On process, stealing, originality and intention

 

After a bright start with my first painting of the year, the next two have got a little stuck. It's something to do with wanting to carry on with the feel of the horizontal paintings from last year's sketchbook, which is impossible not least because I've come out of the sketchbook onto 'better' paper. Unbeknownst to me, the first painting of the year managed this transition because actually it was a slightly different ratio to the horizontals, which meant that the image had to evolve in a slightly different way.

Insisting on the original ratio, the second one (above) was more or less able to become itself because it was no longer horizontal, so that had to change as well. But the most recent one got stuck; I drew in pencil first (rarely a good idea), I couldn't decide what forms to include, and I started out with colours I'd decided I wanted to use. All of these are known to be killers, from past experience. Here is the doomed image:

So I'm doing something now that I rarely do, which is stop to think about what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. Assessing what's evolved of its own accord, in terms of sources, noticing how the changing scale has affected the size and placement of images, and admitting to a change in process that has become safer and less unpredictable. This is exactly what made me leave the animal series a couple of years ago, despite the fact that in that case the images were still interesting to me, and they remain some of my most-loved ones in terms of card and print sales. That's too bad. I'm not here to achieve card and print sales. My line has to be free, risking itself with ink and no pre-planning. 

My subject matter inspiration wandered last year into 50s design, and then to woodcut motifs. I abandoned my rule about not taking shapes and forms from living artists, and just followed anything that fell into the process. The horizontal format arose accidentally and I loved it. But now it's time to move into something different.

Something that I can't see in advance, something that gives me cold sweats and fear as I hand over my conscious desire to make paintings to the ink bottle with its uncontrollable nozzle and try to trust to  something much more exploratory and unknown. You probably won't notice anything different. But I will.

I'm going to give up ideas from 50s design and living artists, though I may be allowed to play with the forms that have already landed in last year's paintings. I possibly may force myself to work out my own abstractions of living forms, something that I'm usually too impatient and hasty to bother doing.

Or I may not, because frankly the need to make a painting is so strong in me that if I want to keep the spontaneity of my line and composition alive it may just be that not working out anything at all in advance may be my only possibility. 

Apart from not wanting to steal from living artists, I think one of the reasons that I don't want to persist with using European woodcut forms is something to do with what I can only think to call cultural imagination. Attractive and clever as those designs and woodcuts are, our imaginations here in Europe and America have seen those forms many, many times. I began to notice this, as I got attracted again and again, that there was a certain kind of designy form that I love, but I've simply seen it too many times before. Whereas when I look at a 17th century design form from Assam, India (or an Ajanta cave painting from the early years of the Common Era...), I find a whole new world.

The composition is different, the forms are different, the colours are different. The handling of space is different. My imagination doesn't know what's going on here, it has no idea what to reference to. I could read up on the fact that it's from a narrative about Krishna if I wanted, but I don't really care about that. I can't experience it as a narrative about Krishna because I wasn't brought up in India. But as this, as a visual idea, is not made up of ideas or meanings that need to be articulated in words, I can have some kind of an experience without them. Something that thrills my soul, because of its different-ness, it's unknown-ness.

So I think I may try to go back to mining the colours and forms that populate my lifelong study of the Indian aesthetic, and see if there's anything there that what wants to happen anew. In an odd kind of way, as someone who once studied Indian history, and even had a tortuous year of Sanskrit which allowed me to read just one verse of the Bhagavad Gita in its original form, there's something in me that wants to stick to a version of what I think of as working from original sources.

I'm not trying to create a visual response to the world that tries in some way to be new or original, which I think you could say is one of the cultural tropes which informs 21st Century art in Europe and America. Instead I want to honour and play with the creations of long-dead artists from somewhere other; culturally, imaginatively, whose intention was not this. These artists were not trying to impress their audiences with their originality or individual cleverness, they were in service to something else; something higher and wider and stranger (have you ever read a hymn from the Rig Veda ????) that can never be known by us in terms of words or understanding. This is the field of my exploration.

Spiralling around True North

 

Today I shared this image on my facebook page. I didn't say anything about the post as it never occurred to me that anyone might think that I might have made it.

But they did.  At least I think a couple of people did. Wow. First of all, I'm amazed to be credited with such an image. Secondly, I'm fascinated by what it was about this image that created some quite strong reactions. What energies does such an image carry that they communicate in some way to people from another culture, and possibly another time?

