Mondrian in an upside down world

Now without getting too heavy about the following saga, I cannot help but point our that it does reveal one of the several cracks that I believe weaken the strength of the Post Modernist foundation that has reigned over us all these past eighty years. 

Objective and scientific reliance upon truth has been eroded in almost all aspects of modern life, from the way we receive information to the way we impart it to others (both our own, but also our entire collective cultural histories too that have opened up like autopsies for all to see). One cannot argue with things like this anymore than one can deny a giant river through the Alps. However in the political world, in a powerhouse like America, the concept of an objective truth has all but evaporated, or at the least, been severely damaged by recent politicians. Feelings are not fact, or so we have been taught to believe, and to push this infantile narrative is mendacious. But curiously, in the realm of Art, yes, feelings do become facts in this world of creative invention specially when it is convincing. For Art is a world of poetic contrivance, it's an inspired state of imagination in contrast to the world of politics and science even. Though to place politics and science together in the same sentence is unfair to scientists.

I am not alone in believing that the culprit of misinformation has been groomed by the internet, perhaps the greatest invention since the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg back in the 15th century. But this has been elevated to an even higher state of alert by the search engine Google and others. The speed of any information circling the globe today is mind-boggling. It is a Yin-Yang situation because all its fortunes are coupled with equal misfortune. 

Why do I bring this up? It's not exactly rocket science, but in this venerable world of experts and know-it-alls, there are concrete clues reminding us that these smartypants are sometimes clueless. For example, this Mondrian had been hung upside down for eighty years before anyone realised it (See below, or better yet, google the story).

In the following photo two gentlemen are looking at the version that is in fact upside-down. The correct version is at the very bottom in this post, and in it, are a double set of dark blue lines running horizontally at the top which give the picture weight. They also give the work a sense of gravity when correctly presented (and the way the artist had originally intended, though this is my own feeling). 

I also prefer it this way because of the single blue line running up the far left side of the picture, and this too, appears to anchor the image. Visually, also, my eyes gravitate more to the left, and they run up the blue line as if a heavy column to the imaginary heavy roof that once covered the Parthenon in Athens. 

But hey! It's not the kind of picture that would draw me in enough to really look at in the first place.

{Addendum} Because this painting was principally made by using rolls of coloured tape that have so severely disintegrated the curators have decided to leave it in its current state. So thus, it will continue to be hung upside down.

Turner, a king in the realm of wise children

I was sent this small Turner watercolour recently by a mysterious gentleman, whom I don't know, a certain Peter Shear from Indiana who is a painter. I believe that he stumbled upon this small blog space and understood not only what interested me but also himself too. In any event I thank him for this small gift.

It was a shock to see it for this unpretentious little oeuvre, lacking in any visual presumption is just so perfect and beguiling that I could weep with envy. Its innocence speaks of a rare and simple vision, one which only a very insightful young child of rare sensibility might be able to pull off on a very lucky and insightful afternoon. 

There are at certain moments this awkward honesty in Turner's voluminous record-keeping of the sea and sky that reveals such a playful abstraction that one could possibly think (if they knew little or nothing about Art) that it was done by a child. But this would be a fairly cheap value judgement by smug smart-alecks whose sensibilities are be ruled uniquely by the left side of their brains only, for this is a masterpiece of invention.  

The perfect brilliance of this tiny and unobtrusive little souvenir is beyond description. This child-like innocence belies a profound vision, one that was cultivated by a lifetime of looking at Nature, but also by an enormous talent buried deeply within the structure of its four corners and behind its quiet and simple design. 

But hidden within this simplicity are the essentials of picture-making. There is a foreground, middle ground, and a background which together, seem to come racing up to the viewer all at once as one plane exactly like the visual world does in fact. In Painting, this is the art of greatness for it has to be learned through practice, but also a generously extensive understanding of Art History itself. 

This is because normally, our eyes don't allow this to happen due to our incapacity to focus on all planes all at once simultaneously. It is therefore left to the artist to reconfigure this physical impossibility in order that we, the viewers, can imagine it. But this sounds way more complicated than I am making it out to be. But put simply: generally, our eyes only reveal to us at nanoseconds at a time, an entire organic view of the world as we look out at it one moment after the next. It is why some painters will squint their eyes whilst looking at a landscape in order to see it as one whole organic form in their mind. But to paint it as one whole viable form can only be achieved through an abstract process, one which the gifted child does often so naturally.

This means that normally, we cannot, without practice, see a landscape as painters have learned to make them because they were re-created using a kind of abstraction built by planes that move forward and backward on the two dimensional surface. 

There is no doubt that a landscape painter will look out at the world in a different sort of way just as a botanist will also see a garden differently than the rest of us. 

The painter must be inventive, for instance, he needs to put into place a kind of visual scaffolding that can fashion a foreground, middle ground and background, which are not readily apparent to the rest of us because our eyes do not naturally take them in as one. 

A viewer doesn't realise any of this because they don't have to think about it, it's a given and taken for granted. But the painter seems to understand this though in different ways because they know they need to reconfigure a visible world through a sort of connivance of talent and gumption to reconstruct the logic of a landscape in a painted image. Alas, for the gifted and clairvoyant child (and a few lucky painters and visionaries), it's innate but for most painters it needs to be learned. I had to learn it for instance, because it didn't come naturally to me as I had lost that creative child much earlier in my life. 

