A full spectrum

Dutch self portrait (c) Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

Early Rembrandt: his colours are bold and gleaming, his compositions elaborate and ambitious; the drawing is wobbly in places. But Rembrandt is unmistakably there right from the beginning. His early Historical Scene reminds me of the clumsy vigour of the youthful Velazquez who, in just a few short years, elevated his painting dramatically, adhering to his same vision but finding more and more assured means of expression. Delacroix (2010: 141) exclaims of Rubens: ‘It is very evident that Rubens was no imitator; he was always Rubens.’ One feels seized by the same conviction when one stands before an early Rembrandt, and this is reassuring. Finish and fluency come with time; originality of conviction and sensibility shine through in spite of underdeveloped abilities.

Detail of Rembrandt, Historical scene

The Rembrandthuis is a veritable cavern of treasures, augmented by the practical demonstrations of printing etchings and mixing up paints from pigments. Huddled in Rembrandt’s tight and dim etching studio, privy to etching, drypoint and engraving techniques, peering into pots of ink made of burnt rabbit bones and linseed oil, watching the hasty print come out clouded with too much ink on the clear surface, one emerges with an entirely different understanding of what Rembrandt produced. Encountering prints made by his own hand, and able to compare them with the efforts of others to recreate them from the same plates, or to make copies of them, one is struck by the artistry of the entire process and of the masterful hand and inventive mind behind them.

Rembrandt’s atmospheric prints make use of a full spectrum of techniques, he pushes every method for what it can give him, overlapping and merging and setting them off against each other to maximum effect. Drypoint curves with their fuzzed burrs render hazy leaves blowing in the trees, but crisp, sharp, engraved lines lightly caress figures in blazing light in the foreground. The darks are an absorbing mixture of furious hatching and the controlled rubbing of ink; they transition thickly into light passages, and one appreciates that this transition is supplied deliberately and carefully, it does not take care of itself or lazily blend two unrelated areas.

Rembrandt

That thick hatching is never harried or negligent; it alters course because the image takes it there. Rembrandt is unafraid to search around the surface of the object as if actually feeling his way around it, little clumps of hatches rolling this way and then that way, breaking into each other like rippling waves in a canal. His inventiveness with mark-making is astonishing, lively and ever responsive to the subject.

Rembrandt, Militia Company of District II Under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq, known as the Night Watch, 1642

Returning to the Rijksmuseum to see his paintings, after emerging from the intricate world of his etchings, his compositional prowess is instantly striking. It migrates directly from his small and tightly-spun etchings to the grand format, bringing its seething dark patches and soulful transitions into the light and its expert contrasts that make the light flash where it really needs to. We are all painting with the same ground up bits of dirt in linseed oil. But Rembrandt knows how to find an impressive range within the mix, how to play tones and textures off against one another for specific effects of light, how to use lightness of touch to convey brilliance, how to deepen space with quickly engulfing shadows. The Night Watch dazzles less for its individual perfections but rather for its pictorial unity. The pictures that flank it, decked with smooth drawing and inventive rendering, ring with even-handed clarity. Each face in them is well-depicted, each pose carefully arranged and interlocking with the next, each figure grouped with others, yet shown in its individuality. Yet in these pictures, composition is conceived much more as a linear arrangement of given subjects. Rembrandt sacrifices much–he gives us stumpy legs and obscured faces–but he has puzzled over how to present us with a picture, not simply a spread of information. The vast stretch of darkness across the top reads just like his etchings–a thick darkness hangs heavily over the militia, certainly unnecessary for the reproduction of their likenesses, but indispensable for a resonant, night-swamped image.

Amsterdam

Delacroix (2010: 209) laments that ‘The majority of painters who are so scrupulous in their use of the model spend most of their time putting faithful copies into dull and ill-digested compositions. They believe that they have accomplished everything when they reproduce heads, hands and accessories in slavish imitation of nature without any relationship with one another.’ One is left in no doubt that Rembrandt digests his compositions–that his smaller works, many of them hardly more than thumbnails, give him such a sense for the whole, allow him to extract salient passages and subdue others, or weave them more subtly together, in a way that eludes more faithful painters. His compositions do feel chewed–it feels as though he is intimately acquainted with them, as though he has explored every crevice of them and considered their weight and role with respect to the whole. And seeing etchings in their first, second, sixth, seventh states, seeing the gentle alterations, and the sometimes dramatic revisions, one sees that Rembrandt considered and reconsidered, reworked his images, knew them thoroughly and beat them into the shape he wanted. This is a kind of familiarity and deliberateness that one does not meet with often.

Amsterdam

 

Delacroix, Eugène. 2010. The journal of Eugene Delacroix: a selection. Edited by Hubert Wellington. Translated by Lucy Norton. London; New York: Phaidon Press.

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.

