ABSTRACT versus FIGURATIVE? IS THAT THE QUESTION?

A demonstration 

Imagine that one day, as you're in the middle of painting yet another of the realistic pictures you're known for and are good at, you suddenly stop, put down your brush, and say:

Enough! I've had enough of this! Why must I go on endlessly depicting what I see? Music doesn't have to tell a story or imitate familiar sounds - why shouldn't I too break free from representation? 

So you take some blank canvases and papers and boards and paints and solvents and you start exploring ways of creating a visual art which doesn't describe or interpret known objects but is  its own reality. 

Immediately you become aware that certain options are open to you. Gradually, depending on your tastes, moods, influences and the random effects which the materials themselves provide, you choose to pursue one or more of those options. Having put aside the figurative content which previously dominated your attention, you now focus on process, invention and concept. 

Links below are to relevant works by some of the innumerable abstract painters who created personal styles out of some or all of these eight modes. The processes often fuse or overlap, but I found it useful to single them out.
1. STAINED
Free-flowing, transparent or dense, indeterminately-edged, ethereal. Bissier, Frankenthaler, Still
2. BUILT
with informal blocks of interlocked shapes, creating perspectiveless depth by colour and texture. De Stael, Hodgkin, Diebenkorn
3. GESTURED
with brush, charcoal, fingers, etc. A spontaneous calligraphic means of creating form. Kline, Blow, Hitchens
4. GEOMETRICIZED
Devising and obeying invented rules, proportions, concepts, hard-edged, rigorous. Mondrian, Nicholson, Malevich
5. PATTERNED
Over-all, edgeless, whether patiently drawn or made by controlling random processes. Pollock, Tobey  Davie
6. FIGMENTED
fragments of imagination and chance. Shapes invented or loosely based on remembered objects. Mirò, Gorky, Friedlaender
7. SCRIBBLED
Linear signs, perhaps words or hieroglyphs, on smooth or rough surfaces, coloured or plain. Klee, Twombly, Tàpies
8. FILLED
Large empty fields of intense colour, atmospheric, enveloping. Rothko, Olitski, Newman

That's my over-simplified but fairly accurate summing-up of some of the paths taken by any painter who sets out on a journey away from representation. 'Art for art's sake' makes sense when perceived as a desire to escape from the prison of the seen - or rather, the scene - in order to paint something other. How do you get to that otherness and still remain a painter? The eight processes shown above are possible ways to get there which have been explored and elaborated by most of the abstract and semi-abstract painters of our time.

However, they are not exclusive to modern times or to abstract art. If you isolate details from well-known figurative paintings of any period, it's very clear that those modes crop up everywhere and that they play a role in shaping the styles of individual artists, whatever their subject. What was new about some modern abstract art is that it made process become the master, the subject, rather than remaining merely technique, the servant. 

But ABSTRACT versus FIGURATIVE  is a false dichotomy. Great figurative art of any period never re-presents reality as we know it  so it's already abstraction. But it does offer startling new ways to see the familiar and, sometimes, shows us things that are completely unfamiliar.

The fragments I've selected merely show examples of the eight abstract modes in the handling of paint or the composition of these particular figurative paintings. I don't mean to imply that these artists' work can be categorised under such labels.
Links to the full pictures from which the details are taken:

1. Watteau
2. El Greco
3. John Singer Sargent
4. Vermeer
5. Klimt
6. Bruegel
7. Rembrandt
8. De La Tour


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LUCIEN FREUD IS DEAD

HEAVY-WEIGHT CHAMP LUCIAN FREUD R.I.P.

Last year I caught his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and wrote about it on July 26th . I wasn't a big fan but I pay homage to his life-long dedication, his single-minded focus and his prodigious skill. There was something athletic, something of the spirit of the weight-lifter and body-builder in his work: those huge muscles developed through sheer will-power and obsessive exercise. Maybe I'm stretching the metaphor too far but it sums up the impressions of Lucian Freud's painting I gathered over the years. Freud and Francis Bacon were close friends and both of them, in their work, were deeply concerned with flesh. But in my view, Bacon was the greater painter because he dared to look beyond or behind matter and those glimpses, though terrifying, allowed his paintings to break through the density, the weight of matter, in startling ways. This is just my opinion of course and it may be completely skewed. 

