New Work - Still life

I have been interested in a variation on one of the traditional themes of representational art for a while, the still life, but a reinterpretation, not only in being a monochromatic portrayal, but in the incorporation of distinctly modern, un-painterly objects.

The flowers that had been in our house recently were very attractive to me as a subject, and in particular the perspective of looking downwards onto them.

(untitled as yet)

Acrylic on linen 90cm x 150cm

It is only in working on this piece that the significance of certain elements emerged, and clearly it became a painting abut loss, about death. The photograph on the mantlepiece is of my grandfather, my mother’s father, who has been dead for many years. I took the photograph from my mother’s house, after she died this year. The light reflection onto it obscures the face, obscures identity. The painted card of a Springer Spaniel next to it is a reminder of Jenny, a companion animal who graced my life for four wonderful years. Since her passing some three years ago not a day has gone by when i do not think about her.

Flowers are of course a traditional tribute at the time of death, and to one side of them is a empty bowl. Something has been emptied out into the light on the other side, into which a leaf is also absorbed.

A principle reason for my interest in the monochromatic portrayal of flowers, is the idea of flowers made of ash, or dust, an image suggestive of Elliot’s Waste Land, and Four Quartets..

There is also an empty candlestick on the left, and the fireplace contains dark fire, that is also a rose, or debris and no fire at all.

On the right on the mantlepiece are a bottle, possibly containing oil as used in anointing, and a candle, again a traditional association of death.

On the left on the mantlepiece are two vaguely defined objects - they could be stones or screwed up paper perhaps ; as the latter they contain the idea of the impossibility of speaking about the ultimate mystery, language of any sort fails.

As always, the painter’s act is never pessimistic, always an expression of hope and faith - not religious faith of course, but faith in the possibility of the worth of human life. Sometimes it seems a rather difficult position to sustain, internally, but as long as I paint I can have no doubt on one level, as a certain belief is inherent in the act.

Death of course is the great mystery, and painting can say nothing illuminating about it. As is true in a way of all painting, the subject is the process itself, and here I am drawn by the possibilities of the monochromatic .

It may be strange that in the dark Winter of Covid, the painting is connected in its origin with the imagery of Vaughan Williams “Folk Songs of the Four Seasons” with its deeply joyful earth symbolism and traditional flower imagery. My reminiscent engagement with flowers also echoes the floral centrality of the poem ”To a Lady” by William Dunbar (1465 - ?1520) , a long time favourite, in which the poet is concerned to find cultivated “rew” as an answer to his incompleteness and longing ; in “A Sprig of Thyme”, perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful of Vaughan Williams’ quoted folk songs, it is conversely as undesirable that “rue” is figured, as it replaces the sought-after thyme .

What permeates both this folk song and poem, with great beauty, is the circular motion of versification, embodying a sort of resignation and underlying acceptance. There is circular motion in this painting also, both in the shape of individual elements, and the rhythm in which they are arranged, which could have a similar connotation.

There is contained within the music of Vaughan Williams, and Dunbar’s words, both wistfulness and joy - perhaps encompassed in the dual aspect of the plant rue, and the dual aspect of love, with its inevitable parting, both rose and thorn.

In my concern with flowers I also look towards Spring, and re-establishing connection with earth, in so far as that is possible for a city dweller, or indeed a human. The loss of connection with nature, of kinship with fellow beings both animal and plant, a rift that seems to deepen by the day, is the fundamental wound of human life, sublimated into the widespread concern of traditional arts with love, loss and longing.

Death involves self-giving back into the primal matrix, perhaps illuminating the tradition of flowers at this time.

Through a Glass Darkly

Work in progress.

The painting contains the shape of a glass goblet viewed from beneath with the suggestion of sparkling wine, a celebration, yet at the bottom is a skull, the insoluble residue .The inside of the skull and the teeth are visible, also the throat which forms a stem to the glass .

Although the bowl shape is containing, it is breached in places, mainly by slabs of white, like light, which spins out of space to sculpt the form, as well as peeling outwards from it .

