I DON'T WANT TO FIGHT ANYMORE

 

It's nothing in the big scheme of things, nothing at all, but I'm now painting, for the first time really, without using a photographic reference. It's just small black-and-white images of things I have in my head: misty shadows, dark corners,

hazy shafts of light, blurry night-time visions, translucent curtains in the evening sun, the memory of a passing car's headlamps filtered through the blinds and projected like a dream sequence onto the ceiling as I lay awake in the middle of the night, a lifetime ago. I don't think that I was insomniac as a child, but I vividly

remember marvelling at the things I could see at night, once the noise of the daytime had subsided and my eyes had become accustomed to the dark.  

 

Two things about black-and-white: in low light up to a certain threshold, such as in the twilight late at night or early in the morning, the human eye doesn't see colour, only monochromatic light. And the same is true, apparently, in the beginning of our lives: we only begin to develop colour vision about a week after our birth, before that everything, likewise, is monochromatic.

 

Undeniably these paintings are an attempt to excavate the holy, reconnect with something mysteriously meaningful beyond the supposed analytic clarity of daylight. I just try to go as far back as I can, paint the simplest images that come, be as sincere as I can, and think as little as possible while I'm doing it - leaving aside my usual diffidence, forgetting about the tyranny of technical perfection, all of that. I'll even claim that I'm trying to feel my way into these dreamlike images, follow my intuition, trust my instincts, all these things that used to elude me. And I tell myself that that is enough.

 

David Russon

April 2026