From Pencil To Paint

Just how do we get from this...

To this?

"I think that painting today is pure intuition and luck."
Francis Bacon (1909-1992) on Matthew Smith

I remember as a child, the excitement of producing a drawing with which I was really pleased; one that was so good, I thought, that it cried out for the addition of colour. Even then, I knew that colour was the ultimate test of my artistic skills. How often had I heard adults say, "That's lovely. Are you going to colour it in?" Eagerly, I would get my crayons and begin. But before long, my art would turn from absorbing pastime to tedious labour. Far from improving my picture, I felt as if I was defacing it and all my lovely lines would disappear under an increasingly frustrating tangle of incoherent scribbling.

For most of us, our relationship with art begins in a disappointingly similar way. We begin with lines. We understand them. Lines describe things. They have definite boundaries. But colours blend and blur. Colour is exotic, complex, and psychological. With colour an artist can make magic; for most of us, all we manage is mud.

If I can draw, I remember asking myself, why can't I paint?

Thinking in blocks is the key. In the same way that we speak in sentences rather than single words and composers write phrases rather than notes, painting requires a leap into a fully integrated way of picture-making where every colour, every stroke describes every other colour and stroke. And that is why it is so difficult. Colour can exist in the mind as a formless quality of light, but when we bring it out into the world, it must possess a shape. Even Rothko, who did his best to create shapeless paintings, was restricted by the rectangular proportions of his canvases. Colour and brushstroke, therefore, are inextricably intertwined and to separate them out leads to the tyranny of the colouring book. When I paint a pot or a pear, I imagine I am loading my brush with that object which I then mould onto the canvas. I am not filling in a pre-ordained shape; instead, I invite the object to manifest itself and work hopefully towards that  magical moment when, as Francis Bacon said, "the image is the paint and vice-versa."

From Pencil To Paint

Dillington House

2 July

10am to 4pm

photo credit: Debbie Hart at Studio Paradiso painting holidays in Tuscany

Dinosaur Feathers

I gave this talk at TEDx Bradford On Avon last November and again, last weekend at TEDx Warminster School, with a few adjustments. I made the accompanying illustrations on the iPad using the Brushes 3 app, in real-time, as I spoke:

Let's begin at the end.

I teach people how to paint and draw.

I’ve done it for nearly twenty years now. 

And lots of people seem to want to do it, but it isn't easy.

Wassily Kandinsky said that you could learn the craft of carpentry and be fairly certain of being able to make a table, but you could learn how to paint and draw and never be sure of creating a work of art.

So it can be really frustrating and you can't make any money at it. So why do it?

After a few years I began to think. All these people; If I knew why they really wanted to make art, then I might become better at teaching them how.

From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the crayon drawings of our children, the desire to make marks is fundamental. But why?

Imagine a world without birdsong.

About 230 million years ago. 

230 million is such an enormous number. It’s hard to conceive what it really amounts to. 

So, start counting now, take your nourishment intravenously and don’t sleep. 

You’ll arrive at 230 million sometime in 2017.

230 million years ago.

No birdsong.

No birdsong because there were no birds.

So here are the dinosaurs. 

10 million years go by, still no birds.

100 million years go by. 

Still no birds.

A highly intelligent dinosaur wouldn't be looking up at the empty trees and thinking that a few birds would brighten up the old swamp a bit. Birds would be completely outside the dinosaur frame of reference.

So too would a giant asteroid.

Anyway, about 60 million years before a giant asteroid changes the world of the dinosaurs for good, along comes caudipteryx. Caudipteryx lived in the Cretaceous Period. Its fossilised remains were found in China, along with thirty other species of feathered dinosaur. 

It was about the size of a peacock and couldn’t fly.

So the feathers were useless then.

Well, not really; they were for sex.

Display.

That’s what artists do, isn’t it? Display.

You know; pictures at an exhibition. It’s another kind of display.

Colour and movement. The sophisticated mating rituals of an advanced civilization.

You may not like the idea that the same primitive drive that put feathers on dinosaurs puts pictures on your walls, but a Damien Hirst spin painting is pretty and so too are feathers.

