Ça va me changer (This is going to change me) (2018)
Meghan K. McGinley | The Plain | Artwork | Issue 2
Acrylic on canvas | 36 x 48 inches

Artist’s Note


"Ça va me changer" is the second painting in a string of three that, together, form the Ça Series. The French utterance “ça” is multifaceted in its use: a pronoun, an interjection, and a noun at once. The substantive form, always capitalized, has a psychoanalytic root. It is the French derivation of Sigmund Freud’s concept of the id, which governs our unconscious, instinctual impulses. As follows, each one of these works taps into an artistic well that champions intuition over reason. Color acts as a language of the senses, one that is felt before it is studied—a language recovered.

These pigmented fields are the product of a single brush, a rhythmic kaleidoscope achieved with only red, yellow, blue, and white. I seldom clean my instrument when I shift between hues, preferring to exhaust the colors against the canvas and inside each other. This language is one of guts, desire, fury, and future. It is one that drove an aching future, an imagined future, a failed future that changed me. A dialogue between the “recovered” and the act of recovery—getting better—now informs my waking life. This dream-in-being shapes me, colors my perception, and, most of all, urges me forward.

By Meghan K. McGinley
Meghan K. McGinley is a PhD Candidate in French Studies at Vanderbilt University. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and East Hampton, New York.
June 2021
Symposeum Magazine Issue 2