If Art Is An “Imitation of Life”, What Is “Life”?
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| Pablo Picasso in his studio ‘Le Californie’ with a glamorous enthusiast. Picasso rode the crest of painting’s triumph and perhaps understood painting’s impending implosion and death. |
Art asks what life is
Painting is rightly declared dead by some on a regular basis.
When a painting is conceived as a dingbat of interior design, or as an advertisement for a current art movement, an observer can smell painting’s disconnection from life— lots of painting smells like yesterday’s fish.
Art may be an “imitation of life”, but this phrase sheds no light on art by leaving “life” as a vague, undefined x in the equation of ‘art = life’.
But a living painting asks: “What is ‘x’, what is life after all?”
Painting asks this questing through specific ingredients:
Ingredients of a Living Painting
1. Tension.
Tension, whether psychological, narrative or compositional, resonates with life’s dissatisfying, conflicted or poignant aspects.
A painting that explores conflict of wants and unsatisfied yearnings directly quotes from the individual’s life.
2. Play, Fun.
The sheer fact of presently being alive urges both profound wonder and shallow pageantry.
The perpetually serious can only communicate through the dark urgency of impending doom‚ but Play, life’s toy trumpet, life’s energetic, bright childish song, welcomes viewers to snap out of indifference, to drop their guard and to enter a dialogue about life.
3. Sensuality.
As life’s matchmaker, an artist prompts a love affair between the viewer and the real, physical world.
The artist embraces the material world unapologetically. The material world is life’s vocabulary, the building block of our human experience; everyday experience is ‘spiritual’ in ‘spiritual’s’ final meaning.
4. Chance, Happenstance.
Communication is art’s right foot, accident is the art’s left foot, and having two left feet is great art.
Welcoming and incorporating accidents of process takes painting’s meaning to a place that narrow, conscious reason cannot reach.
In one hour of painting, an earnestly communicative artist turns his modest collection of brain cells over about 8,758 times.
Claude Monet in his studio. If you want to see into Monet’s mind, look at almost any of his paintings of lily pads. Monet loves life’s simple experiences.
5. Wit, Irony.
Not taking process, message or self too seriously is the artist’s antidote to modern sense of isolation. None of us would last for forty days in utter isolation unless we see the slightest wink from even our worst enemy, for we are social beings— far more than our civilized neighbors, the ant.
6 Hope.
Too much hope erodes hope art’s tension with sugary optimism. Too little hope makes any art— painting, film (Kurosawa’s ‘Ran’) or play (Shakespeare’s blinding devastations in ‘King Lear’)— unbearable to experience with direct attention for a second time. Hope is sugary frosting, yearned for delightedly, but sickening if consumed abundantly.
Picasso’s “La Guernica” exemplifies a measured offer of hope: amid Nazi Germany’s and Franco’s villainous devastation a woman holds a candle, the crudest, most desperate symbol of hope. Hope is the singularly uncontrived communication of an artist.
“La Guernica”, oil painting on canvas by Pablo Picasso.
7. The Ephemeral, ‘Anicha’, Death.
Rothko correctly insisted that his incandescent paintings depicted death.
The Buddhist concept of anicha suggests that everything that has a beginning has and ending, including our lives and the lives of those that we adore and cherish. We are finally able to stand at our full stature as sentient beings by comprehending this incandescent fact, and we might be tremendously kinder and more giving to ourselves and to other by doing so.
The ephemeral, the ‘anicha’, confounds our ideal of a ‘perfect’ life. At the same time it imbues our lives with value and urgency. Plastic flowers, for example, though long lasting, are valued less than living, momentary flowers are. Similarly, our days before our death are not limitless grains of sand on an endless beach, but perhaps only a handful of sand— and so of incalculable value, now.
Ephemerality or ‘anicha’ discusses our tremendous longings, regrets and urgency woven inseparably into our daily life.
Chagall in his studio among his childlike answers to life’s heavy questions.
8. Sustained Ambiguity, Sustained Path.
An artist benefits by developing comfort with deep uncertainty about one’s artistic direction.
A deeper sense of direction, living on pure fascination with art’s process, leads the meandering artist to places unimagined by the ‘self’.
The poet John Keats refers to this ability to sustain an artistic path in the face of uncertainty as Negative Capability.
Living painting never haunts well worn paths. It cuts new trails for the artist and viewer to experience life freshly.
August Rodin in his sculpting studio. Rodin’s models seemingly were pushed inward, not only by his chiseling eye, but by his quest to eliminate the ornamentations associated with art.
9. Proportionality.
Balance these ingredients to direct a painting’s entry into life experience.
One can detect these ingredients used to greater or lesser effect in art of the past (except irony, a modern phenomenon). For example: 19th century romantic painting and poetry, Greek tragedies, ancient cave art, 20th century silent film.
What Painting Can’t Do
- A painting born without the wish to resonate or to rhyme with life cannot speak.
- Painting can never teach nor dictate a viewer’s response. Like one parent trying to conceive alone, a monologue lives out its days childless. Painting offers a place of dialogue and a realm wherein to experience life newly.
- Painting cannot improve our world. People cannot improve it either. Individuals start the world’s improvement. By delivering a single, didactic message, painting becomes mere slogan or graphic design. Art discusses human experience with that one all-important, world-improving individual.
De Kooning and his wife in his studio.
What Painting Does
Great painting – and all great art- rises above the limitations of its medium, not by convincingly simulating life but by asking, “Is it just me, or have you experienced this as well?”
By subverting the assumption that we are strangers to our own lives and squatters— beleaguered, uninvited guests— within an unwelcoming universe, substantial painting celebrates life.
Matisse later in his life enjoying what he always loved to do— to do what he was born to do.
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