“Depth of Field” an exhibition

We have an exhibition at the Steeple End Gallery in Halesworth Halesworth, as above.  We wrote a short piece as thought to accompany the exhibition.  Here it is

What we used to call Modern Art has set itself a number of problems.  Perhaps ‘problems’ is also a misnomer, because they do not entail absolute solutions.  One of these ‘problems’ then is the depiction or creation of space before, behind or on the picture plane itself. Looking at the scene we perceive space: how do we map these three dimensions onto a two dimensional surface so as to induce a recognition in the onlooker? Pre-Renaissance painting employed a shallow space behind, or on, the picture plane in which relatively two dimensional figures and buildings were arranged parallel to the picture plane -  behind, but not very far behind. So that these images in shallow space co-exist happily with shallow relief – carved and gilded frames on altar-pieces, for instance.

 Renaissance painting employing perspective introduces a potentially very long space behind the picture plane, with forms set at any angle to the canvas. The frame becomes a window containing a view to infinity, denying the flatness of the canvas, and that of any surface the image sits on: a Renaissance painted ceiling seeks to destroy the architectural form it sits on, punching holes into space beyond

Abstract colour field painting, according to some of its practitioners (Heron for instance), proposes a space created in front of the canvas. Devices which might suggest recession – overlap etc – are avoided. Here we have used the optical term Depth of Field as a portmanteau for this ‘problem’ of space. Painters nowadays are not obliged to choose one category of spatial use, or to commit themselves exclusively to one system: indeed, the currently favoured trend is towards a heterodox approach. These concepts are rather abstract unless you are looking at an actual picture, when they become simple enough.  But do we sit around, you might ask, thinking about them and construct our construct our paintings from this cogitation? Of course we don’t!  Painting is an intuitive activity which is done, with the help of instinct, from the part of the brain which we know is there, but cannot entirely control: the area which provides the ‘Ah ha’ experience, the ‘Eureka!’ of Archimedes. But as we try to say something we are nonetheless conscious, among other things, of the problem of space, or try to find out what we want to say, to the onlooker. Even our instincts have been trained by our immediate predecessors.

 

Dom Theobald

Nets and Stones. Shallow spaces, thought of as either vertical or laid flat. Objects falling or floating or both. Vitrines, streams, transparent nets, moving stones. Tanks. Held in Water. Ice. Clear resin. Static space. Coloured spaces. Cross section of another space. Exploding space. Acoustics of space, how we hear and see. Layers, overlaid. The otherness of two-dimensions. Growth through space. Colour, line and song conspiring to create space and colour.

Dom Theobald    Slope  etching

 

Jilly Szaybo

My recent paintings are about an accumulation of tiny details from nature, which, in my work, may appear sometimes to shuffle about and move in and out of focus. I like the idea that they may also buzz and whirr. These elements can be contained within circular shapes, perhaps a disc or a loop.

 

Jilly Szaybo   Nocturnal   acrylic on canvas

 

David Page

Like most of my generation I inherited pictorial preferences from the Cubists, so that I tend to tilt horizontal surfaces up towards the picture plane, and try always to preserve the integrity of the surface. But I am fascinated by perspective – Hobbema’s The Avenue, Middelharnis is a great favourite, and Breughel’s Hunters in the Snow, which seems to contain perspective rather than being moulded by it.  In my small painting Little Bridge in Snow, for instance, the perspective of the bridge is countered by the iconic shape in the middle, like a Japanese character, and the rods and lines anchored to the top frame, so that depth is both asserted and denied.

David Page   Meander Ploughing     oil on canvas

 

 

 

 

 

Gifts from the Greeks: John Craxton

This is a revue I wrote for Cassone , the art book review site, but because of some muddle it wasn’t published there. I was interested in Craxton from early on, and prompted by small coincidences – for instance, I spent many months in Galatas/Poros without realising that Craxton and Freud had been there before. I first saw Craxton’s work in the 1950s, in a copy of ‘Penguin New Writing No 32′, in black and white. My father was amused by this neo-cubism, and wrote a short poem in pencil in the margin

If to Greece you should go to learn farming
You may find biped goats a trifle alarming
But Greek farms hold other surprises
Greek farmer’s feet are of two different sizes

More important Greek surprises were in store for him.
 

