Style and Expectation

On my recent trip to London I went to the Giorgio Morandi show in Highbury. I haven't written anything about it because I don't have a lot to say. It's good, it's interesting and it's worth a visit but, a couple of curiosities apart,  it didn't make me want to write. I will give a quick summary next week as there are things there which are important to me and I would encourage you to go but the thing that really struck me was when I overheard part of a conversation.

A lady in a remarkable outfit of a fine wool sweater - either cashmere or merino but certainly the brightest cerise in the world, ever - dark leggings and patent leather Doc Marten's was looking at an etching on the wall and comparing it to one of a similar subject in a book in a cabinet. Both etchings were depicting still lifes in similar arrangements. One was made in 1927 and the other in 1956. I was so struck by what she said to her companion that I wrote it down verbatim.

"This one is quite early. That ones later, its much better, its much more stylized"

Her point was that the later work was more in the recognisable Morandi style, with his distinctive treatment of space, ovals and tonality. This was equated with quality. There was a simple thought that the piece that was more typical must be better, because it looked more like it should look. The mannerism was more important than the individual composition. Of all the artists you could subject to this indignity, Morandi is perhaps the least appropriate. His work is about thought and careful observation, not following a formula. For me, this is the source of his rigour and integrity. If his work has certain common threads running through it, it is because it honestly and simply reflects his personality, his interests and his view of the world. This is, however, an interesting insight into the view of someone else. It may be the view of someone more typical than myself. For her, a Morandi picture should look one way and one way only. Does the same applies to other artists too? Is the criteria for judging Picasso's work how closely it resembles Les Demoiselles d'Avignon? This sits in contrast to what I believe is the artist's duty to grow and stretch himself and experiment, but if a lot of other people are more aligned with this lady than with me, it may be a key to commercial success.

There's no conclusion to this post, its just a thought I'm uncomfortable with but need to consider.

Edges

I live on an edge, in more ways than one. Today I want to talk about an edge defined by London's circular motorway, the M25.

Once upon a time, I lived about 3/4 mile inside the M25 and I painted pictures of the suburbs. Now I live perhaps 300m outside the M25 and I paint the landscape. This photo is my border, where the Thames passes under the motorway between Runnymede and Staines.

To a degree, the difference is simply the type of environment where I spend my time and with which I therefore have a closer relationship. Before I faced towards London, working in Tolworth and Molesey. Now I see London as nothing but a necessary evil and turn my back on it, heading into the woods at every opportunity.

In Alanland, where Alan is King of the Alan people, ideas are never that simple. When I restarted painting last year, before I started painting the countryside I picked up exactly where I'd left off 13 years before by depicting the suburbs. This time it was modified by more than a decade as a shopkeeper but I just wasn't feeling the excitement of before so I turned to my more immediate landscape, Runnymede and the Surrey countryside. This grabbed me in part because I hadn't painted landscapes with serious intent before - it provided new challenges and stretched my vocabulary and I like to make things difficult for myself.

Recently I have looked at the suburban work I started last year with a little distance and it fascinates me, it is intriguing, ambivalent and surprisingly emotional. This raises some questions fundamental to my practice.

Given that as an artist I don't feel that sitting on a fence is an option, what should I think of being on two sides of a fence at the same time? Is to continue with both strands of work to sit on a fence, to dance on it or to repeatedly hurdle it? Should I rigorously close my options down or accept my restless nature and succumb to tangents and whim? How will my decision impact on my ability to focus?

 Perhaps there is a way to unify the two strands in a single body of work, but does this run the risk of being a mish-mash which does neither thing well? Since in many ways they explore the same concerns, using the duality of represented space, the joy of colour and the sensuality of paint as tools for coming to terms with my surroundings, maybe they are in fact exactly the same?

This is why I am reluctant to show my work here, despite teasing it. I am tempted to show both strands, but for the sake of a quiet life show them in different places using different names. Years ago, when both strands first started to manifest themselves in one exhibition, one critic found it hard to accept it was all done by one person. There is no simple answer but deep down I suspect I must show both, show them together and take the questions that go with that on the chin.

Ice Age Art: Arrival of the Modern Mind

The British Museum's current blockbuster is a gathering of artefacts made around the turn of the last Ice Age. It argues that the existence of these 40-10,000 year old objects proves that by then man had evolved into what he is now, with the same instincts and capacity for thought. It goes on to argue that the discovery of specialised workshops and work done by experimental archeologists suggest specialist artists existed, and that means there must have been organised social groups - one hunts, another makes - and given that there are individual caves where there are similar paintings made thousands of years apart then these social groups must have retained very consistent values over an enormous length of time.


One thing I was delighted to see was the acknowledgement of, or maybe even obsession with, the fact that we will never know what the purpose of the objects was and although its fun to guess its ultimately futile. As such the secondary message was that we can't do other than appreciate these as we would contemporary art. To this end the exhibition tried to show how art had been influenced by the discovery of these objects but I found this a half-hearted distraction - a photograph of Picasso's studio, a stone Henry Moore, a couple of Matisse prints.

