Thanksgiving with Tom

I am spending some time in Halifax. Yesterday (Thanksgiving Sunday) went sketching with new friend Tom. Certainly a treat to meet and get to know an artist who had been a huge inspirational influence in setting my direction as a painter and helping me to make the decision to become an artist in the first place.

Tom's attitude, ideas and knowledge is as sound as the quality and source of the subject matter of his images. The truth to, dedication and core emotional values underlying what he does is refreshing counterpoint to the frenetic shifting values of the postmodern.  As well, the reinforcement of sense of place in art (and which Tom has, through his drawing on the specific, and through his influence on eastern Canadian art, certainly made manifest) is an issue which I have lately begun to feel challenges and impairs through its absence, a lot of emerging and current production.

Tom has a dry wit and a pleasant and comfortable nature which is refreshing. Even his occasional jibes and criticisms are delivered in a forgiving manner. He is a man comfortable in his own skin, and comfortable with the position he holds in the arts. One thing quickly obvious on first conversing with him is his knowledge of art history and his wide ranging appreciations. This is an area in which I identify completely; being understood as a "realist" painter does not limit one's own broad areas of influence, hidden or obvious.

I guess this is a funny time in my life. It seems that there is coming to be the closing of a large circle of experience; perhaps this is a necessary part of my path before moving on. I mean energy is restless and inspiration develops from and expresses new ideas, which are the result of change. It seems that through Virgil, and Tom I am beginning to see from a more mature position my struggles and enthusiasms of the last 3 decades. Not that there is the need to turn a new leaf, but a sense of the need to consolidate power and expression on a different plane emotionally.

So yesterday Tom loaned me some paint and a few brushes and we went out to the shore road and spent a few hours in the sun on the beach. I did a sketch of Tom painting. Some insight into his world and magic.

What is Correspondence

I was in correspondence with a good friend and fellow artist today, someone who's perceptive mind and ideas have always had a telling impact on helping me understand my own labyrinthine connection to what it is to be an artist. His statement "art is life for me- life is art" is so deceptively simple that it takes a minute to realize actually how profound that statement is. What is art if it is not the actual visceral core of one person's experience brought to a point of beauty and as a transmissible object of contemplation. Put all the crap aside- it is what is left over after the hype, efforts to achieve novel or noticeable effects, visibility via celebrity, and chasing the carrot of the latest novelty whether it is painting, conceptual art or photography. The moment of conviction- the point at which something fundamentally human is expressed is the moment when beauty (or call it magic, or mystery) is brought to life. And this is the depth of feeling one person has for and in, life. That is why some things register as art, and some things as novelty. Why some things fly and others only walk or remain stationary. Skill is that of the mind and not the hand, and it is the unwavering connection with that which is true and significant that makes art. The statement by Wilde "art is what is left over after everything else has fallen away" makes better sense if one considers what the left over bits refer to.

Teachers lead by example, but the learning is knowledge we build together.

Newfoundland Suite- Yellow Box Gallery

Sept. 6- mid Oct. 2013 at the Yellow Box Gallery, Saint Thomas University, Fredericton. A group of oil sketches from a series made in 2012 in southwestern Newfoundland. Curated by William Forrestall with text by Virgil Hammock.

