Pouring your Life into your Art

Whether you like it nor not, your art is often the reflection of who you are and where life has taken you. That may be an unnerving idea, but it seems to be one that most artists, in all disciplines, have to come to terms with.

“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved,” wrote Ansel Adams. And for photography, you can substitute any art form, from dancing to singing to visual arts or theatre.

Images of Sacha Copland dancing on a wine barrel at La Porte Peinte residency in Noyers, France, as she choreographs a new work, The Wine Project, tells us about all her past experiences and ideas. As she herself writes about The Wine Project, "There in the glass was the soil of a place and in that soil was a soul”.

Sacha Copeland, Artist Director, Java Dance Company, New Zealand (photograph courtesy of Emma Hellowell)

Sacha Copeland, Artist Director, Java Dance Company, New Zealand (photograph courtesy of Emma Hellowell)

Sacha Copeland, Artist Director, Java Dance Company, New Zealand (photograph courtesy of Emma Hellowell)

Frequently, the artist has little awareness of what is going into the art being created, if that small inner voice is in charge. It is only later that one realizes that there is a wonderful circularity in what is happening, a reason and its result, direct and obvious or much more subtle. It may be years and years later that something seen, something experienced comes floating up and into the art.

I began to realise, for instance, that my childhood exposure, on walls of my home in Tanzania, to Japanese woodcuts, wonderful prints that had been created after the 1923 earthquake in Yokohama, Japan, was the reason for my always feeling comfortable with negative spaces reaching all four sides of a piece of paper. Drawing or watercolours, it does not matter: I feel almost compelled to use the entire surface of the paper, edge to edge, to create “dis-balanced” spaces that play into the whole composition. To me, it is part of my concept of art-making; I feel very strange when I confine the work I am creating to the inner parts of the paper, leaving blank space around the image.

Marronniers III: Chestnut Bark, gold-silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

Le Chant des Pierres III: la Bourgogne Profonde, gold-silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

To me, the richness of art forms resides to a great degree on all these inner layers of life experience that the artist brings to the act of creation. Sometimes you capture and understand them, sometimes you don’t. There, again, part of the fascination of art is how each of us completes the dialogue of the art work.In other words, sometimes that artist’s life experiences resonate with the viewer. Sometimes they don’t because the viewer has had a radically different life and finds it difficult to find bridges stretching across to the artist’s world.

The question that lingers at the back of my mind is: what happens as present-day ever-accelerating giant changes in technology, urbanization, life styles and cultural mores show up more and more in art forms?

Do these changes create huge divergences in art and its adherents, particularly between generations? Or do we continue to acknowledge that certain art, in whatever form, transcends generations and centuries because the richness and power of its content and message? And, ultimately, who amongst us is the arbiter of the enduring character of that art? The super-wealthy buying at art auctions, the more “humble” supporters of all forms of art, governments and/or non-profit art organisations funding the arts, or who?

I wonder if Ansel Adamsthought of those “down-stream” aspects of art-making as he created his wonderful photographs.

Colour versus Black and White

When you are surrounded by brilliant, sunlit hues and above the sky is blindingly blue, it is easy to be captivated by colour and want to translate it into your art. We all resonate to colour, and it is and always has been the dominant approach to painting. Nonetheless there are those, artists and art lovers, who also resonate to black and white and shades of monochrome in between.

I read of a perfect summation of this difference in an El Pais article about the resurrection of the Leica camera, once considered the ne plus ultra of 35 mm. cameras for most of the 20th century. Every great photographer, from Capra to Henri Cartien-Bresson used a Leica because it was quiet, highly portable and had remarkable lenses that allowed fantastic photographs to be taken. Cartier-Bresson believed too that all edits to the image should be made when the photo was being taken, not afterwards in the darkroom.

Near Strasbourg, 1945, Henri Cartier-Bresson

Until the digital camera came along, Leicas were much esteemed. When the then nearly bankrupt company was bought out in 2005 by Andreas Kaufmann, heir to an Austrian paper company fortune, a fascinating development occurred. Andreas Kaufmann gambled on differentiating Leicas from all other digital cameras: the M Monochrom Leica only takes black and white images. When this Leica was launched in May 2012, the model was priced at a cool 6,800 euros. It has become a runaway success in the photographic world, selling like hot cakes through Leica Boutiques around the globe.

As Andreas Kaufman was quoted as saying, “For me, colour is more emotion, while black and white represents structure.” The remark resonated with me.

True, I was brought up with a grandfather and mother both photographing in black and white in East Africa. In fact, they were so successful that they kept the farm going on photographic sales during the dreadful Great Depression years when the farm was in its infancy and barely sustained them as a family. I have always considered black and white photographs of the 1930-50 era in Europe as marvellous works of art, as well as the amazing photographs that Edward Weston and Ansel Adams took in the earlier 20th century. 

Kelp, Point Lobos, 1930, Edward Weston

Onion Halved, 1930, Edward Weston

Pine Cone and Eucalyptus Leaves, San Francisco, 1932, Ansel Adams

Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Marzanar, CA, 1944 (Image courtesy of  MOMA)

By the Seine, Robert Doisneau

I also love black and white drawings for their immediacy and unadorned truth of execution. Look at this one for direct simplicity and power of composition.

Self Portrait, 1924, charcoal, Kathe Kollwitz

Even black and white paintings have an impact that indeed speaks of structure and logical thought.

Atlantic, 1956, Ellsworth Kelly (Image courtesy of Whitney Museum of American Art, New York)

Uneasy Centre, 1963, Bridget Riley

It is as if you can get your teeth into a black and white work of art, while one in colour is a fraction fuzzy, tugging at emotion and heart strings. Portraits, landscapes, even still life or abstracts: they all evoke passion, sympathy, joy, sorrow, lyricism. Black and white images seem more cerebral, more challenging often. I find it logical that I am more and more fascinated by metalpoint drawing – it is all back to black and white. 

Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même!

Art and Beauty

Beauty - in all the arts - is part and parcel of the creative endeavour, to some, but not to everyone. For ages, in the United States, it seemed that the concept of beauty had become almost effete, out of favour, something to be ignored, denied or ridiculed, in many circles. Then, of course, there has been a reaction, and the word "beauty" seems to have crept back into artistic vocabularies. Especially into vocabularies about the visual arts. Perhaps in our rather dismal, complicated times, we all need something to uplift and cheer us, something bigger and more noble than our mundane daily lives, something that gives pleasure to our senses.

It has always seemed to me that beauty is something almost magical, because so often, it catches one unawares, stops one in one's tracks, and blows the whole world wide open into wonderful new dimensions. It can be anything - a painting, a drawing, music, sculpture, a bird song, scenery, light falling onto something, cloud formations... But instinctively one knows that one is registering something special and uplifting - the day becomes better and often more serene, even for a moment. I am sure that there are wonderful analyses of the brain lighting up in its different parts as a person registers some form of beauty; ironically the more illustrations I see of brain functions, the more beautiful I find them to be as well!

As an artist, it is always demanding, humbling and fascinating to try and convey, on paper or canvas for instance. something which one has found to be beautiful. So seldom does one ever succeed in doing the subject justice. But an artist is impelled to try. Since I am also aware that every person who looks at the art one has produced is bringing to the equation his or her own life experience and therefore form of perception, the melding of my endeavours and that person's "eye"can help (or hinder!) in the rendering of beauty.

Ansel Adams was truly correct when he observed, "Art is both the taking and giving of beauty". It is an important dialogue to have, an exchange that can be priceless.

Ansel Adams with his Camera

Jeffrey Pine, Ansel Adams photographer (Image courtesy of anseladams.com