Good Painting

 

Recently while on a painting trip in Abiquiu, New Mexico I was questioning myself how I could explain to others just what I am doing with this brush in hand. I assume that many painters would explain their painting process in terms that you read about all the time: light, value, color, hue, composition. Frankly, I’m not sure what any of those terms really mean. Ok, I’m exaggerating a bit, but I do so intentionally. The ‘craft’ involved in painting employees these terms seriously, and while at times useful, they don’t fully explain the ‘art’ of painting. To me they are words that best describe a painting after the fact. And even then they fall short of explaining what a good painting is truly about. 

 Being from Michigan, painting in NM can be completely disorienting. The high desert just isn’t anything like Michigan, so it is a perfect place to ask questions about process and purpose. Lately when I have been painting I have this welled up feeling that what I want to be able to do is simply scoop up the key colors and shapes of the landscape and throw them in a pile onto the canvas. Francis Bacon once said he thought painting was throwing paint onto the canvas and hoping something interesting stuck to it. I relate to that statement. I’m not at all suggesting painting is some accidental act, but it should involve the subconscious. What makes any good art form interesting is the aspect of controlling the uncontrolled. Having one foot in the conscious, deliberate realm and the other stepping or at least sticking a toe into the less controlled subconscious; all the time walking a line between chaos and control. Our modern day reasons for boundaries always being pushed lies in the nature of art making itself.

So I’m out in the high desert wanting to scrape up ochers shaped like rocks and pale turquoise strips of sediment and deep purple shadows and a even deeper sky blue and whirl it with one brush stroke onto the canvas.  Wiping or carving or conjuring enough of it away to regain some resemblance of a landscape that daunts me, I’m hoping for something good to come of it all. 

I think of good painting in terms of, feeling, weight, poetry. Good painting has to work at least on some poetic level. T.S.. Eliot said that poetry often ‘communicates before it is understood’. Eliot is talking about art that is connotative rather than denotative. Eliot even went as far as to say he believed that good art isn’t about expressing ones own personality. “Poetry is not turning loose of emotion; it is not an expression of the personality, but an escape from personality”, he said. He felt that the individual poet or artists work stemmed from history and perceptions rather than personality. “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable”, Elliot contended.

Good painting, can be at times understood by a better understanding of what bad painting is. Russell Chatham says bad drawing or painting “is recognized by timidity, indecision, insensitivity, conventionality and of course in a larger sense by the absence of soul and heart”. Chatham could be accused of being subjective but there is no crime in a subjectivity that remains open to possibilities. 

My best efforts often happen when a painting session goes bad. What I’m thinking I want to happen – doesn’t happen.  My first reaction is to chuck the whole thing and start over but usually if I make myself stop and really look at what I am doing on the canvas it takes a turn and often becomes one of the better efforts. What happens in this instance is that the painting started out in my mind as a idea but a painting isn’t solely an idea in the mind. Its a physical result of a act and if you pay to much attention to what you had thought it should be, at the expense of what it is turning out to be,you’ll lose every time.

This is why you can’t teach painting like a recipe (unfortunately people do it all the time).  You can be taught to follow someone else plans and ideas but then you end up judging everything you do by what they do or have done. What’s the point of that?

Richard Kooyman   May 2008