The painting could refer to addiction, using a pun with the famous mirror idea from the King James Bible as title.

As in other recent paintings the mouth and speech are prominent, however the image is a departure , and whilst being abstract, has more figurative references. it is an example of the way the content of paintings arrives - the work is a struggle, but the result is out of my hands . To me this image suggests the past, in an atmospheric, semi-mythic way, as embodied by certain examples of sixties cool and post-bop jazz, and the paintings of Francis Bacon..

If the artist lives a life steeped in art, music and poetry, the ground is prepared and images can emerge .

Andrew Motion has written that for Keats medicine and writing were different ways of being a physician, and Ted Hughes saw in the poet the role of healer . Motion refers to Apollo - God not only of music and poetry, but of medicine too .

Surely then, the artist should not feel self-indulgent about casting a wide perimeter, without knowing if this will be useful in work . It is impossible to know, and besides, such a quest has universal significance. Joseph Campbell’s mono-myth refers to something similar.

All this also is looking through the glass darkly - looking into a fragmented mirror.

Through a Glass Darkly

Acrylic and mixed media on Linen 90 x 150 cm

the problem of being a painter

My work consists of two seemingly disparate and irreconcilable strands. On one hand, there is a monochromatic realism that dwells on the instruments of mechanical making ; on the other, a colourful and fragmented near abstraction. These are the modes of painting that I am intuitively drawn to, and it has puzzled me why my habitual methods are so seemingly unrelated.

It came to me recently that what is common to these two approaches, is a concern with the image, to be more specific, the paralysis of my ability to make art in the face of a world becoming critically over-filled with artefacts. 

In terms of the visual, this filling began 64,000 years ago, when the painters of the Maltraviesco cave first stencilled their hand prints on rock (these were probably Neanderthals). It continued with more elaborate cave paintings in the pre- civilisational era and as civilisation evolved images amassed at a steady trickle. At first this was largely in religious contexts, then the aspiration of image-making changed in the Renaissance, but this was still confined to the houses of the rich and powerful. The whole process accelerated massively however with the onset of photography and the advertising industry in the early twentieth century, from which time communal space became more and more occupied with visual imagery. For some there is now a sense in which the world is full, and the artist constantly struggling to make something new to overcome the feeling that more imagery is not needed. 

Besides this, there are different ways in which the image has become problematic from the beginning of the twentieth century , difficulties that underlie a growing distrust not only of the pictorial, but of its counterpart in other arts, for instance of narrative in literature and melody in music. Firstly there is post-modernism, with its skepticism and irony, and mistrust of grand narratives . Along side this is the development of psycho-analysis through the work of Freud, Klein, Jung and others, in which the unconscious undermines the subjective self. In the visual arts, the work of Picasso and Braque began the unravelling of Renaissance visual perspective and conceptual simplicity, and this has continued since. In physics the unpicking of our experience of reality began with Einstein and relativity, undermining the simplicity of dimensions, showing space and time are continuous, and energy and mass interchangeable. The first subatomic particle was discovered towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the study of the very small continued through the work of `Bohr in the twenties into the origins of quantum mechanics. This included the possibility that so-called reality is crystallised from a mass of possibility by the act of observation (to collapse the super-position or quantum wave function). In all fields the world of common sense, common reality, has been revealed to be illusory.

All these factors erode the conceptual underpinnings of subjective truth . For some however there is a further dimension of uncertainly about the image, that stems from a realisation of the way that humans have affected the world, mass extinctions, global warming, depletion of resources and the like, and which results in a radical distrust of that which is human.

Yet despite all this I accept my work as an artist to be an essential human vocation, with all that goes with that, and as well as paralysis, I have found in the tension at the heart of painting - the dialectic of form and abstraction - the possibility of a way forwards. 

