No Boundaries for Art

As I spent a magical morning in the Ridola Archaeological Museum in Matera, South Italy, last summer, I was enthralled by the freshness and complexity of many of the images on the Greek ceramic vessels on display. Since the Greeks had been coming to Southern Italy since the 10th century BC, huge numbers of ceramics have been found, often totally intact, in different archaeological digs in the area. Some of the pieces were imported from Greece, but many were created in Italy. 

 Detail from a Greek vase, Apulia, Italy, 4th century BC

Red figure Greek pottery, Matera

As I wandered, entranced, I remembered reading that many ancient Greeks, such as art critic and writer Philostatus, thought of art as a continuation of our world, the space within which we live and breathe. There were no boundaries between art and the world; the figures existing in contemporary art or on the pottery surfaces  might have been imaginary, but they were as real to the Greeks as film characters are real and believable to us today as we watch a film. In other words, art was viewed as an extension of reality. No wonder so many of the figures, fish, birds and other creatures in dynamic movement around those red-figure vessels I was seeing in Matera seemed so arresting.

Three sea-perch and three limpets. Apulian red-figured fish-plate, ca. 340–320 BC.

That long heritage, from the Greeks and from earlier artists working on cave walls, rock faces, in Mesopotamia, China, India or Egypt, has always involved realism in some fashion. Art has blurred the boundaries between the  imagined world, the depicted world and the real world; man has always expected the viewer to have "leaps of faith".  Today, artists grapple with the same issues. What a visual artist sees and experiences gets distilled and translated into images that go beyond the range of verbal description.

Noted artist Michael Klein was quoted as saying, "Painting realistically is a means to an end." What he is interested in creating is the visual image that was the basis for the feelings he wants to express - the boundaries of reality and art flow through the artist's brain and hand in seamless fashion. Developing a visual language implies that an artist looks hard and learns to see things for what they really are.  

In the same way, according to sculptor and artist, Lee Ufan of Korea,  boundaries between art and reality can be eliminated by "allowing the relationship among the viewer, the materials and the site to stand in for the experience of art" (Alexandra Munroe, Guggenheim curator, writing in Art & Auction, May 2010). Ufan  makes the art object "disappear" so that the art becomes "a fluid and dynamic event occurring in real time and space".

Ufan talks of "the art of encounter". Mankind has been blurring the lines between reality and the art encountered since time immemorial.

"Cannibalising" the World

Joan Miro famously once remarked that "That magical spark is the only thing that matters in art".  In other words, he noticed and absorbed everything imaginable around him in his life, cannibalised it and transformed it into art, especially in his sculptures.  The most amazing things became part of his art, from his children's toys to the famous paper bag which caused one of his foundries to exclaim, "You expect us to cast a paper bag?"  The answer was yes, in bronze!

Miro - sculpture, image courtesy of Jeff Epler

To me, the lesson Miro gives us all is that as artists, we have to be open to every possible resource, every possible influence, because from it, and usually from the most unlikely of instances, comes the spark that leads to creation of something new in our art.

We all know about those moments when we pass something which is part of our daily life and which, until magic suddenly happens, has been unremarkable.  Then, unexpectedly, the light falls on the object in a certain way, or there is a new relevance to it because of something else going on in our head, whatever.  Then the "cannibalising" happens, and we can incorporate a new dimension into what we are creating.

Other times, the world becomes fresh and exciting because of a visit to somewhere new, which talks to one.  That little voice inside one's head says, "Pay attention, this is important", even though, at the time, you don't really know why.

This happened to me in Matera, South Italy, when I was looking at Neolithic shards of pottery in the Archaeological Museum.  They fascinated me, and I draw a lot of them, something I normally don't think of doing.  But as I drew them, I began to realise I was linking back to early artists who had, in their turn, looked around them in their world and cannibalised images from what they saw.  This was a link of many thousands of years, a fact which made an even greater impression on me.

Once home again, I realised that these notations that I had made were potentially the basis of a series of silverpoint drawings.  I was cannibalising on the world I had encountered in Matera, in essence.  This is one of the drawings.

Basilicata # 3 - silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist

Thanks to those artists working aeons ago, I started doing work that is totally different from my normal drawings.  Sometimes it is definitely fun to be a "cannibal of the world".

Art - Binding People Together

One of the most fascinating books I have recently read is Eric R. Kandel's newly published book, "The Age of Insight.  The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain. FromVienna 1900 to the Present".  It is dense, interesting and challenging, as it details the many new discoveries of how the brain works and the many dimensions of humankind's involvement with art over millennia. There are so many aspects of the book that are worth talking about, but one short passage resonated with me because of my recent visit to South Italy, a place so rich in history.

