I think

 

Returning to Descartes after my own (continuing) decade of communing with the ‘great book of the world’ brings some refreshing sentiments (2006 [1637]: 10). Descartes, described as vaguely averse to social interaction, and whose own words betray an intellectual confidence that would commonly be described as arrogance, shines nonetheless as a glowing example in my current scholarly position. For while I am ironically obliged to memorise his key precepts, he, with a weary sigh, sets aside his books, and even abandons the whirlwind of travel, feeling compelled above all else to set to work—to order his own thoughts (Descartes, 2006 [1637]: 11).

Faced with the thought of a few extra bachelor-level exams, I come upon an unexpected internal resistance. This method of learning—which once consumed my time and absorbed my hungry mind—seems dull and soulless; it does not stir the movements of my mind as it used to. I note with some surprise that all those years of rote learning and trustingly following teachers have worked their effects: new and complex ideas are not threatening; entire books are not half so laborious as the scattered chapters I used to wrestle with. The hunger for interesting ideas is coupled with an aptitude for working related ideas into one another, for noticing points of contact and of difference, and for seeing the broader themes and sensing the overall direction of a work in its entirety.

But it remains a formidable step from gathering and organising the ideas of others to casting them aside and asserting one’s own position. Such articulation depends on the kinds of skills accumulated by following in the mental steps of others, probably even on being fluent in the language of their concepts, and certainly familiar with their debates; but it ultimately requires a blank page. A blank page and a few other indulgences: time, space, and courage, often cloaked as misanthropic arrogance.

Inwardly, my convictions begin to bite. I do not read with the same wonderment and open curiosity, trying on the outlooks of others, judiciously weighing the matter from all sides. I clash with these books: I tear at their holes and prod their weak spots, wanting them to help me but finding them inadequate. I am reaching the point where I will have to abandon my books and establish my own framework, my own method. These snarling convictions, peering here and there through the cracks left by others, need a clear ordering, explanation and defense. I must take a good look at them. I must decide—even plan—how to go about this.

Kant cuts a fine example. Forced to support himself, he turned to teaching immediately, privately at first, only managing to secure a teaching position at university after several years. But his pay depended upon the attendance of students, and so he had to take on a huge workload and court a dedicated following of students. This occupied him for decades—decades!—before he secured tenure, at which time he promptly sat down and (I believe the technical term is) busted out the Critique of Pure Reason. What captures my imagination is the thought that Kant did not waste a moment, though his route was a slow one. Teaching is a battlefield; it offers ample opportunity to test one’s ideas. My own experience of teaching drawing makes plain to me that ordering the content is the easy part; the greater burden of teaching falls on defending one’s ideas. Students concoct all manner of contradiction; they embody resistance. The cunning teacher needs a sack of reasons to stay ahead. But if she can stand by what she presents, she can sharpen it from every conceivable angle with the rigorous discourse that the classroom offers. When a quiet desk presents itself, the work is almost done.

Rousseau (1953 [1781] : 328; 374) sought not the solitude of the desk, but the open air and physical movement. The rolling fields of France, kissed by the sun, were his blank page, and as he wandered them without company he turned his thoughts over in his mind, working and reworking them, embellishing them, tasting them aloud and testing them against the breeze—and forgetting them, and whipping them up again, until they finally found their way onto paper in a gush of impassioned certitude. ‘For never having been able to write or think at my ease except in the open air, I was not tempted to alter my methods … The forest of Montmorency, which was almost at my door, would be my study’ (Rousseau, 1953 [1781]: 376). Such leisure yields no precise and referenced scholarly articles—and that is the point. We can all sit down with our notes and produce something technical. But can we commune with our own thoughts until we know them inside out? Until their structure becomes self-evident, emerging organically, as if from nature itself, and not in the forced and reference-laden form that the shackles of the desk impose?

Arendt says, with no fuss, that the writing is easy. ‘Schreiben Sie leicht, formulieren Sie leicht?’ her interviewer inquires (‘Do you write easily, do you draft easily?’). Through plumes of self-assured cigarette smoke she assures him that writing happens with little effort. Because she only starts writing once she knows what she wants to say—a simple but easily overlooked method of working, one that reveals the same attitude as Rousseau and Kant before her.

Deleuze, as we have remarked, uncovers concepts in unlikely places, such as in the observations of the painter Francis Bacon, demonstrating a remarkable fidelity to Bacon’s statements and at the same time an impressive inventiveness in kneading them into Concepts. For the philosopher, as he and Guattari (1996: 2) emphasise, creates concepts—actively creates from the fodder of the world, unlike science, which tries to categorise and explain it. He seeks connections across the vast and fluctuating plane of philosophical thought, and finds delightfully original ones (Deleuze and Guattari, 1996: 90). But that, of course, is the philosopher’s job (1996: 51):

‘In the end, does not every great philosopher lay out a new plane of immanence, introduce a new substance of being and draw up a new image of thought, so that there could not be two great philosophers on the same plane? It is true that we cannot imagine a great philosopher of whom it could not be said that he has changed what it means to think. …

Those who do not renew the image of thought are not philosophers but functionaries who, enjoying a ready-made thought, are not even conscious of the problem and are unaware even of the efforts of those they claim as their models.’

To return to our original model, Descartes, who captivated us from day one of our bachelor’s degree with ‘I think,’ those fateful words that knocked us spiralling into years of doubting, probing and stipulating, we must likewise, upon casting aside our books, establish for ourselves a method. It might look look like limited but exacting principles derived from logic, geometry and algebra, it might look like rural France (since people ‘are all they can be only in temperate climates’—(Rousseau, 1991 [1762]: 52)). Descartes (2006 [1637]: 15) would never thrust his own principles on anyone else, but we might regard his example and set about deciding upon how we are going to reach this intellectual clarity, and let our own ideas flourish. For ‘it is not enough to possess a good mind; the most important thing is to apply it correctly’ (Descartes, 2006 [1637]: 5).

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1996. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University.

Descartes, René. 2006 [1637]. A Discourse on the Method of Correctly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Translated by Ian Maclean. Oxford: Oxford University.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1953 [1781]. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Translated by J.M. Cohen. Melbourne: Penguin.

———. 1991 [1762]. Emile, or, On Education. Translated by Allan Bloom. London: Penguin Books.

Onwards

It followed me home (c) Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

I sense a breakthrough on the horizon. I reflect that there must be few people who really attempt the transition from the new world to the old—few native English speakers make more than a half-hearted effort to learn another language; most find Europe quaint but of inferior living standards. In short, it seems more forward to have moved on from the old continent and its old-fashioned ways. The chasm between analytical and Continental philosophy is no mere physical border that one simply crosses by plane, but a dramatic shift in mindset, as I begin to experience first-hand at the Universität Wien.

In Vienna, there is an immense investment in and reverence of the history of philosophy, which is no real surprise given much foundational philosophy was written in German, and I immediately find myself thousands of years behind with my light smattering of Descartes and Plato, my utilitarianism and political theory, my if A then B. I expect history to be full of dry consecutive names; instead a rich forest of ideas towers before me, its immovable trunks mellow with age, its foliage swaying slowly and heavily, conscious of its own import. I tread slowly, leaf by leaf, dictionary in hand, eyes and mind open. In the face of my rigorous training, Deleuze and Guattari (1996: 22) assure me that philosophy ‘does not link propositions together,’ and caution against the false equivocation of philosophy and science that logic encourages. Paul de Man (1986: 19) politely suggests that I am under the tyranny of logic.

It is mildly amusing that the Anglo world holds so fast to the rigid linguistic frameworks they have built up around their ideas, precisely because of their clumsiness with language. Perhaps it is the very linguistic agility of Europeans—the ability to swing from language to language in a heartbeat, deftly expressing themselves in two, three, four or more languages without shyness or reserve—that makes them less precious about language. Language, indeed, is far from a monolith the way the monolingual tend to worship it. It bends and flexes under the demands of each moment; it changes flavour with each speaker, each a product of a unique mix of hereditary, educational and experiential backgrounds. Language is not God; it is an ever-mutating and stretching membrane that exists between individuals trying to make meaningful contact with one another.

