As an artist, one of the aspects of daily life for me is the ongoing concern with development. The expectation of all artists is that they move on. When I look at the likes of Scully, Rothko, de Kooning, Frankenthaler and any number of other artists I see a mature vehicle with evidence of prior experiment in a variety of styles. They all reached a point, at some point in their lives, and then spent the rest of it running variations. Is that where development stopped? It seems to depend upon how you define ‘development’.

Much is written about phases, particularly with someone like Picasso, whose prodigious output spanned most of a century and continually crossed from one medium to another. Many writers have suggested that the markers in his work all correspond to his women – something that can be levelled at a de Kooning as well, as his underlying jealousy of Elaine and her affairs found its way onto each canvas as violent and unrelenting disappointment. Is development really just a reaction to social circumstance and the emotional baggage carted through life? Biography writers would have us believe just that.

One of the questions that used to regularly be presented on art exam papers concerned the ‘ideas’ of the artist – usually separated from the ‘influences’. ‘Development’ came in third and I always thought that asking 17 years old to deal with any of this was preposterous. Students memorised that the Surrealists used notions from Freud about the subconscious; Giacometti saw humankind as lost; Monet read about the colour theories of Chevreul and painted accordingly. It seemed easy to make lists and students did so accordingly. Choosing Picasso as a topic was also easy when the art history textbooks neatly divided his life into recognisable chunks. Is this what we mean by development though? Lists and phases? You could say that most artists went around in circles or at least circled the same physical and psychological aspects of their lives repeatedly, forever unresolved. An artist like Bacon painted his masterwork Three figures at the Base of a Crucifixion very early in his life. Whether he saw himself as the crucified figure surrounded by issues of blood sports and a distant father figure is all grist to the mill for biography writers but the question in my mind is whether he developed beyond that point? He never again had better control of his medium and tales of him scraping off all of the paint after a night working on a canvas, are legendary. As with Picasso, it was the relationships in his life that provided the impetus to phases and writers are ever keen to allocate phases based upon failed relationships.

Picasso, Bacon, Munch as male artists all had their issues. The more famous or infamous the artist, the more links can be found to fill books. Their development as artists and as people is measured by their inability to come to terms with their lives. Is it the same with women artists? Lee Krasner was caught between the needs of Pollock, her need for independence and the domesticated ‘other’ portrayed in the press. Stylistically she could not get away from the influence of her husband even after his premature death. Other female artists are measured by the level of their ability to separate themselves from the strictures of their traditional roles as mother figures or their collective upbringings where major parental figures have cast a pall of doubt over life as an artist. Those that chose not to go down that path such as Agnes Martin and Grace Hartigan who was much criticised for abandoning her son, also reached artistic solid ground and a mature style that denied points based on relationships or social norms or at least showed no overt signs, so in terms of development, are we talking about the same thing? Is the only marker of development based upon subject matter?

I have read any number of times that the last works of Rembrandt were technically better than his early work. I’ve read the exact opposite about Picasso wherein everything he produced in the last decade of his life was described as a ‘mess’. De Kooning’s last works were greatly simplified but between dementia and enthusiastic assistants it’s hard to tell whether this was a stylistic development or not. Artists are expected to get ‘better’ at what they do as time passes but slickness of technique and fewer failed experiments while sounding like development may only present a superficial understanding.

What about the development of an idea? Picasso invented Cubism, spent some time working through its possibilities, and then consigned it to history where untold numbers of artists took up the idea until its influence faded out. While he called himself a Cubist there was continual change in his output as he wrestled with the compositional problems of everything outside of the analysed figure in the centre of the canvas having no part to play. The reason that he abandoned this approach was that there was nowhere else to go until adding collage occurred to him and in turn that approach was abandoned. Thereafter he retained elements of his Cubist style but spent his life creating portraits of his women and going to bullfights [Guernica notwithstanding]

If development is measured on a linear curve, then how do we deal with lack of linearity?

In my own case, I worry about lack of development in that I don’t have a string or wives or mistresses; I don’t have major changes of style every few years; I don’t have a philosophy based upon grandiose ideas or a philosophy based on philosophy such as that of Wittgenstein or Sartre. What I do recognise is a handful of ideas that have followed me like strands all through my life. Those ideas surface regularly in different combinations. But if I had to plot a linear path that aligned to artistic development, I’d have trouble. Perhaps it is only possible in retrospect and in the hands of others. Perhaps we are all incapable of recognising ‘development’ while immersed in practice. Meanwhile I’d like to think that what happens tomorrow or next week is at least a step forward even it is only another degree of advancement on a circle back to where I started. For all of the reading, knowledge and experience that I have accumulated, I’m not sure that what I’m doing artistically is really any different from that era long ago when I first entered art school and was instructed to adopt the house style. I didn’t, sort of rebelled and floundered about for the four years. Maybe that was development in my case. Who knows?