Φοῖνιξ

εἴκει γὰρ ἤδη θυμὸς οὐδ᾽ ἔτ᾿ ἀντέχει,
θινῶδες ὡς ἄγκιστρον ἀγκύρας σάλῳ·.

My soul yields now and no longer resists,
Like an anchor’s fluke dragged through sand by the surge
— Euripides

All these receive their birth from other things;
But from himself the Phœnix only springs:
Self-born, begotten by the Parent Flame
In which he burn’d, Another and the Same.
— Dryden

Was ich besitze, seh’ ich wie im Weiten,
Und was verschwand, wird mir zu Wirklichkeiten.

All that I now possess seems far away,
And vanished worlds are real to me today.
— Goethe

Abstract Painting

In the twenty first century, we live within an overwhelmingly complex international web of cultural conceptions and technologies. Our cultural artifacts are mostly electronic. They are noisy, brutal and addictive, designed for instant gratification, and they are ubiquitous; they are also largely based on photography (and variant moving-image derivatives of photography), which means that they consist of disembodied images. This disembodiment reinforces our materialism. As materialists, we do not seek out the work of art, our need is for the product. Unlike the work of art, which embodies physical being in the world, products are representations of ideas, ideas like ‘status’ and ‘power’. We are therefore unable to be present to the beauty (or otherwise) of things in the world, since we have no feeling for “the thingness of things”,¹ only feelings and ideas about what things mean. To dwell in culture such as this, the nature of our own being is more than just hidden, it is entirely unknown to us.

If the work of art is not a product, what is it? Poems by Simonides of Keos are amongst the oldest lyric fragments that survive from ancient Greece. The first century Roman writer Quintilian relates the following story about Simonides:

when for an agreed fee he had written for a garlanded boxer the kind of song which is usually composed for victors, part of the money was refused him because as poets commonly do he had digressed and sung the praises of Castor and Pollux; so he was told to seek the balance from those whose deeds he had celebrated. And, as the story goes, they paid their due: for when the victory was being marked by a splendid banquet, to which Simonides had been invited, he was summoned outside by a message that two young men on horseback wanted him urgently; he failed to find the young men, but the outcome showed him that the gods had been grateful to him: he had scarcely crossed the threshold to leave when the dining-hall collapsed on the banqueters ²

This suggests that art is in service to the gods. Writing two thousand years after Quintilian, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger suggests that the work of art originates as the temple.³ Speaking of ancient Greek sculpture, Heidegger says that a representation of a god “is not a portrait whose purpose is to make it easier to realise how the god looks; rather, it is a work that lets the god himself be present and thus is the god himself”.⁴

If the work of art is temple, the artist is priest. This was the exact thought in Shelley’s mind in 1821 when he wrote the following:

Poets … are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion.⁵

Percy Bysshe Shelley translated Euripides and wrote a reply to Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, and he was one of the first European artists to identify materialism as being the enemy of the true work of art. Artists who followed Shelley’s lead include Dostoevski and Tolstoi, Wagner, Rimbaud, Kandinsky and Ezra Pound. As Pound wrote towards the end of his fifty year project The Cantos: “the temple is not for sale.” ⁶ Pound did not mean that the artist should not be paid; he meant that the work of art is not a product.

In order to consider conditions specific to the art of painting, I return to Simonides of Keos. According to Plutarch, “Simonides calls painting silent poetry and poetry painting that speaks”.⁷ It is significant that Simonides refers to the ancient silence of painting, since silence is neither highly regarded nor easily found in the current circumstance. Even more significantly, given that poetry was sung in ancient Greece, Simonides’ words describe the union of poetry, painting and music. Opera, which originated as an art form in Italy at the end of the Renaissance, was born of the desire to return to this same union (or unity of form). In the nineteenth century, the composer Richard Wagner was especially associated with such a concern, but there are various ways in which the work of art can be possessed of the same unity of form which characterises ancient Greek art.

