I have just watched a YouTube video featuring the German artist Georg Baselitz. I was struck by the following things he said "Our yearning needs painting" and "The image must contain something that other paintings have never had. Something that has never yet been seen, that has never been solved. The eye must pursue an idea that has not been pursued, and that mostly means chaos." This strikes a chord with me because I am always striving to find some indefinable other, something beyond the ordinary, in my own and others paintings.
In the odd way that things can lead, these words inspired me to go back and tackle a painting I had shelved, that had pushed me far out of my comfort zone. It is the middle section of an eventual triptych based on a mother and child theme. The first panel will feature the "other mothers" the members of the medical profession you have to accept into your family when you have a disabled child. I hope to depict this with white shapes of nurses and bright red crosses emerging out of a tangle of grey corridors and a background of hospital green. The third panel will contain "the mother" about to step through the hospital curtain that separates her from her child.
Detail of wheel
In the central panel I have tried to create the initial image I saw in my head of my future, as the consultant said "I'd like you to think about the words cerebral palsy" while he examined my baby daughter. The results of her MRI scan had revealed the extent of the brain hemorrhage she suffered whilst being kept alive in the neonatal ward . I have heard there is a poem about discovering your child will have special needs, likening the experience to being on a plane thinking you are going on holiday to Spain and then discovering you are going to Mexico for example. I like this analogy, it is not what you chose, but you do discover new things that you would never have come across. However, when you first hear about the change of destination, it feels like your plane has been hijacked and you are going to be landing by parachute, without a map or belongings.
Detail of face and arm.
I tried to paint this image without too much emphasis on thinking and let myself be guided more by feeling. I therefore have less idea as to whether the outcome is successful. It is not accurate, it was all about the wheel and a slumping figure of my full-grown child. I tried to disregard the usual warning barriers that spring up and direct me away from a crap result. So here it is, it could be crap or it could be something. There are parts I can take from this that can be used for a further attempt. Here it is:
Oil on canvas. 33 x 41 inch.
Maybe like Baselitz, I should turn it upside down...
This is one of my favourite nursery rhymes, I have started to think that's me with the broom:
There was
an old woman
Tossed up in a basket
Seventeen times as high as the moon.
Where she was going
I just had to ask it,
For in her hand she carried a broom.
"Old woman, old woman,
Old woman," said I,
"Please tell me, please tell me,
Why you're up so high?"
"I'm sweeping the cobwebs
Down from the sky,
And I'll be with you
By and by."
There are many things I would like to do that circumstance does not yet allow. Did I tell you I want to go to Venice? I have a big wish list of wants, but I have begrudgingly learned to honour the ordinary. I live in the Midlands, the centre of the United Kingdom of Great Britain, (wow, doesn't that sound like a magical place !) I can assure you the reality is often not. Or is it ? After all, was it not out of the run-down and polluted Black Country, that arose the gloomy mountains of Mordor in Tolkien's mind.
Yet because I live here, I feel land-locked, and often long for the sea. What is this condition in us that always longs for the other?. This is were my current painting sprang from. I don't live in a pretty town but it is on the edge of rolling hills. Between the dreary rows of terraced houses you can glimpse the countryside in the distance. I was walking back from the chip shop in the drizzling rain when the image for this painting came into my imagination.
Marking out.
In progress. Working title: Fabrication. Oil on canvas, 145 x 166 cm.
Detail.
Necessity is the mother of invention and there are infinite resources to be found when we make do and mend. How many of us as children, have sat in a laundry basket like a coracle and sailed away on a swirling seventies carpet. I loved the idea of magic carpets and remember sitting cross legged on a rug. Disappointed it wasn't working I began to construct daydreams instead. Imagination uses constraints to climb up. So I will see a landscape in a pile of laundry and go to Venice on a magic carpet for now
I have started painting this image above, because of Louise, my lecturer that died last
year. She really wanted me to create it after she saw my sketchbook version, so I will give it a go. It is a
landscape made out of patterns. The pattern of a landscape created from
what I had around the house: scraps of fabric, dishcloths, kitchen
roll.
The beginning of a Vuillard inspired landscape.
Patterns are great for suggestion. Whether the flickering flames of a fire, the lumps in ugly woodchip wallpaper, garish curtains or fading light or eyesight, you have to work with what you have. I particularly like the painted fabrics in paintings by Vuillard and Bonnard, and this is what inspired me to try and paint fabrics. It looks like fun.