Against Govism

In November I wrote a letter to the Guardian about Gove’s plans to marginalise the arts in education. This is how it came out in the Guardian:

Gove and his lot are stuck in the realm of the 3Rs. Today the information.world is an increasingly seamless matrix of visual, verbal and aural – TV,       the internet, texting and tweeting- and the arts are at the centre. Children have to learn how to understand, judge and use the new means with the old. Meantime the Govites arrange chairs on the deck of the Good Ship Education without any idea what seas they are sailing into.

As edited I thought this sounded brusque, out of context, and close to gobbledegook, What I actually wrote was this:

The Editor

The Guardian

Sir,

The central problem is much larger than ‘the marginalisation of cultural subjects’. It is that Gove and his lot are stuck in the realm of the 3 R’s,  if not  the Trivium & Quadrivium. Life has moved on: for a child growing up today the information world is an increasingly seamless matrix of the visual, verbal    and aural. The world is Television, the Internet, the mobile phone, texting and tweets, and the ‘Arts’ are at the centre, not at the periphery. Children have to  learn how to understand, judge, and successfully use the new means with the old. Meantime the Govites continue to arrange chairs on the deck of the     Good Ship Education without any idea what seas they are

sailing into.

It seems to me important to expose & put the skids under Gove, the worst education secretary of my lifetime: he has, so far as I can see, no experience of teaching, and no understanding of education, but is entirely undeterred, driven by political ambition and a primitive theory of learning.  Milk-snatching aside, Margaret Thatcher when she was education minister at least listened to her civil servants and went out and batted for them. Peter Wilby (Guardian Mon 28 Jan) writes that “Gove alone [of ministers with big projects] can look forward to completing his project by the election, largely because he ignores almost all advice from professionals.” I have been baffled by the way in which Gove has been allowed to rejig the whole education system, and by the apparently numb immobility of the Labour Party, which should have been fighting and obstructing every inch of the way. Gove’s deforms will have to be rectified after the next election using up time energy and scarce money. There is at least some evidence of resistance in the education Ministry – the Guardian (Tues 29 Jan., p.9) writes: “Gove.. has told friends civil servants have blocked policy initiatives…” Thank God for that, then.

It is probably worth while trying to spell out what I was trying to say in my letter. The information world which I grew up in (the ‘fourties and ‘fifties) was moved along by conversation, books, daily papers, the cinemas, the telephone and the radio – the last of these marking a radical change from the Victorian era. Television was just beginning to penetrate, (though I did not begin to absorb a television culture until I was in my thirties).  The next generation grew up with Television as a given. Radio, television and the telephone have accelerated the speed of circulation of information, which with contemporary technology moves from its source almost instantaneously, and is then disseminated very quickly. An atrocity in (say) Syria is photographed on a mobile phone, sent somewhere, and spreads in minutes rather than hours.  The problem now is filtering out the relevant from the information overload, and this is done, not by a small band of journalists, but by everyone in reach – (you might almost say by The People).

” Our efficiency in living our lives as ordinary human beings depends on what we do with this bombardment of information.  … [This] involves ignoring some of it, seizing the rest and interpreting it in the light of past experience in order to make as good a guess as possible about what is going to happen”  The quotation comes from Jane Abercrombie’s fine 1960 study The Anatomy of Judgement, compelling reading for teachers.  But the bombardment has increased exponentially in the mean time.

Apart from the increased velocity of information and ease of access to it, one major change has been in the amount of visual information available. In the past if we wanted for example to look at the work of a painter, we had to find a book paper or magazine which reproduced the work: now we can find examples on the screen in reasonable resolution in seconds. And this applies also to newsphotos, video clips, maps, monuments, scenery and so on. In the past visual information of this sort was usually presented in a verbal context (a photograph illustrating a newspaper article, for instance, or a clip of film in a news programme): the visual was moderated by the verbal. Nowadays it is just as likely to be the other way round: the commentator tries to elucidate meaning out of clips of amateur video of events as they happen. In an interesting reversion the sequence of frames which when speeded up creates film has now become a form in its own right as the increasingly accepted graphic novel. – a procession of freeze-frames with added verbal elements. What used to be called Comics. Non-verbal sound was always used to point up language on radio and in film. We all know simple sequences of action which become sinister or happy depending on the sound we are experience at the same time, to take a simple example, and this information, sound including music, increasingly penetrates the other forms, determining their meaning, at the same time as music takes up far more of our communal consciousness.

