Just keep going

'...if you want to create, sit down, lower your head in deference to the task ahead and get to work. But get out of art's way!' (Nick Cave)

Yesterday the road ahead to painting with oils seemed, if not completely blocked, certainly strewn with great tangled clumps of thorny brambles. 'Keep going', that's all. Just keep going. Today I feel rather more hopeful.

 

'We are in service to art, not the other way round'

It turns out that the unknown that was and is still beyond me is currently oil painting. I bought some oil paints over ten years ago, but have been put off by the solvent vapours, and the texture and nature of canvas. 

Some time during lockdown I had another go at canvas, using thin acrylic. Something was there, but I just couldn't abandon the lively ink line that had first greeted me back in India in the 80s, which had been insisting on itself ever since. So I had an ink line on canvas, thin paint, but then what? There was nothing better about canvas than ink on paper, and the paint soaked in and I lost my rough brush mark edges.

I tried giving up my inky line...

The problem was my training in line-free tonal drawing. It's magical, what you can do that way, but for some reason I didn't want to rest there. I can do the tonal thing, the life-capture or life-inspired thing, but it's been done, by me and others, a million times, and I just didn't want to go there. So then I tried putting the line on top.

But again, nothing seemed to be gained compared to my usual thin acrylic on paper. 

A bit later I decided to 'take myself in hand' and 'really focus on learning about oil paint'. I put myself on a little self-study course, trying to get to grips with layers and solvents and 'fat over lean'. It whispered something to me, but with a spirit now allergic to trying to learn things formally, I stalled, unable to see how to take it forward.

My mind/intention was trying to do what my cultural conditioning told me I was supposed to do (discipline myself to 'learn my scales' before being allowed to play and have fun...), but my spirit wasn't having it.  I was soon back to more spirit-guided weirdness, working on paper in response to poems of a composer.

There were already so many issues going on at once. The endlessly vexed question of subject matter, working figuratively but not directly from life. The nature of materials and tools, learning anew with every painting. The challenge of colour. The mystery of a process that continually takes things in directions that don't originate in my conscious mind. 

I could have gone on working with the ink line, paper and thin acrylic for the rest of my life and never run out of things to explore. But as soon as something starts to fly, become a little series, it as quickly runs out after a few paintings, because somehow it becomes glib, it becomes repetition, even if every time something is learned anew. As the summer arrived and I was able to open my windows to aerate the smell of solvent and linseed oil, a tiny promise from months ago to try oils again began to insist.

This time I didn't start with little test pieces. I smeared some stuff on two bits of lovely textured paper, and then I just did a big fat doodle in the ink line and acrylic style on a larger piece of canvas pinned to a board. It is all precisely how not to do oil painting, but this is the way I have to do it; in order to simply play, in order to explore rather than feel that I'm following someone else's instructions.

Then I got over my childish rebellion just a little and tried what I imagined to be more measured and proper approach (random subject matter, some Victorian relative photos currently on my living room floor...). Perhaps this is an underpainting?

I'm beginning to understand now that you never have to worry about losing density or richness by being thin, because this is oil paint. It's a sumptuous miracle. All the things I tried to do do make acrylic stay thin but build density without going plastic shiny.... well goddamn, I don't have to work with any of that because this is oil paint. I have woken up in my best dream, even though I have no idea what to do.

There are huge challenges ahead, if I ever get past just trying to work out fat over lean. I don't always want the neat blending that oil facilitates, I've come to like the way that fast-drying acrylic leaves an edge, that can then be worked over. If I give up my line, how will I deliberately transgress the limits  that demarcate a form...something I deliberately like to do with my acrylic and ink (which for me has a metaphysical resonance, as well as being an aesthetic choice)?  Will a painted line carry the same charge? There will be times when it's going to feel all wrong, when it's no longer fun, when one of these problems will overcome me and leave me feeling helpless.

I don't know the answer to these questions. But perhaps I'll find something that I could never have dreamt of with ink and acrylic, something that I still can't dream of but may discover if I don't lose my courage.

'Art moulds us into the shape it wants us to be and the thing that serves it best...Art doesn't like being told what to do. It doesn't like me getting in the way' (Nick Cave).

'Art doesn't like being told what to do'

Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, Issue #240. 

