The Ever-Fresh Pleasure of a Useless Occupation

"Le plaisir delicieux et toujours nouveau d'un occupation inutile."

Ravel inscribed these words by Henri de Régnier on the title page of his score for Valses Nobles et Sentimentales; an indication that, despite his fascination with the waltzes of Schubert, he was fully aware of the almost mindless gaiety of the Viennese ballroom and the self-satisfied pleasure that led to the catastrophic Great War.

The delicious and ever-fresh pleasure of a useless occupation.

The words seemed particularly appropriate as I wandered aimlessly around Poitiers during the recent Easter holidays.

The French were ensconced at the table with their families, the streets were empty and I was free to wander. When I had completed my first circuit of the city, gawping at the grandeur of the municipal architecture and the vast public spaces that are such anathema to English town-planning, I realised that I had more than enough time to do it all over again... and again. I had a date at 4pm and here I was at 11am, my belly already full of coffee, croissants and municipal architecture, with six hours to go and no desire for an early lunch. What was I to do? 

In his excellent book, The Art Of Travel, Alain de Botton describes so well the kind of lethargy and incuriosity that can overwhelm us in foreign places and at such times. During a trip to Madrid, he chose to malinger under the bedsheets in his hotel room rather than endure the tourist slog around the town, imbibing historical and geographical tidbits from an almost reproachful guidebook. The hardest thing, he wrote, was to take pleasure in lying there, whilst knowing that just outside the room was an exotic, new world, just waiting to be explored. 

We feel, so often, like disembodied observers when we visit other places and cultures. We blink at the world from the other side of our goldfish bowl without any true feeling of engagement or belonging, conscious always that like the holiday clothes in our suitcases, we will shortly be bundled up and carted back to a place of familiarity, where the boredom of routine can seem infinitely preferable to the disconcerting tedium of our present anomie.

Clearly, it was time for me to do that thing; to mitigate the unfamiliarity of my circumstances and my present ennui with an activity with which I have had the greatest propinquity for more than fifty years: 

My own delicious and ever-fresh pleasure;  the useless occupation of drawing.

At a life-class, a student with severe back problems once told me that drawing was a more effective analgesia than his TENS machine and at the Society of Disabled Artists meetings in Frome, where I taught for several years, many of our members found that drawing (and painting) made their chronic pain go away and for a time, made them forget that life for them was not 'normal.' This is no surprise as drawing is neurally demanding, engaging as it does, the hand and the eye as well as the brain in an extraordinary synchronicity of movements and measurements. And it is that rare thing; entirely autonomous, self-directed labour, the end result of which is yours and yours alone, to do with as you will. Added to that, drawing changes the act of observation from a passive to an active one and reinvigorates your curiosity in the world. With the rekindling of that curiosity, lethargy vanishes. The municipal building is no longer on the other side of the goldfish bowl but right there, under your hand, along with the rest of the city. You have internalised it in a very conscious way and you may find that even when the drawing is done, your rekindled curiosity continues to grow rather than diminish.

Now I am home again, regardless of any artistic merit they might have, I look with pleasure at the drawings in my sketchbook because I can remember the circumstances in which they were made with a kind of clarity that is absent from the rest of my trip. In The Art Of Travel, de Botton suggests that travel 'twists our curiosity according to a superficial geographical logic.' 

I'm inclined to think that drawing unravels it again.

Verging On The Sublime

Klosters' heyday as the winter playground of English royalty is long over but there are no echoes of nostalgia or signs of faded glory about the town's immaculate streets. The whole place is so bright, so spic, span and affluent that it can make an English visitor quite heady. If the altitude doesn't make you swoon, the lack of litter and graffiti will. The sunlight is sharp in the crisp mountain air and everything it touches gleams. The spacious shops are bright with the rainbow colours of hiking gear and pool wear. Mountain bikes, tennis rackets and Norwegian walking poles abound. Winter or summer, Klosters is focussed on the life lived out-of-doors and that is why so many people still take the little red train from Landquart and venturing this far up the Prättigau valley, alight just one stop before Davos. Above the town, the green pastures which swathe the mountain slopes are neater than an English lawn and dotted with old wooden barns that are better kept than any palace. To me, the valley looked so fresh and perky, the entire place could have been a built overnight, just before I arrived.

