A poem that was recently brought to my attention…

Muséé des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden

dysphoria

Painting is dysphoria. ‘An impatience under affliction: morbid restlessness: uneasiness: want of feeling of wellbeing.’ (chambers concise dictionary)

The single figure always refers to another, whether that other is absent or present. The figures desire, actions are defined by this other.

 This does not necessarily root painting in narrative, although it does imply a causal link between the central character and other facets.

Such a link can be establish on the grounds of a justification which exists outside of the linear nature of literay time. The panic, the state, the impact can be a permanent condition brought on by the other. It need no be the direct effect resulting from a previous cause. The two are symbiotic rather than intrinsically linked in a historic hierachy.

The protagonist, I am suggesting, need not precede the victim. There states can both exist in the eternal now, the moment of flux, which the painting deals with.

On another note, we need no depict the protagonist. We only need focus on the ‘victim.’ The protagonists prescence or existence can be suggested by an unseen ofstage prescence. Hints of exists or doorways can potentially imply this.

Jacques Louis David’s Brutus. 1789

Look at the still life at the centre of this piece; a proto photographic, almost Carravagesue, creation. It is a small but crucial detail. It speaks of the paintings true meaning. The blade pierces the fabrics, a reference to the piercing of the domestic space by the loss of the young men. The still life is a poetic metaphor for the whole painting. This is a picture about domestic grief.

History lies. The perpetual desire to find meaning in a picture through a socio-political recontextualisation is the legacy of T. J. Clarke’s brilliant writing. Such a methodology denies an analysis which places the works visual structure at its basis. David’s Brutus is a case in point, a closer analysis of the picture shows that we should not so readily accept this image as one overflowing with proto revolutionary sentiment.

The accepted analysis of this work is that it anticipates the revolution; a celebration of a republican state, with Brutus as its hero. There is no doubting Brutus is the key celebrity figure of republican ideals. Having swore an oath on the body of Lucretia (who had committed suicide after being raped by Tarquin, the monarch) he led the charge for the overthrow of the monarchy. As head of the republic he had to display myopic stoicism in following his ideals. He sentenced his own sons to death for their plot to restore the Monarchy.

The grounds for this image as a celebration of pro republican feeling are flawed on two levels. Firstly it depicts the domestic grief in response to the sons death. This is the tragic effect of Brutus’ actions, not the best moment to select to aggrandise republican ideals. The Oath of Brutus or the sentencing of the sons would have shed a warmer light on the ideology.

Secondly there is no historical evidence to suggest that in 1789 David, or indeed France, had vehemently Republican ideals. The French revolution, the collapse of the Monarchy and the rise of the republic seems to have happened in an incredibly short period of time. To suggest such ideals would be intrinsic to David’s morals is to ignore the fact that this was a man capable of adjusting his moral compass for personal and artistic gain at any moment. This painting may be a celebration of antiquity, but it is not a call to arms. The ‘Death of Marat’ 1795 is a far more incontestable example of pro republican propaganda.

If such an analysis is bankrupt, or at the least flawed, then we need to return to the image itself. When we do we find an image of surprising compassion and emotional complexity. This is not the cold purely intellectual construction that a label such as Neo-Classical so unhelpfully suggests.

Consciously or not it is the structure of David’s images which initially controls our segmented consumption of the whole. In previous works, such as ‘Oath of the Horatti’, the structure is more explicitly controlled by architecture. Whilst architecture is present, and important in this composition, it is a single object that pivots the image. The empty chair in the central of the painting is the pivot around which the drama unfolds. It is empty. The absence of the presumed figural presence attests to the void left by the death of Brutus’ sons. Its spatial centrality speaks of its narrative importance. The dead bodies are carried through in the background; by it is this foreground absence which strikes a chord. Thus the image becomes about the domestic grief and reaction to an absent other.

The chair echoes the division of the image into engendered realms. On the right we have the female half and on the left the male half. They are positioned as emotional binary oppositions. A dialogue between the halves is opened up, each feeding our reading of the other

The female half is about the presence of grief. The group of figures echo the Niobe group. The borrowing is not just about a knowing nod to antiquity but an awareness of the power of emotions contained in the particular figural mechanics. The mother reaches out in a hopeless grasp, trying to deny her sons passing. At the same time her other arm holds up her daughter who swoons from the gravity of emotion. The double action speaks of her role of a mother, caring for a daughter, which thus heightens the sense of lost contained in her outstretched arm. The other daughter holds her hands up to block the vision; her features contain a moving melancholy. To their right a figure is draped with a cloth. By hiding her features our imagination creates a reaction beyond the realm of vision.

Brutus displays no such outward emotion. His stoic presence recalls Michelangelo’s Issiah. The quotation is not just derivative or an elitist reference but an awareness of Michelangelo’s ability to display emotional feeling through the form of a figure. David creates an emotional contradiction between the top and bottom of Brutus, between the face and the body.

The face looks out blankly, stoically excepting the death. Its eyes look to us but the lack of communication speaks of an emotional blankness. The body, conversely, twists dynamically, the toes curl like those in Titian’s ‘Crowning of thorns.’ The tension in the figure speaks of a burning anguish which is being repressed rather than an emotional bankruptcy. He sits in shadow, his back to the empty chair and his family. Everything about his pose is fraught with unease.

We move between the two realms aware that the female grief attests to the torment which Brutus tries to hide. The cost of his personal loss for the greater good of the state is pictured not as heroic, but tragic.

I am continuing to attempt to make progress with the painting of flesh. I think one crucial realisation is my awarness of my lack of knowledge or innate ability with this particular, crucial, facet of my work. Previous thoughts on this subject have also espoused an overall dogmatic and scientific approach to painting flesh. I do feel though, with the help of Andy, that I have made some advancements.

Read the rest of this entry »

This picture has really struck a chord with me. I think you have found that stillness, but with tension and balance, that you so admire in Vermeer and Weischer. It is without doubt this particular quietness that gives the picture and unsettling melancholy.

The space and the colour in this work are also excellent. I thinkn this is your best work yet. If we do a swap in the near future I ‘want that one’.

Personally I think you have found an avenue which really opens up a particular voice for you. Your complex perosnal narratives and figures are good, but these still lives have a real power.

The later wants noise and the former has silence, either in opposition or acceptance of paintings inherant quietness. The same is true of movement, one craving it in excess and the other accepting its lack of prescence. It is control vs excess, in formal terms balance, harmony and symmetry vs chaos, disharmony and asyymetry.

The melodrama is the theatrical. The desire for a constructed idealism.

The melacnholy is the real. The acceptance of the humble and mundane, a quiet sublime.

The melancholic image alwyas saeems to be the musing of a found subject/image

The melodramaitc image is always constructed, always stage, always actively created.