When writing another post I looked up Contemporary Art on Wikipedia. The entry is confused to say the least, but after a certain amount of dithering settles on “still living” as the deciding factor. Well I am still alive but I doubt if a “contemporary” gallery would put my work on its walls. The word “contemporary” is one that is guaranteed to provoke a rant from me. On the program “Grand Designs” nice but a bit dim Kevin uses it a lot. So do architects, kitchen and bathroom designers, architects and anyone else who wants to sell you stuff. This has been especially difficult for me as I have been browsing kitchen and bathroom online stores. It essentially means boring with no decoration. When modern designers do attempt decoration the result is often risible and clumsy. Decoration requires a degree of historical knowledge and proportion that is just not taught today.
Contemporary interiors are mostly zero clutter affairs mostly with no charm whatsoever. Not a patch on the simple Japanese interiors that it could be argued inspired them. “Japanese?”, you cry. Yes it all came from Japan. Some of the ideas came from Laozi, a philosopher and the founder of Taoism, who held to the “aesthetic ideal of emptiness”. Designers in the Bauhaus and elsewhere saw Japanese tea sets and writing sets all of which would look fine in one of todays so called contemporary spaces. They got their ideas back in the form of the international style which is still in the process of destroying beauty in architecture around the world.
I sometimes think the whole modernist movement is the avoidance of criticism. If you merely splash paint randomly on your canvas, or paint it a single colour or one colour with two stripes then you are reducing the number of things that can be criticised. With no reference points no concrete judgement can be made. If I draw a figure this is not the case, proportion, economy of line, quality of line, tonal arrangement, relation of the figure to the page, character, balance of light and shade, the list is really depressingly long! With a minimalist painting with only a fews elements the placing of those features is inevitably overwhelmingly important, which is why in my opinion good minimalist painters are so vanishingly thin on the ground. Post modernism is an odd thing as far as I can see it is modernism unchanged, it was just invented because people felt the need to move forward, but could not see how, so they just changed the name and carried on with the same old stuff.
One of my own experiences in the design world is that if you put anything interesting in it will be commented on, if it gets commented on people will have opinions, those opinions will differ and whatever was interesting will get cut. Something that inspires no comment will however slip by without really being considered. This all promotes a blank grey average which we can see today all around us. Partially it is due to democracy. We have this idea that if we take a broad spread of opinions about something and average them it will result in an improvement. This is not the case however with art or design. Much in the same way if you took everyone’s favourite colour and mixed them together you would not come up with anything other than muddy greeny grey.
Contemporary art tends to discourage intelligent opinions. People are reduced to saying, “Oh a child could do it!” often not because they are stupid or unsophisticated, but because the work itself has shut out all possibility of a worthwhile stance to take in regard to it. For me if it is not possible for a viewer to inhabit a work in some way, then it is poorly done.
Painting time has been thin on the ground of late, so not too much to show, and the longest gap between posts I have ever left in a number of years.
I was sneakily taking pictures at Christmas when I was sussed by two granddaughters of my host… the resulting snap had something I liked, I might make an oil painting out of this, the water colour doesn’t quite work but an oil might.
This was a day spent drawing in and around Roman Rd in London. This is just by the Regents canal. Very chilly wind but the day was lovely.
This is a few yards away looking the other direction into the city. Even colder here, like sitting in a wind tunnel! I just indicated the tones of the more dense hatched areas by doing a small section. Then filled in the rest somewhere warmer…
I got even less of this done on site. Just the drawing and an indication of how the tones were to fade in the distance. Looking south from the Roman Rd.
Went walking with a friend and this view of Fontmell Down in Dorset looked wonderful. So I went back at the same time a couple of days later and I was in luck it looked even better! Watercolour.
This is West Bay station near Bridport in Dorset. This is studio but I noted the time of day so shall go back and paint it en plain air when I get the chance. Watercolour.
A life sketch to finish up!