'Exactitude is not truth', again

 

‘Exactitude is not truth’

I’ve been thinking about this quote from Matisse for many years. Matisse felt that there was an inherent truth about a person or an object in the world, which he felt lay beyond its outward form. My interest is not this notion of inherent truth, but something which is neither the exactitude of  naturalism, nor the relative abandonment of real world objects which occurs in abstraction.

The internet is awash with art which impresses non-artists with its technical proficiency...‘ I thought it was a photo!’ etc. This model of art has been with us in Europe and America for quite a few centuries, and is what you might call a conduit model – there’s an object in the world; the human receives the object through their perception exactly as it is, and reproduces it as accurately as possible; resulting in piece of art that is a clever and accurate reproduction of the original object.

Other cultures often have a different history of intentions and purposes in relation to making things. The makers of ancient artefacts, for example, don’t appear to have been  interested in whether the proportions of a clay goddess were much related to a real female in the physical world; they seem to have been more interested in conveying, or summoning, or creating, or placating, or even just playing with, some kind of world energy which they could feel moving through their lives. 

Similarly with Indian miniature paintings. Leaving aside theoretical discussions about rasa (Indian aesthetics), or the complex symbolism of ragamalas/raginis (musical modes represented as paintings, sometimes personified as women etc), a simple example of this summoning of world energies can be seen in the plants in an Indian miniature painting. If you study these, it’s clear that the painter didn’t care about exactitude, but was doing something else.

Rather than coming about through the conduit model (object passes to human, human makes accurate reproduction of object, human puts reproduction out into the world) the miniature painting plant seems to come about through a process of transformation which occurs as the human’s feelings and perceptions work upon the object they receive from the world.

So....object in the world – enters human through organs of perception and becomes mixed with feeling, playfulness, visceral response to colour etc – and eventually something new appears. This new thing has the recognisable features of a plant, but it’s been changed by its passage through the human. Perhaps it has the feel of a plant. Perhaps it’s a simplification of what a plant actually looks like. It’s something which doesn’t exist in the natural world, something that can only come into being by means of this route through a human. Our culture ‘allows’ this in illustration or design, but has historically looked down upon this kind of interpretation/transformation of worldly objects in the world of painting (‘primitive’, ‘folk art’, ‘outsider art’ etc).

A Year Of Pushing Colour

Two posts below from recent days (transferred across from my Facebook Page). 

The first finds me doing a review of the last year.

'Made myself a little review of the last year in painting. It starts at the centre, with the last of the animal paintings. That was a beautiful, satisfying series.... and then suddenly my neat pen line said, no more (follow clockwise, up from the ram...)

I started painting with an ink bottle with a nozzle, which I could barely control. And then the beautiful palette I had been using for so long, pthalo turquoise, red oxide, yellow ochre, perylene maroon.... also rebelled. Purple, it yelled! Pink! Lime green! Cobalt blue! Ugly not pretty! Add white and black! Risk messing it up every single time! And then came posca pens. It's been a wild ride, and I hope it gets wilder.'

Then, a few days later...

'Living life as a maker of images, with a commitment to be exploring something most of the time, in an unhurried, unpressured, undriven way. Sharing the results of that process, with no expectation, no agenda.

Today. A quiet nervous system sigh of relief at the unexpected return of these colours, laden with inexpressible resonances. Temple courtyards in the sun. A shocking glint of sari against worn sandstone like a wild iridescent beetle. Bare feet on hot worn slate arranged in hexagonal shapes to fit the star-shaped outline of the temple plan. Dust. Stains. Green wood. Rusted railings.'

Living Life As An Artist

 

Living life as an artist is a practice.

You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not.

It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it.

It’s like saying, ‘I’m not good at being a monk.”

You are either living as a monk or you’re not.

We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output.

The real work of the artist

Is a way of being in the world.

- Rick Rubin

Writing again

 

January 2023

The last post I wrote here was after my trip to Venice in the spring of 2019. In that post I said that I needed to stop writing and sharing, that I needed to go to ground. And so I did. 

I've still been working, focussing on just making the images, and sharing them regularly on my Facebook page and Instagram This has become the way I work. Theorising and thinking and writing less, at least most of the time;  making something, sharing it, and then moving on.

February 2022

A few days ago though, I found myself wanting to write again. I put my thoughts onto my Page, and a few days later it happened again. This stuff is really not for Facebook, so I thought I'd try putting it here. 

'I don't often try to put into words what I'm interested in in art, or what it is that I'm trying to work with. Today I learnt that Picasso expressed it pretty much perfectly for me after seeing an exhibition of African, Native American and Oceanic artists:

'After seeing this exhibition, he confessed: “I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path.”

Art as something not focussed on aesthetics but on power/some kind of magic has been my path since I rejected the art mores of St Martins School of Art in the 1970s. It took me over thirty years to work out how to even begin to respond to my fascination with tales of Chinese paintings that were so alive that dragons flew off the page; with Indian rituals that used aesthetic forms and processes to overcome human experiences of duality and pain.

This is why I'm still experimenting, still going back to the beginning, again and again.... trying to get myself out of the way in the hope that bigger processes might be able to use me for the purposes of magic. I suppose it's also why I work so much with ancient artefacts, because we can't reduce them to any kind of explanation about what they were 'for'; they were made by humans living in the midst of forces we no longer even recognise.'

I don't know if this will continue, but here I am again, just following my nose...