Category: Briefings

The feeling behind art

I’ve written elsewhere about how we should recognise that a lot of our behaviours, including art, a just our own versions of other animal behaviours. So have you watched a dog lie down? It is intriguing. First comes the impulse, then the spot selection, then walking on the spot in a circle, the head is down and the terrain is checked visually and in terms of scent and finally a satisfied plonk to ground. During this the dog will also be checking its environment, including checking on other animals it wishes to please or stay on good terms with.

That certainly describes a good part of my art process, except with drawings and paintings I am mostly walking back and forwards to decide when it feels right. I can’t help checking what others think either.

For some people art is almost like a meditation, where you are paying attention to each mark and excluding as many outside thoughts as possible. Does that sound similiar?

For others art is a way of expressing anger but the same is true of that too. You need to look for the point at which the demon has for the moment been exorcised. If it is just for therapy then that is enough. If you want to get a message across to others then you can also think about how well that has been achieved.

Even if you are just showing off, you still need to go round those circles until you have managed something that will light up people’s eyes.

Personally I think that the more technical art gets the more danger there is of loosing the feeling involved. If possible you need to manage to balance technique and feeling until you are at the point where you can plonk down and relax, at least for a short while.

I’m Steve and I’ve been trying to make art/craft in all forms since I was little. Alongside various sport, it has been a constant in a much changing life. I have painted, drawn, used most printing techniques, sculpted, made posters, drawn cartoons, made furniture, designed made and painted stage sets, painted murals, landscaped gardens, made animated images and who knows what else. I keep trying and sometimes I am more pleased than others with what I’ve produced by the time I get to the point where I am just going to make it worse.

Alongside that I have also been involved with computers since the 1960’s. I have always been the person who can be given the most technical problem to solve but I was very pleased when someone said of me that I was also the person who could talk to any person at any level of an organisation and explain how things worked and how to use them best.

When home computers came along, I bought one to explore and to get my children used to them. I wrote and amended graphic computer games for them. Being a cruel person, I made them do arithmetic tests scaled to their age to get into the games. All the neighbourhood kids came round.

In 2003/4 Wayne and I went to New Zealand and walked the Milford Track. Each day I walked of ahead and then picked a spot and sat and sketched. People came along and looked at what I’d done and chatted. I’d been playing with my own website for years and after the walk I put all the sketches up there and everyone, from all over the world, who’d done the walk knew where they were and could look at them and remember the spots.

About 10 years ago Ruth bought me a Microsoft Surface, which is an iPad rival. I experimented with it but realised that other tools were often better suited to what I wanted to do. I did take it along to my eldest daughter’s birthday party to play with and ended up surrounded by kids and I gave each of them a new painting to work on in turn. Afterwards I put them all up on Facebook and they were shared around all over again. This year I put a new web page on my current website called The Fridge Door and I put those party images up there alongside all the images of kids’ art I had collected over the years. Cue a lot of sharing and relatives and friends being entertained once again.

Using computers I have put images on T-shirts, sent images to other parts of the world, put scenes on table and cup mats, sketched out designs, helped people get messages across by simplifying them into cartoon like images.

Today’s session should help you further along your journey to explore what a computer and a few apps cane do to add to your creative fun.

When people are taught to paint landscapes, they will often be told to make things further away tend towards lighter and bluer. Unfortunately sometimes people tend see this as a rule, rather than a painting trick to emulate the effects of distance and atmosphere on colour saturation. There are lots of similar guidelines that can become a hindrance if taken too literally.

If you read about the painter John Constable, you will almost certainly come across the tale of him and Joshua Reynolds, where constable puts a violin on the grass to demonstrate that they are not the same colour, after Reynolds objected to the colours in Constable’s paintings.

When photography came along it changed the way we see things and motion photography even allowed us to see how things actually move for the first time. At the same time photography took away visual art’s dominant role in capturing a likeness for posterity. This in turn allowed artists to investigate other roles for their art. Increasing awareness of science, particularly relating to colour and vision, also gave artists new ideas about how to do their job. There have been many debates in art history about how to do things and some of these relate to vision and how we see and remember the world around us.

