artist note #12
the language of paint
When I'm stuck and I have no ideas, I put my faith in my materials. I let them tell me what to do.
I can submit myself to randomness, like Jean Arp, but lately, as I wrote about in the previous ‘artist note’, it's getting lost in their physical properties that I've been more concerned with. In today's newsletter, I want to explore that further.
After reading Art Monsters, I said last time, I'd been thinking, trying to figure out how the ideas in it relate to my own work, which isn't about the body, isn't obviously physical in that sense. I like that it isn't a literal connection, though — love that the way inspiration works is by spinning off in all directions; you can't always see a clear line from A to B, it's more mysterious and interesting than that. It's about a feeling for me. I find it hard to put into words and that's okay, I think. After all, I write to help clarify my thoughts, but I paint to express myself in a way that doesn't require any words. I read a description of the work of a painter I admire, Henry Ward, the other day: that it was about “the language of paint.” I love this phrase, it really resonates with me.
This video I took at my desk the other week is about “the language of paint” for me.
I am craving tactility in my art. I want a viewer to connect with a human quality in it, conveyed through texture and all the myriad signs of the artist's — my — hand at work. To date, I have found it very hard not to be a perfectionist, battling the slightly messy. And now I want to go the other way.
I want to take full advantage of the paint itself to help me do this. I don't always personally love Frank Auerbach's heavy impasto work (although the recent self-portraits, painted in his 90s, are phenomenal), but I do keep thinking of them and how intensely satisfying they must have been to make.
I've found that two entirely opposed ways of working have enriched my love of my materials. Pure experimentation on the one hand has worked just as well as going back to basics and learning traditional techniques.
Teaching myself very simple ways of painting random things like pop tarts, chess pieces, envelopes and slices of bread and butter has made me appreciate the magic of paint in a different way. Of course, I have always marvelled at what actual geniuses can do with it, but I will admit how impressed I can be with myself when I add a dot of Titanium White to a cherry on an ice cream cone. (Very. I am very impressed.)
Among other reasons, I love abstract painting for the way it can be about the paint itself. So, I won’t necessarily ever pursue figurative work properly, but nevertheless there is such value in the fresh perspective these exercises have given me on my familiar much used paints. I recommend it: take the materials you're most comfortable with, that maybe even seem a bit predictable, and use them in a different way, style or technique. The connection you have to them, in my experience, deepens and strengthens.
Because even I don't beat myself up enough to expect to produce a perfect ‘pawn on a highly polished surface’ the very first go, the experience naturally becomes less about the finished image and more about the individual steps you take to get there. You lose yourself in concentrating fully on mixing a tiny bit of Mars Black with a gloss medium and finding out what it looks like when you brush that over Unbleached Titanium. Your brain is freed! The overthinking that can form a barrier between you and your materials, blocking the sensory, tactile pleasures, is halted.
When I first started this Substack, a recurring theme in my writing was about one of my main problems being (in art! in life!) my propensity to get so hung up on the finished article that I couldn't value the process.
In this piece for the Jackson's Art blog, Ann Witheridge writes about the relationship between an artist and their materials. Her opinion, which my own recent experience is fully bearing out, is that the more an artist works, the less their focus becomes on the finished piece and more on the act of making itself — the way their materials behave, how they feel. Over the last couple of months, this has felt so true for me. I have a relationship with my tools now — my brushes, my paints, palette knives, paper, canvases, oil sticks and pastels… we have an emotional life together, thank you, and it's through this relationship that I have finally, organically solved my long-term weakness for letting the outcome overshadow the process. (Only in art so far; though I'm sure the lesson is transferable to other areas in life, that's outside the scope of this newsletter.)
Oil sticks and pastels are a perfect example in this context. Unlike my 3-year-old niece and Yves Klein's models, I don't paint my own skin or roll around naked covered in blue paint, but whilst I'm becoming increasingly emotionally attached to my brushes, the direct physical contact you get with sticks of pigment affords a very special experience.
Not only do you handle the stick itself, but there’s the pleasure of blending with your fingers too. The silky powder of a soft pastel beneath your fingertips, the slightly greasy butteriness of an oil as you press and smear it into the paper… YUM. You can't (if you're me at least) help but get a bit messy working this way. Even if you use an intermediary in the form of a paper stump, the varying degrees of friction as you scratch, scuff or slide across the paper are a sensory experience to be appreciated.
Just as I found the answer to my earlier questions on valuing the process, not just the outcome, in my relationship with my materials, I think they also hold the key to the thinking I've been doing lately. If the example those female “art monsters” set for me was to learn to speak in my own voice on the canvas, then it's in the reciprocal dialogue with my materials that that plays out. I agree with Anni Albers in that quote above, but maybe I would revise it slightly. Let the materials dictate to an extent, yeah, but I think the real sweet spot is when you're in a proper conversation with them, fully and confidently embracing “the language of paint” as you communicate both through and with them.