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| Pablo Picasso in his studio ‘Le Californie’. |
If Life = x, what is Art?
Painting is rightly declared dead.
When a painting is conceived as a dingbat of interior design, or as an advertisement for a pet art dogma, its observer can smell this painting’s disconnection from life, its deadness.
Art may be an "imitation of life", but this phrase sheds no light on art by leaving "life" as a vague, undefined x in the equation.
A living painting reflects life’s essence: a poignantly unreliable series of events that delivers uncertain outcomes.
Great painting resonates with this wobbly, suspenseful human experience called life. It does so with specific ingredients:
Ingredients of a Living Painting
1. Tension.
Tension, whether psychological, narrative or compositional, resonates with life’s dissatisfying, conflicted or poignant aspects.
A painting that explores conflict of wants and unsatisfied yearnings directly quotes from the individual’s life.
2. Play, Fun.
The sheer fact of presently being alive urges both profound wonder and shallow pageantry.
The perpetually serious can only communicate through the dark urgency of impending doom‚Äî but Play, life’s toy trumpet, welcomes viewers to snap out of indifference, to drop their guard and to enter a dialogue about life.
3. Sensuality.
As life’s matchmaker, an artist prompts a love affair between the viewer and the physical world.
The artist embraces the material world unapologetically. The material world is life’s vocabulary, and the building block of human experience, and the bedrock of everything Spiritual.
4. Chance, Happenstance.
Communication is art’s right foot, accident is the art’s left foot, and having two left feet is great art.
Welcoming and incorporating accidents of process takes painting’s meaning to a place that narrow, conscious reason cannot reach.
In one hour of painting, the artist mentally edits a painting about 8,000 times.
Claude Monet in his studio.
5. Wit, Irony.
Not taking process, message or self too seriously is the artist’s antidote to modern isolation.
6 Hope.
Too much hope erodes a art’s tension. Too little hope is makes art unbearable.
Picasso’s "La Guernica" exemplifies a balanced tension: amid devastation a woman holds a candle, a modest symbol of hope.
"La Guernica", oil painting on canvas by Pablo Picasso.
7. The Ephemeral, Anicha, Death.
The Buddhist concept of anicha suggests that everything that begins will end, including our lives and individual consciousness.
The ephemeral simultaneously confounds our ideal of a ‘perfect’ life while imbuing life with value and urgency. For example, plastic flowers, though long lasting, are valued less than living, momentary flowers are.
Ephemerality speaks directly to the longings, regrets and urgency daily experienced in the process of being alive.
Chagall in his studio.
8. Sustained Ambiguity, Sustained Path.
An artist benefits by developing comfort with deep uncertainty about one’s artistic direction.
A deeper sense of direction, living on pure fascination with process, leads the lost artist to unimaginable places.
The poet John Keats refers to this ability to sustain an artistic path in the face of uncertainty as Negative Capability.
Living painting never haunts well worn paths. It cuts new trails for the artist and viewer to experience life freshly.
August Rodin in his sculpting studio.
9. Proportionality.
Balance these ingredients to direct a painting’s entry into life experience.
One can detect these ingredients used to greater or lesser effect in art of the past (except irony, a modern phenomenon). For example: 19th century romantic painting and poetry, Greek tragedies, ancient cave art, 20th century silent film.
What Painting Can’t Do
- A painting without a wish to resonate or to rhyme with life is born lifeless.
- Painting can never teach nor dictate a viewer’s response. Like one parent trying to conceive alone, a monologue dies childless. Painting offers a place of dialogue and consequently fresh means by which to experience life.
- Painting cannot change the world. Individuals do. By delivering a single message, didactic painting is merely graphic design.
De Kooning and his wife in his studio.
What Painting Does
Great painting— and all great art— rises above the limitations of its medium, not by convincingly simulating life but by asking, "Is it just me, or have you experienced this as well?"
By subverting the assumption that we are strangers to our own lives and squatters— beleaguered, uninvited guests of an unwelcoming universe, substantial painting shares life among artist and viewers.
Matisse in his studio.
