Maybe it's all just marks?
Musings on the relationship between abstraction and representation in painting.
When is a tree not a tree?
Some of my recent teaching has involved exploration of the relationship between what we might term working in a representational way (making things look like things) and working in ways which might 'abstract' from 'reality' (an interpretation of things in a way which might depart from the representational.)
For me, this is fascinating to engage with both from an educational point of view - seeing how other people wrestle with the possibilities of these varied strategies (and, indeed, what those terms might mean for them) - and also as a practitioner myself. In the studio, I have found that my painting practice has moved continuously along a sliding scale away from and back towards representation, for many years. Interestingly, at the same time, my drawing practice has maintained a steady trajectory which is largely representational (more of that another time, perhaps.)
In recent months I have been giving much thought to the approach that I take when painting, and in particular because I have been refocusing my attention back onto the landscape as a subject material. In my teaching, I am always at pains to stress that there is (for me) no hierarchy between representing things in a way which mimics 'reality' (or, at least, our subjective version/perception of it) as against abstracting some other visual code from this same 'reality', and using it as a departure point. In engaging with the comments about art on social media, or looking at the kinds of paintings that are often selected by the public at exhibition as their 'favourite', I can't help but think that some kind of hierarchy does actually exist for many people. It would seem that the representational is somehow privileged over the non-representational. In short, it seems many people want their trees to look like trees. More than that - they struggle to understand, or engage with them, when they don't.
Ninety years ago the Belgian painter Rene Magritte produced what has become one of the most iconic paintings of the Twentieth Century - 'The Treachery of Images'. Underneath a carefully painted representation of a smoker's pipe, Magritte has inscribed the words 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' ('This is not a pipe'). Whilst clearly an ironic Surrealist visual pun, intended to amuse on the one hand, it is also an incisive piece of Saussurean logic - this is not a pipe, of course, it is a painting of a pipe. Elsewhere, Magritte would hammer home this visual/linguistic self-evidence, by painting objects and labelling them with the 'wrong' words - as if to reinforce the arbitrary nature by which language (and, by extension, the visual language that is painting) represents things.
Anyone who has ever listened to a painter talking about their work will probably have heard them discusssing their painting in the context of its own reality - the painting is a 'thing in itself'. Essentially we are saying, as painters, that this is its own world - it is not the world that exists outside of the painting. This is as true of work which is representational - even though it might look like the world 'out there' - as it is of work which has gone through some process of abstraction. No amount of skilfull handling of paint, to create the illusion of light and shadow on folds of silk or flesh, can escape the fact that these are just marks made from coloured mud on some kind of surface. I'd go so far as to suggest that all painting is, in effect, a process of abstraction - an extraction or departure from 'reality' - and a reinterpretation, through a system of marks, visual codes, and pictorial conventions, to create a new and different reality. One that is synthesized, and given context, through the act of painting.
I intend to return to this subject in future posts. I hope you've enjoyed reading these thoughts and that you'll maybe add your own. Thanks for reading!
