In the John Moores painting prize 2010 catalogue, Alison Watt, one of the judges, has an essay where she uses an extract to speak about the difficulty of painting.  I love it, so thought I would write it down to try and remember it.

“There’s an essay by Thomas Hess on Barnett Newman which I was given years ago.  This extract sums up for me the ‘problem’ with painting.  I’ve always loved it.

Franz Kline and Elaine De Kooning were sitting at the Cedar Bar when a collector Franz knew came up to them in a state of fury.  He had just come from [Barnett] Newman’s first one-man show. ‘How simple can an artist be and get away with it?’ he spluttered.  ‘There was nothing, absolutely nothing there!’

‘Nothing?’ asked Franz, beaming.  ‘How many canvases were in the show?’

‘Oh maybe ten or twelve - but all exactly the same - just one stripe down the centre, that’s all!’

All the same size?’  Franz asked.

‘Well no; there were different sizes; you know, from about 3 to 7 feet.’

‘Oh, 3 to 7 feet, I see; and all the same colour?’  Franz went on.

‘No, different colours, you know; red and yellow and green… but each picture painted one flat colour - you know, like a house painter would do it, and then this stripe down the centre.’

‘All the stripes the same colour?’

‘No’

‘Were they all the same width?’

The man began to think a little.  ‘Let’s see.  No. I guess not.  Some were maybe an inch wide and some maybe four inches, and some in between.’

‘And all upright pictures?’

‘Oh, no, there were some horizontals.’

‘With vertical stripes?’

‘Oh, no, I think there were some horizontal stripes, maybe.’

‘And were the stripes darker or lighter than the background?

‘Well I guess they were darker, but there was one white stripe, or maybe more…’

Was the stripe painted on top of the background colour or was the background colour painted around the stripe?’

The man began to get a bit uneasy.  ‘I’m not sure,’ he said, ‘I think it may have been done either way, or both ways, maybe…’

‘Well I don’t know,’ said Franz. ‘It all sounds damned complicated to me.’

(Thomas Hess in ‘Barnett Newman’, 1972, Tate)”

(Larger extract taken from Alison Watt in ‘John Moores Painting Prize 2010′, 2010, National Museums Liverpool)

Look at your chin

Look at you chin

Your big chin

Your big chin

Your long chin

Your long big chin

Your mighty chin.

Look at your mighty chin

Rising up to the clouds

Down into the volcano.

Look at it grow

Look at your mighty chin grow

Your behemoth chin

Your tectonic plate of a chin

World moving chin

Look at your chin

Look at your chin.

Johannes Kepler was a contemporary of Galileo.

He stated (in rough terms)

“Before the universe was created, there were no numbers except the Trinity, which is God himself… For the line and the plane imply no numbers: here infinitude itself reigns.  Let us consider, therefore, the solids.  We must first eliminate the irregular solids, because we are only concerned with ordered creation.  There remains 6 bodies, the sphere and the five regular polyhedra.  To the sphere corresponds the heaven.  On the other hand, the dynamic world is represented by the flat-faces solids.  Of these there are 5: when viewed as boundaries, however, these 5 determine 6 distinct things, hence the 6 planets that revolve about the sun.  This is also the reason why there are but 6 planets…

I have further shown that the regular solids fall into 2 distinct groups: 3 in 1 and 2 in the other.  To the larger group belongs, first of all, the cube, then the pyramid and finally the dodecahedron.  To the second group belongs the octahedron then the icosahedron.  That is why the most important portion of the universe, the earth - where Gods image is reflected in man - separated the 2 groups.  For, as I have proved next, the solids of the first group must lie beyond the earth’s orbit and those of the second group within.  Thus I was led to assign the Cube to Saturn, the tetrahedron to Jupiter, the dodecahedron to Mars, the icosahedron to Venus and octahedron to Mercury.”

God bringing order to the world, order borne out of chaos, there is something comforting about this thought.  A very human comfort.  Numbers which grow from the trinity.  The description of God as a line, a plane and the three dimensions  growing from this is a strong image to describe visually an abstract idea.

