Notes taken from Adrian Stokes 'A Game that must be Lost'

Having asked about his (Kenneth Clark) profession, she recoiled when told that he was the director of the National Gallery. She had been in the gallery, but never again. “All those unmoving faces of dead people,” she added. I myself remember regarding pictures in childhood as forms of petrifaction: life, movement, gesture turned to deadness. I peered at lithographs in search of life, in search of evidence not only of the life of the painted figures but of the artist. He who looks for apples – and many people do – in the painter’s representation of them, courts a desiccating experience. There is indeed a sense wherein painters translate valued things into coloured oil. The transformation becomes life-giving when the air of unmoving finality with which art endows the objects we love, is employed to stabilise far-reaching and complex relationships. Yet it is significant that a popular conception of figurative art as macabre dies hard, an idea often transmitted by mystery films, so common there, to antique shops or to halls furnished with portraits.
Adrian Stokes, A Game That Must Be Lost. P 83

Because it combines the sense of fusion with the sense of object otherness, we might say that art is an emblem of the state of being in love / When the artist joins them in the creative process, infantile psychic tensions concerning sense-data renew in him some freshness of vision , some ability to meet, as if for the first time, the phenomenal world and the emotion it carries.
Adrian Stokes, Game that must be lost. P110

The face is another indispensable metaphor for the work of art. We construe faces every day, interpreting the physical showing of lifelong experience. Art divagates upon this coalescence of inner and outer, particularly upon the instantaneous impact of its apprehension. Stokes. A Game That Must Be Lost. P111
Specific forms are derived from that intense engrossment with a material through which a “face”, a physical epitome of experience can be envisaged. For the poet, words, for the sculptor, stone, are pregnant materials with which they are in communion, through which they crystallise particular phantasies. In a sense the work of art is not new enactment but reaffirmation of a pre-existent entity. This entity is allowed once more a full and separate life: it is restored.
Stokes – A Game That Must Be Lost P 111

Here, on the walls, faces and hands that “realise” the sitters. Drawing, texture, disposition, echoing toppling shape, seem to be a rich fructification of character rather than the physical representatives. Such an effect depends on eliciting from us muscular response to the drawing and an increase of the usual correlating activities of vision. We feel this apprehension of inner and outer actuality in prior terms of our muscular responses, let us say, to the benign. ….artists themselves tend to speak more of the goodness or badness of a work of art than the beauty of ugliness.
Stokes – A Game That Must Be Lost P 112

…art is in contact with the whole man and with the actualities of the cultural chaos that she must take to her heart. Stokes – P113

…..my first words were of clouds and of images they embody. We cannot look out upon the external world without any trace of such projection. There are a thousand and one gradations between the power, as we feel it, of the object to suggest associations to us and the imputation, as we feel it, to our mood to this object.

….that our apprehension of the sitters’ characters in terms of our visual and muscular responses to pictorial textures or realisation of shape, is a benign or unifying experience.

…we are as one with the virtu of the object while at the same time we, in turn, are giving to its intrinsic structure in bodily terms, to its actuality or distinctiveness, to its separateness from ourselves, full value.
Stokes p 113