I don't have any information about who made this image, or when. It's from a book published in 2007 to celebrate the Wellcome Trust opening a new public venue in London. The book was edited by J. Peto and was called The Heart (Newhaven and London). It's a Kalighat painting, which means it could be ancient or made yesterday:

'Kalighat painting is a school of painting in Kalighat, a small district in Calcutta. It is named after the Hindu goddess Kali. Kalighat painting originated from the folk art tradition of rural Bengal. The Patuas or picture makers had migrated from Bengal in the early nineteenth century. There are a range of subjects from religious imagery of Hindu gods, goddesses and stories to natural history, social types and proverbs. The range of materials used in drawing are pencil, watercolour, indian ink and silver paint.'

It's a kind of weird synchronicity because I've been fascinated by the Patuas, who traditionally painted long narrative scrolls called Pats (20 metres or more, which as I understand it were unrolled as they told a story...) for over thirty years (anyone reading this who knows more about this/sees errors in my ideas, please get in touch!). In fact, my current long landscape paintings, I realised recently, are unconsciously echoing not only the horizontal walls of Indian mural paintings in places like Ajanta and Mattacheri Palace (which are all narrative), but the idea of the storytelling Pats specifically. Things seem to just circle back and spiral in mysterious ways.

For the record, I want to say that you are very unlikely to ever see me making an image of a Hindu god. I use artefacts, I steal colours, I unconsciously play with energies that I don't understand. But I don't make images of Hindu gods. If you want to know why, apply to read my 1994 Dissertation entitled: Symbol and Reality: The Embodiment of the Divine in the Sacred Images of India (School of Oriental Studies, University of London). 😁

Grounding metaphysical expansion

 

The first painting of 2024. I don't know what to make of it, as usual. Mainly I'm just glad it's here.

I never wanted to have a style. As soon as something looks like it might be repeating itself to some kind of formula, I get uncomfortable. Lots of people seem to find 'the thing they do' and then go on repeating some version of it, probably for many different reasons, one of which might be that it's just a relief not to have to face an empty page every time and wonder what to do. I can also see how a narrowing down, focussing in upon a particular investigation is its own kind of exploration and delight.

For me though this begins to feel like creative atrophy. If it starts to happen I feel I'm no longer simply providing conditions for emergence; no longer creating a space to be surprised in.  I'm being tempted to stay with something not entirely unsatisfying, perhaps to give my nervous system a break from the feeling of constantly putting one foot out in front of me off the edge of my cliff.

Right now I don't want to worry about these long landscapes being in danger of becoming safe or repetitious. Is it just the repetition of a slightly unusual format? Perhaps I think  sameness is appearing because of this format, but that's surely only because it's non-standard; who complains about the sameness of the A size proportions of repeating landscape or portrait formats?

I like the long landscape format because it feels different and strange, and also because it stretches my plants and birds and artefacts potentially into some kind of narrative, though whatever story it might tell is private to the mind of the viewer. I like that compared to the space in the more conventional format, which for me can sometimes be almost overwhelming. Like in the image below.... I'm unnerved by the way this image bypasses space, time and gravity; it throws me into a metaphysical space beyond the normal dimensions/limits which I need to ground my experience and my imagination.

I shared a quote on fb recently about ancient Chinese painters seeing artists' studios as a 'places of applied philosophy'. This seems to be working itself out through me whether I want it to or not, so for now I'm going to stick with my mythical landscapes, not least because they're being pretty insistent. Like I've said before, I just take dictation.

Just experimenting all year long

 

2023 has turned out to be year of experimentation.  Hardly any intended paintings. Sketchbooks, A4 colour tests, a brief return to Indian sculpture, Posca pens, departing from my favourite palettes, taking risks with as much as I could. 

I got a couple of images that interested me in terms of line or colour from the return to the Indian sculptures:

but  that didn't last long. I realised that I was just destroying the beauty that had always captivated me and was not really succeeding in taking them anywhere new.

Then there were a couple of paintings that completed some personal work, making that a private trilogy.

Posca pens...

And then some oil painting experiments...

Finally I landed on the Pith sketchbook in a landscape format, that when I worked over both pages became a kind of long narrative, like an Indian storytelling scroll.

Strangely, and somewhat accidentally, I ended up making some paintings, though I didn't know I was doing so at the time. The best way.

Storylandscapes 2023 video

The human prism

 

I'm interested in visual responses to the world which clearly show that they've passed through a human. The opposite of realism, certainly of hyper-realism.

There is no human who looks like this:

Or like this:

And that's not the point of such images. They channel ideas, feelings, energies, meanings.

