Exactitude is not truth

Still thinking about this after all these years

Drawing, Paris, April 2026

Exactitude is not truth¹.

Henri Matisse

Recently I started playing with a response to the 1950s curtains which I wrote about some weeks ago.

They absolutely fascinate me, and when something fascinates me, I want to explore it in colour and line.

But slowly a voice crept up behind me and said, ‘You can’t just respond to the work of other artists like this, then it isn’t your work’. ‘Why not?’, I asked, ‘How is that any different to working from the living world, or a reference image?’ ‘Well’, said the voice, ‘This is the world as previously digested by another human. You’re not processing it, you’re not transforming it’. ‘Oh, but I am’, says me, ‘Look, I’m rearranging the elements, altering the shapes, reforming things’. But the voice went on niggling.

It used to have these same conversations with me when I was working with the artefacts.

2021

I thought about what it was saying a lot then, but I couldn’t help coming back to the artefacts again and again. I wasn’t trying to be original. I was looking for visual material that moved me, that whispered secrets to me. I was far more interested in my response to something that someone had made two thousand years ago than I was in trying to find a ‘new way’ to respond to the world around me. I wanted images that were mysterious, unclear, pregnant with life mysteries; my own, or anyone else’s.

Time and time again I pushed the voice back and recommitted to exploring what moved me, what drew me in. I decided that if ‘people’ decided that I was being derivative it was just too bad, I wasn’t going to stifle myself by trying to fit into a conservative agenda that was telling me that I should be doing something different.

But now, with the curtains, the voice was back, and loud, because this time I was only barely altering the shapes and arrangements of the original. I was just sitting in front of them and following lines and shapes that interested me with my pen or my ink bottle.

This way of working is a freedom that I discovered recently working with Jane Pike. It started with doodling. Doodling, I found, is marvellous. All art agendas are off the table. There’s nothing except the line appearing on the paper; which I came to realise is, in fact, an extreme form of the free line that I’ve been studying for all of my art life.

The mattering fell away. I no longer had to be trying to work out what exactly I thought I was doing in art; what its point was, how what I was making fitted in to the history of the ideas I had been exploring for decades. No-one was going to see what I was doing, it had no point whatsoever.

After a while the line started getting curious about some of the objects that were sitting around me on my desk, and started playing with their shapes. Not to capture the objects, not to draw them, not even to make some recognisable version of them. Just following shapes. Exploring. Seeking movement and novelty, as all life-forms do.

Then I started doing semi-blind contour drawings of my own past paintings, doing things like starting my eye on the right of the painting while my hand began drawing on the left of the sketchbook.

It was unexpectedly easy and strangely liberating. The images which resulted were artistically ‘nothing’, but for the first time in ages they left me feeling unencumbered and free. My line felt alive, interactive; no longer forever second-guessing its own intentions.

I guess I thought it would go on forever, this oh-so-welcome ease. But after a while, something started to rise up that wanted a change, wanted to see development, wanted it all to be ‘going somewhere’. I don’t know if this was my confused mind, or just the nature of creative process, always looking to move and change. Anyway, the simplicity of the line disappeared, I felt antsy, I was bored by the objects in my room. So I stopped, and waited. I resisted the teacherly imperative to ‘show up, show up, keep going’ and let everything slowly loosen its grip, settle back down.

I can’t trace the shapes of objects on my desk forever, but there’s a magic in following this doodle line in response to the things around me - a magic that bypasses my brain and all of my questions about art, connecting me to the life force that wants to move through me in a conversation with the world.

When I do this, I’m no longer making art. I am, in a strange way, absent - simply following an impulse, which I believe is how we might actually be wired to interact with the world. Like the Andean tribe, the Kogi - in conversation with everything around us, receiving the world into perception and physical awareness without the screening of intent.

the energy has to be kept moving, gently…
like a stream
never stopping
never rushing
never pushing

Nicolas Nunez, workshop communication

I realised the other day that one of the things that draws me to the curtains, and to the ancient artefacts, is that they teach me how to step over the European history of representation, realism, and art-seriousness. Made for specific and diverse purposes - one to become a curtain, the other (often) to serve greater powers in a ritual - these images have no need to be true-to-life; their task is to create atmosphere, summon power, cause something to happen. As I observe the results of the world passing through a human from a different time and for different reasons, my own possibilities expand.

There is no tree on earth that looks like the ones here, but for me these human-interpreted giant leaves are fascinating and marvellous, whereas an attempt to render them realistically would leave me cold.

When I’m immersed in the reality of a forest, or the walking along a shoreline, I experience so much more than just what I can see.

Have I finally understood why art which focusses on accurate portrayal of the world tends not to work for me?

The curtains and the ancient forms ‘take me deeper into the world’ through not being literal. The people who made things like this allowed what they saw to mingle with memory, predilection, idiosyncrasy, feeling, and ended up with something that goes beyond simply what they saw in front of their eyes; something new.

1. If you’re interested in knowing more about what Matisse said, I seem to have written a blog post about this in November, 2010