A limited artist, and some contemporary drawing

A visceral reaction

Two images jumped out at me this week. The first was a painting by Gwen John, in a review of an exhibition of her work in Cardiff, reported in The Week.

Girl in a Blue Dress, c. 1914

The second was an image on Instagram posted by a gallery advertising a forthcoming show. I’m not going to name the artist, because I have no desire to criticise an individual’s work. What I’m interested in is some cultural trends that struck me when I considered these two images side by side.

Though the reviewer summarising press comments on Gwen John’s exhibition found plenty of appreciation for her work, they concluded their overview with the observation that ‘…John was a limited artist, a little of whom “goes a long way”’. This was supported by a comment from Laura Cumming in The Observer, who said that ‘some of these works are admittedly weak’.

I know, they’re critics, and they had plenty of positive things to say too. But these two negative judgements interested me. What is ‘a limited artist’? Here’s someone who spent their whole life exploring the mystery of life through painting, who the writer says at one point painted some ‘brilliant’ canvases, and who apparently ‘pioneered’ a way of altering the surface of her canvas with chalk and animal glue, being judged wanting in relation to what, exactly?

After I had seen ‘Trump eats Venezuala’, I found myself thinking about John’s long years of apprenticeship learning about paint, surface, representation, light, and how these skills were taken for granted and uncommented upon; how we seem to take such things as read when looking at art from the past.

When I saw the Trump drawing, the lack of any such apprenticeship in relation to coordinating eye, hand, experience, material and world was all I could see; it grated on my sensibilities so strongly that I was unable to respond to the idea. I’m not looking for realism or accuracy, but the marks the artist made jar, rub up against my love of colour, tone and line in an inexplicable way.

It’s not that I care about someone making these kind of marks, why shouldn’t they express themselves as they please? But from an art-school-trained adult who is being represented by a gallery, I find this drawing oddly disturbing. I feel cynicism, deliberate carelessness, a clumsy attempt at perhaps wanting to make me reconsider my assumptions and preferences in relation to what I think ‘art’ may be. I’m completely unconvinced, unable to see past the offence of the marks. Of course, I’m judging too, but it’s what I feel in my gut as I see the image, not anything to do with the canons of art history.

The write-up from the gallery showing the Trump drawing includes this:

The importance of drawing has diminished a bit over the past couple of decades - despite historically being one of the most essential foundations of an artist’s output. So it’s very special to see it brought to life in a much more contemporary way, bristling with the artist’s typical energy, passion, bravery and true ( and occasionally re-imagined) stories.

In our always-on, 24-7, algorithm-driven digital lives, it’s lovely to experience the expressive force of something so powerfully raw and naturally human.

I don’t know what to say. Do they mean that over the last couple of decades people have stopped caring about whether or not a drawing is convincing (not accurate or realistic, just convincing)? Or do they mean that people don’t do/use drawing so much now?

It’s hard for me to imagine that someone who had developed the skills of hand/eye coordination, who had studied form and light in the world, would choose to make drawings like this. The skills developed in repeatedly looking and seeing, drawing and choosing colour, over and over, show in the marks that are made later, whatever those marks may be.

I don’t think anyone who has developed observational skills would actually be capable of drawing like this. To me this is like someone learning their first tune on the violin, still playing pretty out of tune, with a scratchy bow tone, booking a concert hall and asking people to come and applaud.

Perhaps it’s about confidence. And how you set up the context. I can imagine the violinist with their scratchy ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ advertising their show in a contemporary context as wanting to push right up to the edges of ideas such as expertise, melody, tunefulness; explaining that they want to challenge ideas about who has the right to make music, what music even is, who the gatekeepers are etc. Is this the equivalent of punk in contemporary art?

And what about Rose Wylie, the 91-year-old artist who recently became the first female British artist to have a solo show in the main galleries of the Royal Academy in London? Is she the same, or different? She did have a training in conventional drawing, and I’m pretty much as foxed about her work as I am about Trump eats Venezuala.

Rose Wylie, Singing Life Model, 2017, oil on canvas, 169 × 182 cm.

I don’t know. For me, it’s something about bothering. Reaching your hand deep into the invisible viscera of the living world, knowing that its sticky plasma is also the lining of your own cells. Something about wrestling at the interface of experience, difficulty, and the world beyond your perception with a mark-making tool in your hand, in the context of history and time.

I suppose this is what these artists are doing, and I just don’t understand it. But that’s kind of my point; I don’t want to have to look for information in order to understand someone’s work, I want to feel it, I want to feel a communication beyond words.

I feel a prickly cynicism in this kind of work that jabs at my spirit.

What do you think?

As someone asked, this image is by me. A bit risky after all my complaints! I think I see it as a illustration of pushing my hand into the viscera of the living world…