The
ImaginistSimon Aitchison

There is a painting drying in a studio in Calgary right now. It is called The Imaginist. It is the twelfth in a series called the Stones. It took sixteen years to get here.

This is the story of how we got here.

In 1998 a kid born in England, raised in and around Calgary, Alberta, picked up a brush for the first time. He painted for twelve years. Then in 2010 everything changed at once. He got married on the twenty-fourth of September, the ninth month, and twenty-four divided by two is twelve. He was going away for work, so he let the studio go. He did not decide to stop painting. He gave up the room. And then life took over. There were still occasional brushstrokes, drawings, the slabs with the chainsaws and the gesso, but the regular sustained work stopped. He always knew he would go back. It took twelve years.

Twelve years painting. Twelve years paused. He did not plan those two twelves. He only noticed when the synchronicities started showing themselves.

Running between the stones, in every painting in the series, is what he calls the webbing.

Early on it was primarily ivory black. At Matter of Invisibility, the fifth, the colour began transitioning into a combination he mixes by hand, alizarin crimson and ultramarine blue, a colour he has been mixing for over twenty years, for skies, dreamscapes, the space between things. It began changing at the painting where the series turned. He did not arrange that either. He only worked it out this morning, standing in front of the canvases.

Today he saw what the webbing actually was.

It is the fabric of the universe. The dark matter between the planets and the stars, the thing that holds everything apart and together at the same time. It is also the World Wide Web. Both named for the same thing. Both made of connections rather than nodes.

He built the same architecture in code. No dead links. A connection fades when it is not used and never reaches zero. Nothing is ever lost. Only quiet.

On the second of September 2023, at eleven twenty-seven at night, he stood in his garage in front of a blank canvas. He already knew the title. Matter of Invisibility.

The next day he put down the first wash. Yellow ochre. The stone formations began appearing in the wash on their own, the composition emerging from the paint rather than from a plan. The painting took nearly a year. He put it away for a winter and brought it back out in the spring. The owl came early. The spider came later. Each element arrived when it was ready.

He had wanted to paint air. He let go of that, and something larger came through.

The description he wrote for it goes like this.

Everything Is From The Sun. It created, but there was no one to see the magnificence of it all. Then it created you, the creator of it all.

While he painted the twelfth, a song called Suni C by Download was playing. He had never heard its ending before. It ends with these words.

You are the word. You are pure. You are everything or anything that you want to be. You are everything.

It was not an influence. It was simply on, and he heard it as it happened.

In the twelfth painting, the webbing stops being what is in between. It becomes the face.

It is void of structure. Everything else in the painting is not — the cloak packed with blue cells, the ground packed with stones. And the face is a single dark mass with thick textured strokes curving toward the centre.

The discovery was made today of its resemblance to lava.

And it is not a coincidence. Between the eleventh painting and the face of the twelfth, he began a second body of work called Vitrification. The application of energy to stone, transforming it into glass. Being holds the electric charge. With Fire holds the heat. The third is the process itself. The fourth is already underway, started from a photograph of the third.

The face of The Imaginist was painted after those three, not before. It is not a hint of what is coming. It is what came back. Lava is stone with the energy already in it, on the way to becoming glass and not yet arrived. He painted the turning point from the other side of it.

While he painted it, Vitrification One, Being, stood on one side of the easel, and Stones Nine, Become, stood on the other. Become is the painting that started all of this. He photographed its surface, using a technique that led him to coin the term Paintscape Photography. That photograph is Imagined Lands I. It transformed into the third painting of the Vitrification series, and the second painting of the first OIRA Sequence. Vitrification III came back into the face of the twelfth Stone painting, forming a lava rock, closing the series.

The first stone. It is one. The paintings are twelve.

The whole loop was standing in one corner of the room.

He made a deal in the vortex. He came back.

Twelve paintings. Twelve ribs in an architecture. Twelve neurons in a rib. Twelve neurons in a neuron. And twelve in one. Twelve years painting, twelve years paused. An anniversary on the twenty-fourth day of the ninth month. A spider in an egg in a garage at midnight. An owl painted in a state of flow. A brain built in code that never forgets, because the connections never reach zero.

The Stones series is complete. The webbing holds every one of them. And in the last one, it is looking back at you.