Burnout and Agnes Martin
Like many people, I was more affected by the pandemic than I initially realised.
But things accumulate and, in holy week 2022, I ground to a serious halt.
It’s holy week again – and anniversaries have a way of pulling us backwards, or propelling us forwards, or both.
I’m not in the same place. In any sense: emotionally, geographically, spiritually.
When I try to notice the start of the healing, I find myself standing with Agnes Martin in the Tate Modern.
I encountered her in the year before the burnout – profiled by Olivia Laing in ‘Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency’.
Through Laing’s essay, I came to appreciate her as a visionary: someone who painted ‘with [her] back to the world’ (p20), and instead gave witness to the insights she received after a process of patient waiting.
Her childhood influences, closeted sexuality and experiences of paranoid schizophrenia were all formative, and she made some radical life choices:
“After living and working in New York, in 1967, just as her art was gaining acclaim, she left the city and went in search of solitude and silence.”
“Her years in New Mexico were marked by a withdrawal from worldly things, a life of renunciation and restriction that often sounds masochistic, though Martin insisted the intention was spiritual...”
Those choices can be hard to imitate.
Not all of us have the opportunity to drastically reshape the outward contours of our lives.
We can’t all disappear for eighteen months and resurface somewhere in the desert. Even if that’s exactly what we crave.
As I’ve woven my recovery around my other responsibilities, I’ve been reminded to take agency over my inner-world.
To turn aside, like Martin, and step into silence: for ten minutes, or a day, or a weekend. I’ve given myself space to interrogate the thoughts I keep company with – and the actions that flow from them. Are they true? Are they noble? Am I being conformed to a cultural pattern that does my soul a disservice?
I had such a deep connection to Martin’s creative story.
So, when I stumbled through the Tate Modern – on sick leave in spring 2022, my career as a practising lawyer disintegrating – I was overjoyed to discover her work in the studio.
Until, after five or ten minutes of trying to relate to it, I got disillusioned.
I didn’t get it. I didn’t feel it. It wasn’t doing anything for me. I moved on.
It was only in the process of leaving the canvas behind that I realised it had reshaped my mind.
Straining so hard to see something of significance in the simple, horizontal pencil lines and pale pink palette had trained my eyes.
I saw beauty everywhere: in the grid of the ventilators; in the frames of the windows; in the intersecting lines of the tiles on the floor.
That was early 2022 and the hard, dark days were not over – not by a long stretch. But, in that moment, life had become art for me again.
Agnes Martin had shared her vision with me.
And I had seen the light.