Today’s children grow up in this visual/verbal/aural soup: to them this is the normal universe. Of course they need to be able to think, express themselves and to use appropriate languages, and of course they need to understand mathematical language and the concepts of science – that is a given. But they will do a poor job of interpreting the information world if they do not understand colour, shape, representational systems, sequence, sound, and music. The way that you develop a real understanding of these areas is by the path of making.  Awareness comes out of struggling to do things and make things. Observation, demonstration and commentary can help, but there is no substitute for direct experience, and making requires equipment, time and dedicated teachers. Learning through making is far deeper and more resiliant  than learning through memorisation.

But the information environment is, in current parlance, a virtual one. It does not involve the full physical force of the body, our delight in our animal powers. We don’t denigrate the thinking, imaginative part of ourselves  to say that it should not be allowed to lose touch with its corrective. the experience of interaction with the physical world. William Morris wisely said that we are most ourselves when our animal self is most accepted: at the other end of the scale is the perceived dichotomy which so tormented Robert Browning, between the thinking person and the man of action.

It’s difficult to see where the idea of ‘soft’ subjects comes from, other than blind ignorance and stupidity, which I suppose is the easy explanation. TS Eliot said “No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job” and by the same token, to do anything really well in the arts takes intelligence as well as the skill and pertinacity which is often thought of as merely ‘aptitude’ and written off as mindless. Any study of the great artists shows that their thinking is incisive and powerful. The intellectual content of the arts is not inferior to that of Languages, History or Maths,

though it is somewhat different. At the same time, although an ability to draw, construct, dance or cook will not get you into Oxbridge, it will joyfully accompany you through life, which does point up some of the limitations of those august academic institutions and the thinking which allegedly flows from them.

Learning through doing, contrariwise, is the great teaching tradition the Arts subjects give to education, which adds another dimension to the life of the body, the achievement of ‘sport’ or ‘games’. Nor should these areas be somehow segregated from the rest of  primary and secondary education: the object of  ‘games’ is not primarily to prevent children from becoming fat slobs (though you might think so to hear politicians talk): it is to engender and encourage delight in the power, flexibility and grace of the human body. Using ones body to do things is one of the joys of life, no less than the satisfaction of using ones mind: though we can for the sake of argument describe these two activities as different, we make a major mistake if we think of them as separate. Separation and categorisation are the watchwords of Govism.

Today the arts and activity subjects are central to education for the world as it actually is. Anyone who needs reminding of the nature of Gove should re-read the first two chapters of Dickens’ Hard Times.  We have met him before: his name is Gradgrind. Go Gove and what you get is the boy Bitzer.  We and our children deserve better than that.

Me at the Castle Open

photo Jazz Green

How Much Does an Artist Earn? The most expensive picture by a living artist.

 

Gerhard Richter’s painting Abstraktes Bild (809-4) which belonged to Eric Clapton, sold at Sotheby’s for £21m. It is a very large painting, which appears to be about 10 ft square; a successful but otherwise not particularly interesting abstract, very rectangular, loosely painted, in scarlet and yellow on a dark blue ground – or maybe vice versa, it’s difficult to tell. Not his most challenging work. I could have put the picture here for you, but someone would probably sue me for copyright – it was the centrefold in the Guardian on 8/10/2012,

Under Artist’s Resale Right (Droit de Suite), Richter will get the maximum royalty allowed, which is 12,500 Euros. (I don’t know if you work on the figure after the auctioneer’s cut). Clapton bought the painting in New York for £2.1 million in 2001. My calculator tells me that for £21m someone could buy 7,000 of my larger paintings.

If I had know Clapton was going to be such a Maecenas I would have kept in touch with him after we went to the Zoo together on a cold winter’s day in the ‘sixties. But that’s another story.

The best comment to make on this sale is the one Fisher made when urging John Constable to send The Hay Wain  (or Hay Cart, as he called it), to Paris in 1824;

Let your Hay Cart go to Paris by all means. I am too much pulled down by agricultural distress to hope to possess it. I would (I think) let it go at   less than its price for the sake of the eclat it may give you. The stupid English public,  which has no judgement of its own, will begin to think there is something in you if the French make your works national property. You have long laid under a mistake. Men do not purchase pictures because they admire them, but because others covet them. Hence they will only buy what they think no one else can possess: things scarce and unique.

- and examination again

The case of John B Gurdon is a perfect example of the fallibility of judgement as forecast.  When he was at school his biology teacher wrote:

“I believe Gurdon has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous; if he can’t learn simple biological facts he             would have no chance of doing the work of a specialist, and it would be a sheer waste of time, both on his part and of those who would have to   teach him.

