Bottling Your Painting Holiday - Part 2

I've just returned from ten fantastic days at Studio Paradiso with our hosts, Dermot and Kathryn. As we were operating out of a new venue this year, on the Torrentello Estate in the Lunigiana, we gave ourselves a little time before the students arrived to make notes and prepare...

Then all we had to do was wait for our guests.

With all the usual domestic chores taken care of by someone else (thank you, Sarah) and delicious, local food put under their noses at appropriate hours of the day (thank you Dermot and Kathryn), artists of all abilities could look forward to a whole week of undiluted, uninterrupted art... and a landscape that transforms from beguiling beauty to recalcitrant wretch with every stroke of the brush.

The problem?

Well, just what are you going to do with all that scenery?

Just how are you supposed to get all that green, all those trees, mountains, footpaths, telegraph poles and bee orchids onto your little bit of paper? Suddenly, all your colours are wrong and while you see magic all around you, all that ends up in your sketchbook is scribble.

Funny how all the "me" time that you've been looking forward to for weeks, can turn into "poor me" time in less than twenty-four hours.

Thank goodness for vino locale and Torrentello's wood-fired pizza oven, is all I can say.

 So, what's the answer?

Temper all that ambition with a little realism, I say.

The landscape is a complex phenomenon of shadows and light, of colour, sensation and memory and you're going to capture it all on a bit of mashed up wood pulp, a stick with some animal hair tied to one end and blobs of different coloured dirt mixed with glue?

 I don't think so.

Alberto Giacometti, Swiss born sculptor and painter, said that "in order to realise something" you had "to transform it." In other words, stop trying to get what's 'out there' onto your canvas and start trying to get what's 'in there' out. Pay attention to yourself and your materials. And keep asking the following question:

The fact is, the landscape will keep on changing while you're working on it. It is a repository of infinite moods. Your painting isn't. Every year, wherever I teach, I write this on the board in bigger and bigger letters.

What you end up with won't be the landscape you saw - leave that behind you, in Italy or France or wherever else you find yourself - but it will be what happened when you tried to paint the landscape you saw.

That's valid, isn't it?

Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky wrote a tremendously difficult solo for the bassoon at the beginning of his masterwork, The Rite Of Spring. Rightly daunted by the prospect of playing it before the maestro, the chief bassoonist went away and practiced and practiced until he'd got it note perfect. At the next rehearsal, however, Stravinsky was far from satisfied with the bassoonist's efforts. When he remonstrated with the composer that he'd worked hard until he could play it perfectly and that in his opinion, he'd played it faultlessly, Stravinsky told him that he didn't want the sound of someone playing it perfectly; he wanted the sound of someone trying to play it.

Every landscape is perfect, but you are only human. That's the kind of realism I admire.

Set painting for Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring by Nicholas Roerich

Knowing Your App From Your Elbow

Besides the sweet shop shrubbery and tree trunks the colour of liquorice allsorts, the other abiding image of Hockney this year has been of the maestro himself, sitting and sketching, with a fag in one hand and an iPad in the other. It's enlightening to see an acknowledged great working in a medium that hitherto has been the province of children, geeks and fantasy artists. One imagines it's a bit like watching that other David - Beckham - playing Subbuteo; only less likely.  But there it is, hundreds of Hockney's iPad images have been appearing in respectable art galleries as well as online, so like it or not, thanks to Hockney, iPad art has achieved legitimacy with astonishing rapidity.

But what about the feel and the smell of oil paint? purists may say. How can these images be unique? Where's the skill?

Anyone who's tried to navigate the slick surface of an iPad screen, leaving a vapour trail of coloured pixels beneath their index finger, will know that the business requires a fine degree of manual dexterity and hand/eye co-ordination. The thing doesn't draw for you and if you're no good with pencil and paper, you'll be even worse with an iPad. Of course, it's a mass-produced item, but so too, is a tube of oil paint; at least since Winsor and Newton started making them in the 1830's. The nostalgists among us may lament the iPad's lack of tactility and its odourlessness but neither of these things are, in my view, prerequisites for great art. It has to look right way before I care whether or not it smells right. And as for the work's presence, its hand-made, artisan-crafted look, this has been a debate in art long before Damien Hirst started paying people to paint his dot pictures; before Warhol, too, in fact, when Pieter Breughel the Younger set up a factory to reproduce his dad's masterpieces back in the sixteenth century.

