Sunday 14 November 2010

Hi campers,

A great and joyous beam of light has shone from the leaden skies, above Tilburg, Holland, where yesterday I visited the exhibition of HOWARD HODGKIN's latest paintings (2000-2010), at the Museum of contemporary Art.
Paradoxically, the best exhibitions are always those that I want to leave immediately. After about 15 minutes of contemplating the works, I feel an irresistible urge to rush home, or rather, to the studio, and there to work, to work and to fully enjoy the supreme freedom that the contemplated paintings have promised me.

Une promesse de bonheur (Stendhal).

Hodgkin's painting does what all great painting aims to do: it shows us that we are free. There is very little, in the field of human endeavour, capable of giving us this joy. Hodgkin's painting pulls out all the stops, it is a veritable feast. Especially so in these bleak painting-poor days.

Two things struck me: (1) other visitors seemed truly touched, and at the very least, aesthetically attracted by the paintings; and (2) slightly more than half the visitors (my reckoning), thought it necessary to meekly follow a 'guide', to listen to what this guide had gleaned from a very limited bibliography, instead of bloody well using their own individual senses and sensibilities and confronting the works ohne Leitung eines anderen, as Immanuel Kant would have it.
It just shows how real and how substantial the fear of the average exhibition visitor is, when confronted with painting.
Exhibition guides should be locked up and possibly re-educated (but by whom?). Visitors asking for a guided tour should be barred forthwith from the premises, for they never even intended to look at the paintings, and moreover, they waste precious floor space and disrupt the relative silence. Guided tours make it nigh impossible for the other visitors to discover the silent music of painting.

Howard Hodgkin's painting seems at first glance to attract because of its considered, 'tasteful' use of colour, texture, even its evocative titles. Indeed, there is no sin in falling in love with a patch of colour, with a rapport between two colours, or in dreaming away at the poetry of a title, but these elements do not constitute the supreme freedom, mentioned above. The painter himself says that colour does not mean a thing. He clearly states that he NEVER tries to make a beautiful painting (does one have to be a painter to fully enjoy the pleasure of hearing these simple truths?). He believes that talent is much overrated, just as I myself do. Moreover, there is no direct relation between the painting and its title, so that musing on the meaning of the title gets one further and further into literature, and thus, away from painting (personally, I believe that the title of a painting has about the same function as its frame: to establish the viewer's attention, to isolate the painting from its surroundings).
All that counts is that the viewer dares to confront the painting, in silence, to undergo the dynamics of rhythm and scale, the journey of the eye, the respiration of colour, the light and space of the painting.

So what distinguishes Hodgkin's paintings from so many others? Take a look around the museum: compare the cerebral and rather 'dry', 'cold' paintings by Sigmar Polke, then again the joyful, 'curious' works by Richter, and then, sadly, the indifferent miserly little pieces of museum decoration by Tuymans. Or just imagine how many well-meaning painters will within the coming months bring forth 'Hodgkin-inspired' paintings, after visiting this exhibition (this is a 'natural' law of causality in the art world).
What distinguishes good painting from bad or indifferent painting, or, even more succinctly, painting from non-painting, is this: a truly obstinate insatisfaction on the part of the painter. In the barely bearable loneliness of the studio, the painter rejects hundreds of paintings for every painting that he 'finishes' (or leaves alone). Each of these hundreds of rejects push the 'finished' painting forward, into life. It is ourselves that we see in it, and it shows us that we are free.

Greetings,

and have a look at:

http://www.howardhodgkin.org.uk

Tuesday 24 August 2010

Last blog of the season, dedicated to Linden.

August 20th.