Borrowed spaces

 

An exhibition! I have a collection of still lives and interiors from the collection of homes I’ve had in the past year or two. I’ve shared my veranda with Australian pythons, my kitchen with coffee-loving Bulgarians, and my living room with a trinket-loving Russian. I’ve worked in borrowed studios, unfurnished bedrooms, overflowing living rooms. I’ve contemplated the death of my Oma through borrowed possessions. I’ve followed a restless painter through German cities, large and small. The view from my window is always fresh. It only seems fitting to show these little pictures in an opulent borrowed Viennese home, adorning the Hauskonzert of the gracious Dr. Brigitte Papis!

A donation for the musicians would be much appreciated.

Eloquence and drawing

Russian plant © Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

Language, woven of conventions, adapts and evolves, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s account of its progression takes a delightfully unexpected path. Language, he (2009: 294) declares, was born of the passions: ‘Neither hunger nor thirst, but love, hatred, pity, anger wrested the first voices from them.’ Physical needs are easily signalled; but the complexities of expressing gently nuanced emotions—of swelling love overlaid with brittle melancholy; of restless expectation shaded with pleasant hope—demand a more developed mode of intimation. The first words to escape our trembling lips must thus have been effusive outpourings of raw poetry, only to be subdued and ordered much later by reason. Language’s intellectual ripening carried it further and further from its first poetic utterances: ‘In proportion as language was perfected, melody imperceptibly lost its ancient energy by imposing new rules upon itself’ (Rousseau 2009: 329).

 

But painting may be spared this ruthless pruning. Painting, as language, has never been reigned in to express concepts with logical precision. It rather remains an unruly address to the eyes that harmonises with the chaotic cadences of our hearts. We are moved because we discover our passions and imitations of the objects of our passions candidly reflected in paint—it is in this empathetic manner that paintings speak with us. And ‘one speaks to the eyes much more effectively than to the ears,’ Rousseau assures us (2009: 291).

Rousseau reserves particularly high praise for drawing. Good painting touches us, certainly; but we ought not overestimate the role of colour in this. Colours, argues Rousseau (2009: 319), operate at a simple sensory level. They strike us immediately, they catch our attention, they please our eyes, but colours alone cannot move us. ‘It is the design, it is the imitation, that endows these colours with life and soul, it is the passions which they express that succeed in moving our own, it is the objects which they represent that succeed in affecting us’ (Rousseau 2009: 319). Colourless drawings retain their expressive force; but colours without contours melt into pure sensory pleasantness (Rousseau 2009: 319).

Rousseau privileges drawing with a more fundamental position than words, much nearer to the earth and to our volatile passions. Love, that consuming passion, ‘has livelier ways of expressing itself’ than with the very words it summoned into existence, however poetic those words may be (Rousseau 2009: 290). Love is fabled to be the impulse that compelled the first drawing. Rousseau (2009: 290) swoons with evident delight: ‘What things she who traced the shadow of her lover with so much pleasure told him! What sounds could she have used to convey this movement of a stick?’ And so we clutch our sticks, the ‘Griffel’ of Max Klinger’s (1985: 21) ‘Griffelkunst,’ with renewed vigour, finding ourselves closer to the poetic expressiveness we crave. ‘Writing, which seems as if it should fix language,’ systematically changes language—categorically domesticating it, demanding ever more precise adaptations, shedding its poetic origins. Drawing, by contrast, abandons the pursuit of precision in order to move us in more complex and thus deeper ways (Rousseau 2009: 300).

It is this resolute devotion to the passions that lends drawing its eloquence. Our visual language, built of rhythmic lines and deliberately constructed compositions, possesses all the tools of charming and winning over our audience: we have not the means to persuade, but to stir. We rely not on arguments, but on poetry, and poetry and eloquence, says Rousseau (2009: 318), have the same origin. While we search out logical colour series, and look for technical solutions that make clear statements about light, about form, about perspective, our technical grammar is subservient to our elusive poetic aims. We ought not forget our advantage, for even words derive their eloquence from the visual, as Rousseau (2009: 291) reminds us; they move us most when infused with imagery and colour through metaphor.

Drawing—design—with unlimited poetic potential, saves the visual language of painting from too strict a grammar. Because though there are means of drawing more accurately, more naturalistically, more literally, the best drawings may be judged to harness the grammatical concerns of truth and precision for more expressive purposes, to elevate something poetic in the subject. An able draughtsman pursues accuracy; a good draughtsman tells seductive lies with his eloquent stick. His impassioned retellings are more captivating than the truth; the visual grammar he works within does not ever refine itself towards rational precision. Good drawing orders a painting according to another kind of logic. It makes the painting a painting, not a mirror image, not a soup of sensations.

