“As I took her arm she stared through my face at the dark branches of the trees over my head.”[i]
“The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction- conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.”[ii]
I have just read Crash by JG Ballard and those two quotes are in my head and in my notebook. The latter is from the combative introduction, in which Ballard talks of “the writer’s role, his authority and licence to act.”[iii] Reading it I feel challenged towards continuing in my attempts at writing, particularly the fiction. The former is taken from a chapter toward the end, I’ve transcribed it because when I read it I knew it was a painting; knew I could make a painting of it. We all keep and make photos and drawings for paintings. I also, (and I doubt I’m the only one,) see paintings in phrases like this one.
So I have two sentences; one that leads towards a painting, one that leads towards continuing my attempts at writing; this is a neat microcosm of the choice I’ve mulled over for at least five years. Starting after I’d completed a teaching qualification and realised how much I enjoyed writing my essays; not for the content but for carefully choosing the words and their order, enjoyed putting the voice in my head to paper.
Again I am asking myself, should I paint or should I write. Obviously this isn’t a hard and fast choice. I could do both, and I do sort of, but it’s not that simple. To begin with there are practical considerations; because of the part-time jobs I have to do to supplement my practice I don’t have the time and energy to commit to both properly, one dominates and that is always painting. I will explore the particular appeal of painting to me later but ultimately I think for me writing performs a different role to painting, I can almost feel gears shifting in my mind as a contemplate thinking as a painter or as a writer; for writing I retreat into a reflective posture.
Because of this I wrongly thought that painting stood out because it was about engaging with the world through making; because it is more physical it has a more direct engagement than writing. It was distinct because (as Tony Godfrey describes it;)
‘Making and looking at painting with its complex traditions is one place where we engage with the land, where we remake it and understand our continuing place in it.’[iv]
However I now think the same would apply to writing for a full-time writer. I imagine a good writer engages with the world as I do as a painter; feels that they are understanding directly through their making, for example in an (admittedly somewhat dated) essay by William Hazlitt he outlines what writing and painting do and it is the diametric opposite of what they do for me.
‘In writing, you have to contend with the world; in painting, you have only to carry on a friendly strife with Nature.’[v]
So I am painter troubled by words. I think it is perhaps important to make some distinctions. I’m not an artist who’s reached this position through a difficulty with words, (I think it is fair to say that some artists have found in imagery a relief from language,) I love reading and writing and if anything I find the distance between the two (words and painting) disconcerting. In fact I think I exploit this; to return to the Ballard quote I want to paint, it is the meaning of the word ‘through’ that triggered me wanting to paint this, the woman is not literally looking through the head at trees, this is just an expression but it is the disjunction between the word and its meaning that immediately meant I saw it as a potential painting. I can separate writing and painting but can’t stop one bleeding into the other.
As you would imagine this engagement with words has led me to try writing onto paintings, but it has never worked, has never brought anything to the painting that the image hasn’t brought itself. If the writer in me loves words, the painter in me is just as suspicious of them: It is easy to think that it is, well, too easy; by simply writing onto a picture you have given it another level, opened doorways of interpretation. But this is a false assumption, words actually reduce potential readings, they are the surest signifier we can use and leave little room for manoeuvre.
They belong on the list of things that you have to be really sure you want in the painting before using them, (off the top of my head also on this list would be skulls, cigarettes, famous people, un-mixed viridian.)
Because of this it is the most certain handling of letters that seems the most successful. When Anselm Kiefer writes on his canvas it fits, we feel the imperative driving him on, marking something, bearing witness with his work. Likewise the paintings of Ed Ruscha or Harland Miller with printed text feel definite, irrefutable.
Miller of course is also a writer, he has written about painting and fiction and a novel itself. I am interested in how different his novel felt to his paintings; though he uses words in his paintings they are not traditional narrative paintings.
I don’t want to dismiss painting as a narrative tool but it doesn’t interest me because I think that a painting should always be altered to make it a better painting rather than to better illustrate a story. But it can be I great starting point and I believe that whatever puts you in front of a painting, whatever quiets your grubby neuroses and gurning libido long enough for you to start a painting is justified.
I haven’t started my ‘Crash’ painting yet; it is cooking in the pot of my mind. So far I only have a quick biro sketch in an A6 notebook, I look at it now and again, I can see it but not yet the painting it’ll turn into. At one of these points I panic as it reminds me of a Luc Tuymans’ painting of an insect in front of a face. Shit, I think perhaps I’ll have to abandon the idea, nothing extinguishes an idea quicker than seeing it somewhere else, realised somehow in someone else’s work... Hang on though, is it a body in that painting? In fact is called Torso? To my relief it is a body but it isn’t the painting Torso it is called Superstition. I breathe a sigh of relief but don’t start the painting.
There is a chequered history of trying to use words with paintings, ‘neither can be reduced to the others terms,’[vi] is how Foucault put it in his famous chapter on Las Meninas. It is largely a fruitless task but we still do it. Why? Well we understand our world through words and likewise we want to understand painting. Writing on painting is predicated on this denial; that you can deconstruct and understand a successful painting through writing. (Though you can drive around the area, you can’t enter the building.) It is perhaps slightly masochistic to undertake a venture you know is doomed to fail.