So here I am, back in Klosters again as a guest of Marianne and Tore Bergengren, rudely awoken by the cart which washes the streets at 7am, peering out of my apartment window at the sun-kissed, verdant slopes that end in those jagged slabs of rock way above my head. And I'm wondering what I'm going to do with them. The trees, the barns, the waterfalls dangling silently from each distant pinnacle like threads of silver, they're all so tiny against the massy rock. Enormous shadows swing about the valley. If you're on the wrong hillside, twilight may reign for hours on end. Unless the sun is directly overhead, it's almost impossible to tell what time of day it is. There's only one kind of majesty in Klosters nowadays; it has ruled the land for centuries and still holds dominion over my mind as I write this, two weeks later.

Just how do you fit a mountain on a sheet of watercolour paper?

The Swiss philosopher, Jean-JacquesRousseau identified the healthy individual as one who was free from the corruption of modern civilised society and (not for the first time) equated the natural world with the idea of innocence. Similarly, the English poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge proclaimed a 'visionary fondness for fields and woods and mountains,' which he believed, kept the 'bad passions' in inaction. In the eighteenth century, thinkers, writers and poets alike, began to look to Nature to define and determine our moral, as well as our mental and emotional states. The time was right therefore, for an art that reflected these preoccupations. That art, was the art of the landscape and the medium that was best-suited to the purpose, was watercolour.

John Robert Cozens: Between Martigny and Chamonix

English watercolourists, in fact, had been articulating these preoccupations for many years previously, but it must be born in mind that their medium was seen as a rather lowly one and worse, the stinging words of Michelangelo must have rung still in the ears of many an art-lover, when he called landscape art 'a vague and deceitful sketch; a game for children and old men.'

JMW Turner South gate of Sargans (after JRC)

Nothing, however, could capture those vast expanses and wide skies quite as effectively as humble water soluble pigment on paper.

Francis Towne: La Chaperieux

By why the pre-occupation with lofty crags and deep ravines?

John Warwick Smith: Alpine Bridge

The English essayist and politician, Joseph Addison, after undertaking the Grand tour through France, Switzerland and Italy in 1699, declared that "The Alps fill the mind with an agreeable kind of horror." 
This is the frisson that Andrew Wilton refers to in his introduction to 'The Great Age Of British Watercolours,' which we may experience when we are confronted by high waterfalls, cliffs, mountains, oceans or storms and our instinct for self-preservation is threatened. This awareness that we are pitted and measured against almighty forces that overshadow and overwhelm us, acquired a moral dimension through the work of philosophers like Kant and Burke and developed into the concept of the Sublime in nature; a concept that was commensurate with, but separate from, that of beauty. In 'A Philosophical Enquiry,' Burke's investigation into the origin of our ideas of beauty and the sublime, the philosopher even went so far as to suggest a quasi-physiological cause for the frisson that is evoked by vast and lofty visual phenomena. The retina, Burke claimed, is so excited by scanning so many successive data points of information that the eye vibrates almost to the point of pain, and consequently 'must produce an idea of the sublime.'

Salvador Dali: Soft Construction With Boiled Beans

The Sublime was finally overwhelmed by the industrialising forces that spawned it and the Great War decimated the ruling class that both sponsored and patronised it. The work of Freud and Jung, meanwhile, suggested a different trajectory for artistic endeavour and the Grand Tour was replaced with an equally hazardous inward journey. After the welter of radical and sensational 'ism's that characterised twentieth century art, John Robert Cousins and the other watercolourists of Britain's Great Age, could  easily be mistaken for mere nostalgists, rather than the plumbers of the human spirit that they were.

The Sublime, courtesy of EasyJet

No one has to risk traversing the Mont Cenis Pass in a wicker basket these days and the alternative coastal journey to Italy is relatively free of Moorish pirates. And thanks to the democratising effect of the camera, the Sublime is within easy reach of anyone with a mobile 'phone and a reservation on a budget flight. A contemporary version of the Sublime would also have to include the routinely breathtaking images captured by the crew of the International Space Station. 

