Little Art Stories

Another art myth.

Under certain lighting conditions the painting would appear to be figurative. This always disturbed the artist, as he had worked steadfastly to remove any traces of the world from his work. However this was the painting that Greenberg had picked out as being the most truthful, the clearest example of the future path for art and the style that if as an artist he wanted to be successful, would be the one to develop.
Greenberg was never wrong, his pronouncements ended and started careers, his omnipotence was accepted throughout the art world. But still the painter was troubled. He had been sleeping badly during the past few nights. Nights of restless thinking, merged into dreams of ancient art. His thinking becoming confused with his dreaming, his identity merging with those artists he dreamed of.
Two artists dominate these dreams; one a Shaman artist from Palaeolithic Northern Europe and the other a seventeenth century Greek icon painter, both artists struggle with their vocations and wrestle with the purpose of their work. The painter soon realises that before he can resolve his own artistic direction, he will have to wait for his dream selves to resolve theirs.

His Palaeolithic dream-self stands staring at a darkly flickering cave wall. Smokey animal fat tapers burn behind him, casting his image from the floor, to the bulging wall and above onto the curve of the roof. The flames spit and gorge themselves on pools of fat, each leap of light pushing and shaping the artist’s shadow into new ideas of itself, as it blends with the dark of hollowed forms and the shadows of rocky projections. In his hands he holds the burnt remains of wood from a charcoal fire, a dollop of grease from a long forgotten kill, on a flat stone beside him. Chalk from the nearby cliffs in hand sized chunks lies at his feet. He sways to a rhythm that plays in his head and he too dreams. He dreams of the spirit world, a world where that moving energy that we call life, goes to once we no longer move and are still. A place where animals and humans are one, a time when the landscape for action is no longer needed, a space-time of vibration. He dreams of his drum. He remembers the day he killed the red deer, from which he took the skin that he dried and scraped during the long summer months before the even longer winter during which he stretched the membrane for his drum. He can feel his fingers in his dream. Fingers tapping out a rhythm, fingers searching for another sound with which to play. Deep inside his chest his heart is racing, beating out that other sound, waiting for his finger thoughts to be caught up in the beat. He drums his dream.
The Palaeolithic painter’s arm stretches out and touches the wall, his fingers sense the stone membrane that lies between the spirit world within the rock and his own remembered world of sun lit life forms. His fingers feel the movement in the rock skin, his dream mind beats a new rhythm of long dead human souls speaking through the stone amplifier. Spirit waves pass through each surface one after the other as the vibration comes into contact with his body, his feet, the floor, the flames of animal fat, the corridors and shafts that lead to the sun lit world above, the trees and skies and mountains and rivers and seas and creatures… Until after distributing this sound equally throughout the entire world, the artist can hear and feel the music of the spirit land in his drawing hand and he begins to draw.

Lost in the dark forms of animals and flickering tapers the dream merges into the candle-lit world of a seventeenth century icon painter. Light flickers from the gold leaf background of an already started image. The Lamentation of Christ is a traditional subject and the painter has already painted eleven versions of this particular scene. He is old now and is regarded as a master of his art. He gazes at the head of Christ that lies horizontally at the left hand bottom edge of the painting. Christ’s head is supported in the lap of the Virgin Mary, his earthly mother, her own eyes stare directly down at his dead face. Only the under-painting has been completed, the next stage is the detailing of the faces. The old painter knows all the templates, is clear as to which colours to use and how to paint the faces, but for the first time, he questions his faith.
For as long as he can remember he has been aware that the Second Commandment read: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. His boyhood tutor Emmanuel had taught all the Commandments to him and explained their meaning. Emmanuel was a painter as well. As a master he taught how to mix colour, grind paints, apply under-painting, prepare surfaces and most importantly he taught the various image templates to be used, including the one of the Lamentation of Christ he was now staring at. The Master’s teachings on the Second Commandment were given to all apprentices just before their first communion and were seen as part of an apprentice’s rights of passage into adulthood. The old painter in his turn had had to explain the same Commandment to his various pupils and knew that if at any time an apprentice was going to forsake the vocation, it would be at the point when he had to reconcile his conscience with his future occupation.
What his Master had taught him was this. Icons are not the likenesses of anything. They are flat images, not graven. Graven images are sculptures and sculptures are objects and as objects they cannot help communicate with God. Flat images that are not likenesses can however be used as communication channels between God and his people. These images are of ideas not things. Artists should never attempt to copy the world, if they did God would then punish them for their evil; only He can create from nothing. But, as God is perfection and all human beings are, since the expulsion from Paradise, in a fallen state, if God is to commune with his subjects it has to be through a mediated form. The icon is an image that is a picture of an idea that allows you to meditate upon the perfection that is God and that allows His subjects to approach Him from a distance. Prayers are focused through the icons whose images, like the Bible itself are frozen into formats that support the historical weight of the traditions of the church. To change any aspect of the format would be an evil act. Only God or his representative on Earth, the Orthodox Church can create anything new, therefore only visions sent by God and sanctified by the Church could be admitted into the existing image-bank.
The old artist had seen a vision of the dead Christ where Christ’s eyes in the Lamentation are open, staring in death into the eyes of Mary. He had recently been present at the death of an old friend, whose eyes in death had remained open. He had found this a powerful symbol of his friend’s recognition in death of a place beyond death. He was sure Christ would have known this too and that in death he would have had full cognition of his resurrection. However, he was a mere man and as such these thoughts were not to be tolerated as they could lead to a false pictorial idea; a new icon template that had not been sanctioned by the Church. If his thoughts were evil, these could be the result of a temptation laid in his way by Satan and as such he would need to purify himself through prayer before carrying on with the painting.

The flickering candlelight faded back into dream dark as the painter started awake from his dreams. At last he knew which path to take.

Give me time

Hi new bloggers. Lots of you need to send me a link before next week. I'm snowed under with dissertation tutorials at the moment so dont expect any comments from me or any meaningful writing. However the new show at the Howard Assembly rooms by Janet Cardiff (that's inside the Grand Theatre)is a show that I will want everyone to see. It starts 4 February – going to 3 March. This is a re-working of Thomas Tallis’ 16th Century choral masterpiece, Spem in Alium and it is a really fantastic installation. 40 speakers each projecting the sound of one person, are used to gradually bring all the voices together to create something uplifting. Remember to walk around the edge so that you get all the individual contributions and then to stand in the middle to hear the totality of the experience. Comments on the space, venue and audience will be looked for.
Also make sure you comment on the city art gallery and the Northern Art Prize. My own fave rave this week is the small show of Chinese found rocks in the small back room in the Henry Moore Gallery. The relationship between carved stands and found rocks opens out a reverse art history where the plinths are more important than the sculptures. Is this how Brancusi started?