Last week he jointly won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

Most of us know people who are not ready or engaged at one stage, but shine at another. The moral is that we should none of us take too much notice of examinations as predictors – or foster teaching systems which are primarily aimed at examination success rather than the fulfilment of individual potential – harder work for teachers, of course. But how would Gove understand that?  As far as I can see he has never taught, and is basically School of Gradgrind.

Against examination – another bite

PS

Nothing could have exposed the fragility of the Examination System more than the row going on, exposing orders passed down to move the goal posts so that the results would look more like last year’s. It should be clear by now that any examination system will always be a nip and tuck device.  You cannot have a Gold Standard, because there is no immutable measurement to appeal to.

If you do not want students to regurgitate rote learning, then you should not suppose examinations will deliver an ability think inventively: that ability, as we have always known in the Art & Design Schools, is best fostered by project work, which cannot be squashed into the sausage machine of examination, and which requires more time and energy from the teaching staff.

Writing about this system I tried to identify all the parts where something could go wrong. One example was of a teacher who got it wrong & whose students, faithfully regurgitating his interpretation,  therefore got low marks, though it wasn’t their fault. Some of you may have thought this a bit far-fetched, so here comes a letter from the Guardian (20 September 2012)

If this English master’s pupils had reproduced his interpretation in a question on Blake, they would have suffered the same fate.

The real problem arises when examinations, not very brilliant tests of ability, are bundled together & called Qualifications, which then determine the ability of an individual to go further, quite likely into areas where those ‘Qualifications’ are irrelevant. The imposition of 5 O levels, or two A levels, as an entry qualification for Art &  Design Courses was entirely unnecessary, but did have the effect of closing an avenue for working class students. In my own case, I failed the easiest Physics O level paper in years. By some chance, being a very innumerate person, I passed O level Maths. That was the shibboleth. Had I failed it, I would not have gone to Oxford, & would not have become a teacher. My life would have been totally different, for a quite arbitrary reason.

Mismeasurement by Examination

Hornsey 1968 poster

Let’s face it, exams are dodgy: an inadequate measuring stick which we all feel free to refer to, and then to devalue where necessary. “He got a First, but he couldn’t boil an egg,” we say.  ” He/she got A stars , but has no social skills/can’t speak a coherent sentence/ doesn’t know which day of the week it is.” And so on. What an examination actually measures is mainly the ability to pass that examination. Most have little predictive accuracy, and are produced by an inherently fragile  system.  If you want some insight into the way they are currently being used, with “grade inflation” and all the surrounding mystification, read a very concise and cogent recent piece in the Guardian by Peter Wilby  (‘Gove is stuck in the past. We must look beyond grades. ‘ Mon 27 Aug 2012   http://gu.com/p/3a264/em ).

Back in the ‘Sixties I was  an A level examiner in English literature. Examinations have to be marked, and this work was done mainly by teachers trying to earn a few honest bob for their holidays: drudges in a form of legitimate moonlighting.

The parcels of scripts to be marked would thud on the floor: I reckoned that to keep up I had to mark 15 a day, at about fifteen minutes per script. If I went out for the evening there would be 30 to mark the next day. Girls wrote longer scripts, conscientiously retailing what they had been taught, but with better handwriting than the boys. The scripts came in alphabetical order. By the time you had read thirty broadly similar answers to the questions on the set books you were fairly tired of that set of responses so it was a relief to open a new packet and to read something different – though of course the novelty again wore off after few more papers. In consequence, when I wrote an article about the GCE system (The Teacher  Aug 1969) I noted, among other things, that people surnamed Aardvark were likely to get rather better marks than those called Zygo, just because their answers would feel fresher. This was only part of an argument to show examinations as fallible measures, but it came out at the Silly Season, so the Papers siezed on it,  there were headlines, and I was roundly denounced in the Telegraph’s letter column.

I said thirty broadly similar answers.  What school candidates did was to present to the examiner what they had been taught to say, as a sort of package. They may even have absorbed this answer whole, as a model reply to a question cunningly anticipated by their teacher in his/her role of Examination Technique Coach.  Candidates didn’t usually hazard their own views, though from an examiners’ point of view it would have been very interesting to read original personal responses. The aim however was, and I think still is, to cuddle up to the norm.

One part of the system that can obviously go wrong is an aberrant teacher. We had one set of papers from students who  conscientiously reproduced what they had been taught about the set books: all the examiners thought these particular responses bizarre and entirely wrong: the candidates (whose fault it wasn’t) had to be marked down, and the school quietly warned about the relevant teacher’s strange views.

