There is a lot of common ground between us, though ‘ground’ isn’t the right word I don’t think. Maybe ‘surface’ or ‘area’ is better. The correct selection or application of a word is not something I usually think about that closely, but out on the water one thinks differently. Mechanically performing a slightly strenuous task takes the mind to a different place, where meditation on minor questions is possible.

It’s a mistake to think that I don’t think. One doesn’t need a brain, simply a mind.

This is hard. But isn’t anything worth doing hard? Or is that just some confused dialectic; something about labour, reward etc.? I should read that stuff properly. It’s boring though and life is hard enough. Still, I do love it out here. Moving and not thinking, or rather, thinking like this. 

Moving is a form of thinking. It’s thought taken form in a way, and it’s what I do, ironically, “unthinkingly”. I don’t really choose where to move to, rather I am taken there, but without wanting to be too ponderously philosophical isn’t that what happens to us all really? Any train of thought or movement has its origins somewhere potentially murky, unclear. 

It’s nice being in this small contained yet open space with people that I don’t really know or have to look at or talk to beyond occasionally giving or receiving direction. We are alone together in a way, separately inhabiting the same space [that’s what we are doing too] and when I think about it like that it is a lot like the experience of painting, when it’s good. An action without thinking, and a corresponding awareness of surface and depth, and the tension between those things.

Yeah, I am aware of surface and depth too. You can’t help but be when it’s the one of the central dichotomies of your existence. But there is this slightly alienating (and believe me I know about alienating) tendency in discourse about painting to try and draw out a lot of visceral feeling or experience to it, when I think most of us, human or otherwise, don’t experience it like that. 

Is it too cliched to think about mark-making on a surface of a panel like an oar skimming across water?

Why can’t you just be satisfied with visual experience? And I say that as a being without eyes.

Well it’s so much more than that, isn’t it? You know, the average person looks at the average painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art for something like less than 30 seconds? How much can you actually see in that amount of time? [I wouldn’t know, and frankly I think it’s insensitive of you to ask] And then at the other end of the spectrum think of those people collapsing in the Uffizi Gallery [Oh, I’d love to go to Italy]. Surely that suggests that yes for most people it’s purely a visual experience as you suggest, but then for others there is something overwhelming about art, or at least good art. I mean primarily painting - as that’s what most people like for better or for worse. It lends itself well to a way into thinking and feeling about things in a different way. Maybe a realer way.

I don’t know about that. I’m not allowed in galleries. But wait, are you starting to imitate me?

I..no!

I think you are. You see, we are not that different.

What do you mean? You’re a meaningless blob whose only purpose is to cause pain.

…And you are?

Jellyfish can’t make art!

Oh yes we can, just look around you! You think humans are the only species capable of experiencing or producing beauty? Typical. Your vision is so narrow that’s all.

Ok, ok, that was arrogant and rude, I’m sorry. And I really don’t want narrow vision. That’s what I’m trying to do here anyway after all, see in a new way, and capture some of that and share it.

That’s all any of us are trying to do – create common experience.

Yeah, maybe.

Text by Benjamin Stafford