Put another way; the 'Academic Painter', of which there are many prestigious adherents, are trained to paint Nature (landscapes and models), as a compilation of separate parts, attaching them through painting technique alone. An academic painter sees only a picture as pieces to be attached to one another, he/she consequently attempts to tie them all together a bit like a patchwork quilt. But unlike them, a painter with a vision sees everything as an organic whole image all at once in their mind. The mind of this painter has learned to make sacrifices in order to achieve a whole picture plane that we call a painting.

In the Turner above, is a great example of seeing the 'motif' of the picture as a unified visual idea. Because of either his long experience or his immense talents, he saw everything as a whole and he always made the necessary sacrifices to create a whole form.

Somehow, Oscar Niemeyer Soares Filho will vanquish fascism

Oscar Niemeyer Soares Filho is my new hero! I went to Brazil about thirty years ago and was suitably dazzled with so much Modernist detail that seemed to be in lurking every little corner or round balcony. And looking down on the mosaic park design from a hotel high above the Copacabana beach front was a joyful sensation and it gave me this crazy unrealistic  optimism for the future of humankind. How did this government, this culture, these people, understand the meaning of such playful beauty? And how were they able to display such civic idealism in a world of limited bureaucratic imagination?? What an adventure! I remember thinking decades ago during my visit.

But watching news of the recent attack on the Congress in Brasilia suddenly awakened in me a complete infatuation and wonder at Niemeyer's design for the entire complex now being so thoughtlessly trashed by the mob. Not only do they not deserve a Democratic system, but neither do they merit Beauty, and that is the mark of a troll.

Ok, these are cheap photos I ripped from Google but I promise you I will go there sometime soon and take my own photos for this space herein! It will be my next pilgrimage because I just love this playfully sedate civic architecture. 

It will be like my trip to see the Taj Mahal already almost forty years ago and which, I should say, several idiot friends had warned me against visiting because that it was a big waste of time. OOOUUPH! These friends, I realised afterward, were the real waste of time because the Taj Mahal was for me, one of the most extraordinary places I had every been in my whole life. 

So like those idiot friends, and those too, who  ransacked the Congress in Washington two years ago, I only pray that these illiterate trolls be sent to Prison for years to contemplate their own furry, smelly feet. 

B.T.W, because I am on the subject, try as I may, I have never been able to see any beauty in the Capitol building in Washington. It has always been a boring, conventional, and ugly bit of cliche architecture for me)

Anyway, one has to love the Brazilians for creating such a remarkable government complex like they did in Brasilia. It's overwhelming in everyway, and it says to the world: We love Life and Art!

Let them eat cake in Painting Purgatory!

 

Evening Prayer Brunswick Heads, 17 July 2020, oil on canvas board, 30 X 25 cm

This rather tasty-looking study I recently saw in the photo library and liked immediately. I certainly don't remember it at all which doesn't surprise me because I probably didn't think it was very interesting at the time. It feels like the memory of a dream.

But today this drizzly first day of the New Year 2023, I see a delicious design as if made by a pastry chef in Copenhagen. But it's not a clean or polished design, and this gives it charm (or not, depending upon your sensibilities). But it has this fresh shaggy feeling of spontaneous whimsy that despite its plasticity (in the historical, and painterly terms) it presents like a flat rough draft from some colourful planet where people communicate through design only.

I like this flat quality, its been something I have been after for years now. Though 'flat' evokes Matisse, I really mean Cezanne, who seemed to compress his large and complicated pictures like he had run them through a press somewhere in Painting Purgatory. And in a rather convoluted and strange way he revisits all those strangely flat landscapes of the early Renaissance around Florence and Siena but even Giotto too, much earlier near Venice.

I do understand that this is not a picture for the general public, though maybe some clever kids under the age of five might really see it. It's not even a picture for the Art Elite because it has traces of Nature in it. "Mais Non! tut! tut!,,, No Nature s'il vous plait!" This is a just painting for myself.

Its sensual colour harmony is simple. Placed like ribbons, a yellow band and a pink one, are both sandwiched between the pale blue sky above and the deep blue-black of the sea below. At the very base of the picture, like an entrance way or a discreet door mat, is a band of blue green to help offset the warmth and to welcome the eye into the picture plane.

The horizon is clunky! Yes,,,, I know,, Ha Ha,,, viewers wishing for a clean line will be disappointed! Alas,,,,,, and it's rough too, it might feel like it was torn from a page out of one's own dream when they had awakened too quickly. 

But, in the end, aren't all paintings rather dream-like in nature? After all, they exist for each of us individually, and only for such a small moment in our minds. Our reactions to them is also deeply personal and we interpret them according to our own emotional history. They come to us seemingly out of the blue, only to be replaced by other incoming images. What do we remember about the experience of seeing a painting? And what do we retain of our own experiences anyway? Isn't it all dream?

It maybe does seem at first more real for the creators who labour and fret over them while wondering if they are any good in the first place. But then, soon, their creations are replaced by other creations, over and over again, as the cycle of work continues. But in the end, even these artefacts will become dreams, and the artist will hardly ever remember making them in the first place.