Brilliantism - by Barry Dickins

Since recovery from both clinical depression and anxiety I have discovered a brilliance unknown to me in every single aspect of existence, in particular underwater currents which sweep before my startled watercolour brushes and simply or complicatedly appear to paint without their proper owner. I who bought the brushes have no say in the preparation for beauty.

I sponge down terribly expensive French watercolour paper with boiling hot water from the very saucepan I heated up eggs in for last night’s tea; and arrive breathlessly in my rented sunroom and commence operations by randomly hurling Japanese inks into the slaked and dimpled paper.

The chance effects or swirling inks married to momentarily stalled black poster paint and its chum the brilliant stark white poster paint are what I am after; it is the love of just letting go and encouraging the chance effects to bash and belt and have a proper drink together.

The sun roasts them dry and I as a pilgrim study the drying of each accidental torrent and pool of colour and then the engraving comes into it and I work up the whole thing as an embroidery. The new brilliance comes from letting things alchemy into other things such as disconsolate outsiders sitting in city parks and even the odd unicorn sipping a hot chocolate at a café somewhere friendly.

The work at the moment is a union forged in frolicsome adoration at the fact of finding myself alive. I am still and restlessly alive after decades of ups and downs but I’ve never lost my love of god who is manifest in every single thing I am lucky enough to see with eyes baggier than the luggage racks upon the Spirit Of Progress. I can still see through them just fine thank you very much.

It isn’t that the creator of Brilliantism is brilliant but a survivor of loss that is simply a common phenomenon of daily life. When I see people devastated in a public hospital waiting room I am similarly devastated and feel the need to draw the scene, but not realistically, rather I would draw it emotionally.

The claustrophobia in city streets is my completed watercolour picture and the vibrancy seen in botanical gardens translates to the happiness in infant’s unjudging eyes. The look in the new picture I am after is the great and unexpected cloudburst or sunbeam pouring into a lonely or a heavenly room. My topics are everyone I see or remember or look forward to dreaming of.