Our language, as painters, is rooted in the grammar of design. We must search out the visual patterns, impose hierarchies, intentionally structure our images, and chase endlessly after the stirring undulations of our lines, for herein lies their emotive strength. Used forcefully, we may speak with an eloquence that moves our viewers more deeply than any string of words. Words have evolved as a tool of persuasion, and ‘by cultivating the art of convincing, that of moving the emotions was lost’ (Rousseau 2009: 329). Drawing, and through it, painting, has not suffered as a language at the hand of progress. Its conventions, though they shift and change, tie it ever to its emotional source.

 

Klinger, Max. 1985 [1885]. Malerei und Zeichnung. Leipzig: Philipp Reclam.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 2009 [1781]. Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music. Edited by John T. Scott. Trans. from the French edition. Hanover N.H.: Dartmouth.

 

 

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.

Leipzig calling

Bathurst Rhythms © Ryan Daffurn

I have had the unimaginable pleasure of forming a close bond with an incredible painter of my own generation: Ryan Daffurn. I secretly think he is one of the most skilled and genuine painters alive, his age notwithstanding. His work is formidable: the fluent synthesis of years of dedicated study and obsessive practice; his lines are sure and energetic, brimming with life.

I first made his acquaintance at the school he teaches at and co-founded in Brisbane, Australia, where his humble and attentive and famously slow and thorough mode of teaching quietly won me over. It was a long time before he showed me any of his drawings in aid of teaching, and when he brought out an eloquently hatched pencil drawing of a tree, curling off into space in all directions, I was shaken by the descriptive power of his restrained and firmly-placed lines. As a student, you place yourself trustingly in the hands of another, and I fear that too often this trust can be misplaced. When you see your teacher’s own rendering of the task you are battling, and their hand is decisive and elegant, and they present it to you quietly and humbly as but one method of working, little seeds of respect begin to take root.

Ryan is a teacher of great humility, and I am convinced that this is because he sees himself as an eternal student. He would rather listen than instruct. His respect for other painters–living and dead–is unending; his determination to find merit and to learn something from every work he sees is limitless. And when himself without a teacher, he turns to the physical world for instruction, stimulation and challenges. His devotion to his senses energises his work, but his inner world twists it imaginatively. Ryan’s work is idealised, re-envisioned, accentuated—beautiful lies delicately woven together into a seamless fabric. Through his incessant reinterpretation of the natural world—his sketchbook always to hand—I have learned to appreciate that art can be better than life.

If there was a living painter whose powers ought to be recognised, whose path ought to be smoothed, whose labours ought to be supported, Ryan Daffurn is he. The winds of change are calling him to Leipzig, where his hard-won abilities can be inspired afresh and wholly concentrated on his own work.

Ryan has a true reverence for art and its power to move us, describe us and even redefine us. His ambition is somewhat disconnected from popular notions of success: he is intent on doing his utmost to contribute something of real worth and meaning. And in my humble opinion, he is capable of anything.

Der schönste Beruf

Minotaurus © 2011 Ruprecht von Kaufmann

Ryan and I had the great fortune to meet and talk with the formidable painter Ruprecht von Kaufmann while in Berlin. This man has made a mighty impression on me and his simultaneous humility and aloofness have set a firm example for my own painterly pursuits. His whole being exudes a reverence for his profession; his quiet manner seethes with indignant contempt for the expected mode of operation of the artist. Painting is his only master, and he has humbly followed where its dictates have led, never turned aside by the suggestions, temptations and despairing rejections of those who have sought to drive the direction of painting. Von Kaufmann is a true artist, as the word ought to be used: skilled, inventive, searching and single-mindedly devoted to his task—by the labour of his hands he brings objects into the world which embody his wordless thoughts.

Der Schimmelreiter © 2007 Ruprecht von Kaufmann

Von Kaufmann’s integrity as a painter is rooted in a profound respect for and love of painting itself. Artists, far from being diligent and talented artisans, are generally expected to think at great length about themselves and then string found objects together in shocking ways (or at least arrange them in rows). Yet von Kaufmann’s quiet dedication to painting shows that he cares not for the title of ‘artist’ but for the quality of the work, and finds great satisfaction in the production of it. He diligently works with his hands and raises a family as any other respectably employed person might. In an immersive video in which he presents his work to the students of Laguna College of Art and Design in California, he says so artlessly and truthfully of being a painter: ‘It’s one of the most beautiful professions that I could possibly imagine to be in.’ This sweet and simple statement has stayed in my mind. The more I look at his work, the more I realise that this sentiment is at the heart of it.

Der Schiffbruch mit Wolf (detail) © 2012 Ruprecht von Kaufmann

Von Kaufmann’s delight in the substance of paint is evident in his lascivious handling of it: the thick and gutsy paint is an absolute pleasure to the eyes. He has long been conscious that the visual artist works in physical media, and speaks of his growing awareness of ‘the idea that a painting is an object.’ At first this meant that his paint grew thicker and more audacious, boldly making itself known within the image. And with time it provoked him to challenge his substrate, leading to experiments with painting on rubber and felt, with gashes in the surface, with questioning the most desirable viewpoint, and with merging painting and installation (though, notably, never abandoning painting). It drove him to adopt wax as a medium for pigment, rather than linseed oil, to give a satin glow and a cloudy transparency to the generous lathering of paint. The earthy physicality of painting remains ever at the fore in von Kaufmann’s work, and I think we would do well to seize upon the sensuous strength of paint even if others fashionably abandon it for every material but.