Birds, however, were not expected.

They just happened to happen.

Over time.

Huge amounts of it.

But dinosaurs had to happen first.

Here are some more numbers and another bird.

The billiard ball experiment is cited by Naseem Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan.

The black swan is a good analogy for those things that happen that are outside our frame of reference because in the Middle Ages, the defining characteristic of a swan was that it was a large, white bird. If it was a large bird of any other colour, it couldn’t be a swan. And that was that. 

Then along came a black swan and that was the end of the “all swans are white” model.

The “flat earth” model worked really well until Columbus stumbled upon America. 

On a daily basis, does it matter to you if the earth is round and not flat?

I wonder, how many models do we carry around in our heads that are actually redundant, unhelpful or simply untrue?

Okay. Some more numbers. 

The billiard ball experiment uses a computer model, created by the mathematician Michael Berry.

The question is this:

Can we accurately predict the movements of billiard balls on a billiard table? And if so, how far can we go?

You know. You whack the first one and off it goes, but where will it end up?

Okay. It turns out that mathematics can reliably predict the outcome of 2 impacts. That’s it.

If you want to predict as many as 9, you have to factor in the gravitational pull of anyone standing near the table. 

And to compute the 56th impact, according to Berry, every single elementary particle of the universe needs to be present in your assumptions. An electron at the edge of the universe, separated from us by 10 billion light-years, must figure in the calculations, since it exerts a meaningful effect on the outcome.

And that is why billiards is a game.

How many billiard balls do we have in the auditorium today, I wonder?

All bouncing around.

So it seems that the unexpected is all around us.

And not just all around us, but in us, too.

JBS Haldane, eminent geneticist and biochemist said that after years of study, he still didn’t know why he did what he did. That it was a matter of chemistry, he thought.

And Chris Frith, Emeritus Professor in Neuropsychology at UCL said recently that actually, "We have very little access to what we're doing."

But here’s the thing:

"We think we do.”

And that’s the problem. We only think we’ve got it all worked out. We only think we know where we’re going.

And what’s on our minds.

But 90% of what the brain does is outside of our consciousness. We don’t know what it’s up to. You’re sitting on the sofa watching TV and it’s getting up to all sorts of stuff behind your back.

Like the family cat.

It's a kind of arrogance to believe that all you perceive is all that there is to the world. It's like saying that you know all there is to know.

I believe it's up to our scientists and our artists to show us otherwise.

But how?

“Fortune favours the prepared mind,” said Alexander Fleming.

Fleming was a great scientist, but a sloppy one. He left his laboratory in such a mess one weekend that when he returned on the Monday morning, he found mould growing in his petri dishes.

But Fleming didn’t bin the lot and say, "That was a waste of time." No, he studied his Mould Juice as he called it.

Later, he called it penicillin.

And in case you’re thinking that's an isolated incident:

Of the thousands of drugs on the market today. How many are used for the purpose for which they were originally developed?

Four.

Steve Jobs said, we think life is like a big, cosmic dot-to-dot drawing.

GCSE’s, A levels, a degree, a career, a pension. Do these things really tell the story of your life?

There aren’t any dots. 

Out there.

Waiting for you to join them up.

A painting isn’t like a dot-to-dot drawing either. If a painter knows exactly where every dot is going to go, he or she isn’t really being creative. They’re just doing again what they’ve already done and we know that if you do as you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.

No. Being a great artist requires “giving to art what art does not have.”

Those are Francis Bacon’s words.

Give to art what art does not have. How do you do that?

Here are some more great artists:

“Make the accidental essential.” Paul Klee. 

“I never lose an accident.” JMW Turner.

They’re both saying the same thing as Alexander Fleming, aren’t they?

Some more words and some numbers about JMW Turner.

Turner was painting for more than 50 years and in that time produced 24,000 watercolours.

Under those conditions, accidents will happen.

He was inviting the unexpected. And he knew, that when you invite the unexpected you must expect the uninvited. It isn’t all good. And it doesn’t always seem to make sense.

Like dinosaur feathers.

