Synthesism

Every craft form is a new way of seeing. A method of producing new thoughts.

When I paint (crudely as I do), I find things I cannot write, not because the words are missing, but because the thought hasn't existed yet. It is made in the act of mixing colour, in the particular resistance of a brush. Then I write back to the painting, and something crosses over. A residue. That crossing is the art.

I paint. I write. I work wood, make music, throw clay. Partially out of restlessness, but also because each form opens a room the others cannot enter, and I enjoy wandering the passages between them.

Synthesism is that passage.

It does not propose that all forms become one. It proposes that they remain distinct, in conversation, each one changed by proximity to the others. The poem that answers the painting is not the painting in words. It is something that could not have been reached directly.

The medium is not neutral: oOil thinks differently to language; wood thinks differently to sound.

To practise across forms is to multiply the kinds of thinking available to you — and to discover, at the intersections, what you could not have thought alone. This is not virtuosity, and it is not breadth for its own sake, but a belief that to make something in one form is to create a question, and that the answer may only be findable somewhere else.