The method I began to evolve many years ago to set off from ground zero, was the free association of small pictorial elements without any end-point in mind, working under the guidance of a few basic principles - to look for an increase in complexity, and to think in terms of certain underlying forms, like machinery, the body and language. The end result could be seen as a snapshot of the collapse of Bohr’s superposition, and what I am watching is the emergence of form from the multiplicity it contains. It is not an image, in any straightforward sense. Importantly in a world reified by positivism, these ideas have a correspondence with the discourse of mystics, for whom little can be said about the reality they have experienced . This is also an important way in which the image fails. If the painting is successful, there remains in it a sense of the moment when abstraction becomes form, and the tension in that process.

In creative terms there is a similar process in jazz, where the melody is first stated, and the instruments then work to erode and subvert it. Revelation comes when it is broken open, remaining as fragments against a cloud of harmonics . My paintings operate in a similar way, propose a similar relationship to image, but in reverse order ; the cloud comes first, any melody is an emergent property.

My monochromatic work however, is not describable by any of these processes ; but it does involve the same paralysis as the inevitable starting point. The interior intention, the formulation of the image, as the foundation for art, is similarly distrusted, but whereas the previous solution was the spontaneity of free association, here it is sought in absorption in the external subject.

Some days during the meticulous drawing involved I can hardly drag the brush across the canvas,  barely put one foot in front of the other, I am trudging, burdened with a tangle of existential doubt , I am Sisyphus, not daring to imagine it is possible to produce a meaningful painting, but compelled to try, and to repeat the attempt on a daily basis. When the work is finished, the scene it portrays is silent, as if abandoned, though retaining the traces where humans have been - the post-its on the wall, the way a rope has been knotted. The finished painting is an unpopulated, post-industrial theatrical set, an empty scene which is not so much waiting for the drama, as remembering it - a drama whose characters might be the striking textile workers of Mumbai, the original Luddites of the old North, or indeed the hopeful inheritors of Ruskin, but in all cases characters whose story is bound up in the struggle of making. Beyond this, the final image reflects the intensity of emptiness, an intensity focused through the monochromatic gaze, as if seen through a microscope; the burning point of attention, the sheer effort that went into recording detail, together with its futility. Here, at the end of making, when the creation is finished, when the battle of manufacture stops, there is the possibility of desolation - yet this is also where the painter takes the leap of faith, of hope, because he has painted.

Hand stencils in Perito Moreno Cave, Argentina (13,000 -9000 BP). (Photograph by Mariano )

Constantin Brancusi

Both the work and the life of Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) would seem a far remove from the violence and alienation of Bacon’s imagery, and the restless grief of Celan. Rooted in a different era, a magical past, he produced sculpture of elegance and mystery, which was nevertheless foundational to the opening up in the arts, of which Bacon and Celan were inheritors.

Born in rural Romania, Brancusi spent his formative years in a village near the Carpathian Mountains, herding sheep belonging to his family from an early age, and learning the skill of woodcarving inherent to the area and its folk tradition. He was a skilled craftsman almost from childhood, steeped in the land based art forms of traditional culture. 

Following casual jobs during his youth, he enrolled in the Bucharest School of Fine Arts around the turn of the century, where he received formal sculptural training. He subsequently moved to Paris, where for one month he worked in the studio of Rodin. Interestingly, in contrast to his own approach, here he was engaged in the mechanical translation of Rodin’s clay maquettes into final marble forms, a common sculptural practice of the time. Upon leaving he expressed sentiments of being overshadowed in the presence of a great artist, subsequently becoming involved in the Avant Garde life of the city, associated with artists such as Modigliani, and going on to himself become a foundational giant of the modern age. 

Central to his subsequent practice was a physical involvement with materials, and a reviving of the sculptural practice of “direct carving”, as carried forwards by practitioners such as Barbara Hepworth, for whom the chisel was equally important.

This essay will concentrate on two elements in his oeuvre - that of the bird, a subject to which he returned some 30 times during the course of his life, and the recurrent stacked diagonal motif of Endless Column - originating in the modest, directly sculpted oak version of 1918 in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and culminating in the 29.3 metre tall, metallic and manufactured version of  the Targu Tiu  sculptural assemblage in 1938 .

