When the conversation shifted: from interacting consciousness to internal world?

Out of culture, out of time

In my last piece I talked about an MFA student who said that what interested her in relation to the discipline of painting was the study of, reaction to, or engagement with specific pieces of work; whether her own, or anyone else’s. I think this is what was at the heart of the difficulties I’ve experienced engaging with contemporary European/American art ever since my experiences of art school in the 70s, when abstraction was at its height. The culture at that time was adamant that the only worthwhile focus for painting was the two-dimensional plane, the paint, and the interior world of the painter.

I don’t think I’ve ever been able to accept that painting and drawing simply stop at the surface of the canvas or the paper. The idea that you can make any marks you like, work paint as you please, that this is the point; to see what can be done between you and the surface that you’re working on. No more narratives from outside the painter’s own field of vision; no more old stories, didactic agendas, or romantic references to literature – no need to reference yourself to any kind of world beyond your own response in any way at all.

Montagnes à Collioure, 1905, André Derain

Good lord, I can imagine the excitement of it, in the early twentieth century. The wildly coloured landscapes, the distorted human figures; the play of scattered light, the abandonment of naturalistic forms, the fracturing of reality. And then, the gradual departure from any kind of direct reference to the world at all; fields of colour, repeating lines, running paint, textured cotton duck.

Helen Frankenthaler, 1963, The Bay

I came in at its peak, when it was not yet okay to want to paint the figure again, or to make any reference to the world as it landed on my retina in any way at all. I was too young and unformed to be able to say, well, I’m going to paint the figure anyway, get over it.

Before abstraction, it seemed to me, art had been a conversation with the broad expanse of a wider world; stories and longings, landscapes in the morning light, the horrors of human suffering, sadness carved into the lines of a human face. I could see how early abstraction had come out of interacting with the world, with painters such as Kandinsky and Mondrian. But in the work of the later artists who evolved from those beginnings, it felt to me as if the link to something beyond the self of the artist had become lost.

Vassily Kandinsky. 1900, The Port of Odessa; 1907, The Colourful Life; 1911, Composition IV; 1923, Transverse Line

After a while, the natural world started to lean in to me. In the first few years after leaving art school I fell into the forms of lichen, split cabbages and garlic; drawing into their innards, tracing their dark spaces.

There you have it, right there, the question that I would ask for the next twenty years.

I copied Chinese landscape paintings with smudgy charcoal, trying to recreate something that was laughing and whispering to me from the originals. I imagined life as a great wave of energy, pouring from above and below, rushing through the scalloped mountain tops, whistling around the tiny black trees and the even smaller humans. Everything was vast, as vast as the inside of the cabbage, as perfect as the garlic cloves nestled so tightly together under the green shoot of their over-ripeness.

Decades later the cabbage came again, tricking me with a photocopier and a small box of watercolours, seducing me back into the folds of life, which by then I had no intention of ever trying to draw or paint again.

After some years of running fractals and inks, creating cosmic poppadums and boundless pink universes, the human world began to lean in.

I was confused at first. I placed bronze statues into my fractal universes, and wondered what they were doing there.

I went back to India and noticed dancers and musicians on the peripheries of the formal carvings of God; started drawing them out of love, felt perplexed about my direction. I was dancing myself by then, and somehow the dancers became my free line, became my own movement, became the form of a Chola Nataraja; all of it about being a tiny emanation of a much larger energy, the dance connecting everything up with its relentless creative power.

Bronze Nataraja, Chola, photographed through glass in Chennai museum

Years later, the Indian dancers and I started to redirect, and I found myself immersed in ancient artefacts, remnants of beliefs and practices from much older times. I placed them beside hares and oryx, birds, fish, snails and trees.

I didn’t understand the conversation that was starting up, though I knew it was there.

The energy of the world was talking back to me, showing me that there had been times, long ago, when humans made images in order to reach out beyond themselves; out of fear, in awe, as part of communal practices designed to strengthen the bonds between everything that existed.

I see now that I was reaching for an art that would function in the way that so much of what I found in India still was – an art that could tell stories and stir psyches, an art that was designed to forge connections between the individual and all that held their lives in place. This was ‘the power of images’ for me, and the purpose of my free line.

With the return of figuration there are obviously plenty of people doing work now which reaches out to the world again, although, to be honest, I don’t really feel what I’m looking for in much of the work that I see. Still, I’m trying to extend outwards and learn more about what’s going on, because I’m sure much of what I feel is just a kind of ignorance. I’ve just started reading Gayford’s ‘How Painting Happens’, hoping to find some help with unpicking my prejudices and learning more about what painting is here, now.

I’m not too inspired so far. I’m reading Gayford’s first chapters, but not finding anyone talking about depth and subtleties in their relationship with the world beyond them, at least in a way that makes sense to me. There’s a reference to the ‘world of the painter’, but it still seems quite internal, and a bit elitist:

When I asked Doig why he thought his medium remained current, he directed the question back at me:

‘I don’t think that’s really for painters. When people have decided to paint, they enter that world. Once you’ve made that decision, the question isn’t really relevant. It’s a question for outsiders. Most painters, whether they talk about it a lot or not, are kind of obsessed with painting and looking at other people’s paintings. It’s an exciting place to be.’

This next quote is a little different. It’s still about the world of paint, surface and painter, but it gives some insight into how that process might work from the inside:

Consciously searching for the next new thing?

‘No, that’s the way that the world, the critics, like to think of it. The next move is what you see, not what you think of. In other words, the next move in my paintings came from paintings that I made, and I saw that something happened in the painting that looked like a really good opportunity – and pursued that. But I didn’t think of it, I recognised it when I saw it, after I made it. It’s a little bit different’.

Gayford, 2024: 17

This I like, the idea that something can begin to happen of its own accord, that’s more than simply intention or will. Stella is not talking about trying to move painting forward, or seeking to become known for doing something revolutionary. He’s focussing on the painting itself, within its own frame of reference, but it doesn’t feel like he’s thinking about his own ‘inner world’, more that he’s fascinated by some kind of energy, a forward momentum, in the marks that are appearing. However, he’s talking about painting in the 1950s, which does seem to me to be another time, a time when the relationship between canvas and paint was still a new world to explore.

I am aware, when talking about this desire for art to connect out to the wider world, that of course many contemporary painters now are doing exactly that; making art about injustice and exclusion, drawing attention to social norms, protesting about violence, and more. Perhaps part of my discomfort is the way that concepts have largely replaced aesthetics. In place of a visual articulation of the mystery of a human face, the unsettling power of eyes staring into mine, now I’m asked to receive a dirty sheepskin draped over a rough metal frame, or a garish, badly-executed painting which feels strangely groundless, without any substance.

For me it was never about the paint on the surface. After learning my basic skills, I was always looking to use them for something I could never name. What is it that I want images to do? Form a bridge? Fool my sensory gating into slipping its guard for an unnerving minute or two?

My images may achieve none of the things that inspired me; may never come close to touching the energies that have always been drawing me on. But that doesn’t matter. I can’t make anyone see or feel anything at all. I can only try to follow this internal imperative as it pushes me to open out, receive in, and try to make space for something to emerge. Most of the time I’m just staggering about in a fog of unknowing.

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Martin Gayford, 2024, How Painting Happens, Thames and Hudson, London