In a chapter entitled "Artistic Universals and the Austrian Expressionists", Kandel delves into the large questions as to whether art has "universal functions and features" (p. 440).  He goes on to state that, "Since the artist's creation of art and the viewer's response to art are products of brain function, one of the most fascinating challenges for the new science of mind lies in the nature of art." The questions then multiply: do we respond to art because our biology dictates our reactions, do we respond to art instead as individuals with our own personal experience and taste?  Kandel refers to one opinion formed by Dennis Dutton, a philosopher of art, that art is not simply "a by-product of evolution, but rather an evolutionary adaption - a instinctive trait - that helps us survive because it is crucial to our well-being." (my emphasis)

Kandel goes on to allude to Cro-Magnon man painting those marvellous images in the Grotte Chauvet, 33,000 years ago, and reminds us that apparently, the Neanderthals, also living in Europe during that same period, did not create representational art.  The conclusion which experts, such as social psychologist Ellen Dissanayake and art theorist Nancy Aiken, have reached is that art was a crucial means of binding people together during the Paleolithic age.  People gathered together in communities and thus enhanced their likelihood of survival; one way to create this social glue was to make objects, images, and events that were important to these people, memorable and pleasurable.  Just like the festivals celebrated all summer in Southern European towns and villages today, despite economic gloom; people enjoy themselves and reinvigorate their social ties, enhancing their daily life with religious or ceremonial events.

I immediately remembered two humble, but to me very powerful, objects I had seen and drawn quickly in the Matera Archaeological Museum in South Italy.

Upper Paleolithic stones from Matera area, South Italy, Prismacolor, Jeannine Cook artist

Hasty drawings, but what fascinated me was the literal binding-together marks that were on these stones, of a shape and size that would fit comfortably into a human hand.  Just my interpretation of the marks, but I found them compelling.  Even then, so many thousands of years ago, for the Upper Paleolithic age officially lasts from 45,000 to 10,000 years ago, our ancestors were scoring careful, thoughtful marks into stone, driven by a need to create art, art to bind those communities together most likely.  

The fact that those stones can still compel our attention today makes an even stronger case for art's universal power to bind humans together.

Architecture's Links between Old and New

Back on April 28th, 2012, I.M. Pei, the architect, was quoted by William Cook in The Spectator  as saying, "What interests me about architecture are the links between old and new – art, history and architecture are indeed one."

I found the most wonderful example of this happy marriage between history, art and architecture during my visit to Matera, South Italy.  In amongst the astonishing labyrinth of caves, grottoes, vaulted homes and churches in the golden tufa Sassi area, many inhabited for millennia, is MUSMA, the Contemporary Sculpture Museum of Matera.  The museum of a many fingered series of tamped-earth floored grottoes, full of niches and wells dug deep into the cool tufa limestone, was originally a palace, the Palazzo Pomarici, dating from the 17th century onwards with some outer constructed rooms added on to the caves. The original caves go back, probably, to neolithic times, and have been used as dwellings or places of worship and refuge ever since.

All images courtesy of the Sassiland website

Yet today, the inspired marriage of art, history and architecture has resulted in an amazing structure that houses a really impressive collection of modern sculpture, Italian and international, from 1800 onwards, but mainly from the 20th century.  Imaginatively displayed and placed in these cavernous grottoes or in the more traditional rooms, the collection is broad in scope and of very high quality overall.  To complement the sculpture, there is a collection of prints and drawings, with a few small paintings, by many stars of the international modern art scene, mostly artists whose oeuvre has included some form of sculpture.

I found the links between the old and the new, through this museum of most unusual architecture, to be really memorable.  It was a highlight of my trip to Matera, and well worth a visit for anyone who is in the Basilicata area of Italy.

That Empty Canvas of Piece of Paper!

Picasso once remarked to Angela Rosengart, the art dealer and collector, "There is nothing so frightening for a painter as to stand in front of an empty canvas."

When an artist has just gone through a creative, productive time, he or she is on a high.  But alas, as we all know, highs don't last for ever, and then the trouble can start.  I found this true - again! - this week, as I returned from a stimulating and fascinating time in south Italy, where I had end my stay at an art residency by being beguiled by the beauty and interest of Matera, the home of the UNESCO-protected Sassi area.  I came home full of ideas and enthusiasm to get right back to work.

Then there comes the first moment in front of the empty paper, in my case... and, indeed, Picasso has it right, albeit expressed rather dramatically.  The creative energy seems to drain out of one, the little voice at the back of one's head starts to murmur about problems, and you end up thinking - oh dear!

So the only thing to do, I have found in the past, is to settle down, turn to more mundane studio chores, scanning art that you have done, attending to paper work, looking at drawings and notes you have made.  You tell your subconscious to go on thinking and planning about the next work you want to embark on, how to go about it, what to try and say in it – and let time help banish the fright at the empty canvas or piece of paper.

I wanted to return to the feel of the area where I had been working, south of Noepoli, in the Basilicata province of Italy.  Humans have walked in those mountains and valleys for so many millennia, and it is good, in dealing with my white paper fright, to think back to the things I want to remember about that area.  Maybe these memories will ease me back into what I want to say about this amazing area of South Italy.

The Sarmento dry river bed, 2012, watercolour, Jeannine Cook artist

Distant Traces: the Sarmento I, 2012, silverpoint, Jeannine Cook artist