I have spent some time stretching and priming a number of canvases. I am making some paintings using, so far, primary colours. I have in mind surfaces divided centrally. Beyond that I do not know. I painted some of them in Red, Yellow, Blue, and one secondary – Green. Plain flat colours. The sheer pleasure of it took me by surprise. An intense hue made from Cadmium and Lemon Yellow almost makes my teeth tingle. (Maybe something as corny as a connection with lemon juice?) But not just the ‘teeth’. I found the experience of yellow so pleasant. (sun?) So with Cadmium Red, and French Ultramarine tinted with Titanium white, the sheer coulour-fullness of the surfaces is immensely satisfying. With the complementary coloured line that will divide each surface, I am searching for an intense (for me) visual event. There seems to be something in this idea of a vertical division. I am concerned that a single line is somehow falls short of what the painting might aspire to. The dividing line centrally placed on a canvas seems to point at difference, whilst symmetry contradicts it. Ambivalence appeals to me.
These colours take an age to dry.
Whilst I wait, I have been drawing. In conversation at a recent exhibition, questions were raised about the drawing in a particular work. Were what appeared to be perspectival distortions deliberately designed to enhance a sense of unreality? Were they mistakes? They could be read within the work as intention, or as outside the intention as it was ‘felt’ in the work. In the event that they were intentional, were they adequate? In so far as the intention could be read in what was seen, to what extent did the image realise its potential? Could the work as a whole succeed in spite of what might be unresolved questions? Those of us talking about the work approached it from a variety of ‘perspectives’. Like much of this kind of conversation, as much might have been revealed about the participants as the object under scrutiny. The question arises as to how such disparity of judgement occurs in the first place, and following from that, what is the genesis of one’s own judgement. Maybe it is something to do with the apparent limits of description and the always tentative framing of questions. Whatever is asked or said becomes subject to the same kind of speculation as the work discussed.
I have been making these drawings with that conversation in mind. I find when I am drawing, control oscillates between me and the drawing, (which might just be a smart way to avoid saying that sometimes I can achieve my intentions, and sometimes I cannot). When the drawing is dominant, (when I am struggling) I have to claw my way back into it. I recognise that I am getting back into it when anxiety recedes. I suppose for me an important element of what I do resides in not failing. But it depends upon a process of resolution of failure rather than a processs of successful solution. My conversations about art are often like that, in that my dominant feelings are bound up with anxiety rather than pleasure. These drawings contain factual errors, technical errors, and deliberate deviation from the factual. The physical movements involved in making a line or tone have in themselves visual potential – responding to marks- having a kind of conversation with(in) the process. I suppose that some drawing comes to completion when its conflicting elements hold themselves in a state of precarious tension.
Thoughts brought to the surface by Anthony Boswell’s latest post. Like the paintings, these thoughts are a stuttering work in progress. I am aware of some contradictions and confused issues below but not at present of how to resolve them. In so far as art concerns itself with its contemporary world, Moore, Newman et al are no longer possible. What is possible is to live in a state of unrecognised nostalgia. Recognising the problem at least permits clinging on!! I don’t know if Andrew has similar feelings, but I have a tendency to feel that what I do is somehow trivial (chances are that it is trivial, but I refer to the feeling) by comparison with much contemporary work and its preoccupations. I feel embarrassed. It is something that I fight. I do what I do with some hope that I shall leave it behind.But there is the possibility that I can put my embarrassment to one side and just get on with being a kind of anachronistic creature, making my stuff and learning from it. I once heard it said that a good judge can enjoy bad art.
Art of the last century as typified by Newman, Pollock etc. might conceivably have evolved into ritual, surviving now in individual and group practices away from the mainstream. As ritual, its creativity defers to the demands of ideal form, open to nuance but bound by formal rules, work that may be judged in relation to that ideal. The making of art becomes social activity (ritual) like a tea ceremony (or vegetable show.) But this comes at the price of an ossified, conservative cultural order with all the coercive techniques necessary to sustain it. (However elegant or profound the ritual might seem)
If there are no longer qualitative criteria in art the implication is that all or nothing survives over time. Conversely those works which reveal themselves to have something to say in the future might have a presence analogous to excellence, for which the concept of drawing could serve as a metaphor.