I want to create Liminal paintings, space and places which are Heterotopias. I want the spaces to be neither here nor there, to exist in the space between. I want my paintings to feel awkward and uncomfortable by merit of a certain multiple familiarity. I want people to feel as if they know the space, place and situation, but also for it to feel new, so creating a sense of trepidation. I want to achieve this through create composite space and characters, which give fragmentary references to a range of other types.

A photo can’t be tragic. A painting can’t be tragic. It is these two facts that make both tragic.

This is not double speak. Post Structuralism, through writers such as Baudrillaird, has put forward a convincing, if slightly melodramatic and abstract, argument for the continued detachment of society and the individual from reality. Reality is dying, it has been murdered. Marxist thinkers such as Guy Debord in his ‘Society of the Spectacle’ pin the blame directly to the technological revolution. Debord cites television as central to a paradox which allows us increasingly frequent and direct access to suffering across the globe, but conversely and increasingly detached emotion reaction to this reality. When we are flooded with live images of others suffering its emotive value becomes bankrupt. What more we are viewing it at an increasingly detached vantage point, which allows us to express idea of grief society expects but not have to deal in the direct sensations.

The problem has got more pressing with the rise of the internet. I have access to a network of information in a variety of formats which is growing exponentially. I am simultaneously more connected and detached to notions of present suffering than ever before.

This condition is unique to us and mirrors neatly the manner in which tragedy manifests itself in photography and painting. A painting or a photograph of a dead body is not tragic. A photograph of a dead figure, if we trust it to be ‘real’, is an image which has been derived directly from reality. A painting of a dead figure may not be real, but a good painter can use all his powers to stage an image which evokes all the drama and pathos of a real dead body. Yet in neither case is it the real thing.

The photograph is an analytical deconstruction from reality. It may have come from a true event but it is now detached. We have decontextualsied, paused it, stripped it out of its causal and spatial context. We can feel sympathy for the figures pictured and even for the loved ones and family of the dead figure. Yet empathy is harder to come by.

In the painting however direct the sensation feels or the sense of loss and pain generated may seem, we are always aware it is not real. Painting is stuck in a constant crisis where the painter and the viewer can strain as hard as they like for a sense that what they see is a real event, real people in real space, yet we are always aware that it is an illusion. Due to this the emotions evoked in us will always be at one step removed.

It is this inability of an image to allow us direct excess to an actual event and the connected emotions that triggers something real. It is tragedy at one step removed.

I have recently started having homeopathic therapy, ostensibly for my eating, which is incredibly limited. I eat no meat, no fruit, no vegetable, no rice, no pasta, no sauces and very little cheese.

The reason this form of therapy interested me is that it is holistic, looking to figure out a complete notion of how you work psychologically and how that is part of what manifests itself in my diet. A form of therapy that searches for a singular, specific cause of my eating would be missing the point. I have long been aware that it is a broader condition linked to my general make up, with a maze of causes and effects.

The Therapist is brilliant. My belief or potential scepticism for the homeopathic treatments I take as a result of her findings is irrelevant. What is relevant is her ability to tap into and fully understand how I work and the impact of this.

What our conversations have revealed is a consistent play between two opposition nature in my mind and actions, which has an inevitable knock on effect with my eating. I switch between complicated and elaborate patterns of thought and highly controlled, regimented methods of dealing with them. I am in this constant play between the two.

The first comes in the form of my inability to switch my brain off. It seems to constantly be spawning ideas, without any filter of quality. Often an idea will keep coming up with barely any discernable difference. In terms of accurately resolving a problem or developing a solution it is more like a machine gun than a sniper riffle.