Earth from the ISS

Astronomy raises the bar by light years.

Omega Nebula by NASA, ESA and J. Hester (ASU)

Back on Earth in Klosters, I know that I will never climb the peaks that dominate my every waking moment.

Chandler: Silvretta Alps

Chandler: From Gotschnagrat

Chandler: Muggenwald

I have to find my own way of conquering them.

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

Briefly In Sicily

The idea was to put David Chandler (art tutor, watercolourist and lover of anything that will fit on a plate or in a wine glass) together with Loredana Waters (unsurpassable Sicilian chef, professional enthusiast and lover of all things Italian) in a villa in Sicily and invite a bunch of people to join them for a week of fine art and fine food. What could be more enticing? Painting under the palms by day and supping under the starry sky by night on a Mediterranean isle, saturated with culture, where Vandals, Ostrogoths, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans had left their antique mark...

That's how I found myself heading out of Palermo through rush hour traffic in a little Lancia; Italian rock pounding from the car stereo and gallons of rain water hammering onto the windscreen.

Our destination that first evening was Messina, where we would be staying with friends of Loredana. The only thing between us and a bed for the night? Two hundred and twenty kilometres, fifty tunnels and raindrops the size of baby birds, plonking onto the car roof.

Two things I learned during the first hour of our trip:  

1. Road-markings are for decorative purposes only and it's okay to reverse on Sicilian motorways if you are in dire need of a coffee, a doughnut and another CD of Italian rock music.

2. Said coffee, obtained over the counter of a late-night service station shop, will probably be the best you've ever tasted. The doughnut will be pretty good too, but the CD is likely to be quite another matter.

Cefalù, where we planned to stop for supper, was strangely difficult to find. After Taormina and Palermo, it's probably Sicily's most visited town and during the summer, owing to its mediaeval charm and sandy beaches, the population triples. But it seemed to me and even to the Sicilian at the wheel, that any connection between the road signs and the destinations they bore was entirely coincidental. Mercifully, after only one U-turn on a fairly quiet stretch of dual carriageway, we stumbled upon it and splashing downhill through pond-sized puddles, we found the ancient port sparkling in the darkness, its streets glossy with rainwater.

Our restaurant was a faintly chilly and cheerless place and would have been improved by the presence of a few more diners besides us. With the whole of Sicily awash, however, it was no surprise that we should be entirely alone. I looked around the room, counting the vacant chairs and tables and feeling embarrassed for the staff whom, I supposed, were feeling equally embarrassed for us. When my companion became embroiled in a long argument with the waitress who then stalked off, I was convinced that I had discovered the real reason for the restaurant's emptiness. But it turned out that Loredana and the waitress had just been discussing the squid. When I tasted it, I knew exactly why this little envelope of rubbery looking-flesh had aroused such passion. It was fabulously, mouth-meltingly fresh and as with the service station coffee, quite surpassed anything I had ever tasted - caught that morning, apparently; the only condition under which the chef would cook it.

After supper, Loredana announced that no visit to Cefalù would be complete without a visit to the old lavatoio, a kind of mediaeval, stone-built washing machine, which utilises the water that runs from the enormous rock which towers over the town and escapes through vents in the sea wall. So we ventured out into the tipping rain again and after losing our way only a couple of times, found the correct gateway. Descending the steps to the lavatoio, with the waves beating heavily against the old walls, we gazed thoughtfully at the ancient stones upon which equally ancient scrubbers got their clothes only slightly less wet than we were then. 

Drying out in the car and back on the road again, we found our way out of Cefalù on our third attempt. We were driving up a mountain in a rain storm, in the wrong direction, but hey, Messina had to be out there somewhere. And we were dry. 

Paccamora, as they say in Sicily.