Wagner’s French followers, Beaudelaire and the Symboliste poets, wanted a poetry as close as possible to music. They believed that in poetry it is the actual sounds of the words (their assonances and dissonances, their rhythms) that carries the deeper meaning. “To the Symbolistes, and to Mallarmé in particular … ‘ideas’ themselves, in the everyday sense of the word, are alien to poetry” ⁸ (P.N. Furbank). Mallarmé defines the “idea” in the work of art in a new way. As A.G. Lehmann explains in The Symbolist Aesthetic in France, for Mallarmé, ideas are not confined to the realm of the intelligible, or rather intellectual, speech, but may be found in any form of art, and especially ballet … and we are led to the conclusion that for the poet, poetry and art is something very much wider than the communication of opinions – it is symbolic gesture in the widest sense: the expression of attitude.⁹

Twentieth century artists in many disciplines followed the path opened up by the Symbolistes, recognising that narrative is no more intrinsic to painting or poetry than it is to music. Symboliste painting is painting in which meaning is transmitted directly by colours, materiality, handling of paint and arrangement of forms, rather than by narrative or any other associative relationship to a model being represented. As such, abstract painting is just a very pure form of Symbolisme. The non geometric pure abstraction developed by Kandinsky nevertheless became the basis for a whole new branch of painting.

I have already referred to photography and its progeny (film, video, television, internet, animé, etcetera) as “disembodied”. In contrast, painting is embodied. Photography is image making, but paintings are not images. In painting, the artist transmits the energy of the body into the work, that is, directly from the body itself, through the arm. I am not referring merely to transmission of obvious physical experience such as walking or running, but to the sum experience stored in the artist’s body. This includes emotion, which is deeper than thought, and memory (the mind is not separated from the body). Memories and emotions are created through the senses, they are in the body, and they can be re-expressed physically.

There is a mystery at the very core of the art of painting. Paint is colour as a material in its own right. Colours are substances in this way only in painting; in all other circumstances, colour is either attached to things or exists as an unsubstantiated idea. This fact enables the abstract painter to establish relationships of association between the world of substances that we live in and the substances of painting, and it is this that allows abstract painting to be so powerful without recourse to narrative.

My own experience as an abstract painter is that each colour takes a particular form (or shape) requisite at any given moment to the emotions held in and expressed through the body at that moment. Colour and form are therefore married to emotion in the moment, but in order to be meaningful, this marriage must be informed by extensive art history and an adequate mastery of techniques and materials. Abstract painting is therefore a discipline which requires decades of rigorous training before serious results can be hoped for. The mature abstractionist is able to connect the energy of being in the world right now to the memories and energies stored in the body. In great abstract painting, the artist actually creates a channel between the cultural present and the historical past. By revealing the living connection between present and past, such an artist is able to reveal both the wider meaning of existence in time, and the particular meaning of existing now.

Beauty, the ancient power of painting (the silence of Simonides) seems almost to have disappeared. Beauty is expression of the relationship between the material (substance being in the world) and cultural forms (existence in history, which is existence in time). The temple is a calling to Beauty. If the art work is a temple, in the specific practices of abstract painting it is a temple in which a kind of revelation occurs, a revelation manifested through the physical process of making the painting itself. That is, abstract painting is the revealing of itself, which mirrors the revealing of self through being in the everyday world. In using the word “temple”, I mean an opening, the kind of opening which offers direct experience of the truth and beauty of our existence in the world in time.

Technical Notes

Truth to materials is the basis of good painting technique. These paintings are based around the intrinsic qualities of the pigments, vehicles and supports I use. This is to say that they depend on their materiality for their effect. I take it as given that contrast of texture is a basic syntax which allows materiality to show up. The paintings consist of contrasts of opaque and transparent, rough and smooth, small and large, matte and gloss, oil and acrylic, and also of various contrasts of handling and so on.

The paintings are made out of an unusually large number of different pigments and vehicles. Pigments used include various industrial metallic and interference colours (which were sourced from Japan), and some other unusual colours which I made up into paint myself. Textural attributes of each individual pigment are markedly different from one another; these differences characterise each particular paint and are as carefully chosen as colour values. Choice of vehicle also determines texture and effect.

I am very interested in laying traditional methods and materials alongside those of more recent origin, within the same painting, and I want to use the broadest language of forms possible. The work also shows use of several techniques which can be difficult to control and are therefore of great interest. These include poured paint films, matte glazing in oil, and the use of crazing and craquelure (which are stable in acrylic dispersion).

I have also become particularly interested in maintaining reserves (of earlier paint layers), and in the physical peeling back of paint films; these effects feel like openings in time. As an intrinsic component of materiality, and in recognition of the fact that painting is process (in time), finger prints, brush hairs, markings left by insects and various other “irregularities” have intentionally been left to show in the finished paintings.