I spent years painting intricate patterns trying to explain the way I heard cicadas speaking to each other, or, singing really. Because I heard them as a whole. Together they expanded a net through the trees, they filled the forest. I walked back and forth beneath the trees, learned how to turn them on and off – the cicadas that is (they’re shy). I learned their patterns, I learned to distinguish between different songs from different species. I learned the roundness of a song emitted from a single point outward and the spiral collapsing as its song ended. Learned to angle my head in the direction to find them. Because if you point your ear canal in the exact right direction, the shape of the sound changes.
I learned the disturbance of the ground, their transparent husks, the cyclical stops and starts, the scars on the trees, then the smell of decay – life as it were.
I spent years painting the soundprint of cicadas because I was chasing patterns. I had painted many paintings in college. All types of paintings. My teacher told me if she lined them all up, she could convince someone that a different artist created each. But there is one that spoke to me long after the others went quiet. It was a repeating pattern of perpendicular lines up-down, side-side, overlay, clash. Concentrated in the middle, feathery on the sides. It was the painting no one thought I could paint.
I was chasing patterns, but I didn’t know it. I was chasing the feeling of seeing patterns. After a trip to the Tate Modern, I spent more years chasing the feeling of viewing a Rothko in a low-lit room. Where my eyes could relax and the ground of the painting receded into forever and the square hung in the middle distance suspended by hope. I was chasing the feeling of a breath catch and being released from my body.
I spent years drawing the cicadas, turning them into flowers, turning them into roils and coils and overlaying them and relistening to cicadas I recorded. I listened to birdsongs in the forest and tilted my head. I listened to water from faucets and creeks and water purifiers and rain and dried leaves in the wind. I took classes and more classes, classical drawing and still life. I learned to paint an uncanny orangefruit. I learned to paint my uncanny song. I went back to my cicadas and patterns and pushed and built up layers and drew and did studies. When they told me to stop painting cicadas, I stopped going to the classes.
And one year for one glorious week, I took an entire week’s vacation to paint the base layer of a 36×36 painting (that’s 1,296 square inches) of two opposing cicada patterns one lit from the inside and one from the outside. It took all of me and all the thoughts and dreams I collected and hid away and buried in journals to connect two unconnectable things.
And at one point standing close – and if you stand close enough to a 36×36 painting, it covers your whole vision – at one point my vision took it all in. All the thousands of data points and years of seeking and problem solving and my arms and hands aching and learning to lightly pencil in the light parts because sometimes you need to be gentle. I took it and held it in my gaze to see how complicated it was in all the ways and thought “it must be really awful to argue with me.”
I can hold so much in my hand and my vision and my painting and gradients and the past and the future and isomorphisms of songs and communication and transcendence. What hope does the present have against this?
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