'I don’t know who I am. My childhood with a father who was a clever multi-instrumentalist but in his heart was sad and angry at what had happened to him in his own childhood, led me to feel as if I had to be a protector of my mum and sister. Also it was a case of me becoming a chronic people pleaser and to have never developed properly as an adult. I feel like I have so much to offer as I’m very creative and I love to help people but I feel unable to move forward. I want to make so much music and art but I’m stuck still and I don’t know why. I guess I’m asking how I can find my own identity.

KELLIE, NORWICH, UK

Dear Kellie,

You don’t need to know who you are to become an artist. Art moulds us into the shape it wants us to be and the thing that serves it best. As a songwriter, I have come to understand that the more I try to make art that somehow reflects what I perceive myself to be, or the identity I wish to project upon the world, the more my art resists. Art doesn’t like being told what to do. It doesn’t like me getting in the way. When I attempt to impose my will upon it, the work becomes diminished and art takes its better ideas elsewhere.

Art is a divine and mysterious force that runs through all of us. It is a thing of supreme spiritual potential that only comes into its true and full being if we abandon all those cherished ideas about who we think we are or are not. Art is entirely indifferent to our self-annihilating excuses, special case pleas and circumstantial grievances. We must cease to concern ourselves with our unique suffering – whether we are happy or sad, fortunate or unfortunate, good or bad – and give up our neurotic and debilitating journeys of self-discovery. Art of true value requires, like a jealous and possessive god, nothing less than our complete obedience. It insists that we retract our ego, our sense of self, the cosmetics of identity and let it do its thing. We are in service to art, not the other way around.

Kellie, if you want to create, sit down, lower your head in deference to the task ahead and get to work. But get out of art’s way! Art will, in time, show you who you are. One day you will be labouring away, lost in the flow, a glorious and unfathomable thing unfolding before your eyes, and art will suddenly and outrageously turn to you and, like a master pleased with his vassal, say, ‘Look. Look who you are. You are an artist.’

Love, Nick'

Nick Cave

Keeping the unknown always beyond you

 'I feel that a real living form is the result of the individual’s effort to create the living thing out of the adventure of his spirit into the unknown—where it has experienced something—felt something—it has not understood—and from that experience comes the desire to make the unknown—known. By unknown—I mean the thing that means so much to the person that wants to put it down—clarify something he feels but does not clearly understand—sometimes he partially knows why—sometimes he doesn’t—sometimes it is all working in the dark—but a working that must be done—Making the unknown—known—in terms of one’s medium is all-absorbing—if you stop to think of the form—as form you are lost—The artist’s form must be inevitable—You mustn’t even think you won’t succeed—Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you—catching crystallizing your simpler clearer version of life—only to see it turn stale compared to what you vaguely feel ahead—that you must always keep working to grasp—the form must take care of its self if you can keep your vision clear...'

Georgia O'Keefe

Sophistication no thanks

 

I don't know what this is all about. I do know that somehow I'm bored with more and more sophistication and panache; that I can't bring myself to make an effort at certain kinds of accuracy or realism, even though I know that would surely thrill me in some way.

I love subdued paintings, all grey and sepia, smudged white, with tiny bits of colour that sing against the linen darkness, and I love well-practiced lines that conjure the perfect form of a hand (hello Durer) or the slope of a nose, a mouth, an upper lip.

And yet somehow I've seen that kind of skill and expertise and subtlety and cleverness and sheer beauty a thousand million times, and I can't find it in myself to try and do a version of all that.

Of course, if I did, I would immediately have to assess myself against the history of 'Western' art, and would find myself, if not utterly wanting, certainly not excited or interested in my contribution. I'd rather just look at the Durer or the Da Vinci in the first place.

I just can't find it in myself to step into that ring. I don't want to try to make a landscape that has the power to be unexpected, thrilling, exciting... how could I ever achieve that, after Rothko, after Turner, after Nolde?

None of this is a conscious decision, it's just the soil, the undercurrent. Instead I go back 5,000 years, 2,500, to gaze at human creations which were made for purposes other than art. There was no art then. There were only human-made artefacts, produced for different purposes; protection, play, supplication...power, warning, gratitude. Making images was just a thing that humans did, like defecation, like eating, like moving to a beat. We are programmed to make images and to respond to them. But not, for me, in the way that any of the art worlds instruct me to today.