Pierre Bonnard, The Red-Checkered Tablecloth
Matisse painted the same room and window again and again, with various props, even though he had the paradise of the French Riviera just outside. When I have a feeling of overwhelming constriction, or sense an imagined lack of freedom, it helps to get lost in films and literature or play music loud to replenish myself. Bathe in poetry and find yourself in it's depths. We always have ourselves and that is everything you need, even if it does not always seem like it. Most of us are lucky enough to have others to share life with also. On a bad day, instead of imagination there is always Google, and for travel, Google Earth.
“Logic will get you from A to Z; imagination will get you everywhere.”
―
Albert Einstein
I am hoping to get a proper website together soon to show my finished work. Just in need of a decent camera and a break in the wintry weather, to be able to take quality pictures of large reflective oil paintings. I have always found this challenging.
In the meantime you can find a more informal selection of work in progress and photography on Flickr. Art I like and inspiration can be seen on Pinterest and Tumblr and if you are crazy enough to want an insight into my mind, I can usually be found on Twitter.
I have not worked out yet whether I should explain my paintings or leave them for others to interpret on their own. As it is early days for me as a painter, I don't suppose it matters much either way. If it does, look away now.
This painting happened suddenly and was my response to a bad day. I just got all the swirling images in my mind that were gathering and put them out of my head and onto the paper. Here I could see them clearly, writhing undefended for me to examine. That same day was turned around as I transferred my sketch onto canvas and began filling in.
I was trying to come to terms with and integrate the gaping void between domestic imagery fed to us from the television and magazines, and the cold blooded reality of hard work and raw emotion as you fall into the role of motherhood.
The only true advice I wish I had received before becoming a mother is "Expect the unexpected, nothing is ever as it seems.". We have little experience to prepare us before embarking on our personal journey into motherhood. Of course this is true of fatherhood as well. Our dislocated society separates the births and deaths from our sanitised and independent lives. Few of our new generation have memories of the birth of siblings at home, or the final preparing of the body of a deceased loved one, as an opportunity to say goodbye. These are not easy things to face but they do not go away by hiding them. When the time comes we are unprepared and have to face these experiences with little support, and it soon has to be hushed up again. We have lost the support and guidance of women in our community. Community is a rare treasure not many of us have known.
So armed with our mothering magazines of perfect images we take our fragile selves into the labour wards like lambs to the slaughter. This may sound harsh, reality may be kind and often is, but babies are born prematurely everyday, many women don't have chance to consult their perfect birth plans as they are rushed into emergency caesareans. New mothers sink into the ambivalence of post natal depression and not everyone is fortunate enough to experience the spontaneous miracle of bonding with their child. Some parents replace their broken rose tinted glasses with an alcoholic haze.
The perfect ideal of a house in the country, in which we can be a domestic goddess is passed off to us through the media as "real", leaving the majority of us lacking. I love to watch these programmes and dream and have my fill of their virtual, vicarious pleasure. Equally it can lead to torment and dismay.
There is a phrase, "Follow me home to know me.". The fake kitchens bursting with le crueset; flowery china and copper bottomed pans are purpose built fabrications and often not the celebrities actual homes. In real celebrity homes adultery and temptations can be prevalent.
A cat curled up on a rug in front of an open fire turns into finding flea bites on your children's skin. The new cute kitten has defecated on your new comforting cushions, and left a dead bird behind the settee. Small mercy that the toddler didn't find it first. The open fire covers everything in dust and brings the extra job of cleaning up the ash and soot. We all have our dreams and then their are the practicalities never far away.
The baby in the painting is copied from a real photo of my poorly daughter, born three months early. When tragedies occur, someone still has to wash the dishes that are mounting up, put the Christmas tree up, do the festivities and put the Christmas tree back. The beautiful flowers in a vase fade and die and have to be thrown away, the bacteria filled water in the vase poured away. These simple yet heroic acts that keep a family going are often the responsibility of mothers. The little things, the disgusting things, the boring, relentless, unnoticed and essential things.
As I have got older I have learnt with great difficulty to let go of my Catherine Cookson ideals of how life should be, and to love the reality of what life actually is as it comes. A technicolour, 3D, scratch n sniff miracle. To turn chores into opportunities for contemplation and listening. We will all still have bad days but I try to face life clearly and openly and enjoy the miracles of having children and being alive.
