The Art of Speech

The idea began with a question: what if politicians held brushes while they spoke? Then with a personal experience, a period when I could no longer speak, and when I measured everything the hand says in place of the voice. So the work starts with pantomime: I learn a speech's gestures by heart, then replay them in front of the canvas, to the sound of the words. Every canvas is square, after Vitruvian Man, in whom the span of the arms equals the height of the body: each canvas is the exact height of the man speaking. Nor are the colours free: each palette is borrowed from the speaker's own symbolism.

The tool did not exist, so it had to be made: ten brushes fixed to the fingers of the gloves. The whole hand paints, the arm follows, and so does the body. Nothing is left between the gesture and the canvas.

Albert Hall, London, 1942. Grandeur, solitude, absolute certainty. The blue and the red come from the Cross of Lorraine, red on a blue ground in its early days. The canvas absorbs the energy of a man addressing a nation from exile.

"I have a dream." Washington, 1963. Glossy black on matte black: the gesture appears only where the light grazes it. The black pastor who brought the cause of Black people into the light, on a canvas that has to be lit to be seen.

The mechanics of hatred. A speech that grinds, galvanises, destroys. One colour only here, blood red, the colour of what those words finally produced. Jarring gestures, crushed paint.

The series continues. Next encounters with the spoken word:

Taking the project on stage: painting the canvas live in front of an audience, the speech playing in the room. What was filmed in the studio would become a performance, where gesture and words move at the same pace, with no second take.

The brush-gloves were invented for speech. They do not need it. A conductor conducts Debussy's La Mer, and his gestures alone guide the brush. The three symphonic sketches give three canvases: from dawn to noon on the sea, play of the waves, dialogue of the wind and the sea. A triptych, like the sunsets.

At the other extreme, Gandhi. No gesture, no colour: a white canvas cut from khadi, the hand-spun, hand-woven cotton. Gandhi asked Indians to make their own clothes rather than let England carry off the cotton; the wheel at the centre of the Indian flag keeps its memory. Here the speech is not painted, it is in the canvas.