Mittsommer (detail) © 2010 Ruprecht von Kaufmann

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Since von Kaufmann’s work is heavily imaginative, reference material can only serve him so far. His strong representational training as a painter is thus reinforced by memory, driven by a genuine fascination with the visual. Again and again he refers to memory, and it becomes clear that he has devoted a large part of his working time to internalising his observations. Small studies, lovely as stand-alone still lives, were born as a means of his absorbing sights. And even apart from these studies, his intersection with the physical world is one of curiosity and deliberate observation:

‘When I see things that I know that interest me and that I want to use in a painting, I look at them very consciously, trying to break them down into the most simple thing that would allow me to memorise how to put that into a painting and how to represent that.’

Painting from memory allows him a vast amount of freedom, and he relishes his early discovery that ‘you can tell people a lot of lies visually.’ But his irreproachable draughtsmanship is ever the firm scaffolding for these imaginative constructions.

Kreuz © 2009 Ruprecht von Kaufmann

Von Kaufmann’s investigations lead him down rabbit holes that make him difficult to categorise, and thus difficult to brand and market. And this is extremely admirable. The difficulty he presents to galleries and collectors is precisely what establishes him as a creative innovator. The market thinks in terms of contained packages fit for profit, making projections based on trends. But a person of real genius concocts something entirely new as if from nowhere. As we wouldn’t expect our favourite bands to churn out the same predictable album every year, but (as true fans) we grow with the band and delight in their growth as artists, there is a real satisfaction in seeing a painter boldly stretch and grow with a searching honesty.

Leap of faith © 2009 Ruprecht von Kaufmann

His quiet disregard for expectations is fortifying:

‘For one thing, I don’t really care. … It seemed pretty clear to me from the get-go that I was never going to have any museum shows or any broader art world acceptance anyway, that this was purely a niche thing.’

Not deliberately shocking, but rather true to his profession, von Kaufmann perseveres on his own path, treading where he must. Collectors may not appreciate the dramatic shifts in his work, gallerists might not consider him a safe investment; these are but small obstacles on the road to being the best painter you can be.

The Pawning (detail) © 2010 Ruprecht von Kaufmann

And this is the heart of it: von Kaufmann knows himself to be a painter. He understands that his work is physical and visual. He knows that he stores memories in his body, and he uses them to weave visual thoughts into objects. Not strictly pouring out narratives, but using subtle narrative cues, he builds counterfactual worlds dense with mood rather than with symbolism. Trained by his sight, he is liberated by invention, able to ‘tweak everything to just fit the composition and the mood you want to set.’ His impressively trained memory enables fluency with his visual language: ‘I actually love, as a drawing medium, on a beautifully prepared canvas, to work with the brush and oil paint. It’s a beautiful way to draw that’s a lot freer.’ Might this sheer love of and reverence for painting well up in our own defiantly intelligent brushstrokes as they do his. We are fortunate to have, after all, one of the most beautiful professions imaginable.

Memory

The more I work, the more I realise how crucial a tool memory is to the painter. In circles of representational painters, it is a point of pride to paint from life rather than from photographs, and yet this reliance on what is physically before us is of course imaginatively limiting. If our ultimate goal is to so master our super-power that we can uninhibitedly create boundless worlds through our brush, a competence with copying arrangements before our eyes will not be enough. It is simply a step on the way to omnipotence.

Our language is visual, and working from life allows us, if you will, to build our visual vocabulary. It forces us to slow down, pay attention, and battle through each problem of light, volume and texture, of colour relationships, of atmosphere, of design. It demands that we are wholly present and alert to the very substances of the physical world: we must pry into the construction of things in a way that word-languages do not. Where our word-brain is content to recognise a chair by ‘some legs and a horizontal bit and sometimes a back,’ our visual-brain needs more information. It notes the turned legs, the crossbars, the torn padding, the ridges, the carvings. But to simply note down these specifics is little more than dictation. Our still lives, if driven by an effort to remember, can serve us more than the image we are currently creating. Draw that chair, paint that chair, and attempt to own it forever.

Much of this remembering is physical, in our bodies, learned through motions and repetition. The artist can achieve astounding facility in drawing by nurturing a muscular memory that is not consciously directed by thought. And so, it is not enough to draw; one must redraw. There is no brilliance in fluking a great image, or in transferring a lucky design and colouring the shapes. Repetition cements what we have seen, both in our minds and in our hands. We do well to draw again with greater understanding, greater confidence, a better feel for the image. Through repetition we fuse part of the physicality of an image into our bodies, we store it in the movement of our arms and wrists.

