The fifteen shadows of a plum
Ah yes, the light...
I opened the culture pages of The Week a few days ago and found myself looking at four pieces of art across a two page spread.
The first image was painted by Ben Nicholson’s father, William Nicholson, in 1920. My first reaction was something like, ‘honestly, what’s the actual point of painting a silver thing on top of a notebook, on a glove, on a box?’. I made myself look some more. Why might someone have arranged these objects like this, so carefully and precisely, and then spent huge amounts of hours rendering them so faithfully in paint? I waited, letting the painting slowly enter my mind, taking in the dark, gloomy background, the way that the shadow beneath the silver casket turned into a different red, noticing the strange flatness of the gloves, which looked as if they had never housed a human hand.
And then I remembered, of course, this kind of painting is about light. Ah, light. I both knew, and had never really considered, how the preoccupation with light is a particularly European concern in painting. I knew that, over a few hundred years, in the context of new developments in science, new interests in anatomy and perspective, and the desire to return to the naturalism of classical Greek forms, European painting had gradually moved away from the flat fields of colour and formulaic conventions of medieval art towards new forms of realism. I knew that one of the key features of this realism was the exploration of chiaroscuro, the rendering of objects with particular attention to the way that the light fell upon them, creating the illusion of three-dimensionality through attending to the darkness of shadows.
As all you art history buffs know well, over time European art gradually focussed more and more on secular/realist subject matter, which eventually took the naturalistic rendering of light and shade for granted. The Impressionists, of course, focussed intensely on the physics of light; deliberately fracturing the conventions of chiarascuro and beginning the move away from realism which would eventually end up as total abstraction.
I rejected all of this when very young and spent most of my life studying the art of a number of other cultures which had continued strong and ancient traditions of using art for purposes of storytelling, invocation, protection and mystery; all of which, for me, seemed to be lacking in the recent history of European art1 .
Looking now though at Nicholson’s painting, which is in the tradition of much older European schools and approaches, it occurs to me that this kind of close study is, in its own way, a portal to the deepest of mysteries.
A person who has never tried to paint or draw something simple like a plum on a tablecloth might not realise, for example, that a plum has not one shadow, or even two or three, but actually multiple, varying shades of shadow, reaching out in different directions as the light falls upon it from many more places than might seem possible. Trying to ‘simply capture’ this reality can take you into an appreciation of the world which is quite different from ordinary, every-day perception.
Looking more carefully at Nicholson’s painting, at first I assumed that the light source was coming from the left, reflecting off the side of the silver urn. But when I looked more closely I saw that actually there was also a shadow on the left, underneath the urn, right where I would have imagined the light source to be. Perhaps the light source was on the left, but something was standing between the source and the urn. Or, looking again, perhaps the light source was actually behind the viewer. There’s shadow behind the urn on the right, but light behind it on the left as well, though the left hand side of the urn itself is not reflecting anything. The more I look, the more complicated and subtle it becomes.
Looking at the other three works in this group of four, they don’t seem to be concerned with the study of light at all (interesting to note that the Nicholson and the Matisse were painted in the same year).
The Matisse has some rudimentary shadow on the face, neck and arm, but this seems more to suggest three-dimensionality than to describe it, and there’s no real sense of a light source.
Beryl Cook, on the other hand, is using conventions not unlike the Indian mural painters of Mattancherry and Ajanta, where darker shading on the edges of things is used to suggest volume but in a very general, non-realistic way.
Finally, although this image is actually a photograph,
it seems to have been deliberately lit in an even way, so there’s hardly any sense of the light at all. Is an interest in the miracle of light falling upon objects now seen to be old-fashioned2?
My own art moved in the same direction - from naturalistic drawing to flat, non-realistic forms - though probably for different reasons. In wanting something different to what I saw as a repetitious concern with capturing likenesses of real things, I turned to art that summoned invisible forces; art which carried stories beyond what the eye could see. Flatness fascinated me. I wanted unbroken fields of pure colour, as opposed to what I saw as the messy, dabby marks of twentieth century European painters, who seemed to me to be always mixing colours into shades of mud, and then adding chalky white paint to try to bring back the light. I avoided mixing, instinctively drawn to the original white of the ground I was working on, using thin veils of pure colour that allowed the white to shine through from underneath. When this seemed too garish, I worked on coloured grounds, letting the colour underneath transform the thin pigment.
I sought the mythic, the invisible, the symbolic and the strange. My interest was life, in the sense of the manifestation of life force as it surged through the world in so many different forms, but somehow I had lost interest in the daily miracle of something as simple as light falling upon a object.
Studying the apparently boring Nicholson painting more closely, I began to reconsider all of my past feelings and preconceptions; about art, about painting, about what makes a worthy subject and why.
The drawing below was recently sent to me by someone I met in India in 1989. She set me the plum exercises, having been trained privately in ‘old master’ techniques, before eventually getting in to the Slade. I look at this drawing now, and am in awe.
In awe not only of the skill that she developed through such close observation of light and form, but of the way that drawing made it possible for her to appreciate the subtlety and complexity of what it was that she was actually looking at, which could not have been known by any other means.
Glossing over the wonder of simply drawing the world is perhaps another example of how, particularly in art, there is so often a sense that things must always be moving forward and developing; that what’s associated with ‘the past’ should be left behind.
I see now that the close study of light - as it manifests in the actual world, as it presents itself to my senses - is as interesting and important as art which challenges social norms, or which moves into total abstraction, or which tells stories through an ancient scroll, or indeed my own explorations of symbolism and colour.
And so I find myself coming full circle, returning to that year some time in the early 80s, when suddenly the world became insanely beautiful, and I all I wanted to do was to draw it, just exactly as it was.
Perhaps what I actually need right now is some slow looking with a 6B pencil in my hand…
As it had been presented to me….
Which makes me think of Joana P. R. Neves, and Diana from Sloppyperfect, recently mentioning the idea that pieces of art so often seem to have to be considered in relation to their importance or place in history (with concomitant ideas of progress and development). In music, for example, though you can be interested in the history of music if you want to be, you can appreciate and enjoy a piece of music without having to know anything about its place in history at all.
It's important to study light...without a *shadow* of a doubt!
Slow looking (with a pencil in hand, which aids the slowness) gives way to seeing, which is something else. Knowing comes later.