My pictures totally lack tension. Tension is the key to the kind of pictures I want to make.

Neu Rauch has the kind of tension I would love to have, that sense of expectancy

Bacon has tension, its the balancing of forms which are on the verge of implosion and collapse.

Matthias Weischer has architectural tension, I tihnk this is a product of the synthetic and artificial nature of his creation of illusionisitc space. It reads as real but seems fragile and on the verge of falling back apart, of decomposing

Titian has tension, Shakespearian tension. It is a multiple tension which functions on so many formal and iconographic levels to the point of being a complex but eloqunet expression of the entire tension of episodes of the human consciousness.

Rothko has tension, colourisitc and spatial mianly, but one which leads to an emotive and traigc frame of reference. Read the rest of this entry »

Titian- Tarquin and Lucretia c1570, Fitzwilliam Museum

 Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia represents a high point in a particular form of dramatic tension mastered by the artist.

 Painting needs tension. The still moment must be pregnant in some form.

 Consider Lucretia’s hand. It vainly attempts to fend off Tarquins immoral and violent sexual approach. It does not sit comfortably in space. It is neither on his chest nor explitally off it, it seems to be hovering in a void. Such a feeling is supported and founded by the softenss of the flehs painting. The form of the hand has emerged from the painterly process, not been held by and confined to preconceived and heavily drawn lines. Instead it held back from being given totally solid form, its more ephemeral qualityaiding the hovering quality. 

Titian depicts the act in flux. The hand seems constantly in the process of being about to touch. Its awkward spatial coordinates make us desire adjustment, the easiest of which is to place it more direclty onto his chest. The mental adjustment is then corrected by the visual truth of its non touch. As such an optical pulse is created, the hand seems to be oscillating between being on his chest and just off his chest. Whilst still it is as if her desperate and futile attempt to hold him off is tragically looped. Read the rest of this entry »

A window points to depth

A wall reflects and absorbs flatness

All thats in the frame passes before being reached

 All ascribed to the crumbling surface is soaked up in a dry mouth

Idealism has depth

Realism has flatness

The place is flat

The Journey has depth

Love is depth and desire it flatness Read the rest of this entry »

Tragedy is not singular. Each artform has its own form of tragedy, as does life itself. Lifes tragedy is obvious, the inevitability of death as a consequence of birth.

Narrative, literary, tragedy is the closest to this. Moving through time and space it necessitates plot. The tragedy in narrative is always tied up in cause and effect. What will happen is an inevitable consequence of what is happening, the end is defined by the start.

Photographic tragedy is different. The photograph is about a moment in reality which had been. Its static nature only focus our attention on the inevitable death of the moment recorded. It is not held in eternity but killed and embalmed. Photography is never about idealism but the depressing realism, the shadow of reality. Its oppositions are tragic reminders of lifes tragic transcience. Read the rest of this entry »

Everything divides into opposites

It all decomposes into mapable coordinates

Composed artificially for need of idealism

These constructs are ascribed to our particular psyche

The imprint of a repetitive history

Never intrinsic but forcing its way beneath the skin

The vertical is male Read the rest of this entry »

Leonardo Da Vinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ is the most famous painting in the Western world. Judging it on its appearance alone people often wonder why. Such universal iconic status, however, is never the product of aesthetics alone. It is various wider contexts which have promoted the picture to such fame. Initial context: Da Vinci and ‘intention’. In 1503 Da Vinci began painting the Mona Lisa. Vasari states that he carries on working on it for four further years, and implies it was left unfinished. Its unfinished state is disputable, but the possibility adds weight to its general position within the framework of Da Vinci’s aims.