Brancusi referred to his own bird subject as a magical symbol of flight with the possibility of freedom from the usual constraints of earthly life. 

His first visit to the theme was entitled “Maiastra”, referred to a Romanian legend, about a beautiful bird with a magical, superlatively enchanting song.

In this, the polished, ovoid bird-form stands erect over a rough hewn base, punctuated by oblong and square stone pieces. Pure and polished it alternately hovers over, and militarily dominates, the ground of the supporting column, sharing something of the relation of a word to the unconscious. 

As with much of his work, it is a celebratory piece - not least, of the materials in which he demonstrates his variety of skills and approaches - in contrast for instance to the darknesses and alienation of Bacon. 

Here as elsewhere Brancusi incorporates the “plinth” as much as the “sculpture” itself, into a rhythmic whole, an almost musical progression, rising through compartments of space from the floor upwards, suggesting a similarity to a sequence of musical bars, the song of the magical bird frozen into physical form. Later images (. )incorporate the same lyrical expressiveness and rhythm of form, progressively freeing the energy locked into this first visitation, into an upward curving leap.

In this context it is interesting to note Brancusi’s friendship with the (then obscure) composer Eric Satie - whose works embody a similar compartmentalised simplicity.

Similarly, with Endless Column, a theme on which he worked for twenty years, there is a flowing, if jerky,  upwards progression, in this case opening at the top, as if a beak or mouth is giving out song, into the potential for infinity. His ultimate expression of the form, in the Targu Tiu sculptural assemblage, memorialises Romanian soldiers who died in the First World War, and is offered alongside two other pieces - The Table of Silence and The Gate of the Kiss, on an east-west axis.  Despite the joyousness of his expression, here an elegiac tone is suggested by the context .

In his search for simplicity, Brancusi was seeking the ultimate within the form, truer to the thing itself rather than a departure to the abstract. 

In this arguably he shares a common impulse with much that is labelled Primitive, an essential wellspring of modern art. Mostly this is understood in its proximity to indigenous and land based cultures. Never the less, both within and beyond such cultures is the world of animals - a magical world in which Brancusi’s upbringing was steeped - and whose simplicity, mystery and vulnerability is inextricably voiced in the human artefacts. Those who live close to the land have a much clearer access to this magical kingdom, and it is the energy of this that shines through many of Brancusi’s sculptures.

Jenny painting and picasso’s minotaur

I was fortunate enough to receive the Eka Valencic award and endowment for my MA degree show at Central St. Martins in 2018, and the following is taken from my acceptance letter ; it refers to the left hand panel of the diptych on the website :

The Jenny painting is a portrayal of the pathos of the animal situation - in the form of a ram’s skull, and a portrait in memory of my rescue dog Jenny. The face is disintegrating and a yellow bird on the right flies into a green grove in the cheek  There is an outflow of water reminiscent of a gushing from a wound. This  is also the hair of a witch, opposite whom is a mask - they don’t look at each other. Over the front of the face is an angelic figure with the face of an owl its arms outstretched in protection and containment . Each eye is different under the arch of a ram’s horn.

The following is taken from dissertation notes written at around the same time ; it begins where a discussion of a verse from Petrarch’s Canzoniere has just ended :

But to focus on one detail in his tapestry; in the poetical fragment quoted, the possibility of the confluence of animal and human suggests the lonely figure of the Minotaur, lower part Man, upper part Bull, conventionally situated at the centre of the Cretian Labyrinth as capturer and fierce devourer of any who approach - yet as imprisoned also, sealed irretrievable until death in (our image of) its monstrousness.

A similar creature is found in the penultimate section of Picasso’s Vollard suite - before the end few images of Ambroise Vollard himself, and so in a sense the real , mythic culmination of a series that is itself fragmentary, multifaceted, and accumulated over a period of years, reflecting contemporaneous changes in the artist’s life, as in the case of the much longer and more ambitious Canzoniere.