But it is not just teachers who can be aberrant, or old, out of touch or eccentric. An examiner can have a breakdown, get drunk continuously, or otherwise go off the rails. When I took Finals at Oxford, the literary theory paper was marked very harshly: it was assumed that the examiner had been having a bad time, poor chap. The exam Board could take note of this, without distressing fuss – Oxford was a small community.

At school level, dealing with vast numbers, the ranges of examiners’ marks were monitored and adjusted: if the curve of one examiner’s marks was well below the average, that curve would be shunted towards the norm (although, what if that examiner really did receive sets of papers worse than the rest?). If one examiner’s marks were wildly different, someone had to re-read and remark the scripts, and something was lost in the process. A kind of uniformity was preserved, but precariously. All this was done in a hurry: the results had to come out by the deadline.

Candidates can obviously experience the same distortions of their performance as teachers or examiners (or, if you like, cricketers or tennis players). The one-off examination holds up an untypical slice of a candidate’s behaviour on one particular occasion. If the candidate happens to be ill, or sorely troubled, on that one occasion, well, tough. Retake the exam or forget about it.

So far as utility goes, the skills involved in a one-off exam are not necessarily transferable.  The fact that you can successfully write about some work of literature in an exam does not mean that you can write a good newspaper article, or an editorial, or a formal letter, or that you are articulate, or that you can effectively conduct business on the phone.  In fact the very form of teaching and examination may well militate against the development of other skills. Richard Kostelanetz long ago pointed to the way that English reviewers were equipped to write prose pieces of around 2000 words.  ..”English writers, when given the opportunity, are rarely able to do a well-organised, balanced, 5000 word essay,” by which he meant the kind of article one admires in, say, New York Review of Books or the New Yorker (‘A Critical Look at the Critics’, Twentieth Century Magazine, Spring 1966). He attributed this shortcoming to the nature of British literary journalism, then overwhelmingly Oxbridge dominated, but of course the breath-length of that writing had its roots in the Oxbridge weekly essay, read to the tutor. Nobody could have got away with reading out 5.000 words.

The main function of exams, or nowadays exam grades – for in my day, as Wilby points out, ‘A’ levels were simply pass or fail, and fewer than half the candidates passed – is to determine who goes on to the next level. They perform a mainly filtering function. Often the filtering is applied without any other benefit being sought.  A requirement was pursued by the Ministry in the ’60s that applicants for the then Diploma in Art and Design should have 5 GCEs. This was in spite of official evidence showing that having such qualifications made no difference to the performance of Art Students – was indeed irrelevant-  again on actual evidence, they did very well in finding work related to their education on leaving college. (The research was commissioned, would you believe, by Margaret Thatcher, but as it proved the wrong things it was sneaked out in the summer recess, when no-one would notice). The only result of the 5 GCE requirement, (followed of course by two ‘A’s) was to keep out working-class students, though this was an incidental, and not, I think, an aim as such.

The concern was then, and apparently still is, to restrict the number of students in further & higher education. Universities have limited permission to recruit.  Why? Even before students were made to pay for this level of  education, we had apparently abandoned the ideal that all those who can benefit should receive it. But what is the case for restricting entry if the students now have to pay for the courses?  Where is the free market? (And if the students are now the purchasers, not the beneficiaries, of education, aren’t they now in a position to demand to determine the nature of the goods purchased?)

The exam system is not a shiny seamless self-consistent gold standard.  It is a ramshackle workaday structure, buttressed by ifs and buts: to use it as the sole determinant of progress in the learning system is immoral.  Changing the rules in the middle of the game looks even more sleazy during the Olympics – where did all that British fairness go? But of course this kind of manoevre  does show how dodgy the structure is.  Again, at a time of high unemployment it is also economic madness to prevent students entering courses and apprenticeships unless you really want so many people hanging around the streets that riots are inevitable.

To the statement “Everybody can’t win” we should reply “Yes  they can.”

When we objected to the rigidity of entrance qualifications for art diplomas in 1968,  Sir John Summerson, representing the authorities,  said that they had at least made  a loop-hole, a doorway – “but you want to make it a Triumphal Arch!” Thank you Sir John.  That’s what we wanted then, and what we still want now..

Monet’s Japanese Bridge

We’re so used to Monet’s Japanese Bridge that we don’t think it odd. “There’s Monet’s Japanese Bridge again,” we say.

And yet there are things to say about it.