Perhaps when Duchamp said ‘dumb as a painter’ he meant it in the conventional sense; unable to speak; painters unable to use words to talk about their paintings.
So we live in the written world. We make work in this world and I would argue that language is becoming more dominant and is seeping more and more into art practice; language is one of the cornerstones of conceptual art. I am worried that there is too much linguistics in painting; it sits better with non-painting. At the beginning of a recent article in New Scientist[vii] it is claimed that 80 per cent of our mental experiences are verbal; the majority of our thoughts are language, the world is language. Painting exists in the little space that is left. Painting is what you can’t say.
But I think here is the problem; as a writer in the 21st century I want precision; I struggle to believe that there are things that can’t be described. As a painter I believe in the unexplainable. It is this schizophrenia that has me ‘caught in the crease.’
Eventually I start the painting, while mulling it over I have changed my mind about the size, originally I’d thought it’d be standard portrait size but I want it to be a painting not a portrait so decide to make it big; really big, taller than me at 190cm. I am nervous about this; oversized paintings of people are something else that could go on that earlier list.
The second interpretation I want to avoid is that there is some psychological hiding going on; a face behind a tree. This is harder, I don’t know this is going to work; the viewer will have to be able to see through the tree and through the head simultaneously, this something that I’ll have to work through in the painting. It makes me more than a little nervous; I think it’s going to mean using the paint slightly expressionistically but how do you use big decorator’s- brush mark-making illusionistic but not emotional.
This is another consideration unfamiliar to my inner writer used to the readymade media of words. Painting has material qualities; its own rules. It is not a neutral medium.
As I’m working so big I go to the National Portrait Gallery to see the Alex Katz, though I guess they are portraits in that they are pictures of people; (Edwin beams down at us in the NPG,) I don’t think of them as portraits per se. To me these figures are synonymous with an American sense of ‘ease.’ I don’t see individuals but a community, an archetype. And light. These paintings are as redolent of the light they were painted in as with Sean Scully paintings.
I am also working on a painting based on Antonio Del Pollaiuolo’s Apollo and Daphne. (I’ve just realised that this an interesting insight into my work; I’ve started two paintings involving people and fauna) but also what is worth examining is that this original painting would be called a ‘narrative’ painting by some, referring as it does to a story within Ovid’s Metamorphoses. But though it does show a scene from this story it doesn’t tell it. It relies on that an audience at the time it was painted would’ve known the narrative of Apollo and Daphne. The story is not told but evoked.
This then is where painting has been and where it is now, where it is superior to writing; evocation; whatever it may be; a story, or light or insouciance. Obviously words evoke to, I’ve clung to the following sentence from Hjalmar Soderberg’s Dr Glas as having the power of a painting;
“Strange, how a shudder always passes through the air just before sunrise.”[viii]
But isolated from the narrative it is meaningless, and if I copied it onto a canvas it’d become a painting. Because it occupies space rather than time, the evocation in a good painting is indisputable.
I am writing this at the fag-end of September; this is my favourite time of year. I can’t really explain why, but it is a bittersweet feeling; perhaps because I don’t know what it means. It is a nostalgia for the present, a feeling of imprecise excitement that I wouldn’t know how to describe using language: It is intangible: A remaining morsel of eighteenth century sublime in the nascent winds and turning leaves.
It is this that keeps me painting. The intangible things keep me painting. If a change of season can make me excited and not know why then I believe painting can do it to: Can do things that the writer in me can’t explain. In the same interview that Superstition is reproduced Tuymans says this;
‘Paintings were the first transmitters. No matter how long they are hung in a museum, three years or 400 years, they still give you something. Every image has this disconcerting element of going further in time, into magical time. Some may think it is naive to think that by depicting something you can capture its soul or that you have control over things. But it really does have something to do with that.’[ix]
The paintings that I like and want to make are representational, and it is easy to think with the popularity of ‘narrative figuration’; Tuymans, Doig, Katz, The Painting of Modern Life exhibition at the Hayward, that it is simply about painting reality. It isn’t. It is about creating a reality and then evoking it.
The painting might be finished. I don’t know what I think of it; it looks like nothing else I’ve done.
We change our minds as painters; I have rewritten this piece three times, Gerhard Ricther’s The Daily Practice of Painting contains an aphorism for every position in every argument in painting. In the leaflet for the recent Ruscha show at the Hayward they printed a quote of his, from the 1980’s when he was making paintings without words on them, now he has brought the words back I hope he hasn’t changed his mind, it’s what I want from painting and because painting does it better than writing its why I paint:
‘At one time I used to think that art was strictly visual, and you’re not supposed to go and dig deeper into messages. But now I believe it all has to do with tantalising your memory. The most an artist can do is to start something and not give the whole story. That’s what makes mystery.’[x]
[i] Crash, JG Ballard
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Painting Today, Tony Godfrey
[v] The Fight and Other Writings, William Hazlitt
[vi] The Order of Things, Michel Foucault
[vii] What’s in a Name: The Words Behind Thought, David Robson, in New Scientist, Issue 2776
[viii] Dr Glas, Hjalmar Soderberg
[ix] Luc Tuymans, Ulrich Loock (Interview by Juan Vincente Aliaga)
[x] Ed Ruscha, The Hayward Gallery
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