My bewildered self, however, a strange (liquid) solution of (non-equal parts) English and German, confronts these wordplays with no small amount of confusion. De Man (1986: 16) wants me to ponder potentially but not definitively recasting the title of Keats’ The Fall of Hyperion in the genitive case, though my natural impulse is to think of titles as identifying handles that are a matter of convention, an afterthought to the real work, which is where we most probably ought to focus our attention. Deleuze wants me to remember a string of metaphors—meat, scaffold and cosmos—and to remember that ‘house’ and ‘scaffold’ are interchangeable, in a seemingly arbitrary game of free-association, but is fiercely insistent that other related words play absolutely no part here. That though the Greeks philosophised via dialogue, philosophers in fact run from discussion, and communication is decidedly irrelevant (Deleuze & Guattari, 1996: 28, 29). What am I to do with these sudden and pervasive contradictions, these unexpected associations and dissociations? Does this English word really capture that French word, and does German have a more precise distinction between reason and understanding, or a finer delineation of existence? Should many words and all their shades of meaning be available, since we all speak different tongues; or should we defer to the language that best picks out the thought we want to express?

Learning another language, of course, makes you take more notice of your own. For I remember being uninterested in the etymological background of the word ‘express,’ which I believe Dewey (1934) spends some time elaborating, to draw attention to the way we squeeze meaning out, or press the essence of our thoughts of feelings from our bodies. German, with particular crispness, makes me confront that I am engaged in a struggle of Ausdruck, of pressing out, which makes this whole enterprise of wringing out the language much more plausible. Perhaps we would do well to mince our words rather than pride ourselves on clarity—arrogantly hiding the duplicity of words behind a fragile screen of necessity.

My tentative steps into the cavernous history of philosophy lead me to concepts wholly unfamiliar to my Anglo ears: such as the apparently familiar trivium, the historical partitioning of language into its three sciences (de Man, 1986: 13). I start to suspect some sort of British intellectual imperialism that kept such pedagogical categories on the quiet on Anglo turf, all the while parading around to the beat of irrefutable, incontestable, unconquerable logic. The trivium, I belatedly learn, breaks language down into grammar, rhetoric and logic (all of which look more pleasing with k’s: Grammatik, Rhetorik und Logik), which exist in an uneasy tension. De Man (1986: 14) points out the ‘natural enough affinity’ between logic and grammar, and the discomfort that rhetoric tends to introduce to this delicate balance. Why resist (Continental) literary theory? Precisely because it resists your concept of language, but from within language itself. It reclaims the rhetorical aspect of language and brings it to centre stage, instead of flicking it aside as unnecessary ‘ornament.’ Were language scientifically precise, we could find in it a solid epistemological foundation. And, as monolinguals, that is the understanding of language that we develop and nurture and protect. When the polylinguals arrive with their freewheeling interchangeability, with their ‘literariness,’ drenched in their clouds of loosely connected pretty words, our chests grow tight and our eyes narrow with suspicion.

Yet our common Greek heritage esteems this more seductive layer of language. ‘How did he entertain you?’ Socrates asks his friend Phaedrus. ‘Can I be wrong in supposing that Lysias gave you a feast of discourse?’ Plato (2010) reports the two stirring each other to higher and higher planes of ecstasy, enraptured in turn by the written speech prepared and recorded by the brilliant rhetorician Lysias, and by Socrates’ spontaneous responses on the theme of love. Having worked each other into a ‘phrenzy,’ they try to knuckle down just what this art of rhetoric is, and how it is to be mastered. Phraedus voices the concern that echoes across the millennia in the doubts of the logicians: ‘I have heard that he who would be an orator has nothing to do with true justice, but only with what is likely to be approved by the many who sit in judgement … and that from opinion comes persuasion, and not from the truth.’ Socrates imagines Rhetoric herself reproaching such Spartans: ‘Mere knowledge of the truth will not give you the art of persuasion.’ Certainly, those who cling fast to grammar and logic suspect this ‘art of enchanting the mind by arguments’ of being ‘a mere routine and trick, not an art.’

Plato’s meta-story concludes with the observation that souls come in all kinds, and must be persuaded on their own terms; a good rhetorician, then, does not pound him with a stick of logic but learns to systematise and recognise types and have her method of argument polished and at the ready. ‘He who knows all this, and who knows also when he should speak and when he should refrain, and when he should use pithy sayings, pathetic appeals, sensational effects, and all the other modes of speech which he has learned’ is a skilful practitioner of the art.

While we risk dullness and lifelessness in delivery if we place all our confidence in the irrefutability of technical correctness (de Man, 1986: 19), clear and logical expression certainly need not be so dry. The elegant and amiable writing of David Hume attests to this, and I recall the deep impression he had on my friend and philosopher colleague Mark Hooper, and in turn on me. In Hooper’s reading of Hume it suddenly struck him that all writing could be beautiful, that one must simply apply a little thought and make a concentrated effort to construct a tight, meaningful and pleasing sentence. ‘Why are there bad sentences?’ Hooper demanded to know, though probably putting it more elegantly. The sentiment has remained with me, and propelled my own writing, which I have always seen as more than a vehicle for ideas. I relish the deftness and precision with which one can summon words, with a little care, the poetry that one can extract from them—ever trembling at the brink of pretentiousness but never (intentionally) sacrificing clarity. Hume’s Scottish pride drove him to France rather than to England, and the example of this self-professed cosmopolitan glows warmly in my mind.

When I began to seriously study drawing, I took a brief but intense string of classes with the formidable David Paulson. He was renowned for breaking pencils and students. He broke my pencil, and my brain, but his intensity stirred my spirit rather than broke it. Yet I left his class feeling utterly adrift. My lines became cruder, more abrasive. I tread hesitantly, my lines faltered. But with time I regained my composure and drew with greater vigour, more poetically, finding expression in bold, calligraphic lines that cut deep into the page. Paulson barks at me still, from the back of my mind. He left an indelible impression on me as a draughtsperson, he left a trace of his marks in mine.

And so it must be with philosophy. When we confront that ancient, disconcerting, but compelling, thickly-grown forest, when we meet with something that seems to tap some deep source just beyond our reach, the important thing is to keep on pushing. To latch on to the people who can guide us through this unfamiliar territory, and to relish the feeling of being cracked open and pieced back together in a new way. That’s what life does with us anyway, and there’s nothing for it but to go on.

 

De Man, Paul. 1986. The Resistance to Theory. Vol. 33. Theory and History of Literature. Manchester: Manchester University.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1996. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University.

Dewey, John. 1934. Art as experience. Minton, Malch & Company: New York.

Plato, and Benjamin Jowett. 2010. Plato’s Phaedrus. 2.0.0 edition. Actonian Press.

Gemeinschaft

One does not find one’s people wherever one goes. Kindred spirits are harder to find, even among those with common interests. The minds that encircle me—those rare few among the many who draw, paint and write—immediately evinced to me a particular harsh quality, a certain incisiveness of thought, a terrible dismembering inquisitiveness, and an undeniable probity in their search for solid principles, for secure footing. These minds apply their powers to questions in ethics, in quantum mechanics, in political theory, in painting, and in every field they shun the mysticism that sparkles around the unstable ground of chance. For as Baudelaire (1972: 65) would have it: ‘There is no such thing as chance in art any more than in mechanics. A happy idea is no more than the consequence of sound reasoning.’

We were thus irresistibly drawn together by a common inquiring impulse. We formed each other in that especially malleable phase of life, reflecting each other’s ideas and words back at each other, finding common concepts and developing consistent vocabulary. Our ideas were strengthened by this validation, deepened by the many viewpoints, tested and stretched out and proven. We constructed our own language, our own way of speaking about these matters, seizing upon terms from those we looked up to, from books, sometimes importing terms from parallel concepts in our complementary fields. And this language is of supreme importance to people like us: because we demand precision. We preference the specific over the mystical and the vague. Our inclination to pull things apart demands a precise vocabulary in order to speak about the patterns we discover, to organise them and to piece them back together. Our approach might well be considered analytic, since we push onwards by first pulling apart and inspecting the parts, carefully piecing them back together. And when I finally found painters who operated this way, I latched onto them fiercely. Painting profits from this near-scientific precision, though most people would prefer to cast art in with magic. Our precision only turns up more profound questions.