Worked out in four pieces, of mixed technique including print media (for instance lift ground aquatint), from late 1934 to early 1935, this Minotaur is an image that invites consideration in the context of the Petrarchan protagonist who walks by the riverside, ultimately becoming  partly alive, and partly stone. Picasso’s four images share much in common with each other - in fact can be seen as the same image worked over in slightly different ways.

In each image the Minotaur is blind, and walking with a stick, its muscular neck wrenched upwards , as if in search of light, or in the questioning of fate or the Gods. At the centre of each image we see the remonstrance of pain, bringing to mind Petrarch’s image of a creature calling for help, but that cannot be understood. In each the Minotaur walks by the edge of water, as in Petrarch, from which, in Picasso, fishermen, with nets in a wooden boat, stare intently - as did the apostles of Christ - faces magnetically torn from the everyday substance of their work to fix on the troubled Minotaur in his fairy tale parade. Once more in each image the Minotaur walks from right to left, and in each is preceded by a small girl, carrying initially flowers, and in the last three a dove. Almost in the wings of the action is an upright male figure - in the first three images on the right,  in the last on the left.

Even though the Minotaur may be understood as an image of Picasso himself in his failing sexual or artistic vision, there is much more to suggest in the series of images, taken as products of the unconscious, and unfolded into a developing sequence.

Led by a symbol of the innocence of animal-bird nature within, the blind Minotaur fumbles to find a way, never released from his unheard bellowing into the sky. Eventually night falls. The darkness is nailed in place by a few rough hewn stars. The figures have wandered all day, now the girl turns around, no longer attempting to lead the Minotaur, who is somehow part of herself, always linked by the umbilical arm. She looks straight at him in the certain knowledge that he is blind. The bird she carries has become a glowing heart between them;  the young man freed from the stone he emerged from (at the sculptors cut) has moved to the left. Seemingly he is offered the staff from the Minotaur ; but is reluctant to accept it.

This constellation of figures that constitute the self has ground to a halt.

Picasso - sexual conquistador, scion of the bullfight - at the end of his rope of carnality, baying at the stars, seems to beg to be released. Yet the symbolic staff, the potency of creativity - at its most naked, the need to speak, to act, to walk - cannot be relinquished. There is no fierceness in the Minotaur to be afraid of - only the fierce heat of his anguish, to pity and to minister to, just like the piteous cattle at the gate of the abattoir.

Centre stage - man/animal in brokenness; its cry the stuttering fragments of Celan’s disintegrating verse, its impotence the silence of Bacon’s scream locked in an ice block; its blindness, an acknowledgement of the impossibility of the task, eyes seared by the enormity of what has been seen. The language of poetry itself confronts its own impotence.

                                                       ************

Of all conclusions, this is the strangest, yet also the most compelling and profound -whatever is said in face of the unspeakable must recognise the impossibility within its own language - must destroy itself from within, even whilst speaking.

This is the phrase written repeatedly until it becomes fabric, or a piece of thread disappearing into nothing  - animalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoulanimalsoul……..… This is iconic text copied until it dissolves into pattern. This is the time it takes to write “ threehundredpigs”, over and over - the less than one minute it has taken to slaughter them….. ….let alone the garbage skips filled with intestines, coming out of the abattoir….

How to speak of such things?

If the hand that writes is erasing itself, its own intention; if the words it fashions are merely shape on the page; if truths about the industrial killing of animals, closely inscribed, dissolve into the appearance of cloth, the knots of accident, the threads of imperfection …this could be a beginning for  an art of the unspeakable, an art of animal suffering.

In the same set of notes, I wrote about the poetry of Paul Celan and the early painting of Francis Bacon, which are mentioned here in relation to the Minotaur’s cry. My own colourful painting is fragmented in a similar way to the poetry of Celan, which will be the subject of my next post.

Comments welcome

Writing related to my work will be included as posts as time goes on ; meanwhile, please feel free to add any comments or questions about my work in general here.