That’s why so many of the artists I know are this complex mixture of arrogance and humility. They know about the accident thing. They know that they have to be both sloppy and great and that art, like life isn’t a dot-to-dot; it’s a messy branching bush and no one knows when or where the fruit will develop; nor how it will taste.

But they work hard to make it happen.

For sex, drugs, rock’n’roll... even for art.

Music, dance, drama, poetry, literature. As Professor Mark Pagel, head of the Evolution Research Lab in Reading says in his book, Wired For Culture, this is the glue that binds our society together.

And it’s as useful as feathers on a dinosaur.

Sometimes, when look at art...

We may hear birdsong

 Sometimes, when we make art...

 We fly.

To see the original talk at Bradford On Avon TEDx, click here.

Why Do It?

A couple of posts ago, I looked briefly at what goes on (or rather, doesn't) in the mind of the artist and put it all down to a condition known as cognitive disinhibiton. Perhaps by now, you've decided that you're cognitively disinhibited too and must be absolutely bursting with creative urges. You just can't wait to flick a brush about like one of the Hesperides, scattering stars across the sky, or maybe you're itching to get your hands into a lump of clay and pull it about like a God modeling Adam. We're still left, however, with one fundamental question: Why?

Certainly, many artists are motivated by personal trauma:

Francis Bacon recounted to the poet, Anthony Cronin, that as a child, he was regularly locked up in a cupboard so that his nanny could canoodle with her boyfriend and not be interrupted.

"Confined in the darkness of this cupboard Francis would scream - perhaps for several hours at a time - but since he was out of earshot of the happy courting couple, completely in vain."

"That cupboard," Bacon apparently said years later, "was the making of me."

In an interview with Artforum magazine, timed to coincide with her M O M A retrospective in New York, Louise Bourgeois revealed that the imagery in her sculptures was almost wholly autobiographical, that she obsessively relived through her art the trauma of discovering, at the age of eleven, that her English governess was also her father’s mistress. Like Bacon, it was a singular event in Bourgeois’ own childhood that inspired her - or should that be ‘haunted’ her? And no, that's not her handbag under her arm.

But what is wrong with these artists? Why can’t they just shut up and get on with their lives like everyone else? Why are they, in Andy Warhol’s words, producing things “that people don't need to have but that [they] – for some reason – think it would be a good idea to give them?”

Let's go back seventeen thousand years to the painted images on the caves at Lascaux in Southern France. These truly magical depictions may at some time have played a part in hunting rites, but the entire system is so carefully sequential that it is thought to evoke the rhythm of the seasons and the regeneration of time. Lascaux may well be homo sapiens' first impulse to depict the origins of the world.

Mating rituals play a significant part in the cycle of images at Lascaux and here we may at last arrive at the real reason behind our urge to create: it's all evolutionary biology.

In his book, the Mating Mind, psychologist Geoffrey Miller argues that the impulse to create art is a mating tactic; a way to impress prospective marriage partners with the quality of one’s brain. Artistic virtuosity, he claims, is unevenly distributed, neurally demanding, hard to fake and highly prized.

Miller goes on to give the example of the male bower birds of Australia and New Guinea who fastidiously create and then decorate their bowers with orchids, snail shells, berries and bark. The bowers are purely decorative, bear in mind, and not to be confused with the birds' nests, which are made at a later stage. Some bower birds even paint their bowers with regurgitated fruit which they apply with 'paint brushes' of  leaves and bark. The females then appraise these creations and mate with the makers of the most symmetrical and well-ornamented bowers. Andy Goldsworthy, eat your heart out.

Anyway, I'm convinced. I’ve seen stuff like this in the local art centre, although I wouldn't go so far as to say that every private view I've attended ends in a riot of coupling.

There’s a weaker argument too. Economist Thorstein Veblen, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and the writer, Tom Wolfe have all suggested that humans make art simply to impress others.

But let's leave the last word on our urges to Chris Frith, professor emeritus at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London. In a recent Guardian podcast about conciousness and the brain, he said:

"We have very little access to what we're doing... but we think we do."