|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
You have a beautiful stretched-canvas on your Easel and your just about to make the first brush mark when you stop and ask yourself, is this a waste of time? Is painting finished, over, redundant, obsolete? Is any thing I am about to do going to be new or merely a kind of reflection of something that has already been done? Can I make a difference? At that point, you have to ask yourself why you want to make this painting because the answer to those questions lies in your intention.
If you want to make a beautiful picture or you want to give painting a go or you want something to exhibit or sell or give to a friend, fair enough. These may be valid reasons to make a painting however, apart from the therapeutic benefits inherent in the process of painting and any monetary gains or the pleasure you might give someone that wants to hang a pretty picture, you may not be wasting your time but you are certainly wasting mine. I might admire your technique, brush marks, draftsmanship, composition, your use of colour, rhythm, movement, energy ECT but your painting will not offer me anything new and I doubt if it will stimulate or engage my intellect and emotions. Whether it is out of naivete, fear or apathy, you are insulting the great innovators of the medium by turning your back on their amazing discoveries.
I believe painting lives on the crossroads between intellect and emotion. That it can be the transporter that merges the two and like past explorers in the medium have proven, the relentless pursuit of this objective will forge a new and exciting aesthetic. This does not have to be devoid of your influences because without context there is no significance. Without acknowledgment of the past, there can only be a shallow, insecure future. If you use an existing line as a guide, you can still draw a straight line even if you do not have a measure. Just as Malevich used Cubism to reach Suprematism. Mondrian may have lined up the impressionists and painters I take my reference guide from like Fred Williams, John Young and Gerhardt Richter were certainly using both Mondrian and Malevich.
I am seduced into using these painters because I am excited by the aesthetic of the grid. It is a perfect icon for life as we know it. There is nothing it cannot or does not already represent. It can also represent nothing, elevating colour to its full potential. It helps us to learn and remember, it brings chaos into order and obscurity into prominence. We live in them, work in them, drive on them, walk on them, swim in them, fly over them, use them to measure the infinite, for reference and communication. Even after the finality of death, we are layed to rest in grid format.
However, innovation is not born from the loins of satisfaction, but conceived from Disappointment in the existing and frustration of unfulfilled potential. It is what I perceived as opposing my ideologies and sensibilities in my guides, which challenge and provoked in me the motivation to explore the avenues of discontentment. I do not always agree with Richter’s colour theory. Secondary colours hopelessly vying for attention condemned to the background overshadowed by the primaries as they fight it out dictating a chaotic rhythm. Or the cold triptyches that reside above Young’s grids elevating the intellect by oppressing the emotion. The arbitrary nature of his process of selecting the pallet. In both painters the isolation of each rectangle hiding the potential of insight and expression. That is not to say that these elements are not relevant in the intentions of the artists but for me they were the catalysts that turned assimilation into innovation.
