My paintings which i consider to be the most successful of my mixed batch have always strived to say nothing at all, through the juxtaposition of a declamation and its denial. This has not been a conscious undertaking. It happens when i begin a work, an image of the desired appearence is in my mind and i paint towards that goal. At some point i suffer a profound crisis of confidence in the message i had in mind. This results in a U-turn and the partial destruction of the ideal. Through the act of chance (i often work through an emptiness at this point, there is no point, there is no intention to be had) the painting finds a point which is more profound than i could ever have manufactured deliberately.
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I believe there to be some sense in some of the following points. I don’t know if I believe everything I say.
I know what you mean by nothing, but I think you do yourself discredit, whilst obviously also opening up the potential for the discussion of the vastness of nothing as a symbolic entity… look no further than the throbbing intensity of Rothko void and there emptyness.
I do think though that painting reaches it highest form of consciousness when we get beyond, by whichever means, the preconceived, the inevitable, the planned out, the designed, the thought out idea.
Thie idea, by its nature, is confined to language. Even the non verbalised or written form of conscious thought is confined by language. We think, when planning ahead, in words, or at least linguisitcally.
Thus by its nature we are restricting our work to a watered down version of the preexisting linguitic idea. Thus we much reach beyond, break or restructure this ideology if we are to find something more profound.
If we do not do this then the work need not exist, it is nothing more than a weak relation of the idea or the articulated idea. It is what backs up PLatos arguemtn, the steps we remove ourselves from the purest incarnation of sometihng being.
The only way we create something which is more worthwhile than that which already exists is by finding it rather than arriving at it directly. It is essential that this thing is uniquely pictorial and is formed through a pictorial language. It is essential that it can be niether fully articulated before its exitence or fully explained after by words. Its conception and its posthomous deconstruction must not be more worthwhile than its actual life blood. It must say something which the before and after cannot. It must be specifically visual in its language, and in our case painterly.
Thus we form a new ideology, once which sets out structure, grids, journeys, ideas, rules and images… but which is aware that they need attacking, trnaslating, refiguring, destroying, rejourneying or shifting if they are to exist as anything to make the painting worth exisitng.
If it does not surprise, if it does not break away, if it is exactly as we imagined and fulfills our criteria perfectly, than that is empty. That is truly nothing, or a something which may as well be nothing as it is a consciously pathetic relation to the idea.
If we strike upon a soemtihng whihc can’t be fully explained, which does not seem to be the sum of parts, which is not empirically measurable or definable in reason or meaning. Then whilst it might appear to have an aesthetic delight of nothingness, there is a good chance that there is something in that void which is utterly profound and worthwhile.
This is, of course, not a trick which we can conscisouly reproduce, as that in itself brings us back into the fold of the same argument. The destination of such a journey is only truly sucessful when its destination is genuinelly unknown. By its nature it is elusive.
In this sense it is a self fulfilling pain in the arts.
Tom
29 Apr 08 at 5:25 pm
Yep I agree very much. Obviously when i described the result of the phenomenon as “nothing” this wasn’t intended as some self-effacing denial that i have no part to play in the drama. It was a way of raising this issue of when an image rises above the idea at the heart of its conception; and this equally raises an issue with my own method of working, ie. when is the painting finished? Other artists i think are perhaps able to begin with such an open forum, the quote from richter “before the idea is the deed” is an example of this. I think i conversely have to start with something (this something being an idea or at least a lyricism). It was my attempt to loosen this strangle hold on the idea which led me to paint the recent simpler, photographic paintings, and i think in this respect they have been successful. Although the reason for me writing the previous blog was to try to suss out that precious moment, which you describe above, when the original reason for beginning a work becomes so worn and convoluted that the courage is found somewhere to purge the image of its ideologies. Through this act of destruction, a new lightness of being is found that wasn’t intended and this “nothingness” feels like it says something far more profound than could have been uttered by any logical intent. This referring to the mysterious property that it wasn’t actually uttered by me at all but has been plucked by chance out of the ether. The tricky bit is when this profound utternece doesn’t come quickly and so the lightness of the subject is cluttered by the over-working of the material. And this happens frequently with both of us i think.
Andy
30 Apr 08 at 2:17 pm