For anyone can throw paint around and delight in improbable new constellations of colour. We revelled in this in purest glee in childhood: ‘The child sees everything as a novelty, the child is always “drunk,”’ Baudelaire (1972: 398) observes, and while this vague dizzy delight is essential, it is by no means sufficient. Our compulsion to understand harnesses this childlike drunkenness and directs it wilfully and powerfully. ‘Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed’ (Baudelaire 1972: 398).

Order! How unromantic! Such a cold and diffident regime to impose upon art! Yet why should it be so? The painters I look up to continually show me that there is a way through the nonsensical mess if one pays attention and works systematically, and their work grows in depth and facility day by day, in embarrassing contrast to the stagnation of those who deny it. Richard Wagner’s musical abilities were mistrusted for ‘the very breadth of his faculties and his high critical intelligence,’ (Baudelaire 1972: 340). ‘“A man who reasons so much about his art cannot produce beautiful works naturally,”’ it was complained (Baudelaire 1972: 340). But it is this blind trust in nature that thwarts the intelligent production of art.

This notion of working ‘naturally’ denies that art, too, is work, that it must be learned, trained, cultivated, challenged and advanced. It longs for the subtle result, the piece lightly breathed into existence, the confident strides of an effortless creator. But these are the very refinements that only come with dedicated and focused work. The untrained hand is clumsy. We should not forget that nature, while she surges on with profuse energy, delights in wild, self-devouring frenzy more than subtlety and harmony. ‘Review,’ challenges Baudelaire (1972: 425), ‘analyse everything that is natural, all the actions and desires of absolutely natural man: you will find nothing that is not horrible. Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.’ The artist tames nature, moulds nature imperceptibly, crafts mesmerising variations upon it that captivate us precisely because they are tailored to us, rather than wild. ‘Things seen are born again on the paper, natural and more than natural, beautiful and better than beautiful’ (Baudelaire 1972: 402). A sensitive and intentional distillation of nature takes place as the raw materials of nature ‘are classified, ordered, harmonised, and undergo that deliberate idealisation’ by the skilled artist (Baudelaire 1972: 402).

The order we seek to impose is thus not entirely removed from nature. It is rooted in nature, it grows out of a desire to understand nature, and this understanding breeds knowledgeable work. Understanding of muscles and bones brings greater sensitivity to the supple movements of a living, straining body subject to forces. An artist can grow ever more attuned to motion and action, and can make quicker and more economical decisions of how to represent this, favouring eloquent overlaps of tendons here, underlining a weight-bearing limb there, gently bringing out a swelling muscle in preference to a less critical bump, wrapping folds of compressed flesh in sympathy with the stoop and twist of the figure. Order does not extinguish the life of nature. On the contrary: it seeks out the essential life-breathing elements, it searches for the harmony between them, it emphasises unity that would otherwise be lost in the cacophony of overstimulating nature, it reconstructs the world according to highly attentive hierarchies (form over tone, perhaps, and elegance of line over faithfulness to contours, light secondary to volume, atmosphere over crisp exactitude, grouping of shapes of colour rather than fidelity to the infinitude of colour). These choices are wherein the art lies. An artist contemplates the limitless world, re-forms it and returns it to us in a more pleasing arrangement.

This is not to say that there is one mould of beauty, for each artist structures her work according to a different system. And not only that, but we each grapple with the time in which we live. Baudelaire (1972: 403) writes of the two halves of art. One is ‘the eternal and the immovable,’ an antiquity alive and present in every age, but this eternal element does not give itself up so freely, and it is this that the artist must distill from the world. It is embedded in every present, and so in each age it takes on a different guise, it cloaks itself in ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’—this is the other half of art (Baudelaire 1972: 403). The real artist, then, ought not renounce her time; she is tasked with extracting from it ‘the poetry that resides in its historical envelope, to distill the eternal from the transitory’ (Baudelaire 1972: 402).

And what precedes such skill is a certain penetrating type of mind. One must, from one’s earliest childhood, be ruthlessly critical. ‘For a poet not to have a critic within him is impossible,’ states Baudelaire (1972: 340), pitying poets dependent solely on instinct. For our ability to improve depends on our selectivity, on our Urteilskraft, on our powers of judgement. Our eye is not easily satisfied, not out of misanthropy but because one taste of something grand has forever raised our standards. We know what is within human reach, and cannot be content with less. We must be ‘poet and critic rolled into one’ (Baudelaire 1972: 340), or we will fail to make a true estimate of our own work, and fail to discover how to amend it.

If there is one thing Baudelaire has really opened my eyes to, it is this: we must not hold back. While our private critiques have bolstered our position, honed our work and sharpened our faculties, we have worked long and hard enough to stand firmly and speak confidently and clearly. And vigorously. What we say might sting, it might win us enemies, it might ring with insult, we might (like Edgar Allan Poe) become known for ‘a hundred other passages where mockery rains down, thick as shot and shell, and yet remains nonchalant and haughty’ (Baudelaire, 1972: 191). But the strength of our insights demand equally forceful delivery. Baudelaire (1972: 51) spurs us on:

‘Once armed with a reliable criterion, drawn from nature, the critic must do his duty with passion; for critic though he may be, he is a man nonetheless, and passion draws men of like temperaments together and raises reason to new heights.’

So my unapologetic intellectual compatriots subject the world to all manner of analysis, inspect it, dissect it, meditate upon it. They put it back together with fearful insight and dexterity. They bolster their cloudy intuitions with concepts they can name. And, when the occasion demands, they rain down their judgements with precision and conviction. Though mountains and oceans separate us, the common threads of our thoughts stretch like glittering webs across the world, fine but strong, and everywhere we rest we plant the seeds of our ideas. We teach, we challenge, we initiate discussion, we loan books, we drop our words, we work, and small ripples begin to spread across the world.

 

Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre. 1972 [1842-1860]. Selected writings on art and artists. Trans. P. E. Charvet. Penguin: Harmondsworth, England.

In order of appearance in my orbit:

Thoughtful Wander
Conrad Ohnuki
An Island in Theoryspace
R W Daffurn
Scott Breton
lpql.net

Ever searching

A pilgrimage to Paris, to encounter Delacroix and Manet in the flesh, reaffirmed that we need not be committed to one way of working. A true artist does not bind herself to a ‘style,’ but searches endlessly after some elusive thing—let us call it truth, in an indulgently romantic fashion. Truth may be uncovered and approximated and represented in many ways, and despite the way we put our artists into categories, their work is rarely so easily defined, so one-dimensional.

Delacroix

I saw Delacroix work of a very fine quality with well-defined contours and smoothly-modelled forms, and work of a more thick and fast quality, all the way up to very course, feverish and rough work, near incomprehensible smears of paint dancing upon the canvas. It brought me a devilish pleasure to see his most violent and spattered work hanging on the same wall as Ingres, classed together as ‘academic art,’ though as far removed from each other as imaginable. Ingres, with his linear emphasis; though his meticulously designed (and redesigned) lines are expertly integrated with his finely-modelled paint into eggshell-smooth rolling forms. The edges are airy, working in a magical unity with the forceful and clear lines. An unobservant viewer might be inclined to write off Ingres as formulaic and predictable, but finally encountering him face to face I am amazed at how his work breathes with such variety from within his preferred parameters. Crisp and deeply modelled spherical forms in rich ruby and emerald colours cloak his Joan of Arc in a convincingly medieval air, while a Venus basking in golden southern rays is treated in such a diffuse, hazy way that counters the severe artifice of the arc of her shoulders. Paint is put to such different use as the picture demands, and though he holds fast to his draughtsmanship, even this does not dictate the application of paint. Baudelaire (1972: 51) is quick to point out to the oversimplifying critic that colour and line are not alien to each other: ‘You do not know in what proportions nature has combined in every mind the taste for line and the taste for colour, nor by what mysterious alchemy she produces the fusion between them, the result of which is a picture.’