Although the iPad signals a huge change in the way we make art, it is not about to replace other paint media - yet. It is, however, an extremely valuable tool for the artist to add to his or her kitbag. Most usefully, it is paintbrush, pencil and paper combined. Most powerfully, it is both shop window and gallery, too.

So let's not spend too long worrying about whether or not the iPad signals the end of art any more than Vincent Van Gogh fretted about having his canvases shipped ready-made from Paris. Let us concentrate, instead, on the challenges that new technology offers the artist. By far the biggest for any iPad artist, has to be to give their work character, to transform that immutable little rectangle into a magic window that makes us look, with a fresh mind upon our world.

So what's new?

All images © David Chandler created on ArtRage for iPad.

David Chandler will be teaching art for iPad at Studio Paradiso (23 May - 2 June and 21 September - 5 October 2012), Chateau L'Age Baston (23 June - 21 July 2012), Exeter Phoenix (19 February 2013) and Dillington House (2 , 23 March & 4 July 2013).

Stale and Hockneyed?

For the past month, during discussions at my art classes, the name of one artist has cropped up over and over again. That artist is David Hockney. Now a grand old man of British art, his recent exhibition, A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy, attracted half a million visitors, making it one of the Academy's most popular shows to date.

When Hockney set up his studio in his mum's old house in Bridlington and began painting watercolours of East Yorkshire, a number of people, including me, were dubious. Hockney's candy colours and decorative textures seemed more at home in California than the dour North of England. Covering Provence in violet and yellow, as Van Gogh did, seemed to make sense, but when was Yorkshire ever emerald green and pink? Does Hockney really have something to say about landscape or has he merely turned the RA into a stage set for a camp version of Babes In The Woods?

Hockney is a prolific painter and clearly has the stamina of an artist half his age. Most of the work on display at the Royal Academy was created over the past three or four years and some of the canvases are enormous. In his own words, the pictures are very "new and fresh as well"  and to his credit, he has got people thinking about landscape all over again.

But what about those inappropriate colours? it seems that Hockney has successfully done the same trick with the countryside that Turner did with those gamboge sunsets of his and re-defined it for the rest of us through his own vision. Visitors to the exhibition tell me that, now, when they look at the English countryside, they see Hockney's colours. They're finding his candied orange and parma violet in the country lanes and copses in the South as well as the North. They were hiding in the hedgerows all along and we just needed someone with Hockney's visual acuity to point them out for us.

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." 

What We Do When We Draw

"We should talk less and draw more. Personally I would like to renounce speech altogether, and like organic nature, communicate everything I have to say in sketches." Goethe 

"The art of drawing which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing... should be taught to every child just as writing is..." Ruskin

I've just returned from teaching a drawing course at Dillington House, so I thought I'd take a look at what acknowledged masters and art experts have to say about the subject. What I found was a wealth of quotes, stressing drawing's importance that were vehement in their praise of drawing almost to the point of dogmatism. From Berger to De Botton, Degas to Dali, all the comments I found pointed to drawing's honesty and directness; its value as a discipline and as an aid to comprehension. And the general consensus of opinion was "Won't draw? Can't paint'!

"I can see it," a student once complained to me, "so why can't I draw it?"

"Because you don't fully understand it," I replied.

But when we look at a person, a pot or a pear, exactly what is it that we don't understand?

The kind of seeing we habitually engage in is a kind of glib exercise in orientation. It's our way of reassuring ourselves that everything is just the way it normally is. Our over-loaded brains reduce everyday visual stimuli to a series of symbols that we are all too quick to discard. Like a sight-seer on a tour bus, we click the shutter and move on.
               


But this facile way of using the gift of sight is nothing new:

"Let two persons go out for a walk; the one a good sketcher, the other having no taste of the kind. Let them go down a green lane. There will be a great difference in the scene as perceived by the two individuals. The one will see a lane and trees... and that's all! But what will the sketcher see? His eye is accustomed to search into the causes of beauty, and penetrate the minutest loveliness... Is not this worth seeing? Yet if you are not a sketcher you will pass along the green lane, and when you come home again, have nothing to say or to think about it, but that you went down such and such a lane." Ruskin

The full quote is on my post for 26 November 2009.

                The purpose of drawing, then, is not to make a pretty picture but to become more intimate with your subject than mere looking allows. Drawing requires that you slow the pace of your life to a more manageable speed. It requires that you contemplate and think about the world around you. It also requires that you think about what you want.

