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!

Unexpected Influences

A couple of posts ago I spent some time looking at Peter Bruegel the Elder. When I say looking I mean just looking, no thought, no analysis and precious few words. In that post I mentioned I would be making sketches of our lovely new snow. This I did. Whilst gathering material on the Friday afternoon, I was struck by the different attitudes there exist towards snow. I was out and about, freezing cold and having a lovely time. Meanwhile, there was a queue of cars going nowhere along the Egham bypass, full of warm but unhappy drivers.

I came back and sketched my sketches with no thought of Bruegel. After all, our work could not be further apart stylistically.

It was only while watching the programme mentioned in my last post that I saw the link. I don't mean the fact that if rotated through 180º the shapes become similar, but that it addresses the same theme from a different point of view.

The program featured Grayson Perry speaking about Hunters in the Snow. For him, the painting is about the drudgery and hardness that is snow in the absence of shelter and security as epitomised by the weary hunters in the foreground, contrasted with the background showing the wonderful, magical playground that is snow when you have the option of heading into the warm at will.

In my picture the same contrast has been rotated through 180º.

The trees that line the bypass are painted as slushy, used up snow that half swallows up the almost ghost-like vehicles with their invisible drivers safe and warm but trapped and fed up. Meanwhile, the viewer is unencumbered by metal and dual carriageways, with an expanse of pristine snow beckoning them into the cold - in other words if I were in Bruegel's painting I would be an ice-skater looking up at the hunters returning through the trees.

This link was entirely subconscious, but now I have noticed it it is inescapable. It just goes to show paintings are a fabulous tool for exploring and digesting, and if made with this in mind they can go on surprising their maker long after the paint has dried.

This treatment of this composition has legs, and I will work it up into a proper painting in due course.

How on earth did I ignore Caspar David Friedrich all my life?

Sometimes, especially as youngsters, we can be guilty of dismissing ideas, people and aesthetics out of hand.

When I was on my Foundation course a young lady said she was influenced by Friedrich. Her work was not to my taste. It was too teenage-girl-gothic for me. At that age the bittersweet dark romance of it passed me by and I thought there was too much cliché and not enough rigour.

On my degree course there was another young lady influenced by Friedrich. There was no gothic element to her work; the influence was more in finding romance in the landscape but again it did nothing for me. So I had a distorted hall-of-mirrors view of him, never really even looking at his work properly, perhaps glancing at a picture if it happened to be in a book I was reading.

This week, having just turned 38, I have finally discovered Caspar David Friedrich.

There was a beguiling documentary called "Tales of Winter: the art of snow and ice" on BBC 4 looking at how winter has been portrayed in Western art. In it, poets, artists, historians and even distant relatives spoke about particular paintings - Bruegel's Hunters, John Nash's soldiers, Nevinson's football match and many others. One thing to praise is the extraordinary quality of this programme's photography of the art works - looking at reproductions for this blog this aspect was truly exceptional.

It featured this painting by Friedrich, "The Abbey in the Oak Wood", and it has grabbed me and refused to let go. Formally, influenced as I am by photography, I adore its tonal structure. Emotionally, it captures that strange mix of hope and trudging bleakness that defines Runnymede at the tail end of winter - an acknowledgement that yes, everything is harsh and a slog, but dawn is earlier every day and buds are forming on the trees. There's a searching quality about it which reaches right inside me.

That's all I'll say for now, but I will find out what of his is in London, have a field trip and report back.

Between running round like a loon enjoying the new snow and recalling the hardships of winter for the furry things that have neither central heating nor supermarkets yesterday, I thought I would bow to the inevitable. Just as the Fairy tale of New York is everywhere at Christmas, now is the season of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Frozen water, fresh snow and a "can't work so we might as well play" attitude is just about right for Egham right now. I saw an estate agent in a suit standing in the falling snow showing off his brand new sledge to some excited colleagues - kudos! Who cares how hard things are, wrap up warm and arse about! I proclaim this as someone who has but one miniature wood burning stove for heat. I know very little about Bruegel but this young lady who is apparently somewhere with proper winters has picked one intriguing highlight - the bird trap.

Anyway, whilst I was out yesterday I gathered some material, so the plan for the weekend is to do a couple of decent oil sketches to see if there is potential there or not. Egham bypass in the snow, smudgy and wet-on-wet, with dirty greys, earths and yellows. Who was it who described car lights in a traffic jam as rubies and diamonds? There'll be a bit of that going on too.

Still snowing...

Getting proper now...