On my way through the relatively quiet streets this morning, became rather irritated by a worrying click in my right pedal. Have to see to that.
At half past five, it was still too dark to read the paper (not that I would read a paper there and then, this image happens to have been my father's favourite measure of darkness). So many beautiful grey and even rainy days have passed, and of course, today (even in this darkness), promises to be another crispy clear sunny day (if this seems paradoxical, I refer you to my other blogs/pages). From across the river, from behind the line of trees, there rises a wall of sound and fury: it is the highway, although it sounds like a Great Migration in full swing.
I eat a sandwich (cheese and salami), and pour myself a mug of coffee. It's not even chilly or damp enough to make me shiver and feel like I'm outside, in nature. Just this tsunami of automobile noise, giving the impression that I'm in a gigantic aquarium. At least this coffee is good (Kenya).
In this darkness, it seems at first glance as if hundreds of battleships of the planet Zog have landed, yonder, where the horizon used to be, and along this bank of the river. Millions of multicoloured twinkling lights. They await the order of the fleet admiral to blast the town and its sleeping inhabitants into oblivion.
Only now, with the light increasing, these UFO's slowly change into the petrochemical plants we all know and love.
Yep, there he is, Alexander von Humboldt, from Luxembourg, heading straight for me, as always, slowing down gradually as he approaches, as if he was stupidly trying to stalk me. I've sort of noticed you, you fat buffoon. When he is about 30 yards away, he settles down, but not quietly, belching hot black smoke and rumbling like an earthquake. Then, suddenly, he rises out of the water a couple of meters, turns, and returns whence he came from. This was Alexander's first bowl movement of the day. Swirls of grey foreign foam rise to the surface and drift off hurriedly back to sea. And suddenly there are seagulls everywhere patrolling the river's surface in all directions.
By now, the dawn sky looks as if God has tried to sweep the clouds from it with his shirt sleeve (image courtesy Jules Renard, Journal).
On top of the light buoy, not far away, a moulting crow is perching, observing me. With his bald neck, he looks like a miniature vulture.
I guess this is not my best day. Have I been spoilt by the vast open space of Saeftinghe ? Can I ever again trust another weather man ? Will I come back here before winter, before Easter ?
This week means the return to the Stress Factory, and the cooling down of the fire and the irons in it.
Drawing was not too bad, though. Like # 2 especially.

A bientôt, I hope.

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Thursday 29 July 2010

July 28th.

Too sad to think about, but the days are shortening. That means that at half six it is darker than a few weeks ago. Good grey and cloudy weather, even a drop of rain now and then.
Today I experimented with the page format. Turning it in a vertical position, I mean. A different kind of space.

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Saturday 24 July 2010

A golden dawn. At 5:30 the sun peeped over the horizon behind me and set the woods on the other bank alight. It promised to be another scorcher, but then luckily clouds came in from the west, to temper the light. About an hour later, I was presented with a second, much more dramatic 'sunrise', in the west, blueish-grey clouds being ripped apart and scattered over the expanse. Good morning.

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Saturday 26 June 2010

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Arrived at 5:30 this morning, but left again around 8. Morning mist was forecast, but the day started out crystal clear, with a cloudless sky, the river as smooth as a mirror, and only the slightest breeze.
Why is this so intimidating?
Everything is contoured, outlined, undeniably in its place, as in an illustration in an encyclopedia.

"Le mystère éclate avec le grand jour," said Braque; "le mystérieux se confond avec l'obscurité."
It takes some audacity (or Quixotism?) to hunt for mystery in the full light of day. 


There are no outlines, lines do not exist. There's the rub.

The horizon is not a horizontal line, the sun is not a circular line, an eye in a face is not an elliptic line, a doorway is not a rectangular line. There are no lines. All this is easy enough to comprehend, but what next? All our drawing implements are first and foremost designed to make lines - even the Greek philosophers drew their geometric figures in the dust with a stick. The alternative would seem to be tonal drawing (e.g. ink wash..), but this is no less of a conventional device, and can as easily turn to trompe-l'oeil.
As a matter of fact, art history has for many centuries been determined (when seen from a certain angle), by these different means.


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Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) seems to have been the first to downgrade this question into an art-political 'problem' (he is, after all, the 'father' of art history). In his Lives of the Artists, he distinguishes the linear draughtsmen-painters - the 'archeological', 'intellectual' and thus Great Painters (Michelangelo etc..), from the lesser, painterly painters: the 'colourists'. After a polite visit to Titian's studio, in the company of the aged Michelangelo, Vasari quotes his great idol: "Not bad, this Titian. Such a pity though that these Venetians never learn how to draw..."

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Ever since Vasari, there has been no escape from this dichotomy: a painter was (is) either a linear draughtsman, expressing ideas, or a painterly painter (colourist), relying not on ideas or anecdote, but on pictorial aesthetics (remember Van Gogh's lonely fight against the ghastly academism at the Antwerp Academy. And he was only allowed to draw plaster casts!).


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In the 17th century, Roger de Piles (1635-1709) - the father of 'connoisseurship' - reiterated this divergence: he proudly champions the painterly Rubens against the 'classical' Poussin, in the Dispute of Rubénistes versus Poussinistes. Colour (/tone) versus line.
This war of ideas lives on in the 19th century, between the painterly Romantics (Delacroix..) and the neo-Classical painters (David, Ingres..).
Throughout his career, Renoir (not often suspected of suffering from artistic angst), was torn between the painterly vision of Impressionism, and classical linear clarity.
Even Cézanne - this most painterly of painters - yearned for the classical linear poise of Poussin.
 

