It occurred to me once, looking round the new wing of the so-called primitive art at the Metropolitan Museum, that if you are an artist and you look at something, some sculpture of a figure, there is always something that you would see that an art historian or critic could not. It’s this: somebody made the piece with his hands and the person who made it had some similarities to yourself. That artist too had an urge to make something, to depict something, to represent some form of perceived reality, to represent and reproduce experience, even though he lived in a totally different era, a totally different society. This connection between an artist from the past and one in the present is always there. The art historian cannot connect back to a work of art in this way; his is a different profession: he is a documenter or a cataloguer, or an interpreter. The artist, however, shares with an artist from the past and from any culture the actual activity; they share the same urge: the urge to communicate a way of seeing things in the world. The earliest art we know of are the Lascaux cave drawings; we recognize the marks because they add up to the look of an animal, a bison. If the marks didn’t look like anything, possibly we wouldn’t even think of them as made by a human being. But when they do, there is no doubt in our minds that somebody a little bit like ourselves, no matter where or when, scratched these representations because we can recognize that that is what they are: a figure, an animal, a spear.
The urge to represent is very deep within us. Depictions occur at very early stages of civilization. And this urge is there because each individual person feels or knows that he or she has a unique sort of experience. They come across something, get excited by it and want to communicate it, because other people will not perceive it unless it is pointed out to them….
Page 15-16
Picasso’s Realism
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| Picasso, Femme Couchee, Oil on Canvas, 1932 |
I had always had a great interest in Picasso, but I never quite knew how to deal with it – like most artists. He seemed too big and his forms too idiosyncratic. How do you learn? How do you use them? But you have to learn. One of the most important things, one of the most difficult things, is to learn not to be intimidated, not even be afraid of working through even his forms to find your own way of doing it. It took me a long time, for instance, to realize fully that, contrary to what some people may think, there is no actual distortion in Picasso. What he does may appear distorted only if you think of one particular way of seeing, which is always from a distance and always in a kind of stopped, frozen time. The moment you realize what Picasso is doing, how he is using time as well – once you begin to realize this, it becomes a very profound experience, because you begin to see that what he is doing is not a distortion, and slowly it then begins to look more and more real. In fact it is naturalism that begins to look less and less real. And that, of course, leads you into thinking about the nature of realism and what it is and what it isn’t. you become aware, perhaps more than ever before, that there are different forms of realism and that some are more real then others.
Page 102
I pointed out to her[Celia] a vast difference between the Picasso and the Watteau: in the Watteau, if you thought about it, you wondered where you, the onlooker, were looking at it from. It was as though you were in another room, looking through a little doorway at a lady being powdered by a servant. But in the Picasso painting, because you could see the back and the front at the same time, you would not ask yourself, where am I? You were inside the picture; you had to be, because you couldn’t be simply outside it and move round it. In the Watteau picture you are a voyeur, you look at the scene through a keyhole; in the Picasso you don’t.
Page 102
All of this stuff has links to Lewis-Williams Mind in the Cave, Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency, and how I want to put the viewers mind IN the work (Mirrors Masks, Looking at drawing and paintings directly from the artist who made them point of view – Even Walters, Gowing (a bit) – They do away with the ‘Keyhole’ Idea, where the viewer is outside looking in – by placing the viewer “Inside” the image, or inside their heads looking ‘out’ at what the painter is seeing. The viewer becomes like a relic, inside the painters head, activating the painter- making the painter ‘work’…???!
Against Edges
We do not look at the world from a distance; we are in it, and that’s how we feel. Some people may not like it, other people do. I tend to like the thought that I’m in the world. I don’t want to just look through keyholes. So, what I’m talking about is the world, and pointing out that there are different ways of depicting space; one way is a keyhole way, essentially the window idea, the one-point perspective. The window is just a big keyhole with edges around it. And you begin to realize that it is the edges that define the keyhole. You are deeply conscious of the edges, I began to be obsessed by them and also by the realization that you might be able to break them. It took me a long time to realize you could break the edges, and, certainly, reversing perspective helps to do it.
Page 103
I think that’s how space is made in pictures: each mark asks the eye to sense different time. I think that is why photographs came to feel flatter for me, because in a photograph the time is of course the same on every section of the surface. In a painting this cannot be the case because a hand moving across it means time is involved and a line drawn: it has time in it because it has a beginning, a middle and an end and somehow this helps to make a space. I have often thought that maybe that’s how it works in real life.
Page 103-104
Dimensions of Time and Space
Suppose that, somehow, it is our consciousness that creates this illusion of other dimension in time. It could be. It might sound ridiculous or silly, but so initially did lots of ideas which turned out in the end to be rather interesting, especially in science. New ideas often seem to go against common sense. I thought, why can’t I put these ideas into my painting? When you begin to understand such ideas, it does seem possible to create a different kind of illusion of space on a canvas. It leads you into such strange areas that at times you even wonder if their of any value at all. Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking about them.
….[you] become aware that the further out in space your looking, the further back in time your seeing and the idea of seeing backwards in time is a bit of a mad notion, or we think so at the moment . It makes me wonder, is all space an illusion? What is space? Just as it’s very hard for us to think that if the universe is finite, space must end and there must be an edge there. And then, what is beyond space? We cannot comprehend it, it is unknowable. In fact, to my mind, the only possible thing you could think of, if, say, space ends, is that it is the exact opposite of space, a sudden wall, a solid mass. But then you’d think, where does that go? On and on forever? Does that have an edge? And even edges then begin to fascinate you. They do me. You realize that they relate to where you think they are and therefore who you are. You then begin to link spatial ideas with identity; or I do. When I see the link between them, it makes me think of all kinds of other things.
I often have these strange ideas in the morning, the moment before I am fully awake. I have been able to use this moment since I was about ten, when I first became aware of it – the moment when your just waking up and moving from an unconscious to a conscious state. What is it that happens, how long is this moment? I’ve always found it difficult to describe. But it is the moment when certain ideas occur which do not otherwise. I assume this happens because the mind is free and uncluttered. When we are awake too much gets in the way. When I was doing all that photography, each step I took was based on sitting late at night and looking at the work, thinking about it and then going to sleep. Then, in the morning, sometimes I’d wake up and think, of course, that’s the next step, and I’d realize that it had been thought out in the moment of waking. I don’t know how long it lasts. You’re not even aware of time and the mind seems freer. I think many people experience this – it must be very common. As you become aware of it you can use this moment of half-awake and half-asleep, use it to let your mind move into areas that in full consciousness you might doubt, or think absurd, and therefore not allow your mind to enter. It is hard to describe it but I’m quite positive that it is there because I have used the awareness it gives me.
Pages 104-105
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