On March 17 1893 Monet wrote to the Prefet de l’Eure: “in order to pass from my land to the land that I rent on  the other bank and vice versa, I plan to install over the stream of the Epte two small, light, wooden footbridges ..”  Permission was  finally granted in July of that year. The bridge we know from the paintings is a practical construction:  a way of getting from one side of the river, or lake, to the other.  Its structure is very three dimensional: the upright members of the bridge rails are stablised by buttressing members which lean back at an angle from extending planks which otherwise form part of the bridge floor.  You can see them leaning in the black and white photograph.

The form of the bridge was influenced by an exhibition Monet had seen of prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai (the trellises, added later, were completed in 1904). Popular Japanese artists celebrated bridges, from the simplest planks to extraordinary engineering feats – perhaps the most exciting architectural structures of their time. Unlike many products of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, these structures are not felt as opposed to natural beauty: they are accepted and celebrated in the prints as adjuncts.  The Famous Bridges enjoy the same reverence as the Famous Waterfalls.

Hokusai: The Manenbashi Bridge at Fukagawa

At the same time, almost always, Ukiyo-e  artists celebrate bridges for their human function: persons, or a bustle of people, cross with animals and carts, banners, Lords, fishermen and travellers. The bridge does not stand as a silent witness to the ancient work of men, or enta geweorc (the buildings of giants, as the Anglo-Saxons called Roman remains): it is a busy place where people pass endlessly.

Hiroshige: The Manenbashi Bridge at Fukagawa

Claude himself, his family, visitors, dignitaries and friends, posed on, and celebrated, the bridge – but only for photographs. There do not seem to have been any Monet paintings of the bridge with a human presence. Its function in painting was different from its function in life.

If we stand back and put this in a wider context, Romanticism had moved the emphasis to ‘wild’ nature where humans were dwarfed or often absent altogether. Lewis Carroll parodies the romantic image in “The wild man went his weary way To a strange and lonely pump” (Poeta Fit, non Nascitur). An earlier version of extreme Romanticism was presented by a chapter in Gerard De Lairesse’s The Art of Painting in all its Branches (trans 1788) entitled Of Things Deformed and Broken, Falsely Called Painter-Like.  This material made its way through Robert  Browning’s consciousness to provide the landscape for Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.

Early Impressionism more pragmatically accepted the intrusion of industry in the domesticated landscape, but whereas Millet, and later Pissaro, presented  a landscape with its working people, Monet and Cezanne emptied their landscapes, unconsciously anticipating the process of industrial capitalism, which, via two great European civil wars,  has denuded the countryside of its labourers. The nostalgic view, of a countryside full of people promoted, for instance, by Kropotkin in Fields, Factories and Workshops, or presented by Kurosawa in Seven Samurai, stands against urbanisation and the emptying countryside of today.  Cezanne paints his gardener sitting in a chair, not working in the garden.  Apart from the folie de grandeur of all those nudes among the trees (Cezanne knew he had not seen them there), people in his paintings occupy one space, and the landscape another.

It is common ground that Monet reduced the elements in his paintings, eliminating figures as he went.  Paul Hayes Tucker writes of the Belle Isle series at the end of the 1880s that:

“Of the thirty-eight views of Belle Isle that he produced, for example, thirty-five include no reference to humankind. There are no people in those   pictures, no houses, no boats, or other traces of civilisation. There are only earth, sea, and sky”

Monet in the ’90′s: the Series Paintings  1990  Boston Museum & Yale UP  p.29

Nonetheless, Monet greatly enjoyed Japanese prints, a large number of which hung in the house at Giverney.  For western artists these prints introduced to new ways of  ’framing’, presenting space, and cutting away from images (in return for what Japanese artists themselves derived from European art – perspective, and Prussian blue). These devices  marvellously recur, in Kinogasa’s film The Gate of Hell (Jigokumon), visually a cinematic homage to Ukiyo-e artists. Degas and Toulouse Lautrec were much better placed to make use of Japanese modes, since they had people as their subject matter, as Bonnard and Vuillard did later.  In spite of his familiarity with Japanese art,  Monet makes little use of these devices from the Japanese in his own painting.

In simplifying his subject-matter he moved steadily towards a painting which  presents a flat plane tilted up towards to the viewer: in effect no foreground or background, and no perspective, but one continuous image from the bottom of the canvas to the top. What this also does is to eliminate the sky – always a problem for landscape artists since the sky’s contents are so substantially different from those of the land, and tend either to produce two different languages in one picture, or to force a formalisation on one element or the other to make it conform.

