George Steiner offers an insight into His uncertainties regarding his ‘Art’. ‘It’ pokes away at suspected distinctions between invention and creation. Writing of an occasion when Duchamp challenges Brancusi (in the Aeronautics Salon at the Grand Palais in Paris, 1912) with “…’Painting is finished. Who could do better than that propeller?’ Art can no longer rival, let alone excel the techne of the engineer. Invention is identified as the primary mode of creation in the modern world.” he continues, ‘It follows that art is becoming amateurish indulgence…..’ (Steiner Grammars of Creation p274.) The uncertainties that continue to surround painting imply a misconception of the nature of the activity of making art in the minds of those (of some of us) who ‘paint’. Painters today are reinventing, sometimes joyously, knowingly, provocatively. He found this. Maynard Keynes suggested that ‘If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with banknotes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coalmines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.’
(http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/economic…)
Mining the past or living in it defines the extremes for the painter. Without wishing to sound too grand, if there is something profoundly pointless about the making of things like this, there seems paradoxically to be some value in it. But if it is simply pointless, then it is trivial. If they are to mean anything, that initial meaning must be His; the first shock must be in the maker. He has been stroking the paper with his hb pencil for some time, looking, reacting, smoothing, softening. Without the bird, what would these acts be? The bird at least offers a reference to the world outside. Or a distraction disguising the possibly true purpose of he work. The lower part of the drawing, shaded on its outside, looks whiter than it should. He loves way that this happens. It’s always a childlike pleasure no matter how many times He repeats it. He tells ‘It’ that this is an image of tensions, visual and felt. The horizontal lines, placed last, seemed to rescue it from aimlessness. (‘It’ interjects with a suggestion about the true extent of the work’s ‘aimlessness’.) Spaces and artspeak hold hands?
He is still twiddling his brushes. The work is an opportunity to do nothing whilst ‘doing’ something. Howard Hodgkin, lend us a mark or two? The image of the bird is a handhold on the cliff. Let go and, only hopeful daubing is left. ‘It’ knows. The scarified surface is nice and soft. He brushes his hand over it periodically, a distraction. He used to smoke. He recalls those times when he searched for a lost something or other, in places where he knew it could not be, in full knowledge of the outcome, just to avoid finality. Other distractions may surprise him. ‘It’ has lost its cutting edge, temporarily.
He is reading George Steiner’s ‘Grammars of Creation’. Steiner’s scholarship is daunting, and the reading puts Him in his place, but gently. There is a mirroring in Steiner’s words of the previous days’ ‘work’.
‘Satan may have provoked God into creating. ‘Show me,’ narks the critic-theoretician. Once creation lies before him, Satan seeks out its flaws. He ironizes the Maker’s self-satisfaction – that “very good”. It is as if Satan sought to touch on some occult fibre of vainglory in Jahve.’ (Steiner, p41)
‘It’ cringes, knowing the feeling, the vanity, and the (self)-destructive impulse. And the revelation that ‘It’ has characteristics that are universal is some consolation; it lights up congruence between those of us writ small and those others, writ large. Not that ‘creation’ lay before ‘It’. ‘It’ pointed to a lack in the image, no urgency or purpose in the marks, an aimless bolting on and unbolting of things. He took note, that was how He felt as well. He decided that the work had no redeeming features. The critic’s point was won. A third voice, not His, then urged caution, it wasn’t that bad, keep it, move on and return to it.
Paint softens the torn surface. A healing skin? The seascape had to go. Instant transformation of the implied space of a horizon to the ambiguous space of flatness. The original painting using suggestive marks has given way to something more descriptive. There is a preliminary approach to painting that He takes which might be what is meant by ‘expressive’. He paints like a shot-putter. Stuff is launched onto the surface with what turns out to be more hope than judgement. Does hope imply a lack of faith? ‘It’ rides with the frustration that is carried in the act and the mark. A period of enthusiastic scrubbing and dabbing follows until He realises the futility of it. ‘It’ begins to tire and He relaxes into looking and a more considered process. The expressive approach is not the painting but a clearing of shards of feeling that litter the floor of the china shop; the bull is still for a while. ‘More considered’, Safer? The work becomes less resistant as ‘It’ retreats. The wounding of the surface is healed by the perpetrator, neutered perhaps by the process. A tamed painting expresses gratitude.
He put some Zinc White pigment on the surface and brushed it in. A seascape appeared, grey reflected light. Truly awful. The work appeals to ‘Its’ sense of perverse pleasure. One of them must lose. ‘It’ eggs him on. Graphite powder is applied. Cotton wool to rub it in. But cotton wool catches on the rough surface , a memory of lint on childhood scabs, stuck and painful to remove. And as he stands back the work remains appalling. It is amused. He laughs. Cotton wool has drawn itself next to the zinc white to suggest a shore. It has all the qualities of bad collage. If the work continues to defy him, He will make it so bad that there will be no end to its regret. Or He might see the error of its ways and allow some means of redemption.