(Copy after Ingres)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is sheer madness to think that there is one way to apply paint, one method that defines us. The French are ever searching. They are testing the limits of paint, not out of ennui, not in a distracted pursuit of novelty, nor out of despair that everything has already been done. They are searching for the manner of expressing what they want to express. They are pushing paint to the very limits of its expressiveness. And perhaps they don’t succeed every time, but they certainly make many surprising breakthroughs.

Delacroix

Delacroix positively shimmers, in every way. His lines vibrate with urgency and vitality. The drawing alone is joyously bursting with life, exploding with energy. I take out my sketchbook and copy two women, crouched and one clasping the other, hair hanging tossed heavily over the head like an extra limb, extending the arch of the body. A perfectly designed foot curves with a lively flourish. My chunky drawing has found the Rubens in these draped figures, in their interlocking arms and their thick wrists and meaty bodies. Without a doubt, Rubens is flowing through these paintings, however loose Delacroix’s paint becomes—in the drawing and in the colours alike. For Delacroix’s colours vibrate as much as his lines. Hanging among Géricault in this huge hall, Delacroix’s colour is punchy, judiciously applied, not overdone, but strong and resonant. Gold gleams and beads twinkle, hair shimmers like falling water and satin shines in its dampened way. A trembling wrist persuades me that Delacroix is able ‘to express simply by contour man’s gesture, however violent;’ while his glinting fabrics and glowing skin demonstrate his ability ‘to evoke with colour alone what might be called the atmosphere of the human drama, or the spiritual mood of the creator’ (Baudelaire 1972: 361).

Delacroix

Perhaps only a painter could find pictures so unrelentingly brutal to be so abundant with life, because she cares more for the paint than for the subject matter. I reflect that it is almost a paradox to speak of Delacroix’s paintings being alive when his themes are almost exclusively death—though Baudelaire (1972: 359) shares my conviction that ‘he succeeded in translating the spoken word into plastic images, more full of life and more appropriate than those of any other creator of the same profession.’ Perhaps this pulsating energy comes from the realisation that life is but a vicious and frenzied struggle against death, which we are destined to lose.

Manet

In Manet I find the same ambitious range. His Olympia consists in such lovely drawing; all the lines lead you irresistibly to her crotch, where the most delicious drawing is concentrated in the expertly foreshortened hand, foreshortened by means of line, tone and colour, so meaningfully and powerfully conveyed in such a short stretch of painting. I think of the controversies Manet sparked, and I can imagine them as unintentional, unwanted controversies, the inescapable consequence of his search after truth. Olympia is certainly striking, but it is no provocative statement that makes her so compelling to a painter. The challenges to the male gaze and other art historical renderings of this picture seem remote and improbable when one stands before the canvas as a humble artist. Baudelaire (1972: 397) would remind us that ‘with two or three exceptions…the majority of artists are, let us face it, very skilled brutes, mere manual labourers, village pub-talkers with the minds of country bumpkins.’ A mere painter would see her task in much simpler terms than the intellectualising public might expect: she would simply be obliged to use all means available to make the image as cohesive and strong as possible. How could it be otherwise than that Manet reserve his best drawing, his soundest use of tone and colour, ‘all the means his craft gives him’ (Baudelaire 1972: 51), for this most fertile region of this modern nude? Formally, she is a strong, arresting, complete unity. Conceptually, she is shocking, because of what strong painting does when it mixes with the present. Can the present abide strong painting? Manet has not let me down.

Degas

In Degas I discover such variety of mark making, often within the one picture. Degas coaxes a self portrait, a luminous pair of hands, out of the surface, working the delicate transitions by near imperceptible degrees without compromising the overall form. He builds them up with increasing intensity from thin, rubbed-out raw umber, as if extracting them slowly from the mud. The humble raw umber underpainting and its gently undulating quality remains visible in places. Pictures grow out from the earthy and close but precise tones, the chroma gradually increasing with smears of rubbed-out opaque colour, and then a finishing touch of a thick and sure stroke of colour at a yet higher chroma. And likewise, the dark tones are deepened with yet darker blues and blacks and browns. The unity is preserved: the variations stay in their place, ever subordinate to the greater mass.

Degas

And I enjoy his alternating demands on the paint according to his intentions. The double portrait of himself and the top-hatted gentleman is arresting at a distance; the dark forms of the men come starkly to the fore, but their faces are finely treated, sympathetic to complex and restrained emotions, the creases of the eyes firm and clear but ever so slightly softened. A single, delicious specular highlight adorns one corner of the square end of the gentleman’s nose. His top hat is a perfect, straight extension of his proud head. Paris glimmers behind them, a positive mash of pale pinkish and bluish whites, somewhat abrasive up close, but remarkably effective. The textural contrast should be insulting to the vision, but this brash experiment has succeeded—against all expectations, the discord harmonises: the picture forms a striking unity.

Rodin

Rodin’s breadth strikes me just as strongly. Certainly I know of his harried surfaces, the presence of his fingertips in thick smatterings of clay. I know this look of frenzied concentration in his rough man-handling of the surface, this working and reworking that belies his countless reattempts at truth, so poorly imitated by those who equate unthinking sketchiness with ‘expressiveness’ devoid of content. But perhaps more unexpected was that sometimes he can be so slick and precise, that he can introduce the most gentle twist, an understated arc perceptible from all angles, though unbelievably slight. That he can be so anatomically careful, and model so accurately. He can magnify this naturalism to monstrous proportions, and subject the body to fantastic strains and tensions—the compression of a foot firmly planted but screwing into the ground, the push and pull of flexors and extensors in heavily-set legs. Yet he can confine all this physical anguish within a smoothly-modelled exterior. And then he can absolutely let loose and let these taught, herculean, muscular bodies melt into strong but somehow unreal creatures, human but somehow superhuman, more flexible, more arched, more sinewy; deformed by their suffering. In these overbearing figures one feels the lithe energy of the smaller, quickly-sketched maquettes that trickle down the Gate of Hell. They are overgrown mud-men, bent and twisted in the cruel hands of a merciless god.

Rodin

‘A good picture,’ opines Baudelaire (1972: 365-6), ‘faithful and worthy of the dreams that gave it birth, must be created like a world. Just as the creation, as we see it, is the result of several creations, the earlier ones always being completed by the later, so a harmonically fashioned picture consists of a series of superimposed pictures, each fresh surface giving added reality to the dream, and raising it by one degree towards perfection.’ And as creators, we must not fall into habit, and thus disengage from our work, but approach each work with fresh eyes. We must bring to it the knowledge that it demands, and ever try to augment that knowledge through our investigations. There is no one way of working, even if we are trying to get at the same truth.

Delacroix

 

Baudelaire, Charles-Pierre. 1972 [1842-1860]. Selected writings on art and artists. Trans. P. E. Charvet. Penguin: Harmondsworth, England.

On naturalism

Pantzergasse, Winter (c) 2016 Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

When I paint, I am ever torn between two conflicting intentions. I am driven towards what we might call naturalism, the honest representation of things as they appear to me in the natural world, but I am constantly diverted by the lusciousness of paint and by my own systems of manipulating that substance that I have cobbled together from things learned and things discovered. As I stand before my canvas, I anticipate how convincingly naturalistic my finished painting will be, but my brain immediately sets to work in undermining that intention by ordering what I see into a complex system of relationships. In short, I cannot paint what I see, because paint promises the possibility of depicting things in more suggestive ways, and because it also imposes certain physical limits, within which I try to condense my understanding of what I see.

This leads me to survey my work with dismay: my paintings positively glow with an unearthly artificiality. The objects and people that populate them are glaringly constructed, and set under a contrived light, though observed from life. I see a more naturalistic painting and I despair at my own artifice.

