Paint is one of those simple truths about art. If the paint is no good the painting is no better. The first and simplest test of the quality of any work is the quality of how it is made.
Paint is a wonderfully transforming medium, but if anywhere in a work the paint just stays paint, then there is no question that the work is flawed. It is like listening to a singer out of tune. If an art gallery near you is fortunate enough to have an 18th century Italian work in its collection, just go and look at the paint and see what I mean. Just pick a cloudy corner of sky and float your imagination around and through those creamy and transparent layers of paint and colour. This doesn't make it a more or less important work of art - that is a much more complicated business - but it does make it at least a competently made work of art that can be taken seriously.
I am constantly surprised at people, painters and punters alike, who think that crude passion is a substitute for the most basic of skills. Harsh as it might seem to the culturally permissive, if you can't paint you can't paint and goes for drawing too. I believe that art is about communication. In a lifetime of working with it, nothing has persuaded me to any other view. There are two things essential to any work of art: something to say, however difficult or obscure or radical, and the effective means to say it. Like most things about art, the making of it all begins with some simple assumptions and these apply whether a work is figurative or abstract, made 5000 years ago or just last week. The complexities come later and are not about how it is constructed but about what the artists and their audiences made of it then and what we make of it after that.
No comments:
Post a Comment