Overcast weather and downcast thoughts. This painting was previously ‘Yes, But What Is It About?’ Ambivalence seems to intensify during grey days. The quality of light has the power to direct thinking. I dislike this painting like I dislike the mood of the weather. But like the weather it will not go away. I see it as a challenge to me. To accept defeat is to be defeated. If the sun comes out I might see things differently. I’ll hang on. I happened to be passing the Whitechapel Gallery last week and popped in. I haven’t been there for years it seems. Not an appropriate confession for an artist with pretensions. I went in at the door by the Restaurant, all shiny and posh with immaculately dressed staff. My heart sank, then on to a large gallery with sculptural work. My heart sank again – work to match the Restaurant! The gallery walls are stripped to reveal the gentle tastefulness of brickwork and (I think) lime mortar, bricklayers long gone, so genteel. I look at the work. Coffee and a chocolate muffin in the caff upstairs. And then on to Atlantis to look around and buy some brushes. Later, at home I researched the sculptor whose work I had seen. Quite unlike the work. I felt in the gallery a sense that something small was being written up to proportions that it could not sustain. But the artist in an online interview was not at all like that. This threw me again. I must be missing something. Perhaps some work would be more accessible if it were left alone. Alternately I might be happier in a cocoon of ignorance. Next day, out on my bike, I wondered about the Whitechapel. Whilst writing a previous post, it had occurred to me that we can use the connections between words to disguise their differences, in that case between panic and impatience. My cross reaction to what I saw as pretentiousness, both in the Art and the Gallery, might have been a disguise for what it really was, envy of the rich and successful. There’s nothing like rejection for denying what you really want.
My brain has had a difficult couple of days. I got myself into a bit of critical difficulty via a review of ‘Scopos the Watcher’. Martin Lang (see his blog below) drew my attention to some salient aspects of his work that I had entirely missed. And today I read Anthony Boswell’s latest post. Whilst not directly connected to my reviewing experience his post echoes my ongoing and no doubt by now tedious insecurities. Encounters such as these serve to reinforce my pathetic capacity for self doubt. My child recoils automatically from slaps from the grownups. But these things are of a piece. Aaron Jell in his Forum post ‘Art is (content to be) Quite Useless (?)’, suggests of Art that ‘The more elusive and indecipherable it is the more it is presumed to be poignantly penetrating and real in an artistic sense…’ Another month until the sun comes out?