But I do not despair for long, because I quickly turn to questioning naturalism itself. And on this point I am persuaded by two claims from Ernst Gombrich. In Art and Illusion, he argues that ‘all representations are grounded on schemata which the artist learns to use’ (Gombrich, 1959: 264). And very quickly thereafter, he points out that the very ‘stimulus … is of infinite ambiguity’ (Gombrich, 1959: 264-5). ‘Naturalism’ is something of a misleading idea because it disguises how variable nature and our own visual experience of it is. At the very least, we might demand that the term be broad enough to admit many types of representation that aim at capturing something honest about the natural world. But one breed of naturalism tends to prevail as the most correct or ‘realistic’ in our modern eyes: the kind that makes us mistake paintings for photographs. We have permitted photography to become the unerring benchmark for ‘reality’ in the visual realm. Photography conditions our experience of sight.

Photography, it must be pointed out (for it is often forgotten), lets us down on many accounts. It fails to match the rich spectrum of colours our eye is able to enjoy, or to exhibit such a fine sensibility towards tonal gradations; it is not binocular, and does not have the luxury of flitting around a scene just as our ever-active eyes devour it, composing a view out of collected fragments. A photograph, an arbitrary slice of time, is often precisely the ‘wrong’ slice that we feel does not represent us, caught blinking or speaking or chewing. Focal lengths distort perspective, bending our physical constitution. As a measure for ‘reality,’ photography makes a fairly poor standard, and probably a worse one for coming so close and deserting us when we least expect it. If we are ignorant of its shortcomings, our conception of ‘reality’ is itself swallowed up by photography.

I do not want to attempt to define reality, for this is an immense task I should not like to claim responsibility for. But I want to suggest that our own vision is more remarkable than photography. When we judge the success of any representation, painted or otherwise, we might remark how near to our own complex visual experience it comes. And we might bear in mind that sight is one thing, and representations are quite another, and the camera, let us not forget, offers but another mode of representation.

And as Gombrich argues, every representation is founded on schemata. Painting that orients itself via photography imports the schemata of photography into painting. The schemata of photography are not simply felt in the work of artists who copy photographs. They permeate the work of many who work ‘from life,’ who directly observe the world, but whose strategy in painting is to organise what they see just as a camera would. They crush dark tones together, even ones that are not actually shadows. They blanch and flatten light areas, uninterested in the undulating forms of the voluminous object before them. They impose a high tonal contrast—very dark against very light—to great dramatic effect, but utterly without nuance. Softness and blur takes on the uniform flavour of the lens, unlike the scattered haze that bleary or myopic eyes encounter. But when refining a surface they disguise lack of structural understanding with microscopic precision: paying painful attention to the blemishes and creases and stray hairs that are prized as ‘detail.’ ‘The artist’s starting point will determine the final product,’ cautions Gombrich (1959: 92); ‘The schema on which a representation is based will continue to show through the ultimate elaboration.’

Put differently: choose your influences, guide your aesthetic. A painter is constantly growing and adjusting her schemata according to what she pays attention to. It was at this point in my reflections that I realised my paintings are bound to become jubilantly vivid and muscular: I feed on a steady visual diet of Baroque paintings. What I relish are full forms, highly energised compositions, three-dimensional rhythms flowing in and around each other, electrified but systematic application of light in its confrontation with colour. Rubens hands down his schemata which celebrate the writhing, swelling, interlocking qualities of the natural world, basked in vivifying light.

And thus, when I paint, I bring other concerns to my easel than the artist who corrects himself by the standards of photography. Uninterested in a snapshot moment, I wade into the confusing and rich task of melting together a multiplicity of moments. A painting takes time to make, and my eyes take time to wander over my subject, drinking in every shifting property and letting them settle into a sustained, unified impression. I continually consider the whole, the way the elements relate to and influence each other. I use line to investigate visually pleasing trails, and I use drawing to animate nature. I orchestrate the elements into a cohesive composition, uninterested in a ‘found’ image, but determined to take responsibility for the construction of this image from the very first.

I make tonal decisions—how closely to group my dark tones, while preserving a logical gradation; separating shadows from halftones so I can meaningfully describe the way light plays over the surfaces. I consider the gamut of colours available to me in my paint choices—how a cadmium yellow and a pale rose red can stretch it further than a yellow ochre and a deep transparent red. I know that no matter what, paint does not have the reach of light, and it is not possible to match the full range that I see. So I establish my limits, reserving the highest chroma available to me for where I most need it, and correspondingly dulling the rest. I impose a logical system of neutralising colour with the falloff of light, conceptualising the relationships between colours as a three-dimensional space that I can move through with increasing fluency. When I vary yellow, I factor in the way purple neutralises it, and what that would mean in my picture, and I consider the ‘vertical’ shift I want to make in tone and in chroma as I transition from one colour to another.

I think about the brush in my hand, how stiff or springy its bristles are, how splayed, how neat and flexible, and I invoke textures by the movement of my hand. Those textures hang in relation to one another, I must reserve certain techniques for smooth objects compared to coarse ones. And everything must fit into the system dictated by the quality of the light: whether it is diffuse, grey natural light, or blue unclouded daylight, or orange-yellow artificial light, or something else. ‘Every artist has to know and construct a schema before he can adjust it to the needs of portrayal,’ Gombrich (1959: 99) is right to insist. And my schema, derived from many places, but notably not from photography, is reasonably sophisticated.

 

 

Painting the ever-shifting natural world demands visual acuity, but also a mental acuity. For as painters, we do not merely observe and transcribe, but we organise what we see. When we paint, we establish relationships, and the character of those relationships—of light to dark, of vividness to neutrality, of smoothness to coarseness to softness to brittleness—directs the quality of the painting. Painting is not, as Gombrich (1959: 78) argues, ‘a faithful record of a visual experience but the faithful construction of a relational model.’ All painters construct relational models; it is only a question of what the model is based on, and how well the painter understands that model.

And the crucial point is whether a painter is passive or active. Because an artist worthy of our attention and respect does not work mindlessly, or randomly, or uncritically. She tests every new observation, and wrestles with it until she finds a way to work it into her system. She pushes her system to do more and more, to cope with greater ambiguity, to suggest more with less, to reflect the shimmering richness of the natural world. To do that, she will probably have to move away from the sufficient but sorely limited laws of the lens, to embrace the sticky willfulness of paint and to try to subdue the chaos in new ways, even if they are unsuccessful at first. ‘[The artist] is the man who has learned to look critically, to probe his perceptions by trying alternative interpretations both in play and in earnest,’ (Gombrich 1969: 265).

My paintings are a head-on struggle between what I see and the beautifully restricted medium in which I work. They document the hard-won schemata that I continue to grow as I bounce between the natural world and the teachings of other artists living and dead. ‘Naturalism’ in painting should never be fettered to the camera, for photography is only another means of representation, with other limits that painting can be blissfully free of. We are mistaken to find a painting more ‘realistic’ the more its relationships match those we are familiar with through photography, because, as Gombrich (1959: 75) puts it, ‘there is no neutral naturalism.’ Paint offers so many subtle and lively possibilities that approach the rich and nuanced experience of sight in ways that photography never will.

 

Gombrich, E. H. 1959. Art and Illusion. Phaidon: London.

Questions

The decision (c) Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

In his eminently readable paper, ‘How I see philosophy’ (collected in the book of the same name), Friedrich Waismann urges us on to the dizzying thrill of the questions that originally brought our buzzing, inquisitive minds to philosophy. His plea perhaps grows increasingly relevant as philosophy becomes more analytically constrained, as the scientific project and its quest for order and explanation and proof creeps into all spheres of our lives, as ordinary people demand answers that ring with the clarity of science. Waismann makes a plea for the fog, for the roving unrest it stirs in us, for the rabbit holes it leads us down and the impassioned discussions it gives rise to. ‘The genius of the philosopher,’ asserts Waismann (1968: 16) ‘shows itself nowhere more strikingly than in the new kind of question he brings into the world. What distinguishes him and gives him his place is the passion of questioning.’ And yet further: ‘There is nothing like clear thinking to protect one from making discoveries’ (Waismann, 1968: 16).

