A World of Blah Blah Blah

This is the summer of sighs and each sigh has its own unique meaning. The sigh is a sometimes song of disappointment or frustration. This girl I know she always feels melancholy. You know she’s not a very honest person for a lover, for a very deep advocate of the truth. She’s always lying through her mouth and eyes. To the world she says ‘I’m happy, I’m OK’ even though she’s not. But I think this chick lies all the time because she’s not really sure of the truth, I get the impression that she doesn’t really quite understand the feelings in her belly. 

Maybe it’s loneliness, a deep, profound pathological loneliness that extends from the north of China to the edge of the universe. And what is loneliness, I wonder? How would you describe the feeling, the experience of it? I’ve come, myself, to believe that the epic voyage of loneliness induces the grandest feelings of apathy and disassociation. The lonely soul is like a tiny scrap of green in a 75 degree (Celsius) average desert. The lonely soul is like a lost, forgotten and unnamed island. You cannot find it on a map, the coordinates are not known by the geographers. There are no visitors and eventually there is no bridge between the I and whatever else. So the music, the words and their definitions, the celebrities, the news stories and the faces of strangers that belong to this world they begin to merge into a single sea devoid of borders, with no end. It is a pot full of nameless feelings that mix and turn into an awful unknowable colour. People ask questions but there is no real answer to be given back. Perhaps my friend is lonely.

And I tell you the opposite of loneliness is all about singing. It is about stumbling across another bird on a trashed lined street who sings the same tune as you. It is at first a story that soon becomes the story which is told over and over again. The singers never grow tired of their story with its discernible beginning and sensible end. Through the story broken hearts are discovered and the deepest of rages are given enough space for life. And sometimes the words that are sung do not align with their intended meanings. This is poetry; the most sophisticated form of code. The tune, the look in her eyes carries the secret, private meaning that only the two of them will ever know. It will not be like the law of gravity, gracing the pages of a thousand and one books for any reading member of the public to comment on. It is a tender, wordless language. A weightless key opens the garden door. You may be lucky to sing once in your life. 

I love the art of Jessy Park. Like many (I presume) I first found out about Jessy Park when reading Oliver Sacks An Anthropologist on Mars (an excellent read by the way). According to Oliver Sacks Jessy Park is autistic (although it makes me feel awkward and uncomfortable to mention that because I think too often people can be easily reduced to a digestible label and in being reduced may not be seen for who they are entirely as a person, as a heart-beating, eye-blinking, thought-producing human being). 

Anyway, the apparent thing I love about Jessy Park’s art is how it seems to combine the psychedelic with the ordered, the utterly personal with the impersonal. Her paintings are so structured and almost mathematical in appearance (very geometric) but the colours within the depicted forms are flamboyant, chaotic and unexpected. All together for me the effect is finally a whimsical one where anything is possible. I think ultimately Jessy Park is praising the ordered, the structured, the sensical through her works. Architecture (the prodigious daughter of logic and physical law) is after all her main subject matter. And maybe in this way Jessy helps to remind us that the systematic is not entirely devoid of a unique beauty and extravagance. Through the windows of Jessy Park’s imagination we can perhaps see the colour in our own ordinary routines, the far stretching kaleidoscopic patterns that are formed by our own mundane rituals (morning train rides, daily supermarket visits, evening news watching). The lives we touch, connect with and influence along a seemingly ordinary road. She doesn’t obscure or distort the ordinary completely but rather filters aspects of the real in a celebratory way. I wish I could live in a world like Jessy Park's. I wish the skies, the buildings and churches of my city were as colourful, but maybe, in a weird way, the whole point is they naturally are.

I think what also attracts me to Jessy’s work is her commitment to form. The buildings depicted are absolutely recognisible, Jessy doesn’t seem to treat architecture with any amount of disrespect. The iconicity of the Chrysler Building is accurately translated in Jessy’s The Chrysler Building with Perihelion and Transit of Venus # 2. The magnificence of her chosen subjects is always articulated and almost emphasised through her unique use of colour where the chosen hues clash violently. It’s an accurate representation but also an entirely personal one. The artwork of Jessy Park ultimately uplifts my soul.