Broken Color Journals - 02

Exploiting the Tension Between Reason and Mystery

A friend of mine (and an accomplished artist), Marty Hatcher, and I were recently "conversing" via email about art. She had just read my previous column, and was telling me that in her own work she was exploring a path of "feeling" a painting into existence.

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Marty is a painter's painter, with old-style academic training and credentials most of us can only envy. She started out doing sketches of classical sculptures and learning in the style of the old Dutch and Russian masters. Her work today would, in my parlance, be described as realist/impressionistic, and in my opinion it also wears its emotional content on its sleeve. So as she spoke of "feeling" the painting, I was thinking, "You're already there!"

She had just gotten off the phone with HongNian Zhang, a classically-trained Chinese immigrant and one of the best contemporary painters in this country. They were discussing a workshop Zhang would soon be instructing at Marty's studio, and he was describing his current line of teaching. He said that honoring the intuitive, emotional side was going to be a prominent concept in the next book he will publish.

Zhang talked of the "innocent artist within," as opposed to the "professional painter" who knows all the rules. In responding after reading my column, Marty said, "I am delighted that this notion of 'letting go and allowing the creative child in me take over' keeps cropping up in my life. To me this definitely means that I am personally going in the right direction."

This is a concept that I have been known to champion. Mention the word "rules" and you hit a hot button with me; I've never been very fond of them. Undoubtedly, the rules of color and light in art are useful. My own work grows and develops in proportion to my learning, understanding, and incorporating them, and my failed canvases are a result of my lack of mastery of the basics... the rules of color and light.

I use the term "rules," loosely, because to me all of it is a pack of lies and half-truths. Marty's opinion diverges – emphatically – from mine on this point, but to me we should use a less authoritarian term... "Suggested guidelines," or perhaps, "concepts." Certainly my use of the word 'lies' is meant to be provocative. Just because it is stated by a master artist as truth should not shield it from the harsh light of examination.

There are many established systems of rules, from the Dutch masters to the impressionists and beyond, and all of them are at least partially – if not mostly – correct. All of them have a specific aesthetic context, and generally that context seeks to incorporate complete, objective realism, and then deviate from it with a stylistic intent.

I have read enough about both the scientific and artistic understanding the perception of light and color to know that even objective realism is on shaky ground, especially when physics becomes involved.

Any attempt to transmute that which is seen by the eye to that which is viewed on canvas is inherently prone to speed wobbles. Even the way in which film and digital cameras capture and record light is the result of a wrestling match between sterile science and a blood, sweat, and tear-stained human existence. We humans have, in our various schools and tribes, agreed that certain methods of painting are aesthetically pleasing, and represent an accurate record of what we see.

I'm guessing that early mankind made the same agreements while viewing cave wall paintings in the dim light of fire. Extrapolate forward into the millennia, if you will, and hear them smugly expressing the same thoughts about the painters of yesterday and today.

I am not an iconoclast. It would be a sadness if my words caused someone's artistic belief system to fall, and a triumph if I cause one to question their beliefs about art... but enough about the rules. Gather them like riches, then break them as it suits you, for art is built on a laissez-faire economy.

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I favor the concept of the "innocent artist" when the state of "innocence" is that which exists before art teachings begin to pollute the mind with the way things "should" be. It's a necessary pollution, like benzene in the water table of an oil field. Who among us feels they can completely do without gasoline? In art our creative engines run on the gasoline of color-and-light teachings, so we have to take care with regard to benzene, which in this case is the "box" of acceptable painting technique.

Yet at the same time, Zhang's term, "innocent artist," amuses me. The innocent artist inside me isn't innocent in any sense of the word. Zhang's concept of coming closer to the child is true, but a child is a slave to the primitive impulses of his id. The "professional painter" in me, the policeman of my psyche, has to keep a close eye on the innocent artist, who is a known seditionist, malcontent, lecher, kitsch junkie, egomaniac, iconoclast, and opportunist of churlish manner and ill repute... and to top it all off, he likes to squeeze my Old Holland paints directly out of their forty-dollar-tubes directly onto the canvas! I have stacks of unfinished work, derailed and in ruin at his primitive hand. I don't want my sinful, caddish "innocent artist" to sully my reasonably good standing in the art community.

Yet, just like the sin of lust, without it there would be no procreation. Our art is born of sin just as we are. As long as we wish to create, the willful, libidinous, innocent artist must be allowed to get his groove on. As to how much fun is too much, that is strictly a matter of your penance to St. Vermeer. You're taught to fear opening Pandora's box, and – depending on what you want from your art – you are right to be cautious. As I stated in the previous column, the best thing you can do as an artist is gather information, then follow your own compass.

Isn't that just what Heironymous Bosch did? And Vincent Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock? They bravely sailed past the known and right off the end of the earth, spilling into a yawning chasm full of wonder and despair. Open that box lid too wide and there could be hell to pay. (Like Picasso said, "Art is dangerous," and I believe he knew Pandora well.)

The voice you hear as you read this column, it could be the voice of art wisdom, or it could be the voice of a fool. Either way, it is an absurd paradox (exclusive to art) that the only way that voice could be wrong is if it were the voice of reason.

We find art in things that exist on the other side of reason, or as it is popularly stated, in the sublime. I would go so far as to define aesthetics as, "the tension between reason and mystery." The sublime is bigger than we are, and it uses color, line and form as its pawns. As Marty described it in the context of her work, "I've actually gone back to the more abstract, even undefinable, way of feeling a painting into existence."

In other words, she is finding ways to selectively undo her learning, which she can always reestablish on the fly if needed. In my own work, I am very much aware, daily, of my shortcomings of knowledge in painting technique. In this column I am a provocateur, and like critics, they are a dime a dozen. But temporarily assuming another's life view and aesthetic philosophies can stimulate new thinking. I want to stir the pot, and nudge artists to look outside the comforts of their self-imposed boxes toward the undefinable – the chasm – as they pick up the brush.

So keep in mind, as you paint, that the only authorities in art are those we have ordained, and we can strip them of their credentials in the blink of an eye if it suits us. Paint with passion, shake loose the chains, and kneel at the altar of art authority as it suits you... Mind you, keep only one knee on the ground, with the other foot poised over authority's neck.