Stephen Scott, as you can see from the paintings on the wall, has both a fine eye and hand. These small paintings speak elegantly to the long tradition of landscape painting. He is a plein-airist which simply means that he often paints directly from nature and that gives value to the immediacy of his art. Stephen is also an unabashed romantic and that, in this time and age, is a very good thing when so many of us are trying to be pragmatic about everything in our lives. One needs to step back and view the world in front of us as something wondrous; Stephen does.
Our relationship to nature has changed over the centuries from the fear of the unknown to the celebration of its beauty. Before the urbanization of European and North American society, nature could be a dangerous place where dark things could, and did, happen. Early landscape art reflected these feelings by showing nature as a place best avoided or as a background to human, generally religious, events and, at times, reduced to visual, stock, clichés. However by the mid-17th. Century, landscape painting came into its own as a reflection of the emerging values of humanism. During the 19th. and early 20th. Centuries, landscape painting came to optimize Romantic sensibilities. Today there seems to be little mainstream interest in landscape art perhaps because it does not fit readily into the Postmodern mode except perhaps as a vehicle for irony. Back to Stephen as a romantic--he paints landscape as a window to an understanding of nature, as a thing of beauty. There is no irony in these paintings of the west coast of Newfoundland, only his sense of that what was before his eyes waiting to be discovered by him and now shared with us.
© Virgil Hammock, Sackville NB Canada, Wednesday, 4 September, 2013. 

Running Down the Muse

One difference between literary narrative and that of the visual arts lies in literature's disambiguative function and its ability to formulate and engage patterns of emotion common to conflict and resolution, (or discord and harmony) which usually arrived at some form of resolution. Visual art relies on quick emotive response from the viewer based on visual and formal narrative constructions which are held in an arrested position (a permanent moment in time). The strength of visual art is its ability to maintain ambiguity or complexity, which is a directly experiential situation.

The development of tension in literature which contributes to a wider array of empathetic possibilities is sequential ordering of narrative turns, whereas in the visual arts such as painting tension either results from indications of struggle evident in the works' execution (providing a sense of temporal development) or in the manner with which the technical or formal means coalesce with or express narrative and emotional complexity. Its strength is in the encoding of an emotional core which can be grasped immediately.

My experiences in Sackville this summer have underlined and activated my concern not only with landscape painting through a revisit of a region with which I have had an early history and which I find envigorating, but as well a concern for the aesthetic function of art, and its referential qualities.

Alex Colville died this summer, and the experience of being in situ of his formation has caused me to reexamine the narrative and formal construction of emotive expression in his work. As well I have been working with Virgil Hammock on a project involving the production of a portrait, and attendant observations on the artistic process are being posted on Virgils' blog. virgilhammock.com  The experience of painting and discussion is leading me to examine the nature of painting as an object of active contemplation.

                   In progress

There is no single mythical characterization of a muse for the visual arts. There is a suggestion that artists were perceived as quite lowly practitioners somewhere below plumbers. The effects of the lack of this source of divine intervention and relegation to lower class status still smarts, leading to all kinds of compensatory behaviour. But from a more Jungian perspective often artists find a muse in the synthesis of anima and animus through the intervention and influence of the signifigant other, leading to the personification of the muse as typically female. Consider though the effect Leigh Bowery (a male dancer)on the painting of Lucien Freud. Freud's engagement with the sexual and physical aspects of Leigh's character found forceful resolution in the depiction of flesh which transcended stereotypical rules of gender engagement and transformed into pure art. In the work of Colville we see a more deliberate construction of narrative through formal means in order to present highly personal emotive constructions which find their power through the tightness of the artists' control of the abstract elements of representation. There is the sense of the work being not responsive but deliberate descriptions of his life.

The muse then is inspiration, and can be idea driven or responsive. Visual art is referential, and the strength of its connection to the referent (subject; statement) lies in its formal aesthetics as well as the intentionality and presence of the artists' experience. The manifestation of skill is perceived either consciously or implicitly, and is the ingredient which tacitly links to well established standards of beauty even highly challenging or seemingly chaotic invention.

The problem as I see it is when the artwork loses the strength of its position as an object in its own right and serves merely as a point of reference to an argument which is best conducted elsewhere.

Sackville, August 20th

The Sackville School

In the age of horse and buggy there was no need of datelines. Times were fixed by local municipalities. Air travel brought the phenomenon of jet lag, but there was still a relativity to sense of place. Technology has provided virtual experience and brought a very subjective global relativism to our identification with the world.

