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| 2010.06.21.01 |
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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| 2010.06.21.02 |
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| 2010.06.21.03 |
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| 2010.06.21.04 |
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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| 2010.06.21.05 |
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.