Interesting that Rich White raises similar issues in his letter in a-n. in asking for some kind of labeling system for creativity. Coincidentally I crossed a connected path to do with the artistic community in my previous blog. He refers implicitly to the artists in your post. Maybe the historical notion of creativity as such now sits uncomfortably with the redundancy of criteria. To design a label to distinguish between creative and other things is to miss the point of creativity that it is ubiquitous. There is the further observation that the creative experience occurs in the subject; the creative object is at conception a subjective event.
Whether or not work needs explanation, we must talk about it.The error is to expect, or even wish for, the kind of explanation that explains. As I wrote this I thought that I understood some of it. It doesn’t affect the taste of chocolate.
I found this hen pheasant by the side of the road, relatively undamaged. Due to the recent spell of coldish weather, I have been able to spend some time drawing it. It tested my capacity to see what I was looking at. The mere fact of looking and turning away, moving slightly, was enough to lose my point of focus. Added to this, the shape of the bird changed subtly from day to day, feathers shifting slightly, body shape relaxing. I followed the light somewhat unknowingly as it moved during the day, tiny changes in appearance read at times as inaccuracies in the drawing.
Its making has been accompanied by a background presence of artists discovered via links from ‘The Hot Chestnut Man’, Beagles and Ramsay, whose performances include offering for consumption to their audience, fried black pudding made from their own blood.
The feeling that results from exposure to their ideas is that I have leaped off a cliff but failed to fall. I remain suspended with no way back and no apparent downward impetus. It is uncomfortable.
Does the community of artists mirror the wider world, in which opposites and contradictions exist and survive as long as they avoid each other and guard their preconceptions, civilised as long as balances of power are not tested in earnest?
Does my bird refer maybe just a little, and coincidentally, to the times in which we live, as opposites in the wider community increasingly defend their interests?
I’m not sure of the presence of any sense in this.
Each time I try to write about something I start with confidence and descend into uncertainty. Like this drawing thing which is around at the moment. Musing around with my thoughts, some things about drawing seem so apparent. Yet when I try to put the thoughts into sentences, they are anything but.
I’ve been drawing for years. I ought to know something. But I realize that all the time I have been doing it, I appear not to have been reflecting on it?
I thought, some drawing is like running – I visualized drawing without narrative, like running, a condition of things and not an analysis – some drawing analyses, some drawing synthesizes. I started thinking about this through reading Rebecca Cusworth, Susan Francis, and today, Clare Smith. in the blogs. What makes some minds stop at the Renaissance? Perhaps it’s a temperament thing.
What is a mirror like accuracy? Is it possible? Is a mirror image to do with deception? Can drawing deceive? Can we be deceived without being ready for it? The lesson that drawing teaches me is that I fall short always. But am I simply afraid of failure and use drawing to control or confront the fear? And as I write the sentence, I wonder what it is that I fall short of? (I think I’m a bit of a sucker for glorious disaster.) I think that I mean that in some respects I am always aware of struggle. When I draw, I suppose that I do not have an intention, or maybe that intentions can seem pretentious, or I find my intentions after the fact. But is this sufficient? Should I have a respectable intention? Sometimes I think that my drawing of dead and dying things is a look into my future, an acknowledgement. I empathise with my subjects.( But I rarely confess to this; I feel the withering indifference of conceptualists. I am embarrassed by laughter at the angst-ridden painter.) And I am not even sure if it is true. Possible meanings are always possible. Pay your money and take your pick; stick meaning like post-it notes onto the floating signifier. Drawings arise from an unsatisfied longing? All activity strives to banish fear? It’s not that we need to feel good, but rather that we don’t want to feel bad. Drawing is one metaphor among many. It has that in common with all activities which risk disaster? And as I think about it , drawing is the overarching metaphor; all activities involve some kind of ‘drawing out’ of structure and content. This is why my attempt to understand, (for want of a better word,) art consists in part of a search for a common thread which might be carried by the concept of drawing. Drawing in all its forms seems to be one thing that historically is always present Perhaps that is why anything can be Art.
With reference to Jane Boyer’s comment below.
Essentially I think that the merely tasteful is not Art, but Art objects can be tasteful. Taste objects are class based tribal totems. Art objects can take any form. The distinction between the intellectual and the physical is false in that thinking is making, making is thinking. (when we think ‘about’ something, we are nevertheless making) Intellectualising is inevitable since we ask what things mean. We cannot know what something means without making something else. (responding to it) Creativity fractures taste.
