exactitude

I can draw 'accurately'. But learning to draw accurately always seemed strangely wrong for me. The act of making precise ('exactitude is not truth') , or attempting to make precise, seemed to kill something. That's why I was so excited when my line broke free in India. Something felt different, began to live. Many years later, a friend would look at those Indian drawings and say that they were in some way naive. I was quite taken aback, because for me the line had advanced towards something much more exciting.

I guess people look at Indian folk art and similarly say that the images are naive. For me this misses the point. This is a symbolic world, a world where images can provoke resonance, deep within the viewer. Or they may not. But the image emerges from a complex human/larger world interface (Kapoor's 'content arising') rather than being the result of a concept or a willed intention.

Someone said to me recently, 'Oh, you don't do real things do you'? But for me the images I make are just as much about reality as a portrait or a landscape. I'm working not so much 'from life', as with life, with the experience of things that are living...

The living line of my emergent content seems to deliberately flout exactitude. 'Exactitude?', it seems to say, 'Ha! take this!'.

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