This is not to decry reason and to rally behind an unthinking mental anarchy. Quite the opposite. It is to stimulate original thought, to pursue reason wherever she may lead, away from convention if she must, out of habits, disrupting prejudices (Waismann, 1968: 32). It is to remember why we started–we and our compatriots in thought, all the way back to Plato–quite simply: wonder (Waismann, 1968: 3). Waismann (1968: 16) urges us, as we flounder in the heady haze of brain-breaking wonderment, to take heart that ‘some of the greatest discoveries have even emerged from a sort of primordial fog.’ The ‘clarity neurosis’ will not furnish us with solutions, but only with the appearance of them. Clarity is reassuring, it gives us no reason to challenge the well-worn groove we circle around in, and for that very reason it extinguishes our creative spark before it gets a chance to warm up.

Waismann does not champion confusion. Rather, he sees philosophy as having a different aim than science (Waismann, 1968: 34). He reflects on a tradition grounded in Descartes and Spinoza, in which precise definitions, like quanta of knowledge, stack up—Lego-like—into tight axioms, by which we can deductively prove that the finite and infinite substances and all their attributes are none other than God himself, Q.E.D. (Spinoza, 1677). Such a logical project is admirable in its ambition, noble in its intentions. And Descartes (1997 [1637]: 7), after all, would not force his method on us (‘Es ist also nicht meine Absicht, hier die Methode zu lehren, die jeder befolgen muß, um seinen Verstand richtig zu leiten, sondern nur aufzuzeigen, wie ich versucht habe, den meinen zu leiten’—‘It is not my intention here to teach the methods that everyone must follow in order to correctly guide his reason, rather to demonstrate how I have tried to guide my own’). No, Waismann (1968: 20) does not seek confusion, but he does call for a change of outlook, defiantly declaring in the face of all this elegant reasoning that ‘insight cannot be lodged in a theorem.’

Franz von Stuck, Amazone (copy after sculpture)

Insight! When we had hoped for answers and airtight proofs, Waismann leads us back to the questions in order redefine the essence and purpose of philosophy. And the essential feature, he (Waismann, 1968: 32) argues, is vision. A philosopher is not a builder of systems, but an agile thinker who cannot help but challenge our accepted modes of thought. She takes nothing for granted, and takes everything in with the same open-eyed amazement as a child, with the same persistent ‘why’ dogging every new piece of knowledge she encounters. She keeps a level head in that primordial fog, and, says Waismann (1968: 10), if she reframes the troubling question she might just ‘dissolve’ rather than ‘solve’ it. But this, he adds, would be a meagre and negative task for philosophy, to simply dispel fogs. No, the positive task for philosophy, he (Waismann, 1968: 21) argues, ‘what is essential in philosophy, is the breaking through to a deeper insight.’ And the purpose, far from satisfying us, is to keep us ruffled and amazed: ‘to open our eyes’ (Waismann, 1968: 21).

Rubens, Venusfest

What Waismann calls for is an attentive outlook that is willing to look at things sideways, to chew them over backwards, and to act in a creative manner. A search for answers already makes a fatal assumption. I am reminded of the notoriously inquisitive physicist, Dr Jacques Pienaar, who guilelessly prefaces his papers with such opening statements as, ‘In order to solve the problem of quantum gravity, we first need to pose the problem.’ This is the hallmark of the born philosopher: ‘the passion of questioning’ is in his blood. He navigates the fog not in order to obscure, not in order to destroy, but because of an insatiable sense of wonder backed up by the courage to cast a discerning eye over all intellectual territory. Emerson’s (1847: ‘Self-reliance’) words echo in Waismann’s: ‘Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.’

What is compelling about Waismann’s view is that is recaptures the philosophical spirit, it reminds us why we started. It reassures us in our hours of solitude, when we are trapped deep in a problem—a snare which we nonetheless find energising. It reassures us when, at our desks, in our libraries, we struggle to formulate our nascent insights into accepted parlance. It reassures us that we are on the right course, so long as we are asking the questions that stir us the most: ‘You don’t choose a puzzle, you are shocked into it’ (Waismann, 1968: 37). It rings in tune with our restless, roving minds.

‘The heart’s unrest is not to be stilled by logic.’

(Waismann, 1968: 13).

 

Descartes, René. 1997 [1637]. Von der Methode des richtigen Vernunftsgebrauchs und der wissenschaftlichen Forschung. Übs.: Lüder Gäbe. Felix Meiner: Hamburg.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1847. Essays: First Series. http://www.emersoncentral.com/essays1.htm.

Pienaar, Jacques L. 2016. The Relativity Principle in Quantum Mechanics. http://perimeterinstitute.ca/videos/relativity-principle-quantum-mechanics.

Spinoza, Baruch de. [1677]. Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata. („Ethik, nach geometrischer Methode dargestellt“).

Waismann, Friedrich. 1968. How I See Philosophy. Ed. R Harré. Macmillan: London.

Scholars & Painters

At last I begin to pull the threads of my life together—to pare back the things that distract me, to braid my core pursuits together into one strong cord. Each sphere of my life centres around art in some manner: I have indeed run away to Europe to be a painter; I am deeply embedded in the sketch groups we have nurtured in Vienna, even extending my involvement to teaching drawing, and I am beginning to find my way in the University of Vienna as a philosophy doctoral candidate, wrapping my brain around some aesthetic ideas that have their roots in very old Germanic thought. And, of course, I have a circle of young and agile minds around me, constantly charging my head with new and difficult ideas. I couldn’t imagine a more practically, intellectually and socially demanding and satisfying way of life.

Universität Wien

When I think of these circles, through which I move so fluidly, I realise that the divide between the scholarly and the artistic can be unexpectedly deep. I see the thinkers’ mistrust of painters’ visual ideas, and I see the painters’ discomfort at others intellectualising their field. At best, the intellectuals graciously entertain thought experiments, but perhaps fail to appreciate aspects best approached by doing, if not denying them entirely. The painters, meanwhile, either quickly become intimidated, boasting loudly about a non-academic book they’ve read or bowing to any thinker who uses big words, or shunning anything that reeks of intellectualism. This disconnect seems alarming at first.

(c) Sasa

But when a painter friend, confronted with an aesthetic idea, felt the need to defend himself, it became much clearer to me. ‘Painting is breathing,’ he said simply, his open hands revealing his sense of explanatory inadequacy. Painters presume that scholarship establishes some kind of framework, a justification for painting. Painters themselves usually don’t have a rigorous theoretical conception of painting, they are simply compelled to paint. And those that seek to find one sometimes spiral into impenetrable written treatises whose ability to improve, support or defend their practical work is deeply questionable. But perhaps this burden doesn’t really exist. No painter should feel threatened by a scholar of aesthetics, or feel that their work is incomplete without theory. Painters and scholars are simply not at all aiming at the same thing.

(c) Sasa

Hermann Weyl (1968: 631), the German mathematician, physicist and philosopher, makes an illuminating distinction between Erkenntnis and Besinnung:

‘Im geistigen Leben des Menschen sondern sich deutlich voneinander ein Bereich des Handelns, der Gestaltung, der Konstruktion auf der einen Seite, dem der tätige Künstler, Wissenschaftler, Techniker, Staatsmann hingegeben ist und der im Gebiete der Wissenschaft unter der Norm der Objektivität steht—und ein Bereich der Besinnung auf der andern Seite, die in Einsichten sich vollzieht und die, als Ringen um den Sinn unseres Handelns, als die eigentliche Domäne des Philosophen anzusehen ist.’

[‘In the human mental life there is rather—clearly distinguishable from one another—a region of actions, creation, construction on one side; that which is given to the active artist, scientist, technician, statesman and that which stands in the domain of science under the norm of objectivity—and a region of reflection on the other side, that takes place in insights and that, as rings around the sense of our actions, is to be seen as the actual domain of philosophers.’]

