Rob Adams a Painter's Blog painter's progress

I’m spoilt for choice about what to rant about at the moment. Curators and their recent upgrading to “uber-artists” is one, but that will have to wait. Originality is this week’s topic, I’ve touched on this subject before, but it really deserves the full treatment. It is, as I have been told and read repeatedly, the most desirable thing to have, the holy grail for any artist, your own little bit of uniqueness. Oddly  almost a century of chasing this hare bred of diversity has produced a strange uniformity , with the vain attempts to be original becoming themselves the unifying ingredient. You can’t paint a straightforward landscape it has to have some quirk or agenda to differentiate it from any other landscape done in any other time.

I did a search on the Saatchi Online for painted pictures related to place, Link you can amuse yourself by arranging the different kinds of originality into types. The odd thing to my mind is that you don’t really need that many categories. Most can be assigned a historical style. You can easily make selections that could be attributed to the same artist, even though they are painted by different people in different countries. Levels of technical achievement are very very low, but we are not, in this new age, meant to care about that. Most of them printed big on a “gallery wrap” and stuck up in a minimalist flat will fulfil the function of “art on the wall” pretty well. The web site has a handy function that puts the picture up on a wall in a generic flat, that is worth a giggle. I am not knocking the site, it has potential, also it seems to sell my pictures… which is odd as no one appears to look at them.

I digress, originality, I am coming to think it is a somewhat vain thing to seek after. What is it in the first place? Wikipedia is quite interesting, but very brief. Apparently we didn’t value it in the same way in Tudor times when mentioning the close similarity of a new work to an old one was considered a compliment… I’m not sure the Romantics were to blame for the elevation of originality though as Wiki suggests. Certainly originality could be a few things. An entirely new idea done in an old way, or an old idea done in a new way, or for a full house a new thing done in a new way! Any of these permutations would seem to fit the bill. But is it any guide to worthiness? If I cast a sculpture using diverted magma from an active volcano into a sand mould created by interring celebrities, (casting by the lost person method) I would almost certainly be the first to do this. Does that newness add anything to the finished basalt masterpiece? Not as far as I can see, it could be a good basalt sculpture or an inept one despite all its sparkly, bleeding edge, post ironic newness.

Do we perhaps mean “individuality” in that we recognise a Van Gogh or a Rothko by their personal style? It is something we recognise, but not I feel what we mean by originality as it is used today. We occasionally get newness in new means of producing imagery, such as the recent arrival of digital painting, or the arrival of oil painting in the 14th century. Once again it is hard to see that this casts any fairy dust, other than that of a very ephemeral kind, on the work produced.

Art history loves a new idea, impressionism for example. Painters saw photographic images for the first time and were amazed at how the world was really composed. These fleeting frozen glimpses of time did not in any way fit golden means or other classical rules. They saw pictures out of focus, blurred and overexposed. For a while a few French painters had this new thing to themselves, but it soon spread to the far corners and was new no more. If we look at the output of the artists concerned the paintings are pretty patchy, with a few standout pictures and many many so so efforts. This is not to denigrate the artists, it is just a fact of life that if you do a lot of pictures quickly mainly out of doors then your failures and unremarkable efforts will likely out number your outright successes.

Degas stands out in the consistent high quality of his work IMO, but really he mostly reverted to a form of working that was quite well established before the impressionists came along. In the following decades the impressionist discoveries were pretty much absorbed into a mix of old and new as in such painters as Singer Sargent or Sorolla. It had become another tool in the box, not a revolution after all.

Photography was I think the real revolution here. In rapid succession painters cast desperately about for new reasons as to why they should be paid attention to. You could paint in ways the camera couldn’t see, or of places that did not exist or were inaccessible. Examples would be the inside of your mind, like the surrealists, or viewing an object in a multi-veiwpoint way as the cubists briefly attempted to do (a very good example IMO of how an idea that sounds plausible failed to produce anything of very much worth). That fragmentation has continued until today until what can be art is a longer list than what can’t.