If you ever stand in front of a wide open landscape and enjoy looking at it, a temptation is to take a photograph. I’d be pretty surprised if you weren’t often disappointed with the result. All the magnificent detail and sweep of light you see will have been largely lost. Even a sophisticated camera has limitations of focus, whereas we can focus near and far repeatedly and rapidly without really noticing that we are doing it. Most of the time it doesn’t even make us dizzy. The vision we have in our head is then a combination of what we have seen and felt, with special emphasis on all the things we have been most interested in.

The next element of perception that is important to highlight separately is memory. While our memories are unreliable, they are still ours. We are capable of holding a lot of detail about a scene, as well as host of related generalisations and also feelings. I know of painters who repeat the same scene repeatedly from memory. Each version is different but also alike. Whether intensionally or not, each painting will often be recognisably by the same person.

That last bit about repeating a scene painting also relates to our ability to produce and recognise schematics of things. Every child does it very quickly in their development and even animals are able to do it. Those Captcha tests that have popped up over the last few years, designed to demonstrate your humanity, would be within the capability of a pigeon or crow, as long as they had been taught to associate the schematic with food.

In the pencil sketch below the are no colour hints about what we are seeing and little difference in tone between near and far. In fact the mast at Emley Moor has more definition than it might have in a photograph, representing what we would see by changing our focus temporarily. Within the picture there are plenty of hints about scale and perspective from the lines and objects. The effect is strong enough for us to recognise that the field in the distance is just a different shape, rather than badly drawn.

So if you do want to paint a scene, reasonably realistically, for someone, based on a photograph, don’t be afraid to paint it as they might see or remember it. Equally don’t be afraid to represent what you want to represent without being a slave to the myth of realism.

In one way or another, I’ve been studying and doing art and craft for more than sixty years. I’ve also been involved with performance of various kinds, crossing art boundaries. For more than a decade I’ve taken people round the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, on the historic West Bretton Estate and talked to every sort of person, from different parts of the world, about art and history. One of the things I stress to people about YSP is that the park itself is a giant sculpture.

Talking to people has made some things particularly clear to me and below are some key points I have learned.

Art is both subconscious and conscious. Most animals, including us, seem to have a sense of shape and form and also sound. Some of us animals use those senses for display and communication purposes. This means that art can have multiple levels of appeal.

Because art has been around as long as we have it is plain that it is important to us in some way.

Art has never had one particular way of doing things, though there have been plenty of attempts to enforce a particular way.

The separation of art from craft is not really helpful.

Even the best artists never fully achieve what they want, let alone satisfy all the people all the time.

Human competitiveness means that arts are often used to show off and to demonstrate superiority and thus other people’s inferiority. You should never let that last tendency put you off trying out your artistic skills, if you, and even someone else, might get enjoyment from the attempt.

Some people can just control themselves better and practice doesn’t make perfect in such complicated skills. Equally, even with control and practice people can still produce neat, colourful but not very interesting art.

We all borrow ideas from others. It can’t be helped. Children’s art is already full of borrowed ideas and styles but can still have a personal impact without complicated skills. We all have to make a compromise to achieve whatever we want to achieve.

Art can look like something but it doesn’t have to copy that thing completely.

Art can be abstract but that doesn’t mean it can’t also represent something or some idea or emotion.

When you produce any form of art you are representing a subject, an idea. On top of that, what you produce is influenced by all the things and people you have encountered. Those two things should influence the tools you use to produce the art and those tools should influence the art itself.

Art doesn’t have to be pretty. All forms of art can be used to highlight unpleasant things. There are all sorts of messages in art and the art reflects that.

If your art has a particularly strong emphasis on message then it is of little use if only a small number of the already converted pick that message up.

The, never displayed, work above was called ‘Modern Gods and Heroes’. It is a visual rant about cars, overcrowding, shallow celebrity and eco-failure from around forty years ago. The fact that I’m explaining it speaks of its relative failure. That doesn’t mean that art shouldn’t have a title or explanation.

You are right to question the value of art and the need for public funding but think of all the other things that command higher prices than they perhaps deserve.

Keep looking, thinking, enjoying and trying.