Boredom And Bile Green

On my last painting holiday in Tuscany, I managed to produce this:

I painted it after one of Dermot and Kathryn's wine-fuelled lunches, on a gloriously sunny afternoon in front of about a dozen people. I'm sure the experience was an edifying one for my students as they watched their so-called teacher getting into more and more of a muddle with his colours and the entire painting went from bad to worse.

I did the same thing in the Loire Valley ten or twelve years earlier, the incident, unlike the many decent demo's I've done, forever etched onto my mind. Then, a student and dear friend told me that my appalling demo' was the most helpful he'd ever seen. Learning from my mistakes was far more salutary, he said, than watching me slickly execute a masterpiece that he felt, in those early days, he would never be able to emulate.

There was some comfort in his remarks as I ruefully went over the events that led to this most recent disaster. It was an unpleasant and cringeworthy experience for me, but if the point of a painting holiday is instruction, then why not acknowledge and accept that one's students can learn just as much from your bad art as your good?

This is a worthwhile idea, but only if we can bear to face up to our mistakes and without any unnecessary breast-beating, dwell on them a little, learn from them and move on.

In one of my local classes, at a quarter to four every thursday afternoon, I would hear the sound of tearing. The perpetrator was Patricia, for whom part of the packing-up procedure was the ripping up of whatever she'd spent the last one and three quarter hours painting. She never liked what she produced and didn't see the point in taking it home, so into the waste bin it would go, in a dozen tiny pieces. She looked blissful while she was doing it, too.

I was never able to convince Patricia that she should hold on to these 'ghastly' creations of hers and attempt to glean something of their merits as well as their de-merits. In this way, she might have learned what she needed to do in order to produce work that pleased her. But no, no work of art could be more pleasing to her than the sound of tearing. In the end, with nothing to show for all the days she spent labouring at her watercolours but a full waste bin, she gave up.

So what are the particular merits and de-merits of my own watercolour disaster?

Well, now that I look at it with a degree more objectivity than I possessed after three glasses of vermentino, I can see that it might have worked. At the time, however, it wasn't the picture that I wanted to paint.

But what did I want to paint?

That it seems, is the crux of the matter. I don't think I really knew. Apart from the fact that I wanted it to be terribly impressive, the rest is a little vague. I just started flinging paint around and hoping for the best. It works sometimes, but not necessarily in front of a dozen people on a hot hillside. On that particular day, I did not get lucky and I couldn't see any potential in the marks I was making. There were no serendipitous insights and then I committed the greatest of all cardinal sins: I got bored.

The purpose of painting is not to show that you are good at it, rather it is to engage with your subject on an intimate level and communicate that engagement.

“In painting," said Matthew Smith, "the gravest immorality is to try to finish what isn’t well begun. But a picture that is well begun may be left off at any point.”

Salient words, but dipping your paint brush in bile green doesn't help either.

And here's an excellent RSA video on making mistakes by Kathryn Schulz:

http://www.thersa.org/events/video/archive/kathryn-schulz

Why Choose That?

I judged the Black Swan Open Art competition recently, along with Irena Czapska (Director at Spike Print Studio in Bristol), Dr Jo Dahn (Senior Lecturer in Critical Studies in Art and Design at Bath Spa University), Charlie Thomas (Photographer and Awards Manager at The Association of Photographers Limited in London) and Tom Bayliss (Sculptor and co-founder and curator of the Tool Shed gallery, Frome).

To the surprise and dismay of many gallery-goers, we awarded the Open Art Prize, worth £750, to Neill Fuller, for the painting above. The decision came in for a great deal of criticism. People hated Neill's painting. They didn't like the colours, they didn't like how it made them feel and they certainly didn't want it on their wall. 

"So why," as one woman said to me, "choose that?"

Here's what I said at the preview:

To enter an art competition you need to be really courageous or deluded. But I expect that most artists are both.

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

And then there are the judges. In a wide-ranging, 20-year-long study of experts in numerous fields, their opinions were found to be no more reliable than the toss of a coin.

Aptly-named, David Picker, who worked in the motion picture industry for more than 40 years confided that if he’d said ‘yes’ to all the projects he turned down and ‘no’ to all the ones he took, things would have worked out about the same.

