When is it the end and how do I know when I am there?
With exactly 2 months to go before my final submission I am resolving work in progress, not starting anything new, okay that’s not entirely true I did have a couple of days painting a denim jacket as a way of practising drapery which was such fun, but this was my final fling.
Now I must retreat into my studio where nothing new starts and a selection of works, must be resolved. Sometimes it feels like a claustrophobic end-of-the-road, a place of anxiety and irretrievable mistakes, at other times it feels like the best aspects of lockdown where focus yields results. So far, I have moved forward with three paintings and successfully trashed another one to the point of no return. At least that makes my final selection process easier!
It is one thing to start a painting and happily meander along layer upon layer with little concern for the end point but there must be an end, or it is somewhat pointless, well I think so anyway. The difficulty is that this endpoint is not easy to define.
German artist Max Doerner (1870-1939) author of a brilliant book, ‘The Materials of the Artist', spent his lifetime researching the techniques of the Old Masters, he defined 11 consecutive steps to completing a perfect replica of a painting by El Greco. When you think about these 16th century painters, such as, Titian, El Greco, Velasquez, they had academy's where students were taught a formulaic, step by step process of layering up the paint to reach an easily definable endpoint.
Now in this modernist/post-modernist world, however you wish to define it, there are so many ways of painting; there are no rules you can take ideas from the Impressionists, the Abstract Expressionists, choosing, ‘Direct’/Alla Prima, all-in-one-sitting methods, and/or the ‘Indirect’ methods of the Old Masters, slowly layering over time. German Impressionist. Max Liebermann a contemporary of Doerner, said, “There is no Technique, there are as many techniques as there are painters. With so many techniques how are we to know when the end point is reached.
The students of the Old Masters followed a step-by-step technique, their anxiety being, whether they were good or bad at the process with its definable end result. I and many other artists of all disciplines have to deal with a more fundamental anxiety concerning the multiple potential methods to choose from with no defined end point. We have to decide this for ourselves and it is not easy. My immediate concern is, when has a work reached its end point and will it be reached in the next 2 months?
Not only that but it is easy to overwork a painting and go beyond the point of completion without realising until it’s too late. I am not saying I’ve done this with Amin but the end point is arguable for both viewer and painter.
My painting style vacillates between systematic method, learning from the accumulated wisdom of the old master’s and somewhat random exploration.
James Elkins in his book ‘What Painting Is’, likens the artist to the alchemist in the way they make up the rules as they go along. He talks about a medieval monk, Theophilus who tells his readers how to make gold by the unnatural offspring of two male chickens. Construct a stone subterranean house with two tiny openings, put a cock in each opening with enough food to keep them alive when they have become fattened from the heat of the fatness they will mate and lay eggs. At which point remove the cocks and put toads in to keep the eggs warm (the assumption being that male chickens cannot roost but toads can!) When the eggs hatch, they first look like chickens but in a few days, they grow serpent tails. These Basilisk monsters are then buried in brass vessels with copper doors where they eat fine earth filtered through the copper. Six months later the vessels with basilisks inside are burned, cooled and pulverised with the dried blood of a red haired man which when mixed into a paste with vinegar and smeared onto copperplate will turn the plates into gold.
I laughed for a whole day thinking about this passage, it made my method seem somewhat tame in comparison to Theophilus's. All I can say is that I am constantly in pursuit of new combinations, making illogical decisions just to see what happens. My pallet is messy and at times I just pick up random blobs of paint, lets say dark…not checking whether that dark is opaque, transparent, Paynes grey, Van Dyke brown or ivory black. There is no end to the potential outcomes of this method, although I would say that there is method in my madness as opposed to the madness in the method of Theophilus!