Entering the Whirlpool


Art and Spirituality

We don’t fully understand the world. It remains somewhat out of our control. Artists deliberately produce work that is mysterious, provocative and ambiguous, offering us the space to lose ourselves, or perhaps find ourselves.   

Below is a brief extract from ‘A Passage to India’ by E.M. Forster. A group of European tourists visit the Marabar caves in India and something extraordinary is expected to happen.

“There are some exquisite echoes in India; there is the whisper round the dome at Bijapur; there are the long, solid sentences that voyage through the air at Mandu, and return unbroken to their creator. The echo in Marabar cave is not like these, it is entirely devoid of distinction. Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls until it is absorbed into the roof. ‘Boum’ is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or ‘bou-oum,’ or ‘ou-boum,’ utterly dull. Hope, politeness, the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce ‘boum’.”

After experiencing this, Mrs. Moore, one of the visitors is sat motionless in horror.

“But suddenly, at the edge of her mind, Religion appeared, poor little talkative Christianity, and she knew that all its divine words from ‘Let there be light’ to ‘It is finished’ only amounted to ‘boum’. Then she was terrified over an area larger than usual; the universe, never comprehensible to her intellect, offered no response to her soul, the mood of the last two months took definite form at last, and she realized that she didn’t want to write to her children, didn’t want to communicate with anyone, not even with God.”  

This is the one part of the book I thought was most significant. It’s like that moment of realization in T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Waste Land’ - ‘On Margate sands I can connect nothing with nothing’. We squirm in the absence of God.

It seems that in our culture this might have something to do with the conflict between intellectual integrity and a sense of desire, - how we may long for something to happen. Maybe it’s the head over the heart, reason over bodily longing. We are split in two, pulled in different ways. 

When I saw the paintings by Robert Fry at the Saatchi Gallery, something happened. In my mind, I saw these painted figures suggesting both a physical and emotional energy and perhaps these might present that torn feeling or the terrible realization like Mrs. Moore sat outside the Marabar Caves. 

As a direct response I wanted to paint one of these figures in Fry’s setting, in his visual, energetic language.

'Entering the Whirlpool (Painting for Robert Fry)' by Tim Barnes,
100x80cm, Acrylic on Stretched Shower Curtain, 2011