I am giving a talk on my work in a couple of weeks, and am busy gearing up for that. It is at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, on May 2nd, for those interested. I have about 7 pages of notes, and 39 slides to show. Hopefully that will be around an hours worth of talking. I will cover a history of my work from the past 5 years, but also some ideas about new ways of thinking about and looking at art.
So basically, below is a rough draft of an excerpt from my talk that I am giving. I am talking about an idea I have been grappling with, and I was hoping I could share it with people and see if it makes sense to a fairly general audience. I am also going to include my new work, so if you aren't interested in art theory then feel free to just skip down to the bottom and have a look at my work. Either way, thanks for reading and please leave comments!
...
At this point, I wanted to discuss a few more
ideas Ive been playing around with about perception. Most of this comes from Brian Massumi,
philosopher and professor at University of Montreal who has discussed the idea
of the real, but abstract, in relation to art. Not to be too grossly overarching in my
generalizations, but among many in our detached convenience and consumption
culture there is an assumption about vision.
Vision is thought of as passive, just a registering of things and,
therefore, art is static and without movement.
Yet, if we were to challenge that assumption, then to say that vision is
not static but dynamic, changes the question entirely. The question becomes what kinds of movement
and what kinds of visual experiential dynamics do we perceive? There are two
artists who, in different ways and to different degrees of success, are working
on questions pertaining to the dynamism of vision. David Hockneys
work has been concerned with time in vision.
Some of his older works like his photographic collages speak to this
attempt. Even now, in his landscapes at
the Royal Academy recently on show, his answer to the question of time was to
go bigger. In an interview with the BBC
he explained
how in the East, the Chinese tackled this problem of time in painting
by making long scrolls and wall hangings that forced the viewer to take time to
look at the piece in its entirety, where your eye couldn’t physically take the
entire work in at once. Hockneys
solution in his landscapes was to go bigger.
It takes time to move your eye up, down, and around his paintings,
thereby highlighting the effect of time on our experiential visual perceptions. Artist Clive Head, who recently showed at the
National Gallery to great reception, says of his work, “[my paintings] display
the use of perspective as a contemporary tool for painting. Creating paintings
is always about inventing space, but the rigid geometry of Renaissance
perspective might seem to preclude the possibility of innovation in
contemporary art. This is further entrenched by photography, which is dependent
on a limited perspectival formula for a fixed and narrow way of recording the
world. My paintings challenge both historic versions of perspective and current
photographic realism. Rooted in my experience of looking around the urban
environment and moving through it, a multitude of spaces, built upon a mathematics
of perspective created uniquely for each painting, are presented seamlessly
within a single unified picture. This offers the viewer a compelling vision
that is not a facsimile of the real world, but an alternative reality.” Head is using a different dynamic of vision,
ordered space, or geometry. His
perspective paintings don’t trick object perception, they activate it
otherwise. The experience of depth isn’t
an optical illusion. It’s a real
experience of depth, minus the depth.
In other examples of dynamic visual experience,
when looking at an object, we can see its volume, feel its weight, and even
tactically how it would feel if you touched it.
We see these things in an object' s form and its texture, not by making a
deduction about the object, but instantly we see these qualities with and
through the actual form. Therefore,
seeing is a kind of action, only
without the action. Massumi describes, “That’s why we see movement in a [spiraling] motif. The form naturally poises the body for a
certain set of potentials. The design
calls forth a certain vitality affect -the sense we would have, for example, of
moving our eyes down a branch of rustling leaves and following that movement
with our hands. But [in art] that life
dynamic comes without the potential for it to be actually lived. It’s the same lived relation as when we “actually” see leaves, it’s the same potential.
But here its purely potential. We
cant live it out. We can only live it in - in this form- implicitly.”
This idea of the inwardly lived dynamic
qualities of perception offer exciting possibilities for new ways of thinking
about and looking at art. There is an
immediate self referentiality of perception set up, an awareness of the feeling
of perceiving. In real life these invisible perceptional
qualities like volume, weightiness, depth and texture are all
backgrounded. They are there but they
disappear into the living and action of life.
But art makes us see that we
see in this way. It brings these dynamics
to the foreground. It becomes a question
of emphasis. Art becomes the technique
for making our perceptions perceivable, a technique for living life in.
In relation to my own work, then, my landscapes set up a place where
rhythm, sound, perspective, and feeling of place are all foregrounded. These intrinsic qualities from places I’ve
experienced and emotional states I’ve felt are all foregrounded in my work,
suspended in paint for consideration.
The abstract parts of my experiences in life are taken out of the
dynamic tumbling through time and are highlighted. This is a different kind of landscape
painting.
...
From the Chew River, Oil on Sized Canvas, 214 x 111 cm
Portrait in Light and Shadow, Oil on Sized Canvas, 55 x 45 cm
Well, here are my last two paintings, as promised. One is a portrait and the other is a new landscape. Feel free to comment with whatever your thoughts are, about the work or the excerpt from my talk. I would love to hear your thoughts! xx
Very interesting thing about perception. To give you my own perspective.....It is amazing how competely opposite Matt and my perception is, of movement, time in particular, life in general, and art especially. We have completely different perceptions of about 90% of the art we view. I see darkness, discomfort, death, and stagnance, and he will see creativity, life, movement and art. Very reflective of how we approach the world in general. The size of the painting or any other changes the artist makes doesn't necessarily change this, infact makes our differences more pronounced. This is true of music too. I'll be able to see the weight, and substance of an object in a painting, and he will just not be able register this because he approaches art without any preconceptions. Its amazing how he assumes so little in say, the painting of a vase...to him there is no weight, no backstory, just lines and paint and colors...mostly light. (This is a bit of an exageration). Its funny how if youre open to other peoples perspectives and ask them enough questions, you can gain those perspectives, until the point you can see anything in art that you so choose. Matt is really good at percieving the exact opposite at what you may want to convey in art...that or Im a terrible artist. While we may approach art in such different ways, however, we always can relate on when we read bullshitty art blogs. Haha. *Ellie Letterman
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