Panic Art - A Conservative Retreat
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Despite the shock of my pornographic images, my occasional use of
collage and my production of feckless doodles (even easier to draw
than a Picasso doodle) - the vast majority of my art - its technique,
its craft, its ethos - is essentially Conservative. I am the
bourgeoisie suburban self-made painter par-excellence.
My first introduction to art was through my father. As a wealthy
business man he had just begun to collect art before he died - I was
six years and ten months old at the time. Our house had many lovely
oil paintings of Irish landscapes, Chinese junk boats, lighthouses in
Storm tossed seas, even a painting of our house Tara - my father had
commissioned. He had also collected a series of wonderful bronze
sculptures of naked ballerina - which heated up my fevered boyish
imagination. We also had a charming collection of Capi De Monte
figurines (featuring bright, happy and carefree peasants). We have
only two of these art works now - one of which I over-painted in 1997.
My mum had to sell or pawn most of them when we were starving. One key
piece though - a Capi De Monte figurine of a French looking artist at
the turn of the century (painting out of doors with easel, canvas,
pallet, brushes and even Beret and goatee) - I adored. But my mother
knew I loved it and one night stark raving mad and angered at my
persistent and willful compulsion to paint rather than study - smashed
it up on the ground in front of me - I was about eleven.
At about five my father taught me how to draw tanks and planes and
put on their insignia - the British Target and the German Cross and
Swastika. I would watch with envy as my father did his Paintings by
Number canvas boards every Christmas. It was also he with my mother
who brought me to the National Gallery in Dublin when I was about
five.
The second introduction to art art I got was through my fathers art
encyclopedia History of Art (editor Claude Schaeffner) Heron Books
1968. Which I first remember flicking through when I was about five -
I was mesmerized and thrilled by Hans Memling, Matthias Grunewald and
Hieronymus Bosch - as a young boy I was as shocked by their horrors,
hells and anguish - as by any horror-flick in later life. In 27
volumes History of Art covered painting from the caves of Lascaux and
Altamira to the Abstract art of Pollock and everything in between.
However my collection only went up to Surrealism because my dad died
before the collection was completed.
Each volume had an introduction, then a main text, then evidence and
documents, principal exhibitions, the principal pictorial movements,
chronology, museums, and finally and best of all a dictionary of
painters (including their short personal history and descriptions and
dates of their best works). This wonderful encyclopedia on art -
written by charming and eloquent French authors - has been my constant
companion since the age of seven when I first opened their pages. One
of the most touching aspects of these book for me was the list of
artist biographies at the back. Looking through these lists I was
astonished by just how many artists there had been - and how we knew
so much about them. In my darkest hours as a child I dreamed that one
day I would be in such a lovely book on art. Painters like Titian,
Tintoretto, Rembrandt, Hals, Goya, David, Gericault, Ingres, Delacroix
and Degas, were Gods to me. However I knew I could live a hundred life
times and still not reach their pictorial genius. But I would have
given my left arm to have a tenth of their ability. Their art has
utterly inspired me - and to this day it is by their pinnacle that I
judge every other art work. These artists formed the
pillars of my temple to art. Isolated, alone, bewildered, and
sheltered I craved views of the world - greater than the sum of my
small terrified life. My eyes feasted upon masterpiece after
masterpiece - each work broadening my understanding of life and
increasing my wonder as such men as these that could speak so directly
from the grave. These dead white male geniuses became father figures
for me - teaching me, challenging me and competing with me. In their
sorrows and joys I felt understood and forgiven - I felt part of
humanity. Art became a substitute religion to me. The permanency of
art seemed to cheat death and the posthumous rediscovery of the likes
of Van Gogh seemed to offer me hope in my caged social exclusion and
silenced shame and hurt. My faith in art to cheat death - was finally
shattered when I was nineteen and I began to compulsively reading
Existential philosophers like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre and
Heidegger - and novelists like De Sade, Kafka, Genet and Camus which
combined with a suffocating depression - to plunge me into nihilistic
and suicidal despair. I had stopped believing in God at about the age
of eleven when my thousandth tearful prayer had gone answered. God was
my first big rejection. But it was only when I started reading
Existential philosophy that I understand what the implications of a
world without God really meant. If there was no God, or Heaven, then
life was essentially meaningless - we will all live pointless absurd
lives and then die - rot in a grave and even the paintings we paint we
decay to dust in a few thousand years. So what was the point of going
on? Why kill time when you could just kill yourself. If God was dead
then in cosmic terms as de Sade pointed out - there was no difference
between living a life of sin or a life of Chasity. Further more - if
God was dead then art was a human joke! It was about the time of this
realization that I started signing my canvases 'Cypher'. These days I
am agnostic on the nature of God or the after life. I think there are
just some concepts man is not meant to understand. Worrying about God
is like a fly in your living room worrying about your relationship
with your girlfriend. There are just some things we will never know -
and are never meant to. So I continue to make my art in the sly hope
of immortality.
