2025-08-15 — 1404/05/24
ANNO VICESIMO NONO DIE
DUCENTESIMO UNDEVICESIMO
VITAE POUYAE
Quotes & Excerpts

I read Bacon saying "I would never have my sitter sit opposite me. I would not want them to witness the injury I would visit upon their face."

I didn't really think I wanted to do it, cuz I didn't really go to the theater. I Wasn't really much of a fan of theater at all. I didn't really go. I just liked the room a lot where the course was. I walked into the room and I really liked it.

I thought this [...] room has [...] such an extraordinary energy to it. So I did the course cuz I wanted to be in that room. That was the only reason.

I think it's a common thing [...] if people have to make many decisions in a day, they tend to say there will be some areas where I will just abstain from making a decision.

I think for now I'm somewhat in that phase, where anything to do with food or clothing, I try to [...] limit choices: eat the same thing, and wear the same thing.

When I asked you Bella Freud why do you think that drawing was abandoned? I think you said to me: "Perhaps it was all that he needed to know for then, for that part, and he'd got what [...] he needed, and could move on".

I was the second of four children, so I wore everything that my sister had finished wearing. And so, I guess, I was always a version of my sister, and then, when I got to be a teenager, and I was able to buy my own clothes, I just bought precise replicas of my sister's clothing.

And I remember she got really cross with me one day, because she had just bought a pink jumper from Topshop, and I had gone to Miss Selfridge and bought the closest I could find to this pink jumper, and she was furious, because she was desperately trying to differentiate, and I was still trying to emulate.

Bella Freud: You're a world-renowned stage designer, director, and artist. You've designed for the theater, for high fashion, and hugely famous music stars, and the Super Bowl, and you've said you don't like to get too comfortable in one medium, and I wondered, what the feeling is, that propels you to change your medium? is it a restlessness?

Es Devlin: I don't think I'm restless. I think I'm curious, and voraciously appetited, and I am—I guess—really aware of how short and precious life is, and every day is, and want to express every instinct to follow each lead that curiosity presents, I guess.

I would spend a lot of time copying chunks out of books. I would read things, and I found a book the other day, actually. I had really nice, careful handwriting at the time, and I would just carefully copy chunks that I loved.

I would go to the cinema and see films. I think I was just preparing—I was just absorbing so much of what I learned. I spent a lot of time in the studio. My boyfriend at the time was a record sound engineer, and I would just sit and listen to the singers, the drummers, and the guitar players. It was a long gestation period of observing ways that you could be in the world and then trying to find my place in it.

I'd come every Saturday morning to do my violin, clarinet, and piano lessons. There was a junior course at the Royal Academy which I managed to get a place on and do these lessons. Then in the afternoon, because I would buy a cheap day return ticket, it had a London underground pass on it so you could go anywhere in London for a day. I was doing this, coming up on my own from the age of 11, and I was just wandering around London on the tube. I could figure it out because I knew what colors the tube lines were. I knew if I followed the red line I would surface in Tottenham Court Road.

Timeout back then used to list the jumble sales. Oh my god! You could look up a jumble sale. Because we were, you know, feral country children, my way of finding my way in London was to go to the jumble sales. My day out in London would be doing my music lesson in the morning, and then I had probably £2.50 to spend in the afternoon, so the jumble sale was the place. I remember I found this jumble sale and it said it was going to be in Neasden. I was like, "Okay, that's like at the end of the silver line, the Jubilee line. I can get there." I popped up in Neasden, went to this jumble sale, had my little elbows out getting stuff.

Anyway, one afternoon my mother said—she'd seen I was interested in Japanese art because I had my Time Out and I'd cut out one of the pictures—"I will take you." We went to the Barbican. When we were leaving, we bought a book together because I had said to her, "I want to paint a Japanese mural on the wall of my bedroom." I think because I had Kate Bush's album The Kick Inside, which has a rather interpretive version of Kate in Japanese mode, let's say, on the cover. So we bought this book, and when I got home I opened it up and it was all Japanese erotic art. My mom hadn't checked it very carefully, but that was okay; it still had all the bits I needed.

I decided that I would match these colors with Dulux paint because that was the right thing to paint on a wall. I went and I got all these different Dulux colors, little testers, and I painted this whole mural. It was an attic bedroom with kind of plugs sticking out of the wall, and I just went straight over the plug with someone's head! I didn't care. Went straight over the door, over the skirting board. I just carried on.

I think to answer your question of the passage from girl to woman: I believed that if anyone set foot in my bedroom, then the evening would take on some romantic, magical proportion. The bedroom—the room with its painting, with its parasol over here, with its bed like this—the room would be in charge of the event. So I guess something in that, having a sense that rooms and places could have their own agency, was part of that transition for me. If that makes sense.

I recently read The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. He talks about the difference between the right and left brain—not in the sense that one does one thing and the other does something else, but rather that both sides of the brain perform all functions, just with different qualities of attention.

He traces this back 700 million years to the earliest nematode worms. There’s evidence that the two brain hemispheres have always been specialized for two distinct types of attention. Broadly speaking, the left side focuses on detail—scrutinizing things to eat—while the right side monitors the whole environment to avoid being eaten. Essentially, the brain has always been divided between the attention needed to seek sustenance and the attention needed to avoid danger. It’s as simple as that.

McGillchrist’s thesis—and one he argues is increasingly urgent—is that we’ve become out of balance. He suggests that the Axial Age (the era of Confucius, Jesus, etc.) may have been when these two modes of attention were most harmoniously aligned. However, he posits that the fall of the Roman Empire marked the beginning of a growing disequilibrium between them.

Today, we’re in a state where the transactional and rational (left-brain dominance) have overshadowed the mystic, holistic, and empathetic (right-brain qualities). This imbalance, he argues, is something we urgently need to correct.

For me, consciously practicing this balance—whether lying in bed contemplating a sliver of light or simply pausing to shift into a broader, more open awareness—helps ease fear. It’s a small but meaningful way to reconnect with that deeper mode of attention.

I had a boyfriend for a long time—from the age of 16 to 28. I remember the conversation: his father was on the phone to me, saying "When will you get a job?". I just hadn't found what I wanted to do, or what I could do.

Day's Context