A letter to Deirdre about Art
On Wednesday, I attended Deirdre’s exhibition of paintings at the Kühne Boekkooi Gallery (12 Walter Road). I was pleasantly surprised and I think that, for a first-timer, it certainly was a great effort. Today, as follow up to the event, Deirdre sent me an email asking me what my thoughts were on it all and, since I didn’t have much in the way of a PE Report and haven’t pontificated on anything arty in a while, I thought it’d include my response here. Let me know what you think.
Hey there, D,
I am really impressed by the progress that you have made in terms of expanding your visual vocabulary and your palette. You’ve certainly taken it a lot further than I thought you would and that, in and of itself, shows great dedication, thought and ability.
With that said, an artist has only two sources to draw from (like every other human being): the internal world and the external world. One without the other leads to the merely decorative while the powerful and enduring, what we call art, arises out of a marriage of both. To clarify, imagine the following example: you are walking in a green field surrounded by a dark grey fog and, while you’re walking through it in silence, it brings you to a mental space where you feel as though you’ve stepped into a fantastic dream world. It makes you feel calm and excited, curious and frightened. When you return home, you then decide to paint that landscape, the green field and the fog as faithfully a possible, down the last little blade of grass and the dew drops. In this case, you would focus, exclusively on the external, ignoring your internal reaction to the scene. The resulting painting, while technically proficient and, I am sure, very beautiful to look at, would, nevertheless, be purely decorative. It would convey nothing more to the viewer other than a faithful depiction of a scene.
Now, imagine the reverse: when you returned home, you set about painting your emotional state but chose not to have it informed by the environment in which you had found yourself. You paid no heed to capturing the colour of the fog, the texture and colour of the grass, the immensity of the space around you or any of your sensory input. Here, you focused exclusively on the internal. The resulting painting, once again, while technically proficient and, I am sure, very beautiful to look at, would, nevertheless, be purely decorative. It would convey an emotional state but would offer the viewer no means by which to access it and step into the same emotional space as you.
In order to make one, or the other, approach work it needs to be informed by both worlds. The faithful landscape needs you to be aware of your emotional state, which would allow you to push and pull the elements of the painting just enough to communicate “somethingâ€? to the viewer. Similarly, the more expressionist approach would need to be informed of the visual world around you for, how can you abstract fog and grass and distil what you need from it, if you are not able to capture and convey it “as it isâ€? first. The conjuncture of the external world and the internal world is what gives great art its life and longevity. It’s what differentiates a Brittney Spears from a Rachmaninoff, or a Sunday painter from a Manet.
So, if I do have a comment to make, it is that: At first glance, I found myself looking at your paintings, impressed by your competence with a difficult medium, interested by your bold mark-making and colours, and, overall, taking pleasure in the results. On the second pass, however, I found myself asking “What now?� “What is she trying to convey here?� “How can I, the viewer, access that space?� and I couldn’t answer those questions. It is clear that the works require more information from the world around you. A blue is not just a blue. Is it a blue from the sea after a storm? Is it a blue from your kid’s eyes? Is it a blue from dusk? For it is in understanding what makes them different, that will entitle you to draw from it what you require to take it from being a painting to being a work of art.
And it isn’t easy. It is, in fact, fucking difficult and not for everyone. I should know. I’ve been painting for over two decades and I am still only now on the first few steps of discovery.
I also saw a lot of Pollock, Kline and Motherwell in your work and, obviously, you have some knowledge of their techniques and abilities. What I recommend that you do is read An American Saga which is a biography of Jackson Pollock (on which the film, Pollock, was based), as well as do some reading on their supportive works (their sketches, preliminary drawings, life-drawings, figurative paintings, etc.) to give you an idea of the process that they followed to get to where they are. A perfect, but less expressive, example of that, of course, is Picasso. Compare his drawings and his observations of the external world and see how he used that, manipulated it and distorted it to give rise to his cubist visual analysis.
I hope that helps. It was really a kickass exhibition. Congratulations.