 For Da Vinci it was one piece of his broader fascination with the phenomenon of life. Da Vinci is the embodiment of the stereotypical view of the Renaissance genius. A man obsessed with the advancement of the human mind through an expansion of our knowledge and awareness of every facet of life. Painting was merely one aspect of this study, amongst literature, music science, astronomy and engineering. In the limited number of paintings made by Da Vinci a chief fascination seems to be the deconstructing of vision. Da Vinci seems interested in recording objects in paint as the eye records them on the retina. For him an object was the collection of light gathered together. The soft edges of the Mona Lisa attest to this notion of images as merely shadows of objects, the result of light hitting the object in space and then transferring into image be the light being re-gather onto a flat surface. The warm glow of the Mona Lisa also supports the notion of painting as a devise through which Da Vinci could challenge the nature of light and image making. If we believe these to be Da Vinci’s intentions then we can project such notions onto the original incarnation of the image. Save damage, vandalism and the ageing of time the painting itself has remained physical similar. Yet our reading of it has shifted, numerous times. The first significant shift happened within 100 years. From this point on it is no longer Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

Giorgio Vasari: idealism and bastardisation

Vasari is the first, and a great, Art Historian. Unfortunately such a status has allowed him to have to autocratic a role in the History of painting. His seminal text, ‘Lives of the Artist’s’, chronicles the Italian Renaissance in three stages. It is an incredible record of the times, yet it is not a text which we should take as gospel truth. Its construction, like any, is biased, and the History it creates therefore artificial. It splits the Renaissance into three clearly definable stages, suggests a chronological rise towards absolute end goals. The arrival at the final fulfilment of these goals is reached in Central Italy in the 16th Century. This is conveniently at the same time (and location) as Vasari was painting, running an art school and during the career of Michelangelo; for whom he was the chief apologist. This was a brilliant marketing strategy. If we judge the art by Vasari’s rules then his account rings true. These rules were; truth to nature, selection of the finest parts, the collection of figures in space to depict moral narratives and painting as a window onto another world. For Vasari design, as a masculine and intellectual qualitiy, was the key ingredient of such a repertoire. Yet this is presuming that all artists discussed desired the total fulfilment of these goals. The Venetian’s (Titian et al) gave paint itself a greater primacy. The early and mid renaissance artists were not so much incapable of creating deep perspectival stages but delighted in the ordering of form across the surface as much as through it. I digress. What is key to realise is where Da Vinci sits in Vasari’s account.

Vasari heralds Da Vinci as one of the key figures in the third, and greatest, stage of the Renaissance, perhaps only just behind Michelangelo. I am not suggesting history is totally false, there is plenty in Da Vinci’s work to justify such celebration by Vasari. What I am suggesting is that Da Vinci’s work, and thus the Mona Lisa, is shifted in its meaning by the role played by Vasari. Vasari’s celebration of Da Vinci means we begin to judge his work by the rules laid down by Vasari. These are rules which have survived as measuring tools in much, perhaps most, literature which follows. Yet when we analyse such a correlation in any detail it seems an uncomfortable fit. Vasari celebrated solid line as the foundation of great art. Da Vinci seemed keen to focus on soft lines, seeing objects as culminations of light, not forms idealised into solid shape by the god like mind of a genius. It is a different belief system in the progression of representation.

Da Vinci’s Millanese ways of seeing perhaps link more closely to the ideals of Venice than those of Vasari and Michelangelo. The impact of Vasari’s account is vast. The painters of the Renaissance were great enough to survive through history with or without him. Yet with him the structure of our memories is more firmly defined the shape of history more rigid. Da Vinci’s work is no longer read entirely on what is seen but through the eye of history tinted by Vasari. It does not matter if we have never heard of him. His ideas have helped clearly define canonical ideals which have filtered into our general understanding and analysis of such work. The Mona Lisa thus becomes misread as fitting too clearly into this picture.