His Japanese bridge  is a curving structure, the chord of a circle. In early days, as you can see above, the bridge was reflected in the lake, forming an ellipse,  a kind of symbol of eternity.  By the time Monet started his series the water-lilies had more or less covered over the water, so the reflection was only faintly visible, or does not appear at all – the bridge stands above like a rainbow, and the rainbow colour is distributed beneath. The series has one main format, though in some versions the point of view shifts slightly to the left, so that the curve of the bridge rises up towards the right side of the canvas. The bridge is a linear event: one hand-rail curve reinforces the other, echoed in turn by the mid-rails and the base. The vertical posts rhythmically mark and echo musical intervals in the curve: they do not function as spatial indicators. The curved horizontal of the bridge is counterpointed by the straight horizontals of the water-lilies, and interrupted by the vertical strokes of the rushes and the willow. This presentation of the bridge icon would be compelling even if it were not reinforced by the many versions in different lights with their variations of attendant shape and colour.

Paul Nash: Behind the Inn

Why do we find this meditation on an object in the landscape so powerful?  It is the intensity of the observation, however deployed, which makes it so, but it is difficult to identify the indicators of intensity. Paul Nash’s Pillar and Moon has a symbolic loading, as do many of his semi-surreal images and photographs but his  Behind the Inn (in the Tate, but hardly ever on display) is almost as mesmerising, with none of the undertones. This question is partly directed at myself, since. like many other artists who paint landscapes, I deal in images that are modulated through human consciousness, but which often  do not contain the human persons who would inevitably have been shown in earlier painting. The work of Breughel is close to that of Hokusai, but in our time the fields are empty. Am I wrong to see in this a sort of moral deficiency?

Absence & Amazon

If anyone has been visiting this site hoping for a new blog, I apologize.  What happened was that my wife Jane (German) tripped in Harleston Thoroughfare, fell onto a wall and broke her upper right (painting) arm in two places. This has inevitably cut into what I was doing, apart from stopping her work entirely for the time being. She is now mending up nicely, thank you.

I expect some of you are as indignant as I feel about Amazon, which seems to have found a way of evading British taxes. (tho it was very convenient and efficient). I believe that any company or person who is trading in these islands should be obliged to pay the appropriate taxes, and that any cunning manoeuvres by way of evasion should be deemed a priori to be illegal.

Anyhow, for current books there is a site called HIVE (www.hive.com) which networks to British independent bookshops: you can collect an ordered book from a local book-shop free of delivery charge The list of participating bookshops is at http://www.hive.co.uk/store-locator. For out-of-print books I used to use ABE books, but it turns out that Amazon owns this too. So instead, use biblio.co.uk “largest remaining independent book marketplace in the world,” according to their publicity.  More info on the site.  And more anon from me soon.

What PopArt was about, including what it wasnt

Rommel in Lines

 Yes, this is another of those misleading titles.  What I meant to say was that Pop Art depended on where you were and who you were at the given time. This is my take on it.  So let me set the scene.

After the 1957 Young Contemporaries (where Robyn Denny scored highly with a sort of revived cubist collage involving sack-cloth and gold leaf), a wave of Abstract Expressionism, or what the press called “drip and dribble,” hit the  art schools, and dominated for a while.

A few years later I was living in St Ives. I had gone there because friends went on ahead, and said “Come and join us;” also because I admired de Kooning, and thought Peter Lanyon’s work might be a sort of bridge to American painting (which was mostly European painting anyway as it turned out). St Ives was where Pop Art reached us, in the form of an idea. As I remember it, we didn’t at first see any images, but we got the concept.  We were already grit in the St Ives oyster, where painting was supposed to be either abstraction with a landscape feel, or landscape with an abstract feel.  Images were meant to be mostly based on battered rectangles or circles, relatively thinly painted, in muted landscape colours. Nobody issued these edicts, but they were implicitly house rules for the Penwith Gallery, which was curiously much more conservative than the actual mature artists then working in the vicinity.

I said we were already an irritation because we used bold or brash colours, non-regulation shapes, and paint squeezed straight out of the tube.  Cruder, less sensitive, unrefined. The most obviously challenging painting I remember was one by Tony Shiels . It was about six foot square, with a disk of lemon yellow within the square and a dot of cadmium red in the middle, entitled Big Tit. It was a hazardous painting in more ways than one: I helped Tony to carry it to the Penwith, along the sea-wall, and a sharp gust of wind nearly dumped it and us into the sea..  But in spite of its satirical intent, Big Tit was not that far from what Terry Frost was doing at the same time.  The pull towards abstraction was still strong. Most of us were working non-figuratively. Lanyon was still using local colour, rather than the bold pigments of his later work, and Alan Lowndes, who had got to where he was in a Lowryesque idiom was momentarily teetering on the brink of a decision to go abstract.