How we shape experience involves identifications and trade-offs. As a self employed visual artist I consider the following: The artists indulgent if perhaps unpaid freedoms vs. the security and servitude of regular employment. The need for branding vs. the need for continual creative development. Within personal microeconomies the need for maintenance of the status quo vs. the development of new paradigms and potentials. The perceived necessity of tapping the power of social and professional networking vs. the need for maintaining private and individual strengths and freedoms.

There is a tradition in the creative life of leaving the activity of the city behind for periods of rest and replenishment, usually for a rural coastal environment such as Ceret, sometimes in the company of creative collegues, sometimes alone. In my imagination the creative work ethic slows but continues, relieved by evenings of discussion or celebration in local cafes, where wine and tobacco smoke mix with heady argument and discussion of the pitfalls and encumbrances of the creative melieu of paris or berlin or london, the dissection with decreased enmity of the directions of rivals or collegues; a general recharging and reshaping of plans for the next season. New relationships are formed and sometimes old ones broken; there is a sense of hiatus.

In a sense it is this divide between romantic illusion and pragmatic realism which defines my struggles. Richard Dawkins view of a world made better by stripping away the maintenance of metaphor through religion in favour of the civilising qualities of science is like the belief that the new i-socialism can replace or answer the need to wander alone in an unilluminated wilderness where signs become portents and imbued with wordless signifigance. So I choose the road less travelled.

Sackville is like that. I came here to spend a summer sabattical based on an appreciation for quiet and the landscape and found something quite living buried in this quiet corner. Maybe all places are like that, but each has its own quality which is the reason that my idea of travel is to go somewhere, stop, and live for awhile. A week or two somewhere doesn't even give goodbyes a valid quality I think. One other point to coming to Sackville is that I went to school here for my BFA, and at this junction in my life I am looking at some of the threads that have been keeping a life in the arts together.

And true to my romantic illusions in this rural coastal environment a relaxed work ethic has continued, nights have been spent in heady discussions with collegues and new acquaintances, mixed with wine (and not so much tobacco smoke) over the pitfalls and encumbrances of the creative melieu, of history, and the dissection of artistic and tactical directions. There has been a general recharging and reshaping of plans for the coming season through exploration of identifications and trade offs.

Which is the point of the relative qualities of time and space.

Sackville, July 26

Performance vs. Production

 

As a rule, artist statements tend to seek a balance between a need for justification for the rigors of creative production as weighed against outcome. It is difficult for any artist to have a clear sighted view of how well a group of works will perform on an impartial stage. As well, in many cases the work itself bears little comparison with the verbal portrait which the statement provides, illustrating the temporal divide between inception and final resolution, that is, the point at which the work passes into the public sphere. 

In a general sense, late 19th and 20th C art has moved toward a more verbal consciousness, that is, the artist position has come to exist as not only an interpreter of the world visually, but has moved beyond the camera obscura to visual encoding. What we know about artistic process is removed from what we know about culture, but as curious beasts we try to reconstruct the creative moment from its social manifestation backward to its singular event.

 

In terms of the studio practice itself, the working process  exists before the culling and curatorial organization of the artist works before they appear in exhibition. It is the exhibition which gives context and reveals the nature of the artists preoccupations.

Take for example:

 

“The consistency in my work lies in the expressive struggle to use the image as a bridge between the felt and the observed.”

 

This is an uncluttered encryption of the issues relevant to my practice. It attempts to define the perameters of my creative process while describing in simple terms how i feel about what I do. As a metadescription it needs no elaboration but can be used as origin for debate. 

The Move Toward Cohesion

Presentation of finished works incurs the development of external signifiers. From my own perspective see the following key terms:            

Expressionism- That which is internally driven, cognitive and emotive in nature. That which seeks to displace convention. Has roots in gothic art and architecture. A  movement toward “style”.

