Helga Páley Friðþjófsdóttir: Í hringiðu alls / With In It All · Þula

Í hringiðu alls / Within It All

We are in Helga Páley’s studio and we are talking. She tells me about the circles, the colours, the small paintings, the big paintings, apartments; she talks about games, how there are autumn colours in these works, about light, how all of a sudden she can see into the future when the painting—what she needs to do to it—shows itself.

Helga talks about how painting turns on, activates, the hand, the head, the body, in a way that is opposite to how the world is usually—where things are turned off. Helga does not call herself a painter per se. She is a drawer. She mentions Amy Sillman who is also a painter who is a drawer. In her book, Faux Pas, Sillman writes about how there is a difference between painters who are “painters” and those who are “drawers.” “Painters” are like eagles: canny and noble birds who soar above us, doing something enlightened, getting the big picture. They are calculating and often have an idea (or concept) in place before they start to paint. (If we read art history we see the eagle taking up a lot of space.)

A drawer, on the other hand, is like a beaver building a dam. Down in the undergrowth, the roots, the mud, chewing and pulling and carrying and struggling because of some more or less natural instinct. The beaver constructs, bit by bit, stick by stick, like a drawer constructs line by line, colour by colour, until something has been made, created; built up of many little things, many decisions taken in the moment by the hands and the body.

If we go just a little further then we can mention Phillip G. Pavia, an American sculptor who also wrote and edited. In 1958 Pavia wrote about something he called “The Problem.” Something that does not only have something to do with lines and shapes and colours and material and constructing forms but also with how the studio is a “total struggle.” A place where a person wrestles with questions like: What are we doing here? Why? How? This is in itself nothing new—the studio has long been a place of judgement and struggle—but what is interesting here for us is that according to Pavia the answer to The Problem is drawing. Not “just” drawing with a pencil on a piece of paper, scribbling, doodling, but what it is we are doing when we draw. To draw is to look, describe, brush, take apart, cover, limit oneself, find something, find colours and lines and forms, see the future; drawing is a mythic and materialistic form of engagement. Drawing puts you in certain positions, gives you a certain point of view. You can be drawing when you are painting or sculpting or cooking or sending emails. Drawing is the paper, then the canvas, then the space, then the studio, then life. Drawing is the beginning and the foundation. Circles, dots, marks. Pavia used the word freshness—drawing is doing something fresh, refreshing, drawing is like fresh air.

In other words, something surprising, never completed, never final, but circular, a looping act in a continuous present that is altered daily. Like all of us. In this way does Helga Páley tell me she is a drawer, a painter who is a drawer. And the answer to the problem is always to keep drawing.