New Space: Why we make art and how

I’ve just found something new in a book that I’ve read lots of times before. When this happens, I have to get over my frustration at not being a perfect reader: thorough, with perfect recall. (Who is that reader, anyway?)  But then I get to remember that the best books offer some of their wisdoms and beauties immediately and then, if you let them, more, irregularly, over years.

The book I’ve been re-reading is Derek Mahon’s New Selected Poems. You may have known Mahon’s poems for a long time, or might have first read him in lockdown, when his poem “Everything is Going to be Alright” was so widely loved.

Mahon’s isn’t, strictly speaking, an art book. But he writes gorgeously, often about looking at art, and what we’re about when we’re making it. I love his writing because he understands the common fuse that runs through the work of all types of artists: questing, longing, winkling out, loathing, preserving, persevering, polishing, prizing. He understands the gift artists give when we strive to offer up a precise piece of an inner or outer life. This offering is an act at the heart of all serious-minded making. Mahon knew it, of course, from doing it himself so lyrically, and from looking at art as an artist does.

I love Mahon’s poem about Pieter de Hooch’s The Courtyard of a House in Delft (1659), and Munch’s Girls on a Bridge. But the poem I’m reading every night now is “New Space”.

It describes an art studio, scrubbed and swept, full of materials for a varied practice. In itself, the studio is a “still life with life restored to living matter”. It embodies and exists for work “that aims for a real thing well done with real significance”.

Isn’t that what we are all doing, or trying to do, at least? Striving to hold skill, intention and import together at once. This interlocking trio comprises a steadying thought when the nagging details of one aspect of a practice start to overtake the others, and imperil the impulse to make honest, beautiful things. I can remind myself of the real thing, with real significance. It’s a human and humane aim, the honour of effort, honesty of intention, and purity of hope.

I love that “New Space” appears on page 101 of the edition I own, an accident that seems to recognise that the poem is simple and foundational: the 101 of art making. Still better than this and its crystalline message, is that the poem is itself a beautiful, crafted work of art. Yes, it offers itself simply and directly, as the studio and practice it describes both do. But it’s neither artless nor formless. No, it doesn’t rhyme to the tight scheme that is so technically dazzling in many of Mahon’s other lyrics. But it doesn’t surrender conscious artistry in the name of simplicity either. Its rhyming scheme is present, consistent, flexible across the stanza. There are couplets and alternate rhymes and half rhymes. Its music is deftly made and lightly sung.

The poem does what it praises. In prizing the carefully and simply made, the honestly offered, it “look[s] to the still living whole/to heal the heart and cure the soul.”

It’s such an affirming idea, an archetype to allay doubt, and a reminder of what we strive for and why, in life, words, and painting.