Romanticism- Not necessarily personally significant or nostalgic in nature, but generally concerned with a kind of adherence to classical formulas of aesthetics. Not limited to 19th C conventions, but includes notions of beauty, composition, form, etc,  and relies on observation of natural form. Offshoots in naturalist philosophy. 

My source of imagery comes from the familiar world, and from identifications or appropriations. These images either fit within my own established sets of identification, or serve to expand beyond the confines of the familiar. In any case, they cannot help but be drawn from personal experience and are autobiographical or topical in nature and reflect a sense of place while attempting to avoid the prosaic. The works include a range of material spanning figurative and landscape. In the production there tend to be periods of disengagement and then reconnection in the development of what I consider the “finished” pictures. In moving toward these “finished” pictures I find often the goal is a process of reduction toward a simplicity or purity of the idea, in the manner of reduction from the outwardly representational to its emotive core. 

 

Part of my production involves having contact with a range of subject.  Being non-serial in nature; I most often feel each work has to struggle for its own authenticity. As well, periodic detachment from the development of ongoing themes necessitates the need for fresh viewpoint, and the avoidance of perceptual or conceptual closure on an idea or formal presentation of an idea. As well, there is so much going on around me; but it is impossible to get it all.  At the point where for one reason or another the picture signals termination of the process it moves into its own sphere of performance.

                        

 From the standpoint of my studio practice I find myself continually in center field, attempting to bridge two seemingly polarized positions. Perhaps this is the root of my own creative energies as well as limitations; the struggle to combine a tendency toward abstracted descriptions of the world (expressionism) with elements rooted in a more empathetic merging with elements of the world. This is visible in transference issues involved in landscape (naturalism), and portraiture and the human form (romanticism). It might be worthwhile pointing out here that although my naturalist representation seeks to diminish stylistic formulations in search of truthfulness in representation, expressive tendencies find outlet in mannerisms of brushwork, the interplay of suggestive and descriptive passages, an awareness of contemporary influence, and the need to loosen closed narrative in favour of a more associative looseness through use of painterly application.  My disparity of artistic direction might consider the observation attributed I think to Goethe that the closest merging of the gothic (roots of expressionism) and the classical come about in the baroque period. Do my works reflect baroque mannerisms?

 

It is a satisfying experience to be able to deconstruct the “exhibition” paradigm.  A certain amount of closure occurs when the work is able to be shown in a way which allows the experience of the works consistencies, range of concerns or pure sensibilities uncluttered by external forces.  In that regard the choice of venue becomes a party to the process of contextualisation, and ultimate validation. It is at this point that engagement occurs, and although the artists vulnerability and exposure do operate as a component of self-representation the work must stand alone.

Sackville, July 9

 

 

                       

           

Just Another Day

There is a space behind the self promotion, hype and selling of success that is sometimes, daunting....

Art Treasures of New Brunswick- Beaverbrook Art Gallery

"Art Treasures of New Brunswick" , Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Feb.21- May 26, 2013

A week ago an exhibit opened at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, "Art Treasures of New Brunswick", curated by Virgil Hammock, critic, and retired head of Fine Arts at Mount Allison University. I missed the opening and lecture because of other commitments but I saw the show today. It was a thrill to find my work placed  next to a painting of a professor and mentor, Edward Pulford, and Saint John painter Jack Humphrey. One thing about museum displays is the amount of room granted to each work. I think another thing is the amount of historical reference, which not only removes the art from the uncertainties of the commercial and/or contemporary world, but provides one with a sense of rest. There is the evidence- that's all there is. I had had some misgivings, having not seen the work since it had been completed, but my fears were put to rest. The painting itself had been difficult, the fact that Alden had died in 1983, and that as he had lived in a time before the ubiquity of digital photography there were virtually no photographic references- some low resolution stills I had taken from a film board documentary, a couple of newspaper photographs, and conversations with his wife, and friends. Plus the memory of the one time I had met him. Still, there is presence, and the most gratifying moment for me was the fact that at the unveiling, his wife, Claudine, was moved.