Next post, I'm going to write about abstract art. Stay tuned for further skewed opinions. 

The weather in London today. 

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REAL CHAIRS, UNREAL CHAIRS.... PROCRASTINATING

Took the photo in a nice Camden teashop where the chairs have personalities. Painted this abstractified version while "resting" - ie avoiding finishing the last episode of La Vie en Rosé.

Why is it that when something needs to be done, other things seem so much more inviting?

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ABSTRACTING

Still not used to my new camera, tried it out at Borough Market near London Bridge, on my way to the Miro exhibition at Tate Modern. More on that later.

Which do you prefer: the photo of the 'real' scene, or the abstract digital painting I did based on this photo? Does detail matter when conveying one's impression of something seen?

 
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BECKENHAM LIBRARY INDEPENDENCE DAY

Plus: I now know who I am
Plus: I have a new camera

Beckenham Library in Kent will mark the 4th of July tomorrow with a self-publish and be blessed day and I am one of the people invited by Michael J. Weller to come and talk about my own experiences. I'll give a short PowerPoint presentation and then perhaps have a chance to dialogue with Mike about that alternative universe known as self-publishing. 

The mikonoclastic maker of HomeBaked Books is a friend and fellow self-publisher who has described me as an itinerant rhizomath . Forgive my ignorance but I had to look it up. Here's what botany and philosophy have to say about rhizome and rhizomatic:

...a characteristically horizontal stem of a plant that is usually found underground, often sending out roots and shoots from its nodes.....If a rhizome is separated into pieces, each piece may be able to give rise to a new plant.

Rhizomatic thought is non-linear, anarchic and nomadic ....Rhizomatic thought is multiplicitous, moving in many directions and connected to many other lines of thinking, acting, and being.

...rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.

Here, at last, is the answer to my lifelong question: WHO AM I?

Thanks to Mike Weller's brilliant insight, I can now carry on in my itinerant rhizomathic way with complete confidence that I am fulfilling my destiny.

I HAVE A NEW CAMERA

My old Fuji Finepix bought in January 2004 has died. Is a digital camera too old at seven? Not by my reckoning but I'm old school and believe things should last and last and last. Unfortunately I've had to accept the unfairness of its demise and start searching for a replacement. This is a process that awakens my inner anorak and there's no snippet of information, however boring, which escapes my detail-hungry eye. After weighing up the evidence concerning those cameras I could afford, I settled on the Canon PowerShot A3300 . All the options will take some getting used to and it feels more fragile than my old camera but it's too soon to say what I think of it. Here are some of the first shots I've taken with it.

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SURFACING

It's been a peculiar few weeks. Blank brain indiscriminately filled with random television fodder. Body weak, uncooperative, sore. Too much sleep broken at eight-hour intervals by the alarm clock reminding me to take another stomach-disturbing antibiotic tablet. But it seems to have worked. I feel more or less normal today. Thinking machinery clanking and creaking rustily back into gear. Legs not so wobbly, nose not so stuffy. Vague desire to Do Something Creative. 

 

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APOLOGY FOR ABSENCE WITHOUT LEAVE

to anyone who is longing to read the next episode of La Vie en Rosé and/or to see what's new here at Blaugustine, I beg your pardon. I have been out of sorts. 

Indisposed, like. Indisposition is not interesting blogging material nor is there any desire whatsoever to blog when out of sorts. 

Therefore silence. 

A sinus infection combined with toothache, extreme lassitude, brain-fog etc.  You get the picture? I'm doing all the right things to deal with this, taking antibiotics, consulting the medical profession in all its wisdom and bureaucratic chaos, sleeping, steam-inhaling aromatic essential oils, sleeping. But not blogging.