"Unlike painting and sculpture [drawing] is the process by which the artist makes clear to himself, and not to the spectator, what he is doing." Ayrton

And dictionary definitions of the word 'draw' are manifold. It appears that when you draw, you might also be pulling out or dragging forth.

Like it or not, when you sit down in front of that person, pot or pear, you could also be on the point of revealing yourself to yourself.

"It is often said that Leonardo drew so well because he knew about things; it is truer to say that he knew about things because he drew so well." Clark

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

Providence And The Failure of Eccentricity

"Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."  Goethe

I love this quote. Whenever I share it with those who are unfamiliar with it, I sense they have an instant feeling of kinship with it and a keen hope that it might, in fact, be true. But what does Goethe mean by Providence moving? The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines Providence as: the protective care of God or Nature as a spiritual power. That's a bit of a fuzzy notion for a rational, skeptical 21st Century human being, isn't it? Given that it will rain on your washing and toast always lands buttered side down, how can the whole universe get going just because you've made a decison? - a very dubious notion indeed, when you consider that there are now supposed to be more than 7 billion of us all trying to get God and Nature to dance the way we want them to.

My own explanation is a little less grandiose and based on recent findings in neuroscience about cognitive disinhibiton. According to Harvard University psychologist, Shelley Carson, 'cognitive disinhibition is the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival' and artists, apparently, have it in spades. Put simply, because artists are distracted neither by the rain on their washing or carpet fluff on their toast, their brains are free to concentrate on other stuff; stuff that other brains are filtering out: colours, textures, relationships, the strangeness of the familiar, the beauty of the banal and most importantly, new ways of doing things. Cognitive disinhibition also explains why so many arty types and geniuses are just that little bit eccentric.

If you want examples of the way the brain filters out 'irrelevancies', check out The Monkey Business Illusion or think about the last time you drove a new car and then noticed, as if for the first time, how many others just like yours were on the road.

I visited my oldest daughter in Manchester recently and we took in the Ford Madox Brown 
exhibtion at the fantastic Manchester City Art Gallery. When Harriet got home, she realised that FMB's The Last Of England, was on the cover of a book she's been reading for quite some time. 'I must walk around with my eyes shut,' she lamented. Not really. Ford Madox Brown's masterful evocation of the great emigrating movement of the 1850s just wasn't important to her.

Now it is.

Providence moving? It's been moving all along. I think what Goethe was talking about was giving ourselves a chance to catch up with it...

None So Blind...

Esref Armagan is an artist from Istanbul who paints pictures of sailing boats and lakes; quaint, red-roofed houses; windmills dotted on the hillside and multi-coloured fish swimming in the deep blue sea.

Armigan's paintings are charming but not remarkable enough to warrant all the fuss that’s been made of them, unless you are aware of the fact that this particular artist has been blind since birth.  Then you may wonder at the way he is able to incorporate into his paintings so many elements that cannot be felt.  His clouds, for example are fluffy and vapourous but how can a blind man feel his way around a cloud?  An apple, yes - but a cloud?  He gives everything its correct colour has a reasonable grasp of three-dimensional space and he can deal with perspective; his roads narrow into the distance, his houses diminish in size.  His pictures are as credible as those of many sighted people and in fact, a great deal more competent than most.  When asked how he does it, he says that he was taught, not formally, but by casual acquaintances who told him what the world looked like.

Obviously, the mechanics of actually getting the paint onto the paper and in the right place, is for him, a laborious matter and he’s had to memorise the location of all the colours in his paintbox.

But what intrigues me, is not how good he is, but how bad most of the rest of us are, if we can only produce art that is as good as a blind man’s.  Does this not illustrate that when it comes to picturing the world, we’re most of us hardly using our sight at all?

Our brains are swamped with so much information at every second of the day that we only take from a given situation those elements that are absolutely essential to the moment.

The rest we discard. 

And this is how we negotiate our way through the hazards and the humdrum of life; with incomplete information and assumptions about things rather than truths.

So while we’re swarming across the globe at ever-increasing speeds, pausing only to squeeze the button on our digital cameras, the artist must stop and taking his time, allow the world to slowly manifest itself around him. He or she will look at all the information that the rest of us have discarded and give it their full attention.

Because the artist knows that if you want to be able to paint the world you have to learn how to see it. And in order to truly see it, you first have to overcome your own blindness.