I have an obsess and habitual series of systems. I make lists, lists of lists. I email myself about six times a day with the same document with tiny alterations. This document has lists of what I am doing, will be dong, need to do. What photos to take, what images to work on, goals, people to contact, things to do today, this week, this month, this year; ideas to expand. I text myself about ten times a day with reminders of things to put on the list or to think about, these will range from reminding myself to send a letter to some waffle philosophy about a painting. Next to my computer I normally have a couple of bits of paper with notes reminding me to do things, often this is a duplication of things in the email. A number of these notes will then also be written in my diary and sometimes will also be on my mobile as an alarm to go off. I check my two email accounts, facebook and the bbc website about twenty times a day.

I have eaten virtually the same thing for everyday since I was three or four. This has been bread, nuts, cereal and sometimes chips. Sometimes the type of bread will remain the same. For the last two months I must have had Sharwoods Naan and a pack of poppadums for 95% of my evening meals.

I get very anxious. Small things bother me.

My mood swings are excessive and tend to happen daily. Alongside this is a parallel swing in energy levels. I am either hyper and up with lots of energy and no attention span or down, lacking energy and unable to move from one thing to the other.

My brain works in quite odd ways. On the one hand it must be quite good due to certain academic achievements. I certainly think I have quite a strength in analysing situations, if not always in my ability to articulate the findings. But I can’t remember things in the short term, I have no capacity for abstract information. In other ways my brain seems either to have very high processing skills or remarkably low ones.

I can’t switch my brain off. I am incapable of stopping it processing thoughts. I have sometimes enjoyed things which have allowed me to switch it off, such as alcohol. This sometimes manifests itself in an inability to live in the present. I am constantly looking forward or backwards, assessing.

I find elaborate systems to provide methods of control over what feels like something constantly spiralling out. I can’t let go of these. I get incredibly anxious and uncomfortable of a routine is change. I am not compulsive in the slightest. If an utterly dull and mundane plan is potentially changed for an enjoyable, logical, sensible, rewarding plan then this unsettles me. I am happier sticking with the original plan. It is again about control.

I am better around other people but gravitate towards being by myself or alternatively with my girlfriend. I often put off doing things or seeing people because it unsettles something in me, it makes me anxious. When I break from this mindset and habit I almost always find it rewarding and enjoyable. I normally prevent it happen due to an artificial fear or a belief that time is lost where I could be spending it developing my painting. I say all of this but then within a studio context I can be very good at wasting times, despite a huge level of ambition and drive.

I get very little joy from success, when something goes right I tend to straight away look towards the next goal and not enjoy the pleasure of the current one. When things go wrong I go into terminal decline for a short period.

I flick between being highly self deprecating and having an incredible belief, to the point of it being an excessive, although internalised, arrogance. I swing between a notion of the self which is either a total failure or touching on greatness. This is uncomfortable but true.

I can’t stand confrontation. On a number of occasions I have developed intense, and serious platonic relationships which have meant the world to me, and then they have reached a point of conflict and this tends to have an inevitable narrative leading towards either explosive confrontation or a total break. It seems to be all or nothing.

I seem to see things in black and white, thus my views on the world flick between needlessly and excessively cynical (about the tiniest most unimportant thing to the way the whole world is structured) to having a poetic romanticised view of life. There is no detached, considered, objective or empirical philosophy.

Everything has to be incredibly unstructured and free flowing and fragmentary but then obsessively ordered. This manifests itself in my paintings, my patterns of living and especially in my writing style. It seems to be a constant battle between free flowing fragments and structure structure structure.

The therapy is seeking to find ways of me reducing the level of control. An awareness and analysis of this seems likes the first step.

In 1839 Paul Delaroche declared, “From today painting is dead.” The advent of painting had led him to believe that there would soon be no need for painting. Instead photography’s arrival has seen painting reinvent itself, using photography to its own ends.

The Modernism championed by Clement Greenberg in mid twentieth century America gave one purified response to photography. Jackson Pollock represent the peak of a rejection of imagery and subject matter, a closed door on association in favour of self referential painting. Paintings, we were told, were to be about their own unique properties, flatness and the spreading of a coloured medium over a two dimensional surface.

Modernism led to painting martyring itself, sending the artwork down a myopic and tragic pathway, with an inevitable finite end point. Painting of this kind died under the weight of restrictive, singular and limiting philosophy.