According to Weyl (and very sensibly, I would suggest), the activities of the philosopher, while posing questions which stem from art or any other human endeavour, are of an altogether different nature than the practical activities themselves. While it orbits around the practice of art, it does not so much support it as probe it, test it, inspect it, challenge it, ponder the nature of it. Philosophy of art as Besinnung, as a contemplative reflection on what art is and what role it plays, is a very different thing from the Erkenntnis, the technical knowledge, that painters cultivate. Philosophers unearth puzzles about the nature of beauty, of sensations, of the role of art, of its ethical import. They try to make sense of the commonalities among the arts, the significance of objects, what ‘style’ could mean, what types of meaning exist in paintings and whether the painting or the painter is self-reflexive. These endlessly fascinating puzzles emerge from the nature of painting, but to be a better painter, one must concentrate on how to mix paints and how to stick them to a surface.

The painter, by contrast, busies herself with visual problems: problems of space and depth, of volume and design, of edges and atmosphere, of the translation of ideas into a physical substance. She grapples with the aesthetic experiences themselves: the intense sensations and emotions and how to record them, how to ignite them in others, how to use a humble physical medium to stir something less rational than the intellect.

These aims, however divorced, need not be antagonistic. Philosophy need not be inaccessible: aesthetic ideas can be expressed clearly and generously. And perhaps philosophical insights, while not justifying painting, or dictating the way in which it should go, can open new avenues for thoughtful painters, or help clarify the nebulous thoughts already hovering in their minds. I only hope that as a painter myself, my philosophical investigations will remain grounded and intelligible because of my honest contact with painting itself. But I seek not to justify painting—only to obsess over it in another manner.

Weyl, Hermann. 1968. ‘Erkenntnis Und Besinnung (Ein Lebensrückblick)’. In Gesmmelte Abhandlungen IV, 631–49. Berlin: Springer.

Painter virtues

Selbstbildnis als Philosophin / Self portrait as philosopher (c) Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

Painter virtues stray a little from those of ordinary people. I have been devotedly following in the footsteps of a very dear painter who perhaps doesn’t realise how firmly astute he is, how perfectly disciplined he is, how resolutely he holds onto the very virtues that divorce him somewhat from the rest of the world, but that render him as sharp and penetrating as a painter may be. He leads by example, by folding me into his tranquil space, and I lose the impulse to write, and succumb to the all-consuming desire to paint.

And I paint slowly, as I always have. When I retreat into the realm of vision, I permit myself to tread carefully, sagaciously, deliberately. There are many pauses, there is much stepping back, sitting down, daydreaming. As an unobtrusive presence in Ryan’s studio, since the early days, I observed that there is at least as much idleness as activity involved in painting. One must devote a lot of time to looking and evaluating. There is a moment when you realise you are able to paint much faster than you normally do. And then you realise that the slowness is an integral part of your work, making room for ordered thoughts. Rilke observed the same unhurried attention in Rodin, in his beautiful little book on the sculptor. ‘‘Man muß sich nicht eilen’, sagte Rodin den wenigen Freunden, die um ihn waren, wenn sie ihn drängten. (Rilke 1942: 14). ‘‘One mustn’t hurry,’ said Rodin to the few friends who were around him, if they pressed him.’

The breaks stretch out languidly as the afternoon sun yawns and stretches deep into my studio, and sometimes books steal my attention. And not even in a scholarly way, but in a guilty, indulgent way. This is the best kind of reading, and probably the deepest well of ideas. I think of Käthe Kollwitz with her Goethe, of both Delacroix and Rodin with their Dante. These writers who lodged deep inside the hearts of those painters and ever held the power to renew their weary minds and reinvigorate their work. It can hardly be surprising that Rilke, a poet, would apprentice himself to a sculptor, when that sculptor maintained a lifelong apprenticeship to a poet. Rilke (1942: 18-19) recounts of Rodin that ‘Er las viel. Man war gewohnt, ihn in Brüssels Straßen immer mit einem Buch in der Hand zu sehen, aber vielleicht war dieses Buch oft nur ein Vorwand für das Vertieftsein in sich selbst, in die ungeheuere Aufgabe, die ihm bevorstand.’ ‘He read a great deal. One was accustomed to seeing him in the streets of Brussels ever with a book in his hand, but perhaps this book was often only a front for being absorbed in himself, in the immense task hanging over him.’

Rilke suggests that all this reading enables the reader to inhabit the ideas well before one turns to clay or paint or copper plate. Books that really awaken the mind and animate personalities, archetypes, heroes and monsters, do much of the work in our idle, daydreamy hours before we begin to work. Rodin’s mind was fertilised by Dante and Baudelaire: ‘Seit jenen Tagen blieben diese beiden Dichter ihm immer nah, er dachte über sie hinaus und kehrte zu ihnen zurück. … Später, als er als Schaffender diese Stoffkreise wieder berührte, da stiegen ihre Gestalten wie Erinnerungen aus seinem eigenen Leben, weh und wirklich, in ihm auf und gingen in sein Werk wie in eine Heimat ein’ (Rilke 1942: 20) ‘Since those days, both these poets remained ever near him, he also thought about them and returned to them. … Later, when he touched on this subject matter again as creator, their forms rose like memories out of his own life, painfully and truly, out from inside him and entering into his work as if into a home.’

In my mind I see Ryan as a figure deeply absorbed in his sketchbook. I never knew another person to love drawing as deeply as he does; I’ve never witnessed such simple and honest devotion to drawing. One can talk about drawing forever; Ryan disappears wordlessly into his sketchbook and enters another universe. Should the sea turn to paper, I fear it wouldn’t satiate his urge to draw. I’ve come to learn that only the act of drawing proves my love of it. And I’ve come to realise what an indispensible support this act is. How steadying it is, how each hatched line helps sift a thought until my head grows clear again. Drawing is an act that restores balance; to think of it merely as a preparatory work is to undermine the pivotal position it plays in our lives. Everything turns on it. It loosens the mind and weaves it back together in an orderly way. A visible amble across the page; a scribed daydream.

Again and again I defend the use of my time: time spent reading, drawing, looking is never wasted. The painter can never apologise for her idleness. She needs, above all, a clear head, and that clarity is only reachable with ample time and space to follow every thought without the pressure to produce. Our practices are often compared to—or sometimes explicitly linked with—meditation, but I think this is a false connection. The painter’s focused and penetrating dissection of the world, grounded in observation, carried by a heightened alertness, inescapably chases after meaning and order, not the sort of egoless abandonment of thought prized by meditation. The painter rather invites a thousand times the stimuli of an ordinary person, and takes the time to sift them for gold, reviewing them one by one, delighting in them, arranging them in meaningful ways.

This delight cannot be overestimated. As I travel on long, winding roads through the Czech Republic, I indulge in the visual feast that unfolds—unfurling hills and forests and rivers melting in and out of each other, and the light that shifts in hue and angle as hours pile upon hours. I feel like I could explode when I see the blue-grey clouds against the golden sky in the mist of a light rain. I see that Ryan is equally absorbed in the neutral blue of the shadowy trees that back on to grass bathed in an unearthly yellow by the oblique evening sun. It’s then I realise what motivates us: we seek not to reproduce pleasant scenes, but to reproduce the staggering wonder at the visual relationships we stumble upon in the real world. Sometimes something as simple as the shocking harmony between two colours captivates us, and it is this delight that we are driven to transmit, more than anything else. ‘Look!’ we cry, stabbing our canvas with the brush, ‘Look how excellent the world is!’