 

The Big Cow

Pop Art meant a much more radical change. It meant a great expansion of subject-matter so that the man-made environment, with manufacturing, advertising and information, became valid subject matter of art. More broadly it meant “Back to figuration!” – we were free. We didn’t know what Pop Art in London was actually doing.  Not having seen it, we had to invent it.  This isn’t an entirely unfamiliar situation in the Arts – in 1846 Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth Barrett:

“And years before that, the first composition I ever was guilty of was             something in imitation of Ossian, whom I had not read, but conceived,through two or three scraps in other books – “

I expect there are plenty of other examples.  You need to remember that in the early ‘sixties everything moved more slowly than it does now.  Art Mags, such as they were, took time to catch up with what was happening now, and TV was still in monochrome. The first Peter Blake painting I saw (the self-portrait with the badges) was at the ICA in Dover Street, after I had moved from St Ives to London.

The new subject-matter, representational, could be almost anything.  There were of course nostalgically familiar objects – the England’s Glory matchbox, Staffordshire dogs and the Union Jack, for instance.  There were also those Airfix kits, assemblable plastic planes which could be painted up and transferred with insignia, and these in turn were conduits for the Second World War (as it is still misleadingly called).  We had lived through the end of that war and popular culture was flooded with its iconography, which still persists to a surprising degree. One of my friends made a number of paintings of downed bombers, and warplanes occur repeatedly in Colin Self’s work. I think they were not just part of an attempt to exorcise the war, but also the continuing violence, which would not go away.

The new subject-matter, even when well executed (which it often wasn’t) was not necessarily likeable. Terry Frost, for instance, a great encourager of younger artists, didn’t give up on me, but he didn’t like what I was doing. And after all, a man who had been stuck in a POW camp didn’t need reminding about the war. Abstraction was at least a space outside of politics.  Paintings of mine at that time upset others than Terry.  Someone at the Penwith said that I had “broken all the laws of art since the cave men!”  I considered that, and thought it would have been a great achievement,if only it could have been true.

The Stuka at the Bedroom Window

One of my paintings which used icons of war was The Stuka at the Bedroom Window.  It retained some of the loose handling learned from part of abstract expressionism, but the central story was the pleasant bed-room wall and curtains framing an evil dive-bomber, buzzing like a hornet.

A more metaphysical use of the related material was The Dog in the Window, where the Staffordshire dog sits calmly on the Union Jack, before a window looking out to a shell explosion on the Somme, during Germany’s invasion of France, ( taken from Rommel’s own photograph of June 5th 1940, reproduced in The Rommel Papers).

The Dog in the WIndow

 

Other non-high art representation systems  infiltrated painting – for instance the cartoon books of RB Crumb and others.  Some of Hockney’s early paintings show this sort of influence.

In The Cruel Elephant for instance, the area of grass under the elephant’s feet holds wavy lines of  written words: ‘crawling insects  crawling insects….” You could say, surprisingly, that Pop Art had reached the inclusivity previously aimed for by the Arts and Crafts Revival Movement. Anything represented or made by hand was in, without obvious divisions or hierarchies.

The Monster that Conquered the World Smiling at Lord Snowdon

‘What is conceivable can happen too’ – Wittgenstein. according to Empson. Finally there is a re-emergence of the vein of surrealism which runs through English art and literature – back through Alice to the William Blake of The Ghost of a Flea.  An example of this vein in my pop was a painting entitled The Monster that Conquered the World Smiling at Lord Snowdon.  The creature was based on an engraving of the zoea of a land-crab in a nineteenth century magazine. Another more simplified version of this creature, now embodying sexual aggressiveness, cropped up in pictures called Strange Fruit of Love and Look Out Little Noddy.  Lord Snowdon photographed everyone important at that time, so he would certainly have snapped the monster.

However, paintings don’t seem to like immediate obvious emotions, unless done by a genius like Goya, so in my case they became quieter. less obvious and more observatory, moving into still life, and later, increasingly, into landscape.

Pop Art included everything in the world, and it was fun. It was an antidote to the fuddy-duddy.  It had a wider reach. As for what it wasn’t, I think, after all, I’ll leave that to you.

Self portrait in the 'Sixties