Lucy Lippard is one of many thinkers to emerge around the 1960’s and 70’s in what was a revolution for many ways of thinking, not just those connected with painting. The period can by summarised by a shift away from detached and singular rhetoric towards a plural and interdisciplinary mode of analyse. There had been a paradigm shift, with ideologies questioned, if not destroyed, in favour of a philosophy which prides itself on problematising any stance and seeks to deny ideology. This, of course, is an ideology in itself.

In terms of painting the impact has been initially liberating. Imagery and subject matter have returned on mass, painters feel no need to follow a single style, but freely reference a multiple range of sources. The same statement applies to subject and image. This openness has developed at an ever increasing pace as we moved towards and beyond the millennium. The shift if not just philosophical, but has also manifested itself in the technological revolution of recent history. The internet has change our ability to communicate, to access information and has remapped our thought process.

More and more painting has imbedded itself in its past, as if it can only exist as a shadow of itself. Painting has killed itself off and been reborn as a zombie. Many paintings of today are the living dead, with mournful cries to the past. Such a condition fits the inherent qualities of painting, which by its very nature sits between life and death, think Keat’s ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’,

“Thou still unravished bridge of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow time”

Paintings very existence is founded upon a constant play between life and death, silence and sound, movement and stillness. Its essence is the moment in flux, the play between binary oppositions of being and not being. Its very nature, that which makes it tragic, is the tension it holds between a desire for a particular state and its inevitable failure.

Each individual painting and the whole history of the medium exist in a process of constant renewal. It dies and it is reborn, in a cyclical process which gives nods to nature, evolution and certain religious ideologies. Each epoch of painting presents itself as a new figure head, a new prophet or king, holding similar forms of power in a new guise and a new context. As such we are right to be constantly proclaiming:

“Painting is Dead
Long live painting“

Freud’s psychoanalytical approach suggests that tragedy is our chance to act out, in a safe arena, the desires we have repressed. It is a chance to give form and action to the barbaric, primitive, monstrous types that society and civilisation has, supposedly, rejected. He sees tragedy as in direct opposition to the control, reason and seriousness of civilisation.

Providing an apology for art which holds it up as the opposition to existence in reality is too convenient. The supposed acts and horrors which society has rejected and which tragedy acts out, in some form of psychological catharsis, would be to ignorantly dismiss and ignore the constant mass of barbarism that exists in our current affairs and recent history.

Hume and Pope are two thinkers who has criticised Shakespeare, mainly due to his populist tendencies and supposed lack of refinement. Pope’s snobbery leads him to dismiss Hamlet as the work of a genius tainted by a barbaric nature.
“It is a gross and barbarous piece, and would never be borne by the lowest rabble in France or Italy. [10] … The grave-diggers make a grave for the poor girl [Ophelia] ; one asking the other whether a woman who drowns herself ought to be interred in holy ground: after which they sing ballads, worthy of their profession and their manners; at the same time, throwing out the bones and skulls of the dead upon the stage. [11]… In the first scene, for instance, the guards says: “Not a mouse stirring” Yes, sir, a soldier might make such an answer when in the barracks; but not upon the stage, before the first persons of distinction, who express themselves nobly, and before whom every one should express himself in like manner.”
The suggestion that theatre should filter life through a system of purification, rather than to seek to present it accurately and honestly, is not a philosophy that should be applied to Tragedy, and certainly not one which Shakespeare or his English peers applied to their work. Decorum is the death of art, seeing it set itself up as a noble, clean and sanitised reflection of life to be digested by an elite few who do not want to be jostled out of the comfort of their existence, be this the aristocracy or in more recent history the bourgeoisie. Art, through history, has had to be to some extent in the service of the classes with power and money, after all its is these properties which all for the production and consumption of the work. Yet the artist must, as Shakespeare did, find ways to work within this system without bowing to its desire for particular packages of culture and limiting notions of taste.

Who are the victims in modern tragedy? Who are to be the Martyrs and scapegoats?