'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.

Do you paint for eight hours a day?

Someone asked me the other day if I was one of those people who painted for eight hours a day. 

For most of my life I wanted to be one of those people, and I've spent the last 15 years learning about why I am not. Oh to be that person who 'was always drawing as a child', or the one who 'finds themselves drawing' in every cafe, sportsfield, train ride, watching the tele...

I have no answers, all I know is that making an image like the one above, though technically easy as pie, takes me somewhere that I can only bear for about 45 minutes. Honestly. And that's only at the drawing stage.

This morning I have been in Mesopotamia with the Assyrians, again, and also in India and Persia; inspecting stone carvings, wandering up the side of gravity-defying mountains, swimming in vertical rivers filled with lotuses and unrecognisable fish.... I don't know where exactly I go to, but it seems to be the same dimension as my dreams, and I know for sure that when I'm in that place I'm not bounded by the contours of my skin or the limits of my conscious mind. It's intense work, and I can't stay there for very long.

'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