seeing spots

Priscilla Mouritzen

Sometimes you don’t know the stories you have to tell until you hear yourself speaking them. 

At the end of a recent trip to South America, I wondered to myself which of our adventures, experiences and conversations, whom amongst the many people we had met, would make it into our family's oral history; to be told again and again. Which photos would make it into the album, shaping our collective memory?

It’s hard to see your own life in broad brushstrokes; to see the big pictures and the patterns. You’re just too close to it, and it seems to evolve and unfold in glacial time. 

In a small way, Pinterest has become a new tool for me in excavating my own heart and mind. I can scroll through the images I have collected, reflect on what is and isn’t in the collection, and see my thinking about categories of things that are interesting to me and how they fit together. It’s a visual mind map. A mosaic made up of a thousand small images. 

(Step back. They resolve into a complex picture. It's a self-portrait.)

So what’s trending these days in my visual universe?

It seems like one of the things is polka dots. Circles. (They are a big feature in my grade one classroom, and have apparently burrowed into my subconscious and made themselves a permanent home in my aesthetic.) Here is a sample of the spots I’ve been seeing, right before my eyes.

Left and top right: Brenda Holzke, tribal bottles. Bottom right: Tetsuo Hirakawa.

Anders Bruno Liljefors

Sandra Bowkett

Michelle Freemantle

Mollie Bosworth

Kitaoji Rosanjin

ad infinitum

Damien Hirst. Hypothalamus Acetone Powder. Household gloss on canvas.

I really can’t believe I’m writing about Damien Hirst again. A year or two ago, I didn’t even like Damien Hirst. And I’m writing about the spot paintings, of all things. What can there possibly be to say about the spot paintings?

That in them, Hirst takes visual art to the place of pure math. Each painting generated by the same parameters, the same formula. Each with slight variations on the theme: so many permutations and combinations. So much measurement, so much perfection. 

And yet they’re not static. The colours don’t stay where they are placed. They push and they pull. They pulse like irregular heartbeats, keeping the irregular tempo of our irregular lives. They throb. They become music; notes freed from the staff lines, floating on the blank white page.

They are the measured beats of poetry. They scan like a poem, in iambic pentameter maybe. Or some other longer, more random rhythmic construction, as yet unnamed. They are the structure of a free verse poem without the words. Without the meanings. Without the voice.

Ad infinitum.

Damien Hirst. Methoxyverapamil. 1991. Household gloss on canvas.

Damien Hirst. One of the spot paintings. Household gloss on canvas.

Damien Hirst. Untitled (Nick, Margot, Chris, India). 1999.
Household gloss on canvas.

Damien Hirst, spot painting.