“Ideally most of our waking time should be spent in a state of contemplative stillness or of acute focus and concentration which are respectively the passive and active faces of attention”. Christopher Allen, October 3 2020.
In an article on sustainability in art Allen looks to the state of mind of the artist rather than the objects produced. This set me thinking [as does all of his writing] about my own practice.
I spend every day in this state but it doesn’t necessarily engender creative energy or a sense of accomplishment so much as a sense of peace where to produce nothing is just as valuable as more paint on canvas. There is always change; change in thinking; change in mediation as one medium overlaps another [books, music]; change in practice. It isn’t about works of art so much as the evolving sense of discovery. While I can recognise themes and ideas that date back over a lifetime, whatever the essence of my creativity actually is, is yet to be defined. It isn’t a matter of endless variations though. Everything I produce adds to the weight of art in the world and only my constant recycling prevents the addition of more useless objects. Each time I recycle a painting whatever was there remains, not necessarily hidden, but consigned to history.
When I read this week of a charcoal drawing being discovered beneath a Da Vinci and the feeling of revelation that it engendered in the art world [or at least some sections of it], I couldn’t help but think that there is nothing new about recycling and preservation of layers of process. The final layer is just that – the final layer. I’ve read that Da Vinci carried the Mona Lisa around for years, adding and subtracting, while he built war machines. He may well have gone on altering the portrait forever. Does this diminish the work in any way? What it does demonstrate is that all of those contemporary artists producing endless variations for the art market [Richter comes to mind] are simply spreading the layers.
The only Richter I see reproduced is the portrait of his daughter turning away or the nude descending the stairs – not the endless abstractions. I know that such reproduction and selection produces its own momentum for longevity in that art history books inevitably show the same narrow collection of work for whatever reasons of availability or taste or attempts to press a stylistic or historic point but I have to wonder what the artists would say about their life’s output reduced to just one [seminal?] work. Often such works are early career.
Lengthy contemplation may well be the definition of process but it doesn’t necessarily mean that a work of art is going to eventuate that encapsulates more than a fleeting moment in time. None of us stand still as artists although there is an illusion created by recognisable stylistic tendencies that all of time is inevitably compressed as subject matter and ways of working continually come full circle. Contemplation may well reduce the volume of art in the world but the sheer numbers of artists presenting their art on social media with little sense of a filter or thought, may negate all of that.
