Iridescence

I have been fostering a fascination with iridescent medium – actually, with many things shiny. (Iridescent medium is a thick, sparkly glue-like additive for acrylic paint. Winsor and Newton made the one I have.) I also love applying varnish to a finished painting, or gloss medium (an additive for acrylics, essentially acrylic paint without pigment). You might have seen this done on Instagram. The effect is a bit like when you wet a stone you have picked up from the beach and which has since dried. Its colours and texture are restored, and you remember why it caught your eye to begin with.

But I do wonder whether this fascination with sparkle can be allowed. Can shiny, sparkly art possibly be granted respect, by me, never mind anyone else? Is it too much like the disco shoes I loved when I was nine years old? Of its moment, soon outgrown, a bit embarrassing after the fact (despite my continuing fondness for those disco shoes).

There are also craft issues that come with iridescent medium. It is rough, a bit cranky. It dries in ridges, it resists sparkling, contradictorily, because it is sandy and grippy. Other paint catches in it and takes off its shine. It dries quickly. It’s lumpy.

None of this matters. I love it. Sometimes it looks like the sun on water. That’s one excellent reason I’m choosing not to care about its nine-year-old’s quality of delight.

Another is that one of the things I have given up with glee as part of putting my own opinion ahead of others’ in my practice is po-facedness. It is one of the least appealing postures, to me, especially when adopted as a signifier of authority. There’s nothing impressive about surrendering your sense of humour. Is there anything drearier than art that cannot admit fun?

I love humour in art, the way it admits an essential humanity. I love visual evidence of a recognition that all sorts of things are worthy of being in art, from underwear to toenails and martinis. I love the fleshly contentedness of Beryl Cook’s ladies at play. I love the sweet embrace of women and the domestic in the work of Anita Klein. Her work radiates love, of the everyday kind, which is enhanced by its dailiness. There is such happiness in that.

And anyway, I’m going to side with Gerry Saltz when he says that all art has an element of decoration. Isn’t decoration just a word we use to put down the aesthetic efforts we make in the home, instead of high art-approved spaces like the studio and museum? Decoration is about beauty. There’s nothing more life-worthy, more art-worthy than beauty. And iridescence is about the fall of light, one of my favourite flashes of the beautiful, which is also everyday, and magical.

So, iridescence it is.