Napoleon and repatriation

There is certainly an active history for the Mona Lisa between its creation and the opening of the Louvre; yet it is that moment which I see as the next significant shift in its reading. Louis XIV had already brought the Mona Lisa to France and had it housed in the Palace of Versailles. Yet the significance of its geographic location came with the rise of Napoloeon I. After the revolution Napoleon has the Mona Lisa moved to the Louvre. The regal building had been transformed into the first major art Museum opened to the public. It was a symbol of the French empire. Its collection was the cultural identity of French imperial civilisation. Housed in the Louvre were objects purchased, gathered and stolen from around the world, often as a by product of their imperial expansion. The Mona Lisa would prove to be the jewel in the crown; a symbol of the high point from the Italian Renaissance. By repatriating the work in Frnace it shifted from being a signifier of Italian creative heritage to a reference of French cultural dominance. It was positioned to be the high point in a museum hung to mirror a particular Vasarian narrative. Sat at the peak it represents the rise to powers of representation. It was exhibited in such a way to imply the French academicians which followed were an inevitable continuation of such perfection. It is a story told through the gaze of French imperial power.

 Myth and fame: Symbolism to The Da Vinci Code.

By being housed in the Louvre, as the star attraction, the Mona Lisa attracted the sheer weight of numbers to create an iconic status. Responses to objects are as important as the object itself in form its status and meaning. By its sheer location the work ensured it had a weight of responses to out bid its rivals for lasting fame. It was during the mid 19th Century that creatives started to be drawn to the Mona Lisa as an image to respond too. The symbolist movement saw the Mona Lisa as a figure full of mystique, a notion supported by the enigmatic smile as well as the paintings own history. It started to take on magical and legendary status.

The theft of the work in 1911 was at first seen as an attack on tradition. Picasso and Apollinaire were suspected. Not surprising considering the later had publicly expressed his desire for the painting to be burnt. Eventually it was revealed that it was an Italian employee of the Louvre, Vincenzo Peruggia. He had wanted to have the worked rehoused in Italy. Despite his failed attempt the act added a new anecdote to the picture and thus another level of history to further aggrandise its status.

For Duchamp the image was a perfect vehicle for his Dada protests against tradition. Keen to attack tradition and convention Duchamp wanted to celebrate the irrational and illogical. Adding a fake moustache to a copy of the painting was a simple but effective subversion and parody of the image. Less political and intellectual puns have continued to be made. If you google the image you come across numerous humorous versions; from Lisa Simpson as the Mona Lisa to Banksy’s version of the Mona Lisa holding a rocket launcher. The iconic status of the image as a part of Western heritage is confirmed by its role in blockbuster books and films such as Dan Brown’s, ‘the Da Vinci Code’. The mass selling book and multi million pound grossing film take the image as the central selling point of their franchise. Regardless of any meaning it brings a certain weight of prestige and fame to the brand. This process of quotation and commentary alters our vision. It makes the Mona Lisa part of our very cultural fabric. It becomes a more detached, generalised, vague symbol of certain values we consider history and the masters attain too. It is Vasari’s doctrine filtered and modernised through the gaze of repetition. She has become a highly diverse actress in our cultural theatre. An empty vessel in the Louvre.

The most pressing incarnation of the Mona Lisa exists in the viewing of the work in its current location in the Louvre. The above readings seem to have become quieter, a far more depressing and empty noise has deafened the silence of the painting. Consider the mechanics of its current display. It has been given its own free standing, high rise wall in the middle of a room. It sits behind a bullet proof sheet of glass. Beyond this is an altarpiece like barrier and the obligatory guards. They stand like the bodyguards of some vacuous, superficial celebrity. This is exactly what the Mona Lisa has become. Behind this barrier are ropes for us to queue within, lining up like sheep’s for a few seconds of admiration of a secularised goddess; her iconic power drawing us in like moths to light or flies to shit.

