PATHOLOGY AND ATTRACTION
Art, Pathology and Attraction
[Dec 2003]
Jean Baptiste-Camille Corot—Sin
la Nain.
Apart from being about
aesthetics, all art is also, in a deeper sense, about our pathology,
whatever has affected us most deeply inside. Whatever in our experience
has come closest to us and impacted upon us most at the deeper, aesthetic
or spiritual level—such will be visible to some degree in our art and in
our artistic tastes. To some extent, this concerns our suffering. Art is
thus partly an attempt to depict, glorify, preserve and immortalise those
very elements in the outer world, which have attracted and fascinated us
the most, and that have moulded and hence drive us. Art thus involves
preserving those times, places and people, those sensations that we have
experienced most intensely. It aims to sanctify and to express them. It
aims to depict those most intense aspects of our being.
In life, we explore what
attracts and excites us as well as other things. As a result, we
inevitably end up excited by and attracted towards certain special things—certain
colours, themes, objects, etc. These come to constitute the key elements
of our artistic world. This is true of every artist. For those people who
continually search and gain only transient excitement, then they end up
attracted to very little in life. They have a big problem. What is the
point in being alive if nothing excites or stimulates you? It means life
and existence become devoid of pleasure, meaning and purpose, when that
stage is reached. It means we have failed to find our true path, failed to
find our bliss, our sense of love and failed to find God in this life.
That is a very sad state of affairs.
Camille Pissarro – The Orchard in
Springtime.
All art undoubtedly
starts in the simple attraction the artist innately feels for certain
visual forms, which stimulate and excite his/her imagination and which
inspire some type of composition, some ‘creative event’ that is the
germ formation of a response to the world. This is usually instinctive.
Without the engagement with a stimulus and the excitement the inner
emotional response there could be no art. Thus, all art can be construed
as a response to the world and a response to an exciting stimulus from
something that fascinates or is attractive to the artist. This must be so
in the very first instant, regardless of what follows later by way of
conscious deliberation or intellectual construction. It forms the primary
artistic impulse.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir… Portrait of
the Actress Jeanne Samary, 1877.
This primary impulse represents the engagement of the
artist with the visual world around him/her, drawing inwards—absorbing—those
forms, shapes, colours and styles to which s/he feels a strong affinity:
selecting those alone and rejecting most others. These forms are ‘pulled
in’ as it were, so as to comprise the key elements of an inner visual
world. It is from these key elements that their art is then constructed
and by which it is clearly identifiable by others. Quite simply, they form
the essence of their art because they comprise the essence of their inner
visual world.
By contrast, it is self-evident that in all the great
artists their lives have been filled with a deep engagement with the
materials and the elements of this world to such a degree that they have
overflowed with stimulus, with excitement, with fascination by attraction
towards those key elements in the world.
Paul Cezanne…L’Estaque, 1885.
In the case of Dali, Matisse, Renoir, Cézanne and
Leonardo, and many others, what strikes us most vividly is the adornment
of their art with key repeating elements and themes that seem to shine out
most. These are the very things in life—subjects, objects, colours,
themes, styles—that have excited and engaged them most passionately and
most consistently, and which can be seen lingering repeatedly in their
work. These features distinguish their art from anyone else’s. Their art
can only be fully and truly understood by an awareness of this fact. Their
art only comes to life and truly makes sense only when we include a deep
appraisal of these key factors. It is these key factors that comprised
their visual and aesthetic world. These key elements were the world, as
they knew it, as they found it. The key elements in their art represent
what in this world ‘hit them’ most forcefully, and which have
fascinated and excited them the most.
Francis Bacon…Self
Portrait, 1971.
Art is undoubtedly therapeutic for the artist; it is
their therapy, their release, and their passion. It is their passionate
engagement with the world, from which their art springs. Understanding
their art, quite simply translates into a process of identifying and
understanding the key elements of their inner, visual, artistic world. Art
is therapeutic in the wider sense of concerning our innate pathology and
is concerned with what in this world has affected us most deeply, most
profoundly, and what we have internalised most vividly and thoroughly. It
is about our joy and delight but also about our suffering and our pain.
