We’ve all been heartbroken; we’ve all experienced love and loss. These things are not new and merely writing them down, or singing about them, does not hold any inherent worth.
In 2001, storied Australian musician Paul Kelly found himself in front of a painting. It was a late period Rembrandt – a shadow-swathed portrait of the artist’s mistress, Hendrickje, then ill with the disease that would eventually take her life. Rembrandt loved Hendrickje deeply, but was unable to marry her due to a clause in the wedding contract he had previously signed with his wife, Saskia. Saskia was dead before Rembrandt even met Hendrickje. Some words in a legal document, signed years before, were the only things that made his mistress a mistress.
Kelly, profoundly moved by the painting, wrote to his own lover that day, the two of them separated by distance. “I wanted to put my arm around you and stand in front of it together,” he wrote. “I miss you like sleep.”
That letter, moving in its minimalism and its simplicity, and Kelly’s own wordless reaction to the painting at the time, streamlines the varied artistic project of a musician who has worked across styles and genres, who has recruited different backing bands, and who has recorded a dizzying collection of covers. Kelly always wants to say less. One might imagine that the ultimate Paul Kelly song says nothing at all, and therefore says everything.
This desire for a creative form of silence – the silence of a look shared between two people, the silence of a Rembrandt painting, the near silence of Kelly’s recent song Life Is Fine, with its short lines, and sparse guitar part – is not merely an aesthetic decision. His is the sort of ecstatic and simple beauty that we find elsewhere in glancing at your partner and realising, with giddy and beautiful shock, that they are beside you, and you love them.
Kelly has always known that the bone marrow of our lives – the things we do every day, the simple things – is the place where the joy and love and heartache can be found. These are the events about which, actually, you can’t say very much at all. They’re Kelly remarking on the absence of a lover and singing, “no you, no you,” on the song No You. They’re the specific ingredients listed in a recipe for gravy. They’re Kelly telling us that two friends “died within months of each other”, on The Ballad Of Queenie and Rover, as though remarking on something as simple as a change in the weather.
And this is the heart of it, really. The real challenge of art is to somehow make the commonplace sing again. We’ve all been heartbroken; we’ve all experienced love and loss. These things are not new, and merely writing them down, or singing about them, does not hold any inherent worth.
The artist must take the things we already know, and show them to us in a way that makes them hit, as though for the first time. Some do this through complexity, metaphor, plot. Kelly does it on To Her Door by telling the story of an entire relationship in a handful of lines. His is an encouragement to see our lives not as some grand narrative with pivotal scenes, but as composed of wordless moments, that are revealed for their inherent magic as soon as we pay proper attention to them.
Of course, we can’t actually live our lives letting each second and small detail hit with their full force. We would go insane. We wouldn’t move from examining blades of grass in our back yard. We have things to do. But this only makes artists like Kelly all the more important. It is here, in the space after Going to the River With Dad has come to a close – that silence – that we find an image of an actual utopia, where beauty and grace live in the things we would otherwise not notice. It is in the simple chorus of Down to My Soul, the song that Kelly wrote after seeing the Rembrandt painting. “You touch me down / Down to my soul,” he says. No more than that.
I know about Kelly’s letter on the Rembrandt painting because my girlfriend showed it to me. It’s in his book How to Make Gravy. We were in my room, on the couch. The light from the windows hit her face, and the book lay on her lap. I had no immediate sense that I would remember that moment forever, but I have that sense now. At the time, it was just me, her, and the book. It was late afternoon. And it was still warm outside.
• Joseph Earp is a critic, painter and novelist. His book Painting Portraits of Everyone I’ve Ever Dated will be published by Pantera Press in 2025