My local library provided me with my third introduction to the world
of art. Like many a crass amateur I read 'How-To' types of art books
in order to learn how to draw and paint. Such authors like; Charles
Read who painted messy splashy watercolors ( including his books,
Painting What you Want To See and Figure Painting In Watercolour) J.M.
Parramon (The Complete Book Of Oil Painting and The Complete Book Of
Drawing), David A. Leffel (Oil Painting Secrets From a Master) who
painted in a kitsch manner influenced by Rembrandt and Chardin and
Gregg Kreutz his pupil (Problem Solving For Oil Painters) - instilled
in me a very Conservative love for watercolour, drawing and realist
painting.
They taught me the differences between artist quality (high pigment
content) paints and poor student quality paints (mostly just filler),
the value of expensive and highly durable French, Italian and English
watercolour papers and the extreme durability of French linen and
Mahogany board. Often these books featured the most technically
accomplished old-masterish, realist, super-realist and photo-realist
watercolour or oil painters. Like a child I wondered at the hyper
realism of their work and the intricate nature of their technique. I
also noticed that these new age academics always used expensive and
super durable supports like 300lb Arches watercolour paper and French
linen. So I vowed that I too would make work as durable!
On television I avidly watched 'Keating on Painting' on Channel Four.
In this series of programs - Tom Keating who was the most famous
English forger of the twentieth century taught his viewers how to
paint like Titian, Constable, Manet, Monet or Renoir. I adored his
programs during which he chain smoked and revealed the secret
techniques of the old masters. He was by far and away the most
technically accomplished and charismatic art teachers I have ever seen
on television. A cockney from a poor family, he had tried to make a
career for himself as a painter but had had little success. In revenge
he was known to have made fakes of work by Samuel Palmer and various
European masters including Francois Boucher, Edgar Degas, Jean-Honoré
Fragonard, Thomas Gainsborough, Amedeo Modigliani, Rembrandt, Pierre-
Auguste Renoir and Kees van Dongen. He claimed that he had produced
over 2,000 fakes in his lifetime. He was finally arrested in 1977, but
the case was dropped because of his poor health.
As a young teenager one of my greatest ambitions saw to be a painting
teacher on television like Tom Keating or in books like David A.
Leffel. I still get nostalgic when looking through these kinds of
books for enthusiastic amateurs - the same feelings I have when
reading old comics).
Picasso for me in my teenage years was the yards stick by which to
plan my own development. I adored his Cubist collages, Surrealist
distortions, and his joyful doodles of later years. I loved his cheek
in taking a bicycle seat and handle bars and making them into a bulls
head by means of one witty weld. But despite the fact that I wanted to
one day make such audaciously simple technical works - I firmly
believed I had to earn the right to do so - just as he had - by
drilling myself first in the rigors of academic, naturalistic and
realist drawing and painting.
One brutal and stupid art school belief that I was tricked into
believing in my late teens was that there was no great art in America
before Jackson Pollock which was brilliantly exposed as atrocious by
Robert Hughes in his masterpiece Epic on American art - American
Visions (1997). Pollock was a genius - a Promethean creative force
equal in a sprint with Picasso (the trouble was - after 100m Pollock
ran out of steam - while Picasso kept on running) but to suggest that
he was the first or only American genius is ignorant and all too
typical of the stupidity of art college students these days. The
oeuvres of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins and
Edward Hopper in oils, watercolours, charcoal or pencil are simply
sublime - and the equal for better know French men like Renoir.