In my painting there is a butterfly that can momentarily break you out of an inward cage of depression as you turn to look at it's beauty. A Georgian shop window, full of the promise of wonderful things reflects the storm beyond. A cottage with roses around the door, leads on to a pretty chintz cup and saucer, or is it clouds gathering. Will the oncoming storm be only a storm in a teacup. Have a cup of tea and gain some perspective, you never know what your future might hold. The gladioli symbolises strength and preparedness, and moral integrity. Exactly what a mother needs for consistency and to be a guide by good example. They are also a symbol for love at first sight, how it should be when a mother first holds her child.
Mausoleum. Oil on canvas. 32"x24". 2012.
I was brought up to care about what the neighbours think, to try to be nice and to please. These are good qualities in certain ways, to be conscientious and aware of your affect on others. It also leaves you particularly suggestible. I am learning to stand up for myself and believe in whatever I am, even if it does displease. This painting is not quite finished, I am going to work some more on the details, these are not good quality photos, but what does it matter. Until further notice I have put my cherished but sentimental notions in a mausoleum.
I am disconcerted by the term "bad art", and paranoid that I may come under it. Is it simply a matter of being in or out of fashion and current opinions. The Museum of Bad Art aims to bring the worst of art to the widest audience. Art ahead of it's time is often viewed as bad, before it is accepted and appreciated. In Van Gogh's case, not even in the artist's own lifetime. It can take a showman who believes in his own art to convince us to believe also. Sometimes, merely a high price can command credence.
Abstract art is criticised with comments such as, "A child could do that." A recent psychology study explored whether a painting could be identified as being by a professional, a child or a monkey: How to tell a masterpiece from a painting by a monkey. Overall it seems that we can identify the mind behind the art. I admire the confidence of abstract artists, capturing suggestions from intangibles. I painted the abstracts above as studies for a background of a future figurative piece.
Marcel Duchamp, Fountain. 1917.
So what is Contemporary art?. Isn't all art made now, contemporary, regardless of it's classical or modern influence. Artists were creating conceptual art long before the "Conceptual" artists were born. Originating in the 1860's Modern Art could now technically be seen as old. Duchamp's original urinal, "Fountain" would be 93 years old, which could be considered antique. In 2004, it was chosen as the most influential work of modern art, by 500 experts. The beginning of conceptual art, it highlighted the creative process as the art rather than the work itself. The artist as "thinker".
John Baldessari
Everything is purged from this painting but art,no ideas have entered this work
Acrylic on canvas, 1966
- 1968
Just as music ranges from punk to classical, this is an exciting time for all types of art irrespective of manual labour. We have rich treasures to draw from and a multitude of combinations of craftsmanship with original ideas. As Duchamp said, " It is the spectators who make the pictures", and it is also us that keep a work modern. A constant stream of new people seeing a work of art for the first time.
Rodin, The Thinker. 1902.
The word amateur seems loaded with derogatory and inferior connotations. In fact it originates from the Latin,"to love". Is not art created for the love of it, equal value to art churned out to meet it's market. It must be the case that all professionals begin as amateurs before another is prepared to pay for what they produced. For your work to be what you love is one of the greatest privileges to aspire to. The tragedy would be if the artist loses their love and authenticity in their effort to make art their profession and source of income. May art forever wrestle against soulless consumerism and never become a slave to interior design.
Naive Art sounds even worse. Is this the term used for artists who for whatever reason have not received a Western art school education.
"What is Art School really? Well, it's a bit of time you are given. A bit of time in which to learn things." ~ Maggi Hambling
One of my favourite artists, Séraphine de Senlis, is considered naive. I discovered a film about her on Twitter via @Deanthepainter.
I have not had time or opportunity to learn the crafts of the old masters, and to some extent I think this is a liberation. I am not confined by what you can and can't do, according to the current consensus on art. Having had chance to develop and mature before the influence of the art world, any skills I do learn will hopefully enhance my ability to express myself rather than obscure. If during the course of my fine art degree I turn into an art snob, please let me know. I hope I can retain a degree of objectivity. Too much specialism can distance you from the actual art. Nigel Kennedy is undeniably a fantastic violinist, but trapped in his classical training he has not been able to fully embrace and create his own individual music. Like the beauty of a rose, pulled apart in an attempt to analyse it's beauty.
