Painting is our gravitational pull, grounding us, focussing us, accelerating us and draws us together by compelling us to work inside (Art and) the canvas. Sure we pour on the blocks and hurdle the obstacles, often failing to find what we intend but we sustain ourselves knowing that we both extend our image making and increase the full-on confrontation of what people have done in the past I We force ourselves to attack the trail of previous modernist Paintings (both 19th and 20th centuries) and lay siege to them to break with their past to affect our change! Can we just pretend that those two versions of Modernism never existed? No. Can we avoid facing-off with them? No. Can we embrace and value those teachings in order move on? Yes! They are guidelines not railway tracks, and our job, even if they seem railway tracks, is to derail them! That is our modus operandi, our job, it is the magnet that both demands of us and illustrates how we break, by a catalytic self-enforcement, our way of accelerating and doing a handbrake turn at the same time!
Break with the past by staring back at the Universe with our Hubble telescopic eye by our own idiosyncratic human eye and see all the new information and interpret it to see more than under our noses by following the science. This is a human story of gravity and our grip and human fingerprint being in touching distance from seeing the past, present and future of the spectacle of the rest of the Universe. How? Because we can see time, black-holes and white holes, dark mater etc but most importantly ‘Gravity’, which is not just about us, it bridges our contact with our solar system because) it varies depending on solar and luna influence all over the Universe of galaxies beyond our own! We are only part of the bigger picture, but something more than a photograph or an advanced tech art of today that will be obsolete tomorrow. This is what has guided ancient Mariners and our greatest Painters etc to see beyond the charicaturing of a piece of cloth and a piece of wood framing it! It is our living paradox that invites us into the limited space to show a wilderness of possibilities and a plethora of changes that we can’t inhabit but for a fleeting glance! We are able to convey our universe of what is in our heads and how we process the mass of overriding information that we only get a glimpse of!
That's it, no all-conquering finite depiction but a lifetime of our social and individual aesthetic that may well be often awkward or unwelcome to the public, but we don’t paint for ‘You', (well I don’t) I paint for me! Paint your own!! It is my visual autobiography that may not be significant to anyone else but me, and it just maybe only authentic to me.
Transform replication is the AI goal by codifying human Painter’s experience of technique etc but it was Leonardo di Vinci who translated scientific invention into being the first Conceptual Artist, by drawing how humans can defy their limitations. Flight and by being able to breath underwater whilst undertaking technical drawings of the human anatomy are unique to human development and originated from being a priceless Painter — Painting does give you wings to ‘diversify’! He completed Paintings that he thought he couldn’t better and that must have both stimulated him and broke his heart. Science was so rudimentary in the Renaissance (compared with today), but he must have asked himself: How can I paint when I don’t understand the composition of what I'm Painting? Today, he may still have been a Conceptual Artist, but I think he would be leading us all as a Painter; taking-on those who have poopooed Painting and exposing the petulant short-termism of those charged with ‘overseeing Art (TATT)" who are a different demographic to the political ‘establishment’ in the UK, but who were too keen to be controversial glory fans of Tech and Conceptual Art etc and who demoted the medium of Painting because ‘Demotion’ was ‘radical and wrestling with social and ideological angst’ of the 1980s! The magnet of transformation was not looking up at the stars but looking under a microscope to impose agendas!! It certainly was post punk (even if its effects were still felt as if it had failed the youth up to the 1990s) in youth culture terms, and it was post ‘Moon-landings’, Cold War rhetoric and would create the right celebratory terms of hedonism of the 1990s of the YBAs, by the back-drop of hard Thatcherism and severe Reaganomics! Something had to give, and a new pattern of Western agendas on Feminism and the limitations of Marxist-Leninism by the over-indulged Structuralist debate, meant that Painting didn’t have anywhere to contribute…. so, it was side-lined like some piece of space debris that orbited the Earth outside the Earths Art atmosphere that would burn-up on entry and be forgotten very quickly! Space junk? Detritus of exiled kit abandoned to the lifeless suffocation somewhere anonymous and without the Art oxygen, drifting aimlessly and ignored on the periphery of a world on the brink of the end of Cold war and almost ready to explode????!!!! And TATT ruled out any place for Painting at exactly where the medium of Paint should have been!!???? Did TATT displace the medium because it had been too influential? Or would it have been too influential during a sensitive time of Cold War exhaustion? Did they think Painting would have risked the stability of global instability to bring about the end of the Cold War? Is Art in general then aback-out or a step back? How did it become so feared? Which tech giant greased someone influential in the Art world’s hand? Why does Marxist China tend to back its Conceptual Artists today? Or have the new multiple superpowers like BRICS used re-orientated global ‘preferred” Art medium of choice to some ‘non-Paint medium? Or does Painting have to get a functional purpose to make the ‘Top Table’? Surely the ‘journey doesn’t have to rely on controlled ‘clocking-on and off’? Or is Painting too ‘difficult to control?
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