I have started to think of my learning in terms of developing multiple selves, concurrently. This might be as crazy and complicated as it sounds. But it becomes more and more evident that progress in drawing and painting is not strictly linear. Drawing, for example, is not simply the precursor to painting, though solid draughtsmanship is unendingly helpful in painting. For even once we apply our drawing skills to painting, we can continue to improve our drawing. I imagine three selves with three fundamentally different approaches, each supporting and reinforcing the other.

The first self is very literal and rooted in the physical world. She first comes at drawing and painting by observation, and makes great progress with the model or the still life before her. She comes to know what to look for and how to notate it. The external world offers her an abundance of information, stimulus, truths and complexities. Rubens himself was one such dedicated student (Clark, 1985: 133):

‘Rubens copied everything which could conceivably add to his already overflowing resources. For the nude his models were, of course, the Antique, Michelangelo and Marcantonio. Titian he copied for his colour, but altered his form… he drew from the Antique and copied from his predecessors till certain ideals of formal completeness were absolutely fixed in his mind.’

If we neglect this observational self, our visual store is weak and our vocabulary shamefully sparse. All the clever ideas in the world will not make up for our appalling inability to express them visually. Yet the element of memory remains crucial. Ideally, we are not only repeating what we see, but repeating it in order to remember it, so that later we can work from our vast store without needing a model, a chair, a light-source before us. Delacroix (p. 208-9) insists, ‘The only painters who really benefit by consulting a model are those who can produce their effect without one.’

Copy after Titian, Girl in a fur

The second self turns away from the physical world and creates her own, from memory. She is the test of how much we have really internalised. And yet, frustratingly, she starts out almost as frail and helpless as the first did. She draws infuriatingly badly, makes stupid mistakes, forgets seemingly obvious bits of anatomy, and generally lags painfully behind. For this reason it can be easier to smugly rely on our observational self to keep producing lovely pictures. But without abandoning our observational habits, we can also begin to nurture this little self and watch her drawings improve and find to our utter delight that she only strengthens our memory.

A wonderfully modest yet accomplished Berlin painter who demonstrates how powerful such training can be is Ruprecht von Kaufmann. There is a lovely video of a talk he gives to some American students, during which he is repeatedly asked about his ability to paint from memory. They incredulously inquire after his reference material, bewildered at a convincing and detailed chair. ‘Oh yeah,’ von Kaufmann explains off-handedly, ‘the couch is really a rip-off, because one of my most favourite artists is Lucien Freud and he has leather couches like that often in his paintings, so … I sort of looked at how he did it and then translated it into my own way of painting.’

Copy after Raphael

The observational self thus never leaves us; never dissolves or transforms into the imaginative self. Rather, she continues to turn her eyes afresh on the physical world, unrelentingly fascinated. And having trained her memory so well, she might not even need a pencil to own new observations, as von Kaufmann further explains:

‘When I see things that I know that interest me and that I want to use in a painting, I look at them very consciously, trying to break them down into the most simple thing that would allow me to memorise how to put that into a painting and how to represent that.’

And not only can we learn to recreate observations from memory, but, as in the case of Rubens, our observations can be ordered by our imaginative intentions, as Clark (1985: 133) describes. ‘The more we study [Rubens’ nudes] the more we discover them to be under control.’ Once the aforementioned ‘ideals of formal completeness were absolutely fixed in his mind,’ when he approached nature he ‘instinctively subordinated the observed facts to the patterns established in his imagination’ (1985: 133).

And far off in the distance I begin to detect a future self who, supported by her sisters and their razor-sharp memory, no longer needs to prepare with repetition, with fully-resolved studies either from life or from imagination. This self will have such a fount of sure and reliable knowledge, such a fluency with weaving her visual vocabulary into intelligent images, that she will be able to work directly onto the canvas. Her ideas will be well-formed enough in her head, and the movements of her wrist so well tuned to her thoughts that she will be bold enough to investigate in the final medium. And though I’ve no doubt she will struggle as the first, and begin weakly and uncertainly, she will grow in power as she trains her ability to imagine and realise a work.

My most pressing challenge on the way to painterly enlightenment is thus to develop my memory in terms of these differently-focused selves. My recent projects have involved a great deal of memory-exertion, and I will share these with you soon. To be a fully-abled painter of the calibre of Michelangelo depends on ‘a confluence of mental activities, calculation, idealisation, scientific knowledge and sheer ocular precision’ (Clark 1985: 57-8). The burden, then, is on us to look, to really see, and to remember.

Copy after Franz Hals, Catharina Hooft, Berlin

 

Clark, Kenneth. 1985 [1956]. The nude: A study of ideal art. Penguin: London.

Delacroix, Eugene. 2010 [1822-1863] The journal of Eugene Delacroix. Trans. Lucy Norton. Phaidon: London.