Something that humans often seem to do when they process the world is to regularise things. Despite the fact that plants, animals and humans in the actual world are never symmetrical or evenly proportioned, humans often like to make them so. There are no repeating patterns in nature. If you look at a sea shell or a zebra, you'll see that though there's a basic idea that may repeat itself, the way that the repeat emerges is always in some way unique to itself, even as part of a pattern.

Though there may be mathematical rules that provide constraints and generate a type, the actual emergence into the world of the shapes of a general pattern all vary from each other in small ways.

Humans take this in, and seem to like to play with tidying it up into regularity.  I find the result of this tidying up process, which shows me that the rose passed through a living human, far more interesting than images that attempt to reproduce the irregular variations of the living original.

The idea, or feel, of a tree, rather than a representation of its actual form...

Having spent the last year or so trawling Indian, Assyrian and Egyptian reliefs and paintings for images that create the feel of plants rather than their exact forms, I've just recently remembered the wonderful craziness of mid-century design.

Human was here, a responding human. 

Expressing or responding?

I often come across the idea that 'real artists' are 'so talented' that they can just draw stuff, like, brilliantly. It's there within them, they were born with that capacity. There's a closely linked idea that what artists make comes from some secret place of genius within them; some source of originality and differentness that's not given to ordinary people. 

As a basically unschooled person, I absorbed this idea from the culture around me, unconsciously. I knew I wanted to draw and paint, but when I got to St Martins School of Art in the late 70s, I was told that drawing from life was reactionary, old hat, conventional, stuck in the past. So I dutifully made my way to the abstract room, and lined my 18 year old self up with a bunch of other youthful furrowed brows, working studiously on canvases that had to be a minimum of six foot wide. I waited for the stuff to start pouring from me, like it was supposed to. Didnae happen. I decided that if something was supposed to pour out of me, perhaps first it needed to pour into me, arranged a year off, and went off to Oman to become a disc jockey. Travelled the length of India by train, dropped in to Burma, sweated in Hong Kong, visited the art treasures of China in Taipei. In fact, the pouring in lasted for the next thirty years, and even when I properly started painting again my unconscious still had to trick me to get me past the idea that when the time was right the pouring out would simply just begin.

What I didn't know then was that, in fact, if you go into pretty much any artist's studio, you will see images that didn't come from them at all, all over their walls; torn off, cut out random images; photos and postcards; images made by old masters, designers, other artists. No-one ever explained to me that artists work, and they feed. They draw and paint and copy and design, experiment and practice, for years and decades (in fact anyone could do this, but most people simply don't, and then they complain that their drawing 'looks like a six year old's'....). Artists feed off colours and textures and shapes in the world, including the work of other artists, past and present. As Austin Kleon puts it, they steal; voraciously, from everywhere. They notice what they're drawn to, they collect, and then they respond.

    'You only speak because you want to react to something you've heard. The idea of an actor going away to their room and rehearsing something alone is an absolute nonsense to me. What you have to say is completely incidental. All I want to see from the actor is the intensity and accuracy of their listening. And then what you have to say will be automatic and then it will become free and alive. And then you can work on it and shape it and talk about it. But the basic kind of engine to it is how accurate is  your listening. And how alive are you to your fellow actors and how accurate your response, and how bold.'

Alan Rickman, interview on Instagram

Sometimes, my inherited cultural voices start to whisper 'But aren't you just being derivative? Why are you using the work of ancient artists in your paintings, why are you just copying stuff, instead of giving us your own original ideas?'

I'll tell you why. Because I'm having a conversation. I'm not interested in 'expressing myself, or creating a style, or working out what people might want to have on their walls. I'm always on the lookout for someone to have a visual conversation with, whether that someone be the human who made a symbolic object in 3,000 BC, or a 1950s designer abstracting plants in their own unique way.

Working with the world, as it presents itself to me.

Moving slowly, thick undergrowth

 

Eventually, at the deliciously unhurried pace that oils not only allow but insist upon, I finished the first series of tiny oil experiments.

The richness of pigment in oil astonishes me. A thin layer of thinned down oil paint glows. When you put another layer on later, the glow gets deeper. When you put on a layer of a different colour, the optical mixing is breathtaking.

And now for the second series of tiny experimental paintings, accompanied by one slightly larger.

There have been a number of technical problems with finding the right mix of black stuff to create the right kind of black line. The linen paper drags at the folded pen nib, the folded nib clogs up with the acrylic/gesso mix. The oil layers make a shine that the gesso removes when on paper. 

All of this subtly affects the quality of the line, which has to be drawn more slowly. I can't sweep at speed like before. Forms disobey my hand, blobs arrive. The energetics of the whole painting change. 

The slowness is ecstatic.