So what of the objects themselves? They range from the very famous - the Venus of Espugue that obsessed Picasso, a reproduction of the lion-man (the original is in a lab in Germany as some of the missing bits have recently been discovered and are being re-attached) - to things that were completely new to me. I will concentrate on just a few.

The lion-man is an underwhelming object in photographs, but in the (false) flesh it comes to life. Carved from a mammoth tusk, it is a man with a lion's head. It is simple, relaxed and stylised yet utterly sure of itself. What really struck me was its size. It is the perfect size to be grasped around the waist by a man's hand. Indeed this is really evident in the video that shows someone making a reproduction with Ice Age tools. When you consider its feet are cut at an angle so that it would not be able to stand on its own you can't help but wonder. It could have been made to lean against a wall or in a niche but with its back leaning forwards as it follows the curve of the tusk it would look like it were cowering - hardly lion-like. So surely it was made to be held. Even today, held above your head there would be a kind of "By the power of Greyskull" moment, or held in front of you before a crowd or between you and an individual there would be a clear statement of power. I know I said its futile to guess, but that's my point. These objects are so engaging, ambiguous and alive that its very difficult not to be carried away into a realm of imagination by the best of them and that is what sets them apart as masterpieces few artists are capable of matching.

Perhaps my favourite object is the tiny diving bird. It half the size of my little finger and utterly compelling. When you scour the web there is an assumption it is diving through the air and even the card accompanying the exhibit in the show speculates about the spiritual role of birds in flight. I disagree. It looks an awful lot like a cormorant underwater to me. The neck is perhaps a little short but I think the distortion from the surface of the water accounts for that. I see cormorants along this stretch of the river every day and, if I'm lucky and the water is clear and the sun is in the right direction, when I'm up high sometimes I glimpse them underwater. This reflects where, for me, a lot of the strength of the work comes from. To be able to accurately carve something moving that quickly, which you will only ever glimpse, requires an unimaginable understanding of your subject. This is a point Andrew Graham Dixon picked up in the preview show on the BBC when comparing the horses of George Stubbs with the the work on display here. Stubbs dissected horses. He knew every sinew and every vein and it shows  in his paintings. Ice age men would perhaps have spent a large chunk of their lives killing, gutting, butchering and eating the subjects of their art. They are likely to have known the appearance, texture, weight, smell and taste of every part of their subjects anatomy in a way no modern artist does, even if they didn't understand the function of each part as we do.

I do wonder about the most common raw material, tusk. The drawings in particular have a particular quality which is consistent across thousands of miles and thousands of years. They feature very clean, precise yet lively lines. I suspect it is inherent to the process - scratching with a very fine and sharp implement on a surface which maybe has softer and harder areas. Most of the lines seem to be a constant width yet the effect is of a width that varies, so I would speculate the lines are deeper in some areas than others. If I can find an equivalent material I would like to explore this further.

In conclusion, it is a compelling exhibition which is thoroughly recommended. Man has been capable of extra-ordinary things for a lot longer than we might think. As an artist, the key lessons are not new but are of fundamental importance. Rigour is everything. Learn your subject intimately through observing it every which way you can. Then take your time and anything is possible.

A tentative definition: trying to pin down art

Just lately, when people have asked what I do, I've been using the phrase "I'm an artist" quite a lot. Inevitably, there is a range of reactions.

       Reaction #1: Excitement                       Reaction #2: Whatever            Reaction #3: The Intense & Helpful Idea

"The Helpful Idea" has been by far the most telling. I have spent half my life, a bit here, a bit there, steeped in art. Most people haven't and as a result their conception of art is fundamentally different to mine. It reveals itself in their ideas about what I could do. The ideas tend to be intense and range from the useful to the insulting to the laugh out loud bizarre but they have one thing in common - Art Is Pictures.

I do not think Art Is Pictures. I certainly do not think Pictures Is Art.

Last night, on my Business Studies course, I was asked to do an elevator pitch. The idea of this is to explain your business to a stranger before they've had a chance to escape out of the lift you are both in. Its purpose in the real world is to help find customers and in the classroom is to help you clarify your own understanding of your business. This was the first time I had spoken to the group as a whole about what I get up to and some words came tumbling out as I tried to explain.

"You can have a relationship with a painting. Look at that photo on the wall, you can get everything you ever will get out of it in a couple of glances, but if you hang a decent painting on your wall then even if you look at it every day for a year you'll still be getting new things from it and you'll still be engaging with it." By things I mean pleasure, emotions, thoughts, the spotting of links, insights and so on. From the reaction I got it was plain that some people there had never thought about art as anything more than a pretty picture and certainly never considered owning any. Those few words generated a frightening amount of curiosity. Next week, ready or not, I have to bite the bullet and take my work public as a result.

So for now, my working definition of art is this:

"Art is a [insert art form here] with which both the creator and the viewer can have an ongoing relationship"

and frankly, even if I say so myself, that is the best and most succinct definition I have ever come across!