Both elements get woven into the art. You only have to look at Lucien
Freud, Goya, Francis Bacon, van Gogh and some of Picasso’s darker stuff
to see that art is often as much about pain and ugliness as it is about
joy and beauty. Indeed, in some artists the suffering and pain entirely
eclipse the joy and the aesthetics. Thus, art is therapeutic and
cathartic.
Art is centred about our response to the world, to the
world as we see it, of how we found it to be and how we personally
experienced it ourselves. Not as somebody else saw it or experienced it,
but we ourselves personally and subjectively. Art is therefore rather
selfish and self-centred; it is egocentric. It is a story told from an
inner world depicted in colours and shapes.
Paul Cezanne…Blue Vase.
Most art involves the selection [and partial—perhaps
even the endless—reworking] of the most exciting artistic elements in
the visual world, drawn from the visual world, internalised by the artist,
and creatively recombined and rearranged into new and exciting effects
[images] that carry a message about the world as we see it—or how it has
affected us. It conveys an impression of and a message about the world as
the artist sees it, solely from his or her own point of view. Sometimes—perhaps
even very often—this process may be unconscious, in the sense that the
artist cannot explain why they like certain things, or what appears in
their art and why. At other times, it is a conscious process, even a
tedious one, of painstaking construction and composition, a process of
conscious or part-conscious reworking of the same themes and subjects,
over and over again.
Either way, for the art connoisseur any sound
interpretation and evaluation of the works of an artist may well require
an enormous amount of thinking, observing and reflection. The pictures
have to be fully absorbed and reflected upon from many angles and in many
moods before their significance dawns. There is the first rush of
attraction and excitement, and then follows a longer period of reflection,
meditation and analysis, in which the key elements of the artist’s work
become more solidly identified and which can be said to account for one’s
own attraction to this particular artist. The attraction may well turn out
to be a resonance between two inner worlds.
Yves Tanguy…Through Birds,
Through Fire but Not Through Glass, 1943.
In many respects, the task of the artist is often to
challenge and rewrite the apparent rules of the visual world—the rules
the world seems to be governed by—so as to create ‘impossible acts’
or entirely new visual experiences that stimulate the imagination, that
stun and excite one into new ways of seeing. Many of the works of Escher
and Magritte belong in this category; likewise, Tanguy and Miro. Some of
the best art certainly does create impossible acts, and yet, apart from
pushing boundaries, still conveys a message and has an aesthetic
attractiveness about it too. The greatest art does all these things and
the work of the greatest artists has these elements in superabundance,
visible or tangible in virtually all their work.
Consequently, many artists feel a sense of therapeutic
release or illumination from the creative process. Each time they make
something new, they feel a new sense of joy. They have broken and reworked
those rules all over again in a new way. This brings excitement, bliss,
euphoria and often an intense sense of release from the confines of the
visible and tangible world as we see it—a sense of triumph often dawns.
In an intensely subjective way, they feel blessed and released from the
normal rules, as if they have been induced into God’s way of looking and
creating, as if they have transcended the rules and thus gotten closer to
the creator of all rules about how the world is shaped and how light must
fall on things and illuminate their shape and colour. That an artist can
do this seems like an imitation of God’s creative power and confers a
certain mystery and dim sense of power. This makes all artists somehow
separate and special beings in the world.
J M W Turner…The Thames
near Walton Bridge, 1806.
In the case of Turner and
Constable—two of the most highly influential artists—it can honestly
be said that they were not truly very revolutionary in terms either of
subject or technique. Certainly, they emphasised the continued shift away
from religious themes and towards more overtly secular ones, initiated
after the Reformation, especially in
John Constable…Brighton Beach with
Colliers, 1827.
Dutch art, but beyond that it is hard to see what was
so great about them. Primarily, their fame and importance resides in the
dapple technique of Constable and the tremendous obsession with blurred
lighting effects in Turner that together inspired the revolution in French
art after about 1850 and which led directly to Impressionism and
ultimately also to abstraction and expressionism; in other words, to all
the art of the modern epoch. Beyond these facts, however, there is nothing
very revolutionary per se about Turner or Constable. Both were very
ordinary artists who turned out much competent but astonishingly ordinary
art.
In fact, their fame rests not so much in what they did
but what came after them and which can be traced back to their enduring
influence; they were the main precursors of many revolutionary approaches.