In reading about the American painter Agnes Martin, I came across one of the great axioms of abstraction. Never talk about where your idea came from and if necessary, invent a past that may or may not have existed. Certainly, never admit to health problems, mental health problems, alcoholism or problems with the people in your life. After all, alcoholics and mental patients can’t produce art, now can they? There is a great fear of either being pigeonholed or not taken seriously. I’m not sure which is worse.

I once stopped to draw on the Great Ocean Road just beyond the South Australian border. There was nothing particularly auspicious about the time or the place other than that I chose to stop there and take out my sketchbook. Isn’t that what artists do? Seated on a chunk of conveniently placed rock and facing the ocean I was unaware of another vehicle pulling up behind me. Soon enough there were voices. Acting as intermediary, my wife started a conversation with the female traveller who was looking quizzically in my direction. She ventured over and peered over my shoulder at the drawing. ‘Is this what he known for?’ she asked my wife. All my wife could say was, ‘oh yes he draws a lot’. This appeared to satisfy the woman who could now add the encounter to her travellers’ tales. She had met an artist and labelled him. All was now right with the world. If you add that to another encounter, the plot thickens.

I had decided to go and do a bit of life drawing at a college in the city. There were a lot of us earnestly scribbling away and a would-be expert prowling around offering direction. I just as earnestly hoped that he would leave me alone. Before I knew what he was doing, his hands were rifling through my folder. Out came a drawing. ‘Look at this everyone’ he intoned with enthusiasm, ‘see how he drew the hip. Remarkable!’ The drawing was held face high but even so, those on the far side of the semi-circle couldn’t see anything. The woman beside me asked breathlessly, ‘how on earth did he fit it on the page?’ Her own version was just the face and hair elaborately rendered with a 6H pencil after two hours work. Pigeonholed again. I was the man who could fit a whole figure on the page and could draw hips. Fame followed me.

The reason I bring all of this up has more to do my current copy of Artist Profile than anything else. Of the artists profiled, three are of Aboriginal descent, one is non-binary gender identified, one represents the gay community, two have European sounding names and claim all manner of cultural heritage and one is a radical feminist. I didn’t have to look far to establish this information – it was all in the first paragraphs of the articles. The art is secondary it seems. Establishing pigeonholes is far more important. That way at least, the reader knows which ruler to run across the output and the article writers have a hook on which to hang their comments. My inclination was not to bother reading the articles at all and just look at the pictures.

Archile Gorky, the self-made art icon of the first half of last century said that he wanted to create art without an accent. I can see what he meant. He was modern without being modern. He didn’t fit into the Abstract Expressionist box or neatly fill the one that identified American artists of the so-called New York School. The school was an invention of Greenberg anyway to put a reluctant America on the modernist map, the only home-grown art being of the social realist kind.  De Kooning in particular objected roundly to being identified as anything that smacked of Expressionism let alone, Abstract. His big concern was how to paint modern versions of the figure by looking to the past for inspiration. And not just any figures but the multitude of women in his life. And of course, when he abandoned his black and white painting stage, the closest he came to abstraction in the Greenberg sense, the all-knowing critic heaped on the vitriol. He had betrayed the cause. The label no longer fitted – if it ever did.

In the minds of the public the critics and the gallery owners, artists stand still in time. There is before and then there is the mature style. There is nothing beyond it. An artist friend of mine worries that her constant experimentation will lead to perceptions of bittiness. She would like to be pigeonholed but for the right reasons. Being remembered or categorised as the artist who couldn’t focus on one particular thing and stick with it, isn’t one of them. If as an artist you stand outside fashion and time you will likely be acknowledged as an eccentric. If you choose to remain within recognised parameters, you may well be taken up by a gallery and sell for a while, the art market being what it is, but while the medium can change [de Kooning took to sculpture late in life] the essential form cannot. After all, a Picasso is still a recognisable Picasso no matter what the subject matter or critic-identified stage in his career and he didn’t mind in the least being remembered as a Cubist since he invented the label.

Maybe that’s the clue. Invent your own label. None of this vacillating between modes, methods and materials but an easily identifiable label, preferably one word, that would fit neatly on your gravestone or trip lightly off the tongue of the man/woman in the street. Elephants. He was known for painting elephants and wasn’t he good at it. Anything is better than being remembered as mentally ill but then again it didn’t do van Gogh any harm. He was not only mad but a post-impressionist – only he didn’t know it. I wonder what he’d have said about that.