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Drink with Shadows |
hen I was young, I knew I wanted to go make art. There has never been any
other career I wanted to pursue. Making pictures became inseparable from myself. I
used to carry my portfolio of drawings around in primary school, even if I didn’t
have an art lesson that day. One day, the headmaster stopped me and said he’d love to
know what in my folder was so precious. I said nothing: I just looked at him. What I
should have said was, It’s my identity.
At school, I had a very traditional art teacher. There, drawing realistically from life gave me a good grounding for the more imaginative work I do now. I attended college in Portsmouth, England, and in 1981, obtained a B. A. degree in fine arts with honors. Since then, I have lived and worked in Edinburgh, Scotland.
I took part-time work to sustain myself while I developed my particular style of
figurative painting. I’ve been lucky: the pictures that come out of my life seem to
touch people with their particular mix of joy and melancholy. I now make my living
painting full time and have one or two main exhibitions a year, as well as group shows
abroad and throughout the United Kingdom.
My pictures are about feelings, moods, emotions. I don’t use models. People often ask why my figures are so big (some people call them fat, but I think of them as big). I’m not really sure myself.
I’m a very solitary, very private person. At home, I get up, have my coffee, and sit down to paint—usually early in the morning. I paint all day and often into the evening, usually not even stopping for lunch. Time passes quickly. I have several cigarettes throughout the day, a banana, a piece of cake—whatever comes to hand. Finishing a painting is all-important.
I first compose the picture in a small sketchbook and then draw it out onto a larger,
primed board. I paint in acrylics. They dry quickly, which I like. I’ve worked with
oils and pastels, too, as well as some ceramics. I use a high-gloss varnish on the
finished paintings.
My ideas for paintings come from everywhere! A feeling or a mood is somehow transformed into a visual context. Emotions are portrayed in poetic imagery, and in a dreamlike way are visual expressions of a deeper experience. I don’t analyze my pictures, but I can usually see where they’ve come from and what they’re about. But I don’t feel a need to tell people the source. It’s better for people to interpret them in a way that is more relevant to their own lives. Sometimes pictures, like music, express things that can’t be expressed with words.
do a lot of moonlight pictures. These paintings are
dreamlike, otherworldly. They are about the world between the physical and
spiritual, where physical forms become as soft and intangible as drifting
clouds, and feelings take on a physical form.
I have lists of titles of paintings I’ve yet to do: I tick them off and add to
them constantly. "There Are Angels in the Trees" is one such title. This one
will be a picture of trees with angels in the branches and leaves, and maybe someone
looking up at them, probably in the moonlight. The image came from something very simple:
the plastic bags you often see stuck in the branches of trees. I saw this one day and
gazed up at the tree, imagining the objects to be angels’ wings, caught in the tree
as they flew past!
Another yet-to-be painting is "Angel in Waiting." I saw a very old woman carrying her shopping bags, almost doubled over, her stooping back a kind of hump. I imagined that inside the hump on her back, angel wings were forming: obviously near the end of her life, the woman was beginning to turn into an angel. This painting is still taking shape in my head.
"In the Symphony of Sorrowful Souls" will be a large painting of a group of people—men and women—maybe fifteen or more, standing and sitting by the sea, in the moonlight, all playing various musical instruments. It will have a melancholy air, hence the title, which is a variation on "Symphony of Sorrowful Songs," Symphony No. 3 by Górecki.
In "But Can You See My Soul?," I’ll paint a naked woman standing by the
sea in the moonlight in front of a free-standing, full-length mirror. She has her back to
the viewer and looks over her shoulder into the viewer’s eyes. It’s as if
she’s asking the question in the title. Perhaps it’s about self-examination, or
about the seen and unseen.
I suppose that my life might seem strange to anyone looking into it. Fortunately, I live with Michael McVeigh, who also makes his living from his art. I don’t think that we consciously draw from or influence each other’s work, but there are certainly parallels in our work: his work is figurative and also largely imaginative. It is abundant with poetic imagery. There are people who have bought Michael’s paintings and mine, quite separately, not realizing our connection to each other. Michael works in the front room of our old and crumbly tenement flat, which is small but full of character. Michael, too, is full of character, and has masses of curly red hair. We’ve been together for thirteen years. There is a great affinity between our work and between us.
