still managed to keep things going on the painting front, but these were all things I enjoyed doing.

At some point, most fortuitously, in the midst of our comings and goings my wife came upon a small advertisement in the corner of a magazine publicizing openings for government jobs in Germany. We discussed the possibility, analysed things from all the angles we could think of and she even sent in her details, but we failed to act on it, we let time go by and allowed the mechanics of our sunny existence in Portugal to go on. It was only a few years later when the ministry followed-up on my wife’s initial application, asking if she was still interested in taking the admission’s test, that we felt that it would be unwise not to give it a try even if we still weren’t sure precisely what the job and the move entailed. Having established that the thrills of adventure outweighed the possible disadvantages we took the gamble and set out for Berlin where my wife joined the diplomatic corps being posted one year later in the Sultanate of Brunei.

There is some irony in this, a sense, too, of the inevitability of certain things – the impossibility of escaping particular patterns in one’s life. I grew up in diplomatic circles and studied to become one myself only to drop-out in my last year in Law-School to become an artist – a move that I felt liberated me from a course that, having been of my own choosing, felt increasingly not to be truly mine [especially in post-revolutionary Portugal and a rapidly shrinking world when diplomacy lost much of its mystique in favour of what I call ‘diplocracy’ in which true diplomats were subtly made redundant, replaced by technocrats and the wonders of IT communication].

Art gave me wings and a feeling, arrogant perhaps, of having taken the reigns of my life back into my own hands. I believed that I had managed to escape from the conveyor-belt on which I had been trapped and moved along for so many years as if in sleep, and to finally awaken and DO – to reshape and redirect my life through new conscious action towards a different ME. But for how long can you keep up conscious action? How long before that too finds its way back into the mechanic drone of everydayness that inevitably wraps us up in the end?

In the first years after leaving that other life behind I was at times assailed by doubt, not the hindering kind, but there were thoughts in my mind, conjectures of what it might have been like to live it out, and what kind of person I would have become. How can you ever be sure that moving away from what you are isn’t actually running straight into the pitfall fate has laid down for you all along – and that staying on course, for once, would have been victory. Had I really taken the reigns of my life into my hands or had I given up on a promising career and succumbed – brought down once more by the downward pull of human nature – to a condition of dilettante mediocrity?

To this day I take some comfort in the belief that the Life-energy and joy I get out of creating Art and being exposed to the public’s response are indicators that the move was not completely misguided. Not an easy move, mind you, never an easy move, but one that makes me feel much more alive than when I contemplate myself in the parallel world I still find myself revisiting in my mind every now and then. Life on this side of the tracks still feels very much like an adventure I don’t wish to know the end to. And then there are all the ideas, knowledge and understanding of things I came across and gained and that I know full-well I would never have had the time or disposition to investigate or live as profoundly as I did had I decided to stay on course.

And so, finding myself so close again to aspects of that other life through my wife’s new job, I can’t help but feel fate’s mockery over my childish attempts to free myself from its claws.