The only act an artist need make is the labelling of whatever they choose as art, that is the art act in total. We were told again and again at art college in the 1970’s that it was the choices of the artist that made the art not the skill of presentation. The result of this rather intellectually flawed idea has produced some difficulties. Previously technical or intellectual merit judged on previous artistic achievements was the guide line as to what was desirable Without that means of discrimination, however unreliable, there was no guide to quality other than guessing in a way that has shown itself to be pretty random. It has turned out that those who had financial interest got to choose what was and was not to be included in the canon of art and was therefore of value. Though they may claim to be seeking originality the choices made seem to undermine that claim.

Essentially the choices are as in the Elizabethan day: things that are similar to what has been anointed as good before. However the difference here is that there is a cut off point. You mustn’t look too far back. The cut off point is around 1900 or thereabouts. You may emulate anything from the Bauhaus or Revolutionary Russia, 1950’s America is also fine. If you stick to these periods you will be awarded the title of “contemporary” if you stray beyond these bounds you will be “traditional”. All this is as far as I can see entirely illogical, abstract painting has a tradition, which pretty much all abstract painters adhere to, the other flavours of art in turn have their trail of what you might call traditional influences behind them.

Historically there has been an ongoing process of looking back, the textbook one is I suppose the Renaissance gazing back through rose tinted spectacles at classical times. This produced marvels of human creativity, a similar act of looking back in the 1800’s for the most part I feel did not deliver in the same way. The Pre-Raphaelites did the same but with mixed results, due perhaps to the popular sentimentality of the day. Our current age looks back to the turmoil around the turn of the century in 1900. Originality could I think be just a phantom, no more tangible than Sensibility, the  Romantic yearning to express intuition and emotion, or the exhausting search for the Sublime. Even reality turned out to be strangely ungraspable as the Realists discovered.

All of this hardly matters, if you collect the generally agreed masterworks in a row originality seems to me to be a minor ingredient, but in contrast individual vision and technical mastery appears I think a very large component. It is I feel what you see, not how you see it and how you express it not what you express that matters most. Or to put it more crudely  a simple idea very well done, will mostly I think resonate more for a wider spread of people over a longer period of time than anything more grandiose.

The way in which we imagine originality might occur might in some part prompt our often prurient interest in the tortured journey of the artist, which sometimes can outstrip our interest or care for the quality of the end result. At first glance this would seem fairly reasonable, but a painting is at the end of the day just a made object. We don’t care if a chair was made by a manic depressive with a penchant for self mutilation, so why should a painting require this irrelevant ancestry?

There is nothing wrong or shallow in just appreciating a hand made depiction or abstraction for the atmosphere it encapsulates, or the poetry and elegant means of its execution. Whether it has been done before in a similar way before or not is hardly relevant to that moment of simple, uplifting and very personal pleasure.

Some paintings, I would like to reassure visitors that I cut off no part of my anatomy before, during or after the production of these humble efforts.

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This is a work in progress still. In some ways the pauses needed for drying with oils are a boon because after a few weeks of living with it you come round

to a well reasoned list of improvements and amendments to carry out. On the list here is scumbling pale over the distance whee the main glow is and

some simplification of the tones here and there where the surface is too busy. It is the Royal Exchange in the City of London. 24in by 18in.

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Another studio picture, it’s great to be back painting in oils. If I never do another acrylic I shall not be sorry! I’m happier with this one. The silvery October

light was what struck me when I was out sketching. This captures something of the mood of peaceful activity that seemed to inhabit London that afternoon.

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This was what I was sketching with on the day. Waterbrushes were the unfamiliar medium here. I charged them with a warm and a cool colour in ordinary

watercolour and combined them with a black brushpen. A bit rough and ready but very quick for getting down a quick impression. They also allow working

standing in the street with no clutter, just pad and pens. Brewer St in Soho.

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This is Old Compton St. I was slowly getting the hang of it, very easy to overdo the blacks.

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Beak Street. Hard doing this as people were banging into me as they passed by.

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This is Mary le Strand in the Strand. I was a bit more restrained on the blacks here which works much better. Water pens have real potential as a

quick sketch medium, the fact that they are quite hard to control adds to the vivacity of the end result. These are all tiny 5in by 4in and only took 10 to

15 minutes each.

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I took the same gear to life drawing that evening much, easier to control in a larger format!

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Last one, for big areas I just squeeze a few drops of colour on to the paper and then spread it around. it was fun to draw from a clothed model for a change.