The essential point of all of this is that this project has made me feel as though there is some aspect of Paul Julian's life and work which has personal, specific relevance to my own life; that I am personally somehow close to him.
Obviously, this means nothing in real terms. I did not know him, I never will. He lived halfway across the world and died years before I was born.*
*(I know this for certain because I started plotting out his family tree using my dad's Ancestry account that he doesn't know I'm still logged into.)
Engaging with Julian's works in the way that I have been – by researching, looking, recording; seeking something in them, getting as close as I possibly can to the texture of their layers of paint and their physical, material composition, even through the barrier of digitality – breeds this kind of response. The texture of the work becomes the texture of my day-to-day, and the significance of the research in my life right now bleeds backwards into my past, to my childhood house and the empty lot my mum grew up in. I internally flesh out the hazy details of my own life using the scant facts of anothers. This feels somewhat selfish, maybe; but as Maria Stepanova writes, in her autobiographical tome In Memory of Memory,
“in place of a memory I did not have, of an event I did not witness, my memory worked over someone else’s story; it rehydrated the driest little note and made of it a pop-up cherry orchard.”
The constructed absences in Julian’s background paintings reflect the absence I keep running into when researching him*, the disorientation and frustration of which finds its expression in the image of the void placed on top of his childhood home.
*Opening book after book on animation history, animation art, animation theory, and turning to each index only to find no mention of not only Paul Julian but of background art in general; emailing the curator of the Warner Brother’s archive in California and being told that unfortunately they ‘could not find anything relating to Paul Julian’, and that within the archive as a whole there ‘are not materials specifically relating to the background art itself.’
But in our world of hauntological engagement, absences become their own kind of presence in the fact of their tangible effect. They may become barriers to building knowledge in the traditional, ontological sense, but absences are conduits to knowledge built upon an emptiness; upon missing foundations.