I was thirty when I walked into an art teacher’s studio for the first time.
I had never painted. I did not carry the identity. I was not building a portfolio. I had one oil painting in my head that would not leave me alone. I needed someone who understood materials well enough to help me execute it without diluting it.
The teacher I found was older. He did not call himself an artist. He called himself a scientist.
That detail mattered.
He treated painting as a system of cause and effect. Pigment behaves in specific ways. Oil dries at a measurable pace. Composition shifts perception predictably. There was no mysticism in the room—only material properties and attention.
Under his guidance, I did not produce one painting.
I produced two.
They arrived dense and self-contained, carrying whatever had been waiting to surface. They were not decorative. They were not designed for admiration. They were not optimized for approval.
They were performing a function.
When Work Changes the Atmosphere
Later, in central Christchurch, there was a shop that felt more like an indoor market than a gallery. People wandered in casually. It was not a space built for confrontation.
I brought the paintings there without a defined goal. I wanted to see whether they could survive outside the room in which they were made. Whether they could stand in public air.
The shopkeeper hung them high on the wall.
The next day he called.
He was not angry. He was unsettled.
Customers were refusing to enter. Complaints were coming in. The paintings were not being analyzed or debated. They were altering the atmosphere. Something in them shifted the emotional temperature of the room.
The work was not discussed.
It was avoided.
That reaction revealed more than praise could have.
Art as Encounter, Not Decoration
Most creative work seeks acceptance. It adapts to the space it enters. It anticipates reaction and adjusts.
Some work does not adjust.
Some work is catalytic. A catalyst, in chemistry, accelerates a reaction without being consumed by it. Catalytic work operates similarly. It enters a space and makes latent tension visible. It surfaces avoidance, recognition, resistance. It does not instruct. It exposes.
The paintings did not tell viewers what to think. They made something available. The response belonged to the person encountering them.
When work is honest enough, it does not negotiate with the room.
It changes it.
Destruction as Completion
Years later, before I was married, I burned them.
Not from shame. Not from regret. The work had already completed its function. It had processed what needed processing. To preserve the canvases would have converted them into artifacts—objects to revisit, reinterpret, sentimentalize.
They were never meant to become relics.
They were events.
Keeping them would have anchored me to a closed interior season. Burning them acknowledged their temporality. Once the internal shift occurred, the physical form no longer carried necessity.
The medium was expendable.
The transformation was not.
When Medium Changes but Function Remains
I have never tried to recreate those paintings. I do not remember them in detail. The imagery matters less than the mechanism they revealed.
Some creative acts exist to metabolize experience—to convert diffuse emotion into defined form, and in doing so, change the person making it. Once that conversion occurs, the object may no longer be required.
These works are encounters first, objects second.
That principle persisted long after the canvases turned to ash.
Some work exists to endure.
Some work exists to alter.
Some work exists only long enough to complete its internal task—after which preservation would dilute its meaning.
The form may change—canvas to language, pigment to rhythm, image to idea.
The function does not.
Not decoration.
Not persuasion.
Transformation.