We don’t have a pattern, or routine, but if we’ve both finished work for a day, we’ll cook a meal, drink wine, and eat. There are no children: I’ve never wanted any. I’ve enough in my life.
I do have a family, though. My dear sister, Kya, writes and makes embroidered pictures.
She recently married a lovely man, John, who grows vegetables and sells books. My mother,
Aďti, comes from Finland and is a natural folk artist. When I was
younger, I remember my mother using a red hot poker from the fire to burn patterns into
our coffee table. Another time, she painted large gray cobwebs all over the walls of our
house. She has her own very individual and impulsive creativity and is also full of
stories: memories she carries of her own very rustic life and upbringing. There was the
time she had to pull a cow out of a well, and the time Great Uncle Oski went berserk and
had to be tied up in ropes and rowed across the lake to the village where he could confess
his sins to a minister. Another time, my mother and her sisters knelt behind the hay barn
and prayed for hats themselves. The very same day, her aunt arrived on a
boat from the mainland with presents for the children: the exact hats each
had imagined and described. My mother’s stories are like fairy tales from the forests
of Finland that have now become a part of me.
Looking back, our family life must have appeared eccentric to outsiders, but for us it was all quite normal. My father, who died some years ago, came from Scotland. I also have a brother, Toni, who suffers from schizophrenia and has spent most of the past twenty years in a hospital. Ten years ago, he hanged himself, but was resuscitated; as a consequence of the lack of oxygen to his brain, he is now physically disabled as well. Despite this desperately tragic condition, he is extremely intelligent and full of poetry. He spends all of his time composing poems. The resilience of the human spirit is astounding.
I visit Toni twice a week, and his experience has naturally become part of mine.
Psychiatric hospitals are strange places, packed with emotions of every kind. They can
tear your heart to pieces, but there are also moments of beauty. I remember one evening I
went to visit: the long corridors were deserted; there was just the sound of my own
footsteps. Then, out of nowhere, I heard the dreamy voice of a young man singing. I
couldn’t see him, but his song, "Why do the birds keep on singing?
…Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?" floated past
me and echoed through the emptiness. This, too, will become a picture one day.
Extreme experiences of sadness or tragedy can give you an insight and understanding of a world within—a world beyond the physical. They teach you not to be judgmental and to value the smallest acts of kindness, to value humanity in all its shapes and forms. There is beauty in everything. Finding the beauty or goodness in even the worst of situations or the bleakest of moments is important. If positive and negative can be balanced, then love and compassion can become the fruits of suffering. Life is a mixture of misery and mirth, and my paintings are the fruits of my life.©
EXHIBITS
Featuring Aliisa Hyslop
Aliisa Hyslop’s work will be part of a four-person exhibition October 29, 1999, to November 13, 1999, at Cambridge Contemporary Art, 6 Trinity Street, Cambridge, England (telephone: 0122-332-4222; fax: 0122-331-5606; web site: www.artcambridge.co.uk; e-mail: cam.cont.art@dial.pipex.com).
Aliisa’s work will be shown next year, in 2000, in May at Valvona and Crolla, Elm Row, Edinburgh, Scotland; in September at Cambridge Contemporary Art and the Leith Gallery, both in Edinburgh, Scotland; and in November at the Tolquhon Gallery in Aberdeenshire, Scotland.
She is now on-line at The Rostra Gallery, www.therostragallery.co.uk.
Hyslop’s note cards are published by Canns Down Press, Beaford, Devon, England, EX19 8LZ (telephone: 0180-560-3341; fax: 0180-560-3545; e-mail: sales@cannsdownpress.co.uk; web site: www.cannsdownpress.co.uk).
Hyslop’s paintings range from two inches square to forty inches square and from $200 to $2000 (at present).
Aliisa Hyslop can be reached at 0131-556-6896, or via the Blackadder Gallery, 5 Raeburn Place, Edinburgh, Scotland, EH4 1HU, 0131-332-4605.
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this is only a taste of what's inside the printed version of the magazine!
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