Beyond the room is the paraphernalia that surrounds the modernisation of the Louvre; where the museum has moved conspicuously towards entertainment over value. In the shop and all around there is a plethora of Mona Lisa related merchandise, pens, notepads, t-shirts, posters, fridge magnets etc. etc. Is this the purest form of Kitsch? The work has become nothing more than the celebratory figure head of a business, merely a part of commerce. The irony, and its almost funny, is that its celebration leads to a total emptying of original meaning. That which got it to the heights is that which is lost. It’s like equivalent of celebrating reaching the top of a mountain by being pushed over the edge. In this current geographic and cultural context it has become a vacuous symbol of a capitalist societies need to consume and devour empty and quick experiences. The very mechanics of its presentation control the semantics of this new dimension of meaning. It is very hard to get beyond or transcend this. Thus it is possible to account for the fame and iconic status of the image. It is celebrated for numerous reasons which have shifted through history; each added a layer of weight and permanence. The irony is that such multiple refilling of the vessel has led to its eventual emptying.

Form as a pathway to tension.

Colour as an expression of tensions.

Too much conflict within the work, too much tension.

Light as a unifier.

Caravaggio, the puppet master.

The scene setter

Believable light, believable scene.

Form can be distorted further.

Rembrandt, ‘A Woman bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?)‘, 1654.

 ONe of the most stunning virtuoso displays of paintings I have ever seen. By all accounts an elaborate ode to a love one. What amazes me about Rembrandt is his ability to transform paint into a wide range of mimetic ends without ever loosing the autonomous suculence of the paint itself. It always reads as stick, sexy oil paint as well as its representational counterpart.

 That counterpart is never subordinate though. It is not like Rembrnadt sees a hierachy in the role of the medium. He sees the process of representation as a way to celebrate different properties of his medium, the two are always symbiotic, never at war.

 Look at the thumb on the dress. The dress itself. The light which flickers across wat, through skin and on the dress. The manner in which the leg breaks thorugh the water and the reflection of the legs across the riplling surface. Always with such loosness, with such seeming ease.

 When put into words we reduce the acheivement down to something simplisitc. It is in essence. It is nothing more than what many a painter has aspired to before and after Rembrandt. The difference is that only the smallest of handfuls of painters can acheive it with such sophisitication.

This eulogy is necessary. I wish to assert a believe in a hierachy. Some painters are better than others. It is without doubt true that the rules we judge painting by have been radically altered and are constantly evolving. Yet there are eternal truths and certain goals to aspire to. Within this framework there is certainly remit to gauge one painters success over another.

History may lie. Canons might be artifical constructions. But the deconstruction of such idealistic tower building should not mean we dismiss all aspects of the vantage point. When we sift back through the shattered lense which nows looks back, certain gems still emerge as strong as ever, even if the structure in which they were raised is crumbling.

 Rembrandt’s , ‘A Woman bathing in a Stream (Hendrickje Stoffels?)‘, 1654 is one of these gems.
 

The absence of noise is different from silence.  It is a state of being where sound should be present but isn’t.  This is a predicament which painting can be the most effective of mediums at articulating, it was present for a short time in the formative years of cinema, when film was silent, but even then its effect was diluted through the moving image, it very rarely stayed long enough to haunt you.  Perhaps the exception is in Eisentsteins film The Battleship Potemkin (bare in mind i may have spelt this completely wrong) which so famously influenced Francis Bacons scream.  The potency is captured in images at times when our logic tells us there should be noise but there isn’t, the effect produced by the knowledge of something missing.

It is curious that at a stage in human development when we are offered everything at the flick of a switch, the greatest potential strength in painting is in its perceived weakness to not be able to offer us all we expect of a modern appliance. 

The first great exponent of the silent scream came before it was evident that anything was even missing.  So it is in this respect, no surprise at all, that Goya found his absence in the wake of the illness that left him profoundly deaf.  He was a very great painter already, but after the illness his work seemed to reach a new level of clarity and painful precision.  For a man whose sole purpose was that of communication, both to give and receive, the pain of this disability must have been keenly felt.