Don't worry, I'll be back. Hopefully restored and re-energised. All expressions of concern, love, encouragement, health-tips, praise etc.etc are very welcome. Sorry I didn't ask sooner.

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NOT CAT BLOGGING

I am not a cat blogger. I don't have a cat and don't want a cat. Or a dog. Or a hamster or a rabbit or a parrot. I love all animals but do not want any of them as household pets. Not ever. 

However.

In the street where I live there is a strolling cat, a flaneur. This cat probably lives in a house nearby, is well-fed and well cared for but is not a home-loving cat. He - I assume it's a he - is a free spirit, a wanderer. He hangs out. Everybody knows him and caresses him - he ambles by and rubs up against your leg, anybody's leg. He's promiscuous that way. For a while I thought I was his favourite because if he saw me coming he'd run across the road and follow me to my doorstep, demanding to be allowed in. So I took him up to my flat once and let him wander around, offered him milk, cake, ham, ice cream - all of which he refused. After a short inspection of my premises he demanded to be let out. Next time I saw him on the street he ignored me. Then disappeared for weeks. Okay, I thought, see if I care. But I bought a box of cat biscuits, just to have on hand. We met again by chance and I invited him to my place once more, just casual-like, no committment. He tried the cat biscuits and liked them. I called him pussykins but that sounded too soppy so I changed it to Pushkin. 

When I came home yesterday evening I saw Pushkin sitting in the open garage of a house near mine, looking vague, spaced out. If he were a human I'd say he was stoned. I called him and persuaded him to follow me home which he did without enthusiasm. Inside the apartment he walked around dreamily, apparently remembering the layout of the rooms. He stretched out on the floor of my studio for a while then went downstairs and laid on my bed.

I got my camcorder and filmed Pushkin as he nodded off. Sam Taylor Wood made a movie of David Beckham sleeping. I'd rather watch Pushkin than Becks sleeping. I edited the movie and put together a soundtrack with bits of loops from Garage Band. 

After a nice long nap Pushkin ate some cat biscuits. Then I let him out to continue his wanderings. I am not a cat blogger.

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OUR DAVE IN LONDON

 The Via Negativa is a road well-travelled, at least in Dave Bonta's cyber-corner of it, even if in the real world it is hidden in Plummers Hollow, a Pennsylvania mountain woodland richly populated by a great variety of animal, vegetable and mineral wildlife, every specimen of which our Dave knows personally, addresses by proper name, and often photographs, films or writes poems about. I say our Dave because he's a friend among good friends, first encountered in the blogosphere, then in New York in 2007, then last week right here at home. Here he is looking at the cyclops-eye of my camcorder while we talk - a rambling conversation which he recorded and which will eventually appear on Via Negativa as a podcast.

It takes a very good reason to lure this hermit-ish poet/ philosopher/ naturalist away from his porch in the woods and the excellent reasons which brought Dave to the UK for two weeks were a book, a reading and an exhibition. The exhibition: Clive Hicks-Jenkins' 60th birthday retrospective at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, beautifully documented on Clive's Artlog. The book: The Book of Ystwyth for which Dave contributed poems; and the reading of his poems, along with the other poets, as part of the festivities around this prestigious event. You can see more about all this on Via Negativa including links to other bloggers who have written about it. 

I enjoyed Dave's visit so much, savouring the peaceful attentiveness he gives to everything, a rare quality that I can learn from. The attention I give to the world is often agitated by ego-driven judgements and coloured by emotions - not the best way to use one's perceptive faculties.

 
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DISCOVERING ALBERTA HUNTER

 ALBERTA HUNTER 

I found her by chance on YouTube and I am making her my role-model from now on. Here is proof, if proof is needed, that age cannot wither the singing/dancing/creating/celebrating spirit if you only let it fly. Inspiration for us all. 

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