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NEWS
Essay on Representation and 5 Books on Painting
1st Book
Of the three books, this most fully engages with the technicalities of what a painting can catch and how. The writing tries to describe my back ground attitude and experience of painting and I have tried to link brush marks to the possible communication that they may carry. Most art criticism, being made by non-painters is, with rare exceptions, unable to deal with the handicraft of it, and just waffles on about vaguely connected other matters, or intangible “spiritual values”. I have included details so that the paintings which are often 90 -110 cms square, may be more closely studied. (The PDF versions allow considerable zoom-detail to be available). As important part of my “heroic” (because lost) battle against abstract art, I have above all tried to avoid pretentious talk, whose contagious spread has been the main result of what you could call the “Abstract Project”!
2nd Book
Like Book 1 contains paintings and writing about painting: especially on what is the "truth" status of art. Is it presumed to have an over privileged access to "truth" or is it just allowed its area of play and irrelevance? Does it really appeal to anything deeper in an individual; can it reflect general social attitudes or is it just decorative? Has there been created an adequate language to describe what painting does and how? At the end of the book there is a long consideration of the conversations between David Sylvester and Francis Bacon on representation; I hope convincingly described, in the widest sense.
3rd Book
In Book 3, as in the previous books, you could say that the underlying theme in much of the writing is the truth status of painting and of landscape in particular: what does a painting presume to catch or embody. Does it have reality? Francis Bacon once stated that “after the camera, painting had to deepen the game”, and since Bacon did not believe in what you could call, “the abstract project”, painting had to be representation-plus. Painting is a single territory that stretches from Picasso to the humblest amateur and they are all judged and judge themselves in terms that are common. In simplest terms, a painter tries to “say something” that matters, rather than simply making something pretty or pleasing. That makes painting an unforgiving arena, where most of us fall on our face. That “say something” is never a purely aesthetic value, so in what I have written in these 3 books there is a lot that may seem to some, only very obliquely relevant to “art”, since it deals with the tensions of modern life and what it is that “nature” represents for us.
4th Book
Here is an unsettling thought of Wittgenstein’s that seems to be similar to Wordsworth’s mysterious phrase alluding to – “Unknown modes of being”.
“There are matters that I have not passed near because they did not lie directly in my path or in my particular world. They are matters and a problematic that pertain to Western thought and the world that it has envisioned (or thrown up!) and which maybe only Beethoven and perhaps Goethe have dealt with (approached) and which maybe Nietzsche passed near to and which no Western philosopher has considered and so perhaps such matters have been lost to the examination by Western philosophy. I certainly have not confronted such a problematic and so, when “I have done with the world”, I will have just left an amorphous pile of considerations like something forgotten in a junk room or loft which leave the world in all its multitudinous complexity just as it was”: (then Wittgenstein follows that modesty with a more disturbing thought) ... “or perhaps more truly, the end result of all that work is that it has treated the world itself as something forgotten in a junk room”. And Wittgenstein held that true for our whole culture.
5th Book
In a painting there is a subtle and mysterious relation between it’s world-echo (of whatever degree of likeness and “representation”) and how that plays off in endless back and forth reflections with the technical “tricks”, manner and paint marks that an artist has slowly stumbled across in order to make a painting seem both real and “right”; and I say “stumble” because it is all so uncertain, since a painter (in modern times) has to invent their own language by a process of endless trial and error – trying to make the painting “readable” and comprehensible to others, and also to present (to use a lofty word) a “vision” – a way of seeing; which with Landscape should express a love of some kind. Then in addition, there are the jumbled influences of this or that painter that one has seen and liked. Considering all this, one understands why the great Japanese artist Hokusai should have sardonically joked, “…. And when I have reached the age of 140, I will have begun to understand how to…..”! After all, it is a presumptuous matter to attempt to make a worthy representation of the world and our experience of it, and one which also, others can share! This book of details was originally made to test myself – to check how much representation there was, even in the small details. I dislike abstracts, or any painting that is just making empty “painterly” gestures! To modify Clinton’s self-reminder, “It’s the economy stupid”, I like to mutter, “It’s the world stupid”. That’s what child art and Van Gogh teach us, and by wrong example, galleries with their non referential daubs!
There is a sort of refrain throughout all three books but particularly Book 3, which is the repetition of the words of Chief Seattle. 1854.
“Humankind has not woven the web of life.
We are but a thread within it.
Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves.
All things are bound together.
All things connect”.
Chief Seattle. 1854
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