There is an architect working today, I can’t remember her name, who speaks of the importance in experienciality.  What she means by this is that throughout the history of humankind we have sought to control our immediate environment.  And now, we have finally come to a point in our evolution where we have reached a level of almost complete control.  We have central heating at home, so the temperature remains at a constant, we get into our cars and the same applies, get to work and the same again.  This need for control spreads further still, into our social world.  We are connected to people in ever more disparate ways.  We communicate via text or email, we make friends over the internet with people we never meet face to face.  We have TV’s and hi fi’s in every room of the house.  All in an effort to curb and control our occaisions of human contact.  Why?  Because other people remain unpredictable and spontaneous.  The problem that all this controllig of the environment leads to a numbness, a numbness which we desire because its safe, but what we actually need is something different.  We in fact gauge the extent of our existence through experiences.  Perhaps more and more these experiences are needing to be manufactured in the form of adrenalin pursuits or (in the case of the architect) in the architecture of our homes.  So for eg. in order to go to the shower or kitchen you may travel down a walkway which takes you outside for a moment, thus experiencing different environmental conditions.

How does this affect the role of painting?  Well, the absence inherent in painting makes the present more profoundly and keenly felt.  But in order to make use of this, the previously stated factors have to be understood.  Just because its a painting doesn’t mean it automatically succeds in imagining the silent scream.

Its strange how i think of this when my most recent paintings hav been the quietest i have made, but then by describing them as quiet it shows that during their production I had, for the first time, begun to meditate on the importance of noise within a painting, indeed, i think they are my most successfully controlled works in terms of volume, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re my best,  or any good at all for that matter.

By understanding that the absence of noise isn’t exactly related to sound in the traditional sense, but in a more abstract musicality (ok, i know the analogy of music when describing painting is one of the oldest cliches but its relevant here) we can begin to understand the success of Goya’s greatest works.  The figures after the on set of deafness take on a more characterised appearence.  in the louder pieces, like his madhouse paintings, the faces are often gurning contortions.  It’s as if bone has taken on secondary importance to the maleability of the flesh.  And those key instruments of silent communication, the eyes, like full moons, and the hands, take on a profound significance in the acting out of each particular scenario.  the mouths themselves become caves, which appear to be sucking in the voice.

However even in his quieter paintings the impact is no less profound of disturbing.  Take a look at Bandit stripping a woman and tell me you’ve seen a more disturbing image.  The success of all his works lies in the pitch-perfect balance of the figure-ground relationship.  The ground as a nothingness is the perfect platform on which to cast his performances.  Amplifying their voices.

As for Fracis Bacon, well, just read all of the above.  The 2 greatest exponents of the silent scream lie as unerringly close bedfellows in the structure and composition of their works.

Iconographic signification is the product of historical repetition. The gender associations of certain figural dynamics are an example of this. Michelangelo’s ‘David’ and Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ are both the product and the provider of limiting and particular gender roles in visual culture. They provide a high renaissance iconic fulfilment of a historical continuum that was largely unchallenged until the 20^th century.

For Michelangelo’s ‘David’ read the archetypal male: Tall, erect, vertical, active and heroic. The fulfilment of Vasari’s male dominated aesthetic, a worked under pinned by a power of ‘desegno’, that supposedly masculine trait of intellectual rigour.

For Titian’s ‘Venus of Urbino’ read the archetypal female. Most depressingly a type seemingly formed by its opposition to the male, not through autonomy. Here we have the horizontal, the reclining, the submissive eroticism; the receiver of the male gave.

The relationship between reality and art is not as simple as the one way mirror people believe. Art also feeds back into society. The formation of such clear gender principles in visual form is obviously the product of limiting social modes of gender engagement. The product of a species which needs to have clarity and order so finds it easier to create a two way hierarchy between the sexes.

Art does not just reflect this back to us. It helps imbed the notion more firmly into our consciousness, leading us to believe the artificially constructed ideals as being intrinsic facts of the human condition. When you have as iconic models as those of Titian and Michelangelo, which remain celebrated through history, than it is very hard to shake of the constrains of such an image. Art is both formed from what we have made ourselves and both helps mould us. It is a far more active agent of social power than many people give it credit for. In this case it is still a shackling influence we are trying to escape from.