With Cubism, painting once again becomes a painterly hunt, instead of a capture. Photography has in the meantime shown itself to be far more efficient at capturing reality and far cleverer at 'depicting' it, than painting. Cubism, at heart, does not rely on ideas, it does not endeavour to 'express' ideas: it is simply, and heroically, on the hunt for a reality, a reality that is not conditioned by convention; by Renaissance perspective, for instance (see Split Infinity). "Détruire toute idée pour arriver au fatal," says Braque.
The Surrealists go the opposite way. Plastic or pictorial values, painterly vision, mean very little in surrealist painting. What counts is to illustrate ideas, to 'express' uncommon interpretations of a given, assumed reality. Exceptis excipiendis (Miro, Ernst..), surrealist painters are quite content to make use of all of the most conventional of plastic means,
without adding to painting in general. It is all about the idea and the 'image' (Magritte, Dali..).
The Expressionists, even though they too assume a given, or pre-existent reality (which has to be 'expressed' or 'deformed'), prepare new pictorial paths, through their exploration of form and colour. A posteriori, painterly qualities carry more weight than the 'idea'.

We see this parallel history between on the one hand, 'idea-driven' painting, and 'form-based' painting, continue into the present. The former has spread its genetic material into Pop Art and conceptual art. The form-based painting sees its last large-scale culmination in what is loosely called Abstract painting.

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Recent art history describes the era of total unraveling of cultural and artistic values. The idea-driven art clearly has the upper hand, presently, and form-based painting has mostly degenerated into vacuous decoration, and/or does no longer transcend its physical substrate.
Unfortunately, most of us cannot imagine, let alone accept, that form is the foundation. 'Abstract' painting is considered to be merely form without content, whereas 'idea-art' - however mindnumbingly indifferent as to form - is supposed by all to enclose content, some sort of idea (however vague or mediocre), and is thus felt to be valuable. Concerning drawing, this also explains why so much of contemporary painting replaces the essential act of drawing with photography: the instant 'form-generator'. To the ready-made conventional form (the selected and/or adapted photo), some sort of ideality is then superadded.


And that is why whenever I can, I go and sit myself on the bank of the Schelde, and armed with paper and the ultimate linear drawing tools (pen & ink), I try, against all odds, to hunt for the most plastic, the least palpable of qualities (light, space..) of a reality that is constantly escaping and regenerating.

And that is why I shall return on a later day, when there is more cloud cover, or mist, or rain to hide or soften the harshness of this cerebral reality of outline and perspective, when there is more wind and more atmospheric variability to suggest some articulation of light and space.


I'll be back...

Braque, Georges, Le jour et la nuit. Cahiers de Georges Braque 1917-1952, Editions Gallimard 1952.

Vasari, Giorgio, The Lives of the Artists, Oxford University Press, 1991.

de Piles, Roger, L'idée du peintre parfait, Editions Gallimard, 1993.

Sunday 6 June 2010

Thursday, June 3

Arrived 5:30 am. No more mist, but early mornings are glorious anyway. Anything can happen, the day is not old yet. The Schelde offers little movement, though. At flood-tide, the river seems just to fill up: the water level simply rises, whereas with ebb, the water flows in.

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Wednesday, June 2

A beautiful misty morning, with the sun soon breaking through. I arrived around high tide; the river seemed to hesitate between ebb and flow. The rest of the morning very sunny and unforgivingly clear, little wind. Luckily, around noon clouds came in, affording somewhat more variation in light. Resolved to return early the next day.

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Sunday 2 May 2010

This first batch is a selection of drawings I made during the Easter holiday.

As soon as I get my head round this blog publishing, I will attempt two things: (1) to publish my drawings after every drawing expedition; (2) to give some idea of the history of my drawing, showing a selection of work made in Holland, Zeebrugge, Bretagne...

I will further accompany the pictures with thoughts and ideas that usually get jotted down on the backs of blocks of drawing paper, scattered computer files, or the back of my hand, and thus, get lost.

In these days of mass culture, mass media and mass consumption, it might not seem self-evident for an artist to go and work 'sur le motif'. I hope to elucidate my strongly held opinions on this and related matters.

Comments and/or questions are very welcome.










Saturday 1 May 2010

Ever since I can remember I've been drawn to open spaces. Here in Antwerp the most open space at a cyclable distance is at this spot on the bank of the Schelde. Weather and other circumstances allowing, I make about ten drawings per expedition.

From this day on, I intend to publish the results of these drawing expeditions, and some of the thoughts that may accompany them.