It’s taking over everything

It’s taking over everything © Samantha Groenestyn (oil on linen)

Based purely on observation and my own experiences and without recourse to hard research, I’ve come to hold the wholly unfeminist view that men are, generally speaking, better at things than women. I certainly don’t want to make any normative claims that things ought to be this way, but since these observations have troubled me my entire life, and have sometimes made me feel without hope due to some seemingly inbuilt inferiority, I simply want to speculate about why this might be.

Christ Church, Oxford

And I wouldn’t be the first. Virginia Woolf meanders through a very persuasive line of reasoning, narrated through her wanderings as a guest through the ‘courts and quadrangles of Oxbridge on a fine October morning,’ much as I found myself this past October. ‘Intellectual freedom depends upon material things,’ she argues (1928: 106).

‘Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.’

And while I certainly do not disagree with her thesis, I want to build on it and offer an idea of my own. This being that, perhaps due to greater material liberties, perhaps due to the way they are encouraged to explore and not taught to everywhere be cautious, afraid and compliant, boys learn in a fundamentally different way to girls. And they learn more thoroughly, more single-mindedly, and more carried by their own wilful curiosity even if it drives them beyond the accepted bounds of education.

Oxford

It is no secret that girls, only recently permitted an education, are performing better in schools than boys. But our education system does not, if I might make so bold a claim, encourage greatness. Instead it asks for compliance, adherence to curricula, and measurable aptitude through examinations. I was an excellent student in both school and university, often triumphing over the very boys I looked up to. I was willing to accept the terms of the game, and perform the requisite tasks to receive the desired praise. A boy I particularly admired—Billy—gave approximately zero fucks. We had a beautiful symbiosis: I sat next to him in physics, listened attentively to the teacher while Billy drew or made jokes, and then I brought all my questions to Billy. And he furnished me with every answer, with insightful explanations, demonstrations and a depth of understanding that absolutely dazzled me.

Bodleian Library, Oxford

School was a magical place to me, where there was a library and people who set aside time to impart their knowledge to me, knowledge I was hungry for but did not know how to access. School was, I’ve no doubt, infinitely boring for Billy, except for getting to sit next to girls like me, because all of his learning took place outside of school. When I realised this, it blew my mind. School seemed a holy sanctuary of knowledge; Billy taught me (among wave theory, additive and subtractive colour and how to calculate trajectories, Simpsons jokes interspersed) that school barely skimmed the tip of the iceberg and that our teachers were cruelly holding out on us. He had university textbooks at home, and did all the calculations during the summer holidays, and learned a great deal from the mistress of experience, thanks to his mother allowing him to blow things up in the backyard.

Girls have adapted to the education system because we are extremely good at being submissive and we care how people measure us. We are well-trained since birth, since the dawn of time, to obey instructions and meet requirements. We excel in this for we are ever conscious of how others perceive us—our hair, our gestures, our conversation. School is merely another form of etiquette, and we fit its rigid confines comfortably. Yet despite the academic success of girls, it’s also no secret that men remain at the top of just about every imaginable field. Women can demonstrate understanding of taught concepts, but we are stunted as innovators.

Copies after Sir Alfred Gilbert, Icarus, and the Roman Clio, muse of history, The Ashmolean, Oxford

True genius depends on making leaps, taking risks, and working doggedly at a single problem in the face of sustained criticism. It requires a degree of madness: obsession, single-mindedness, anti-social tendencies that compel one to stay home of a Friday night solving a problem that matters to no one else. These traits are—I don’t pretend to know why, or to claim that this is necessarily genetic—characteristically masculine. It’s unladylike to grow your armpit hair or to express left-of-field ideas. Our mental states are as groomed as our hairless skin. I want to suggest we ought to let them grow wild as our brothers do: assuming nothing, open to new concepts, and fearlessly tackling them with reason. Let us remain so madly fixated upon our tasks that we, too, become impervious to attacks on ourselves, and engage only with those relevant to our work.

I’m reminded of the fearful all-consuming passion of a male character described by the undeniably brilliant Mary Shelley (2008: 29):

‘Even at that time I shuddered at the picture he drew of his passions: he had the imagination of a poet, and when he described the whirlwind that then tore his feelings he gave his words the impress of life so vividly that I believed while I trembled. I wondered how he could ever again have entered into the offices of life after his wild thoughts seemed to have given him affinity with the unearthly; while he spoke so tremendous were the ideas which he conveyed that it appeared as if the human heart were far too bounded for their conception. His feelings seemed better fitted for a spirit whose habitation is the earthquake and the volcano than for one confined to a mortal body and human lineaments.’