In the last five years I have increasingly been attracted to the work
of the great Belle Epoch painters like Ignacio Zuloaga, Joaquin
Sorolla y Bastida, John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, Augustus John,
Il'Ya Repin, William Orpen, John Lavery Sargent, Lavery, Sorrolla,
Zorn, John, and Orpen. The Belle Epoch roughly stretched from 1885 to
its bloody end in 1914. The first world war marked the death knell of
the Aristocracy in Europe. Monarchies collapsed all over Europe, the
Czar and family were shot dead in Russia or in England lived to
witness their power, influence and wealth deteriorate decade by
decade. Similarly a war was fought between modernism (the likes of
Monet, Matisse, Klimt, Picasso and Kandinsky) and the Belle Epoch
painters of privilege - and the Aristocratic lackeys got strung up.
But Belle Epoch painting is delightful because of its marriage of
traditional tonal painting with the bravura brushstrokes of Velazquez
and the fresh colour of Monet.
The Belle Epoch painters were the last in a long line of Aristocratic
painting stretching back to Velazquez and Franz Hals. The skills these
painters possessed were lost by the Second World War - never to
return. The atelier training in tonal paintings and exacting life
drawing with charcoal is now lost forever - a chain has been severed
never to be reconnected. The secrets and tips of this art - passed
down from master to master is gone. Portrait painting after the First
World War is a story of clumsy self-taught painters making uglier and
uglier representations of the face. One would be forgiven to think the
sitters of Stanley Spencer, Graham Sutherland, Philip Pearlstein,
Lucian Freud, David Hockney, Odd Nerdrum or Jenny Saville were
suffering from third degree burns or some hideous form of skin disease
- a far cry from the flattering glamor and beauty of the Belle Epoch
Duchesses in a lush directly painted Sargent oil painting.
Moreover the painters who sat at this Belle Epoch court were the last
to know what was required of an old master - dignity, poise,
discipline, manners, gentility and reserve - the same virtuous
painters at court had needed since Da Vinci's and Raphael's day. That
is why I and I think many in the art world are slightly disgusted by
the recent art of the likes of Odd Nerdrum - he may possess the
technical skills of an old master - but he has none of their
psychological health, forward thinking, modernity and dignity.
Today I would give my eye teeth for the drawing and painting training
the likes of Sargent, Orpen and John were given. But even if I were
given it today - it would be impossible to remove from my paintings
the acquired mannerisms of a life times worth of clumsy, unsystematic,
self-teaching.
One of my favorite minor painters of the Belle Epoch period who I
have loved since my late twenties was Augustus John - one of the
finest draughtsmen in history. His drawings in charcoal, pencil, black
chalk, ink and etching are wonderfully varied. There is incredible
energy and directness in his drawings. This is real drawing - from
life - directly and under a time limit. Some of his drawings of his
wife Dorelia in a long dress have a timeless Renaissance quality. The
faster he drew - the better he drew. Yet on the other hand in
obsessively hatched pencil drawings of friends and family he was the
last old master of the hatched drawing. Sadly his skill in drawing
prevented him ever becoming a great painter - frequently in his
paintings he is happy just to fill in the lines - leaving the pencil
marks still showing underneath. But occasionally he manged to pull off
small masterpiece in paint - particularly of his wives and children.
They have a freshness and lack of correction that is wonderful in its
apparent simplicity.
My other great passion is John Singer Sargent. I have loved his work
since I was fifteen. There is no other painter who can match his
flashy brushwork. True it lacks the grander of a sweep of the brush by
Titian, or Tintoretto or Velazquez or Rembrandt or Goya or Manet for
that matter. But as a joyful and sensual celebration of the beauty of
life it has no equal. That Sargent was a repressed homosexual is
apparent when we look at his smoldering charcoal drawings of male
nudes. But it is his gorgeous oil paintings of society women and his
spontaneous watercolours of Venice and other landscape and
architectural motifs which are my favorites. Looking at his buttery
bravura brushstrokes in his oils and his darting wet colorful strokes
in his watercolours I am struck dumb with wonder and professional envy
and as an art lover I am consumed with a lust for possession.
So it should come as no surprise that when I see a guy ejaculate on a
sheet of paper, sell a can of shit, paint a canvas all white, make
naked women rub their paint covered bodies on canvas, fart paint out
of their anus, or pickle a shark - I am filled with suspicion, rage,
laughter and incredulity.
My Website (over 18's only!) www.thepanicartist.com