Certainly for me and my fellow judges, with 400 works of art to study and only enough room in the Black Swan for about 80 of them, the most effective use of our time was to say ‘No’.

I’ve entered the Black Swan Open on three occasions and scored two ‘No’s and a ‘Yes’. But it wasn’t ‘No’... ‘No’... ‘Yes!’ it was ‘No’... ‘Yes!’...  ‘No’. 

When I complained, rather sulkily, to the then centre manager of the Black Swan that I had been rejected, she responded with a nicely-nuanced admonition:

“David, you’re work wasn’t so much rejected as not selected.”

But here’s the thing. It’s your work that is not being selected. Not you. You are still the same courageous, deluded, misunderstood artist you always were. But you’re also resilient.

The American composer, John Cage, came in for a fair amount of vitriol during his lifetime for his demanding, sometimes unlistenable music. When he was asked how he felt about all the criticism, he said that once he finished a piece, it was no longer anything to do with him. Like your children, you have to let your art go and find its own way in the world.

So how did we select? With Kandinsky’s warning in mind, what were the criteria?

Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it? It’s all a matter of personal taste, surely?

Think about all the people who bet on the Grand National. How do they pick a winner? Most of them know nothing about form, so what they do is choose the horse’s name that  they like the best. Now, you can pick a work of art like that. We’re all allowed to say what we like. But no amount of liking will make it a winner. 

I’ll tell you what I was looking for.

The work had to be well-made. By that, I mean that the sculpture, print, painting, ceramic was put together by someone who had an intimate relationship with their materials.

Whatever the work had to say, it had to say well. If it was fresh, startling or original, so much the better. If the work was beautifully executed, but merely re-hashed the same old artistic tropes, then it probably wouldn’t make the final selection.

Confession time. On one occasion we selected a work because the title was so amusing, another was just plain bizarre and we chose another because it was small.

Thirdly, it had to be intelligent. It had to be something that we could turn to again and again, rather than give us a temporary, rather superficial thrill. 

Art evolved from primitive mating rituals and displays to become the highly-specialised way that we explain ourselves to ourselves. That’s how we bond. That’s what culture is. No matter how much you might like the idea, other animals just don’t do it. Culture, said Fitzroy Somerset, is roughly everything we do that monkeys don’t. Take tonight and all the conversation that’s been going on. If it was only about the £750 prize-money, nobody need say a word. 

Finally and most importantly, for me, the selected work had to be aesthetic. A word that comes from the Ancient Greek, meaning to feel, to perceive, to be conscious. The opposite, of course, is anaesthetic. Art should wake us up, rather than put us to sleep.

The winner of the Black Swan Open Art Competition 2013 is Neill Fuller for 'Goin' Down To The Country'.

Thank you, Neill, for waking us all up.

Neill Fuller and the public reaction to his award-winning painting at Black Swan Arts is the subject of my next Seeing Things podcast for FromeFM. You can listen here.

Change your mind. Do it again, differently.

This study was made in about ten minutes at my Thursday morning Life Class.

What's really useful about the Brushes app for iPad is that it allows playback of the entire drawing process, from start to finish and in this way, my constant revisions and changes of mind become apparent.

Drawing is not like tightrope-walking. It is not something that will result in a broken neck if you don't do it properly. Unlike the tightrope, there is no line out there, waiting for you to make a slip; the line is something you create as you go along. You find out where it needs to go and put it there, and how you do this is a process of discovery.

We're not used to this idea, of course. Our school days and working life may have convinced us that everything we do is a kind of test (as Ken Robinson would say, there's one answer and it's at the back, but we're not allowed to look). Someone, a teacher, an employer, a loved one, is expecting the right answer from you and you'd better perform. The white paper, or the empty touch screen, however, is expecting nothing. It is a risk-free zone in which you may experiment with one mark after another. When you look at drawing in this way, your love/hate relationship with your eraser will come to a merciful end. That eraser, whether palpable or digital, is not for correcting mistakes, because there are no mistakes any more; only lines of discovery; signs along the path that may read, 'This way, not that.'

Change your mind. Do it again, differently. That's creativity.