Ealier, I quoted Marion Milner on the zen of sunday-painting. The British artist, Bridget Riley, writing for a catalog that accompanied a retrospective of her work presented recently at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool, UK, talks about the non-propositional thinking involved in drawing and painting, particularly during the exploration that she undertakes as she begins each new work.
For me, drawing is an inquiry, a way of finding out – the first thing that I discover is that I do not know. This is alarming even to the point of momentary panic. Only experience reassures me that this encounter with my own ignorance – with the unknown – is my chosen and particular task, and provided I can make the required effort the rewards may reach the unimaginable. It is as though there is an eye at the end of my pencil, which tries, independently of my personal general-purpose eye, to penetrate a kind of obscuring veil or thickness. To break down this thickness, this deadening opacity, to elicit some particle of clarity or insight, is what I want to do.
The strange thing is that the information I am looking for is, of course, there all the time and as present to one’s naked eye, so to speak, as it ever will be. But to get the essentials down there on my sheet of paper so that I can recover and see again what I have just seen, that is what I have to push towards. What it amounts to is that while drawing I am watching and simultaneously recording myself looking, discovering things that on the one hand are staring me in the face and on the other I have not yet really seen. It is this effort ‘to clarify’ that makes drawing particularly useful and it is in this way that I assimilate experience and find new ground. (p. 15)
. . .
You cannot deal with thought directly outside practice as a painter: ‘doing’ is essential in order to find out what form your thought takes. The ‘new curves’ that I started in 1998 grew directly out of paintings such as Shimmered Shade. The latent visual arcs and sweeping movements came to the fore in Painting with Verticals 1 (2006) and Red with Red 1 (2007). Retaining the diagonals and verticals of the earlier group of paintings, I introduced a curve that connected to the existing structure. This is the underpinning of my new curvilinear work. The vertical is still there, acting like a break in the movement across the canvas. The cut collage pieces define the various contours that arise from combining and recombining the slender curve with its diagonal accents. This has developed into a layering technique that allows me to weave forms and colours together in a supple plastic space. I have reduced the number of colours and increased the scale of the imagery. Would it be possible to once again build up a repertoire of these invented forms, a repertoire that might gradually acquire sufficient momentum to put itself at risk, to precipitate its own kind of hazard? It is only through the experience of working that answers may be discovered within the inner logic of an invented reality such as the art of painting.” (p. 18)
References:
The image is Red with Red by Bridget Riley, 2007.
Bridget Riley [2009]: Work. pp. 15-18 of: Michael Bracewell and Bridget Riley [2009]: Bridget Riley Flashback. London, UK: Hayward Publishing.
This essay was republished in The London Review of Books (31 (19): 20-21, 8 October 2009) and is online here.
In his famous account of learning the piano as an adult, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger refers to a book by psychiatrist, Marion Milner, a pseudonym of Joanna Field. Milner was the sister of Nobel-physicist Patrick Blackett, and great neice of Edmund Blackett, architect of colonial Sydney. Her book is an account of her attempts to paint and draw, and to learn to paint and draw, as an amateur artist. I am not enchanted by her artwork, and I find her Freudian accounts of artistic creativity and its barriers both implausible and untrue to life. I believe Alfred Gell’s anthropological account of art to be far more compelling – that artworks are tokens or indexes of intentionality, perceived by their viewers or auditors as objects created with specific intentions by goal-directed entities (the artist, or a community, or some spiritual being). These perceived intentions include much else beside the expression of feelings.
But Milner’s book is replete with some wonderful insights, many of which express a Zen sensibility. Herewith a sample:
Continue reading ‘The Zen of Sunday-painting’
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This week I was invited to participate as an expert in a Delphi study of The Future Internet, being undertaken by an EC-funded research project. One of the aims of the project is to identify multiple plausible future scenarios for the socio-economic role(s) of the Internet and related technologies, after which the project aim to reach a consensus on a small number of these scenarios. Although the documents I saw were unclear as to exactly which population this consensus was to be reached among, I presume it was intended to be a consensus of the participants in the Delphi Study.
I have a profound philosophical disagreement with this objective, and indeed with most of the EC’s many efforts in standardization. Tim Berners-Lee invented Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol (HTTP), for example, in order to enable physicists to publish their research documents to one another in a manner which enabled author-control of document appearance. Like most new technologies. HTTP was not invented for the many other uses to which it has since been put; indeed, many of these other applications have required hacks or fudges to HTTP in order to work. For example, because HTTP does not keep track of the state of a request, fudges such as cookies are needed. If we had all been in consensual agreement with The Greatest Living Briton about the purposes of HTTP, we would have no e-commerce, no blogging, no social networking, no easy remote access to databases, no large-scale distributed collaborations, no easy action-at-a-distance, in short no transformation of our society and life these last two decades, just the broadcast publishing of text documents.
Let us put aside this childish, warm-and-fuzzy, touchy-feely seeking after consensus. Our society benefits most from a diversity of opinions and strong disagreements, a hundred flowers blooming, a cacophony of voices in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes. This is particularly true of opinions regarding the uses and applications of innovations. Yet the EC persists, in some recalcitrant chasing after illusive certainty, in trying to force us all into straitjackets of standards and equal practice. These efforts are misguided and wrong-headed, and deserve to fail.
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The English poet T. E. Hulme (1883-1917) talking about creative writing compared it to geometrical drawing. Hulme had studied mathematics and philosophy at Cambridge, although without graduating.
The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognize how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise – that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect’s curves – flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can’t bear the idea of that “approximately”. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.”
Reference:
T. E. Hulme, in the essay, “Romanticism and Classicism”, quoted in: A. Alvarez [2003]: Making it new. The New York Review of Books, 15 May 2003, Volume L, No. 8, pp. 28-30.
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