These small visual treats furnish us with small tasks, and that is also enough. Rilke (1942: 17) writes of Rodin that ‘Seine Kunst baute sich nicht auf eine große Idee auf, sondern auf eine kleine gewissenhafte Verwirklichung, auf das Erreichbare, auf ein Können.’ ‘His art did not build itself on a grand idea, but rather on a small, diligent attainment, on the achievable, on a ‘can.’’ The grandeur grows out of the mastery of the small things; the big ideas emerge from the tumble of small delights rolling together and gathering momentum. Ryan’s comments, as he devours every mark of my painting, always lean towards the subtle treatments that most people overlook. ‘This is so subtle’ has come to resound as the highest praise as he deftly picks out the intricate decisions that most captivated me as I worked.

Our preoccupation with such small observations might make us feel we are getting left behind, that we are perpetual beginners, but this humility is the door to learning. Our inexpert trials and ill-conceived experiments, our genuine curiosity means many abortive paintings, some even dead-ends, as we try to instate order in our work. It can be lonely, and when people do speak with us, they miss the point of our efforts, they fail to see the driving impulse and the exploratory thread that weaves through our work. Rodin was rejected by the public for a long time, and when he emerged from his solitude, fully formed, he had already put himself through every test: ‘Jahre und Jahre ging Rodin auf den Wegen dieses Lebens als ein Lernender und Demütiger, der sich als Anfänger fühlte. Niemand wußte von seinen Versuchen, er hatte keinen Vertrauten und wenig Freunde’ (Rilke 1942: 18). ‘For years and years Rodin went along the roads of this life as a humble learner, as one who felt himself a beginner. No one knew of his attempts, he had no confidants and few friends.’ This is a double virtue: we can take our apprentice status and couple it with the sobering solitude that buys us more time to become. And the fruit of this lonely, self-testing time is an unshakeable confidence in ourselves, in our work, in every tiny detail of our approach. ‘Da, als man anfing, an ihm zu zweifeln, hatte er keinen Zweifel mehr an sich selbst. … In der Zeit, als er wurde, klang keine fremde Stimme zu ihm, kein Lob, das ihn hätte irre machen, kein Tadel, der ihn hätte verwirren können’ (Rilke 1942: 21). ‘Because, as one began to doubt him, he had no more doubt in himself. … In the time when he was becoming, no foreign voice sounded about him, no praise that would have led him into error, no reproach that could have confused him.’

We cannot forget the point of our painterly values, so at odds with the world of outcomes and products and services and profits and efficiency. As with any virtue ethics, we chase after excellence. Excellence as humans and excellence in our work. However we exist in the world and whatever we leave behind in it, let’s hope that everything glows with that unmistakeable sheen. I smile with satisfaction when I hear Ryan say again and again, ‘I’m sorry it’s not perfect.’ We will slow down and look and consider and try again until it is.

 

Rilke, Rainer Maria. 1942. Auguste Rodin. Leipzig: Insel.

The gentle ones

Für Oma / For Oma © Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

We reserve our respect for the tough people, and the gentle ones often get pushed aside. But maybe the gentle ones deserve our devotion most of all. I know that Oma was not a bold person, that life tossed her about and that she made poor decisions. But reflecting on her life, on all the things we talked about over Speculaas and coffee, on what I witnessed myself, she seems very strong to me. She was full of patience and optimism in spite of all the obstacles. Despite her private burdens, her kindness and generosity never dried up. The cheeky sparkle in her eyes was her quiet defiance, even if she seemed to give in to stronger people.

The Oma I carry in me is the cheerful and talkative one who was always dressed and ready for an outing, always carrying a stash of biscuits in her handbag, always sneaking pocket money for secret treats. She knew that you just keep hoping and trying and enjoying the little things with people that you love. The Oma I bring with me is the one scheming to return to her beloved Europe, the one whose eyes brighten with hope in the face of this impossibility, the one who forged a life on distant and foreign soil, in an unfamiliar language. The Oma I love flatters you with the wrong age on your birthday card, but she laughs freely at herself, and the card is crammed full of sweet words. She makes you dresses that you’ll grow into even if she isn’t sure of your measurements, she takes the bus to the city an hour early to wait for you so she won’t miss a moment with you, she wants to be seen strolling arm-in-arm through Queen Street Mall with you.

We are all making choices, and trying our best to make good ones. As we lay Oma in the earth to rest at last, let’s not judge her too harshly for hers. Some people take life by both hands and wrestle it into the shape they want it to be. Others accept their situation and mould themselves instead, and their quiet contentedness is all you see of a fierce optimism. Her blood and her kindness once flowed through her soft body that hugged us all countless times. Her blood still flows through us, her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and may her kindness too.

Gentle people can be strong too—maybe the strongest.

 

Sarah Johanna Bruins Groenestyn, 23.03.1926  – 02.04.2016

Ortsbindung

Die Ecke / The corner © Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

Stability is not my main requirement to work, though painting is such a material career, and too much mobility limits my work in terms of scale, time and tools. For even within one city, it is possible to live and work in a rootless manner, in the city itself—painting at home, writing classes in a café, drawing in the gallery, writing philosophy in the library, painting at the sketch group. Sometimes I have the sense that I live in the city of Vienna itself—my workday stretched across its many districts, my books and pencils in my trusty backpack as I bike from place to place. It’s almost more important to feel myself in Vienna than to be able to work for eight uninterrupted hours. The city feeds my work. It is not stability, but a clear sense of place that keeps me content and focused.

I feel with Neo Rauch (in Mueller-Stahl, 2015: 37), the esteemed Leipzig painter, that:

‘Ich bin besonders raumfühlig und von äußeren Gegebenheiten abhängig in Hinblick auf das, was ich da meinen Leinwänden anvertraue.’

(‘I have a strong sense of space and of my environment, and that relates to what I put down on canvas.’)

But somehow I lost the unhurried stillness of Vienna in my increasingly busy days. An urgency nagged at me at every station. Even home ceased to be a haven. Long bike rides through narrow streets watching the smoke rising from the pipes of lonely men in singlets leaning out of windows ceased to soothe me. I cannot work when I cannot ground myself, and even my beloved Vienna was slipping out from beneath me.

So I went to Leipzig for a quiet retreat, where a desk awaited me with a neat pile of Wittgenstein, Kant and Rilke, where a freshly-prepared square canvas perched upon an easel next to a glass-topped table of gum turpentine, wax, Champagne chalk and willow charcoal awaited me. Everything laid out with care and attention by a very peaceful soul, who attended to his paintings like a devoted gardner to his potted plants in a neighbouring room.

The light streamed in the bay windows every morning, and we woke slowly with the scent of brewing coffee and burning coals lingering in the chilly air, Spring hesitating at the door. Soulful Bach cello sonatas filled the air with their deep resonance as we brewed our age-old potions: rabbit-skin glue on the double-boiler, with chalk and titanium white pigment; the rhythmic, physical labour of stirring and painting, of stretching and restretching linen, before we returned to our pictures and our books.

‘Ich bin sogar auf eine gewisse Ortsbindung angewiesen. Der Ort muss mich aber auch nähren, er muss mich atmosphärisch beschicken mit Dingen, die vielleicht in jedem Mauerstein nisten, in jedem Winkel dieses Raumes als Schwingungsrudiment anwesend sind.’

(‘You could even say that I depend on my bond with places. But the place also has to give something to me. Its atmosphere has to fill me up with things that nest in every stone of the wall and linger as low-level echoes in every corner of the room.’ (Rauch, in Mueller-Stahl, 2015: 37).)

I escaped to a pocket of Leipzig that gently nuzzled me into a quiet rhythm. There is always more work to do, more that could have been written, paintings that could have been further refined, more moments that could have been stolen for drawing, more books on Ingres, Balthus and Klinger that could have been devoured. But better than all measurable progress is regaining one’s equilibrium by merging oneself with the very cracks in the walls that surround you. At last I let myself just be, and became absorbed into the hushed but diligent pace of another’s place.

 

Mueller-Stahl, Karoline. 2015. ‘Dinge, die in jedem Mauerstein nisten: Ein Gespräch mit Neo Rauch.’ Spinnerei: From cotton to culture (Report 2015). Trans. Alison Kirkland. Leipzig Baumwollspinnerei Verwaltungsgesellschaft: Leipzig.