Jilted City: bits of Jensen Wilder
Interview 9/8/2012
What is it about Patrick Mcguinesss jilted city that interested
you?
Well I’d heard
his name before, but I was in a bookshop in Heswall. He’d recently been there
for a signing. There was a pretty girl behind the counter and I mentioned how
was sorry I was to have missed him. She told me that there were still some
signed copies. I'd looked through the copies on the shelf and none were signed.
She told me he'd signed labels to stick into the books on purchase. I found
that quite funny, I'm still not sure why.
What about his poetry?
Well, I liked
the way he was responding to the memory of his mother. Place as well. I think
his mother represented his home. Travelled around but she became 'home' to him.
I enjoy exploring the idea of 'home', how someone can make you feel you're
there.
Was there a particular poem that stood out?
No, even now I
couldn’t quote anything from it the collection. I haven't had it that long.
It’s the over arching themes I enjoy. I haven’t sunk my teeth into it. Poetry
is like hard candy, you take your time with it. Some poets that are punchy and
snappy, the best are to be savoured.
What do you think 'jilted city' means?
I think it
means leaving the marriage of place behind. I think he's very bound up in
places, I think he sees them as relationships. He seems like he's in a restless
state, leaving the place where he is to move into his memories. Like jilting
someone at the alter. The idea of home for him is slowly becoming memory, you
have to forget/withdraw from where you are in order to recover memory; to
return home. You jilt anything you give up on.
What does it mean to you?
This idea of
jilting a place where you are in favour of another is one of my themes. Life
themes, I mean. I left Liverpool, the place I first made love, the place I made
memories… it was a relationship. I went to study in Bath and excommunicated
myself from Liverpool. I had this feeling I'd never return to Liverpool. So,
thinking back, I connected my sadness’s with the place, to give myself the
excuse not to look back.
I was in Bath
for 5 years. I had manic patches, bouts of depression. I connected to Bath like
a new love and when that love went sour, when I had my last mental break-down,
I came back. So I jilted Bath, like I had before. I was so depressed, I didn’t
think I deserved to live down there. So again it was a jilted love. Sometimes
we don't leave because things have ended, we leave because we don't want to
fight any more. We go into a coma.
Ultimately
'jilted' to me, is a forced exile however it comes about. Whether that is
because things got bad, or you did, or they spurned you, or you just got nerves
walked toward the bride.
What does the city at night mean to you?
“Caffeine
is the fuel of the city by day, alcohol is the fuel of the city by night.” -
'Identikit Manchester, Mark Rainey..
The city at night means opportunity. Well no…. actually
yeah. (laughs) the city comes alive at night. The people are a lot less
inhabited. I think desire and camaraderie is elevated and accelerated. Men
you’ve never met, who you knock into by accident, start a fight with you and
then two seconds later they want to take you around with them and by you coke.
And with women, desire is elevated, they're less inhibited. A lot of what
people think is debauched behaviour, is so much more natural. The city at night
to me is a landscape of impulse. It’s the hardest to capture. You can paint in
the day because the landscape is lit up by the sun. Everything is there for the
eye. But night… we can't see everything. The only light is signs advertising
this or that activity. I think the most important thing to remember about the
night is how much more we are in control of what is seen at night. If we don't
want to see it, we don't illuminate it. It's a limited perspective in one sense
and at the same time we're wholly in control of what is seen.
Jensen Wilder is a writer and poet
based in Liverpool
http://la-voliere.tumblr.com/
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| Edward Hopper Nighthawks 1942 |
1 Comment:
I like the ideas that are put forward here, particularly the talking of leaving and arriving and leaving a place. It's giving cities more of an emotional character, which is something I tried to feed off. There's another Hopper painting called 'Approaching a city' which paints the view from a train. It's not that spectacular, but like a lot of his work, it allows the viewer to project their own thoughts and moods onto the blank expanses of the buildings and spaces.
Framing is important in Hopper's work, with the compositions being quite cinematic. I put a post up earlier about Michael Manns films, but in films like Heat and The Insider, there is a great use of architecture and open spaces, with characters really anchored in the compositions. Particularly in The Insider, seemingly nondescript places such as golf course car park, or a garage are given an extra layer of paranoia. Feeding off these different interpretations of urban environments, aids me in unlocking the core of memories I'm trying to bring through in the paintings. In particular memories of places. I sometimes wonder If my memoires are partly conditioned by films, like it's not a pure memory of that moment or place, but then that makes it more interesting.
Lastly, the writings of Alain De Botton also relate to this. He seems attuned to the character of the places he visits (in his book 'The Art of Travel') and writes evocatively of how they relate to his emotional state of mind:
'The building was architecturally miserable, it smelt of frying oil and lemon-scented floor polish, the food was glutinous and the tables were dotted with islands of dried ketchup from the meals of long-departed travellers, and yet something about the scene moved me. There was poetry in this forsaken service station, perched on the ridge of the motorway far from all habitation.'
Passages like this have helped me to get more of a handle on my travel experiences, both in drawing upon the memories in the studio, and also when out and out and observing things. It's to do with observing the quiet moments, the spaces in between activity. Mainly it's to do with taking my self out of the normal head space I occupy when walking around Liverpool, and into that of someone who's never seen this scenes before. It can almost be as simple as 'What if I was on tall ladder looking at these streets'
It's this kind of thinking that goes into my paintings, working hard to remember the sensations generated from the different places I've visited. These sensations often get submerged in the process of the painting, but to have them there at the beginning of the painting is important. The experiment is to see if they can survive the journey of the painting, to see what really matters!
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