Mutter mit Kind über der Schulter (1917) by Käthe Kollwitz, Berlin

Käthe Kollwitz, an unquestionably brilliant German draughtsman and sculptor, shares some insightful observations in her achingly beautiful diaries on her unlikely artistic development and the falling away of many of her female contemporaries, her own sister Lise included. ‘Actually,’ she writes of Lise (1988: 80),

‘she is more talented artistically. That shows up to this day. But she lacked training. And something else too, perhaps: my guess is that she has lived less intensively. When she was young she cultivated herself and the objects of her love. That was enough for her. I probably had more drive. And it has been this drive alone which has made it possible for me to develop as far as possible my talent, which in itself is inferior to hers.’

Mutter mit totem Sohn (Pietà) by Käthe Kollwitz, Berlin

And, more strongly (p. 24-5):

‘Now when I ask myself why Lise, for all her talent, did not become a real artist, but only a highly gifted dilettante, the reason is clear to me. I was keenly ambitious and Lise was not. I wanted to and Lise did not. I had a clear aim and direction. … But she was gentle and unselfish. (‘Lise will always sacrifice herself,’ Father used to say.) And so her talent was not developed. … She lacked total concentration upon it. I wanted my education to be in art alone. If I could, I would have saved all my intellectual powers and turned them exclusively to use in my art, so that this flame alone would burn brightly.’

Mutter mit totem Sohn (Pietà) by Käthe Kollwitz, Berlin

I want to suggest, along with Kollwitz (p. 23), that ‘the tinge of masculinity within me helped me in my work’—and that in order to reach these heights of brilliance, with the Mary Shelleys, Virginia Woolfs and Käthe Kollwitzes of the world, we must follow the man inside us and adapt the way that we choose to learn. We must set ourselves tasks, ignore external measures, walk away from outside demands. We must not think of ourselves at all, but solely of the work, and abandon all else that distracts us. We must simplify our lives and allow ourselves to be absorbed and consumed with our occupation. Let us turn away from superficial praise; true respect comes with real accomplishment.

For even Virginia Woolf (1928: 98) breathes a sigh of relief at the substance of men’s work: ‘Indeed, it was delightful to read a man’s writing again. It was so direct, so straightforward after the writing of women. It indicated such freedom of mind, such liberty of person, such confidence in himself.’ I in fact don’t think that women need be inferior—and Woolf, Shelley and Kollwitz present dazzling lady counterexamples. I only think that we need to identify where we are causing ourselves to stumble, for these are obstacles that we can remove. Let us not sacrifice ourselves with the sweet-temperamented Lise Stern. Let us not be lost in obscurity with the once-promising Berlin painter Sabine Lepsius, distracted by the care of others, who wrote bitterly, „Schade um meine Gaben.“

Copy after Selbstbildnis (1885) by Sabine Lepsius, Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin

 

Kollwitz, Käthe. 1988. The diaries and letters of Käthe Kollwitz. Ed. Hans Kollwitz. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. Northwestern University: Evanston, Illinois.

Shelley, Mary. 2008. Mathilda. Ed. Elizabeth Nitchie. Melville House: Brooklyn, NY.

Woolf, Virginia. [1928] 1963. A room of one’s own. Penguin: Mitcham, Victoria.

Keine Grenzen

Heather © Samantha Groenestyn, oil on linen

For two months I’ve adopted Scotland, once more, as my home, learning the rugged streets of Glasgow, adopting the frank and fearless tongue of the Scots. Having studied at the University of Edinburgh several years ago I feel intellectually cocooned by this place, a small weave in the strong intellectual fabric of this proud nation, whose independence I near witnessed. The Scottish intellectual heritage is a formidable one, and I’ve lately been enthralled by some research into the specifically Scottish flavour of much Enlightenment thinking and, just as importantly, action.

I’ve been reading of the vibrant, open and liberal mental environment of Scotland in the eighteenth century in Alexander Broadie’s neat little history The Scottish Enlightenment. Certain fortuitous developments, argues Broadie, made Scotland fertile intellectual ground in the wake of the darker middle ages. One was certainly that Scottish thinkers had the impertinence to question things and to think for themselves rather than bowing to authorities like state and church (or Kirk). This mental independence exhibits something of a disrespect for authority. But such openness went both ways, with these authorities in turn being open-minded and tolerant enough to permit such boldness. ‘Intellectual progress appears not to be possible except in an intellectual climate in which people are not overly respectful of authorities,’ Broadie (2001: 18) suggests. Wilful Scotland, impassioned and staunchly maintaining an identity apart from England, has this quality in spades.

