Peteskibreen's Blog

Swiss Psychiatrist C G Jung is quoted as saying: “Solitude is for me a fount of healing which makes my life worth living. Talking is often torment for me, and I need many days of silence
to recover from the futility of words.”

In my studio I have a decrepit red megaphone constructed of cardboard and red craft paper with the inscriptions So Many Words, So Much Noise that I used for an exhibtion of drawings in 2017 at Jugglers Art Space. The exhibition also included a group performance piece at the opening event. The exhibition and performance title started out as Drawn to Silence but I changed it to Against the Flow of my Constructed selves as personal awareness evolved. Silence as escape. The performance centered around a prop I had built covered in old phone book pages – indicators of the wordy social constructs of my selves from “the cradle to the grave” – which eventually led to my disappearance into anonymity and silence inside the structure. My four silent protagonists of silence were first seen attempting to influence me to let go of the megaphone, to set down the “preaching teaching mode” as the symbol of my own pronouncements of what I had become under the constructs of education, religion and accumulation. In so doing to abandon drivenness in exchange for solitude, silence and stillness. My good friend and Hazara man and former Afghan refugee and detainee Sha Sarwari is seen in the following images gently and silently urging me to lay down my megaphone, that symbol of my “preaching, teaching mode”. Someone who has spent days at sea in an open boat to escape the atrocities of war knows something of “so many words, so much noise”.

With Jung and millions of others, I have realised for years now that I need hours and days of silence to heal from the futility of words. Whether my age or screen time or overwhelming relationship pressures of wondering backwards and forwards or more likely a combination of a host of impacts, silence in still quiet solitary places is always a healing prescription. Some advanced thinking professionals in Japan are now prescribing “Forest Bathing”as medicine. [ See In Pursuit of Silence below]

Drawings are emerging from my studio around this theme – Against the Flow of My Constructed Selves. The self portrait below – So Many Words* – is part of a series – 12 Epistles – that are a satirical take on religious icons and new testament stories .

The dyptitch following my self-portrait are the first of the 12 Epistles. Patrick White [ Saint Patrick ]was Australia’s first and only Nobel Prize for Literature awardee [1973] but he had another less newsworthy story highlighted in the late Bishop Bruce Wilson’s book Reasons of the Heart. It is there that Wilson, on sabbatical, recounts his chats and visits with White in his home in Sydney in the mid 1990’s where White tells of his epiphany experience after a fall in a muddy back yard feeding his dogs. It was in that moment, Wilson writes, that White knew and that God became real to him. This conversion – cf St Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus – was soon to be challenged by a far too narrowminded and fundamentalist Anglican vicar in Sydney to the point where White abandoned his “faith”.

Even though I have placed myself outside the 12 Epistles, my piece is as much about how words and the accompanying noise feed my and all of our being and becoming. Patrick White was who he was by the social constructs he was immersed in. Not entirely but significantly. Words make us and mold us to become who we are and how we speak or don’t speak, modulate or excite our behaviour and deeply influence our values. The impact of childhood cocoons – or their absence , capitalism, consumerism, education, religious frameworks and the media make us. As Picasso said of art by children “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up”. I am not advocating naivity or a non-relfective approach to being of course but that in this second half of life – or just in all of life regardless of our age – we need to foster and encourage others to foster an awareness fed by constant reflection that leads to a fearless and sometimes painfully slow rejection of eroding beliefs and suspect world views that are handed to us but that also leads us to a more restful and determined constant reimagining of living and life. And more silence, stillness and solitude.

So Many Words * Guache, ink, collage, red pencil, pages from 1950 edition of Rev Dr G Campbell Morgan commentary on the Gospel of Matthew.

Saint Patrick Monotype, collage, ink, guache, gesso on Japanese paper.

Saint Patrick [Icon] Graphite, red pencil, collage on Japanese paper.

* 12 Limited edition copies of this painting are available. Printed on 308 gsm Hahnamule Photo Cotton Rag Paper by Brisbane Digital Images. $175 + postage. Submitted as a self-portrait in the 2024 Art Gallery of NSW Archibald Portrait Prize. One of 1005 entries but unsuccessful as a finalist.