Importantly, this independent thought was not the response of individuals working in isolation in reaction to established authorities and entrenched modes of thought. Broadie (2001: 78) lays great stress on the ‘communal thinking, thinking with and through others’ of the ‘social phenomenon’ of the Enlightenment. I’m reminded of the reported lively exchange of the Viennese Salons much later, the merging of scientific and artistic minds, the concurrent burgeoning ideas of psychology. In the salons of Vienna, as in the clubs of Scotland, significant developments in philosophy, science, art and politics were birthed through the sweet communion of minds—minds very different, perhaps, in their private obsessions, but formed of the same stuff, the same inquisitiveness and drive. The Scottish Dugald Stewart (in Broadie, 2001: 110) noted that ‘In many cases … the sciences reflect light on each other; and the general acquisitions which we have made in other pursuits, may furnish us with useful helps for the farther prosecution of our own.’ And in the many and vibrantly diverse ‘Enlightenment clubs and societies,’ Broadie informs us, ‘men of disparate and wide-ranging accomplishment set off intellectual sparks in each other, and exemplified the Enlightenment ideal that people should think for themselves but not by themselves.’

Freed from the shackles of dogmatic thinking, and drawn to each other for the flint of inspiration, Enlightenment thinkers came together in ‘an international Republic of Letters,’ a written exchange of ideas that transcended borders and nationalities in a true cosmopolitan spirit (Broadie, 2001: 78). And as I shift from city to city, exchanging ideas with my compatriots of all nationalities, absorbing new sensations and nesting in new pockets of this vast earth, if only for a week, a month, or two, borders dissolve and I feel myself a citizen of a broader nation. I proudly state with David Hume, ‘I am a Citizen of the World’ (in Broadie, 2001: 95). And are our minds not freer than flesh? Our ideas travel even to places we may not, and we must send them there, and welcome back the responses.

As I’ve seen some universities grow perplexingly protective of their knowledge, closing their libraries and seminars to outsiders, I’ve seen others welcome me, if curious of my presence; I’ve seen discontented academics ponder the possibility of alternative free academic journals, investigate open access publishing,  argue for legislators to back public access to research and freely publish their ideas on hugely popular blogs, impatient of the increasingly outmoded notions of copyright and intellectual property. Our scientist colleagues are working openly, collaboratively, discussing their ideas even before publishing, giving us a clear indication that they chase real intellectual progress above success as it is traditionally measured. The international Republic of Letters is revived in this renewed ‘general acknowledgement of our right to put our ideas into the public domain’ (Broadie, 2001: 78).

So let us seize this task as our right! Let us not feel bordered by our institutions or lack thereof, our fields, or our passports. The world might be tightening its border security, shunting hopeful Australians between the Continent and the British Isles and back again, undermining the stability of our physical existences. Despite our European heritage we are denied the freer movement of the generation or two before us, despite our British head of state we are denied permission to live and work on the civilised side of the world. Despite the significant contributions of our Australian forebears—artists permitted the luxury of extended life and education in Paris, London, Florence—we are expected to lick the crumbs of three-month stints and produce impressive bodies of work on a strict time limit.

Nonetheless, our physical circumstances need not dictate our intellectual contribution. Our citizenship in the borderless intellectual republic depends solely on our ‘active participation in discussions and debates conducted in the public arena’ (Broadie, 2001: 95). Adam Ferguson, another celebrated Scottish thinker, urged ordinary citizens to lead an active life, equating a passive existence with being forcefully restrained. Ferguson (in Broadie, 2001: 89) offers a warning somewhat prophetic of present-day Australia, arguing that the smothering of all action in an effort to stamp out undesirable action stifles a nation’s brilliance:

…if a rigorous policy, applied to enslave, not to restrain from crimes, has an actual tendency to corrupt the manners, and to extinguish the spirit of nations; if its severities be applied to terminate the agitations of a free people, not to remedy their corruptions; if forms be often applauded as salutary, because they tend merely to silence the voice of mankind, or be condemned as pernicious, because they allow this voice to be heard; we may expect that many of the boasted improvements of civil society, will be mere devices to lay the political spirit at rest, and will chain up the active virtues more than the restless disorders of men.

And might not this fearful outlook extend to our modern preoccupation with borders, our growing and blinding nationalism? If we are made criminals for seeking to move amongst our intellectual compatriots, for attempting to settle in an existing society that is culturally rich and not an isolated backwater, might not many important achievements be denied our generation? Are we not destroying the intellectual climate necessary for progress other than the commercial?

Our ideas might be unsettling and our movements unpredictable, but this very irreverence for the established modes of thought and action is, if eighteenth-century Scotland demonstrates anything, key to dramatic intellectual progress. Such golden ages exploded into being where ‘geniuses and … other immensely creative people … were living in each other’s intellectual pockets (as well, often, as in each other’s houses)’ (Broadie, 2001: 219). And yet our borderless minds need not threaten cultural identities or national stability, for rather than being thought strictly anti-nationalist, we might perhaps more aptly be considered post-nationalist, something broader and more humanist that encompasses but moves beyond our homelands. As Hume was both a rightfully proud Scot and gladly a citizen of the world, our arbitrary home soil can only ‘be strengthened morally by the presence in it of citizens who attach a high value to rationality and civil liberty’ (Broadie, 2001: 96).

 

Broadie, Alexander. 2001. The Scottish Enlightenment. Birlinn: Edinburgh.