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It was a glorious morning as I strolled with my family down
the steep rural road toward the shimmering bay. At a bend
near the bottom a couple of elderly artists, a man and a woman,
badges showing they were bona fide members of a provincial art
society, had set up easels overlooking the picturesque scene,
which they were industriously depicting in watercolour. We got
to chatting with the gentleman, an engagingly talkative fellow
easily into his 80s, while the woman kept silently painting, scarcely
acknowledging our presence. He confided--pointing to his leaning
walking stick--that being crippled made it difficult to get around
much any more, at least without some kind soul to drive him. This
was clearly a reference to the middle-aged, sturdy-looking man
leaning idly against the paddock fence, attending watchfully to
the painting in progress like an admiring acolyte. The master
explained that his wife's refusal to drive on hills was no help
whatsoever in getting him to such out-of-the-way places, so he
had to rely on the good graces of others in the art society. While
she remained securely at home, the proper place for people of
advanced age, he continued to venture forth into the wild blue
yonder, despite an increasing debility which, nevertheless, didn't
prevent him from standing in front of his easel for hours at a
time.
As
we moved on I called out, "Keep up the good work!" a hypocritical
platitude perhaps, as I've never considered such quasi-impressionistic
landscape painting as good in any but the most mediocre sense. But
my remark was not meant to be insincere, not at all. Though I have
no taste personally for that kind of art, I have nothing but admiration
for the artist's dogged determination to keep doing what he obviously
loves--plein-air painting in exquisite natural settings--given the
stubborn recalcitrance of a body which has all but given up the
ghost.
Like
him, the vast majority of artists will never be famous. Many will
achieve limited, parochial renown to be all but forgotten by posterity,
except maybe for family members, art society types, dedicated collectors,
traditionalist dealers, local or national art history chroniclers:
all strictly small-time. A tiny handful will be posthumously resurrected,
declared 'great' or 'significant' in the van Gogh paradigm or under
the banner of ideological-revisionist art history. The condition
for most artists will remain relative anonymity and obscurity, but
I stress the word 'relative' here: being known and respected in
a local community carries its own weight, however insignificant
against the wider international benchmark.
But
then, why dwell on artists anyway? What makes them so special compared
to 'ordinary' humans? My considered view is that there is no essential
difference, as the human condition is innately artistic. Everyone
is potentially an artist: all it takes to become one is the self-realisation
that that's what you already are. It is not what you do that makes
you an artist, but your awareness of something within that constitutes
an artistic or aesthetic dimension. The primal artwork is one's
own life, indeed life itself as you experience it and reflect on
it. There is no barrier between life and art in this sense, the
sense which everyone shares.
The
usual sense of art, on the other hand, thrives on exactly that opposition
to life. Artists traditionally depict life; it is not enough to
say they merely live it. Asserting that art is life, on that view,
is totally meaningless, so why bother? If everyone's an artist,
doesn't that cheapen the concept, reduce it to the lowest common
denominator where no one can fail at it any more? Art historians
surely shouldn't write about everyone--how could they even begin
to contemplate such a mammoth absurdity?
In
my view, art history, the art world, the art market--in other words
art with a capital "A"--is less important than the art which is
part of all of us, which we participate in by virtue of being human.
I believe it's more important to succeed at life than art (at least
in the usual, commonly held view of art). Yes, one person's success
is another's failure: each may easily invert into the other, like
the fluctuating interplay between yin and yang. Do you place greater
emphasis on your little time before death, or the big time that
stretches endlessly forward and backward? It's not just a question
of art, but a philosophical or religious one. The only difference
is the way you feel about it in the here-and-now, which is all you
can ever truly call your own.
There
have certainly been cases of up-and-coming artists who self-destructed
prematurely, hastening the inevitable end. For them the opposite
may have been true, in sacrificing life for art. Take Philip Clairmont,
the New Zealand expressionist painter who ended his talented life
while still in his early 30s. His final creative/destructive act
was to treat himself as a painting--to be hung, literally. A poignantly
tragic finale to a short but brilliant career. His art was intentionally
made to fall to bits one day, similar to people, so you could say
he was true to himself, as both artist and human. On that view better
to go out with a suitably dramatic flourish than merely fade away.
If
you define your own art yourself, then you succeed or fail entirely
on your own terms. If you equate it with the way you live, then
succeeding at life simultaneously implies succeeding at art, and
vice versa. It connotes thinking about and modifying your own attitudes
and values, to enable you to create the life and identity you want.
It is only a limitation in thinking, a fixed idea, to presume that
art must either be socially visible or not exist at all. The liberating
realisation is that art can be totally invisible except to you,
the creator, that it need have no other existence than in your own
head.
The
invisibility of art is the rule, not the exception, despite appearances
to the contrary. All artworks imitate something which exists only
in the private space of artistic perception and/or conception. In
giving form to that private vision the artwork is identified by
us, the audience, with the artist's interior view, but what we are
really seeing is our own interior view projected onto the artwork.
In doing so we are not recreating the artist's vision, but creating
or recognising our own.
Interior
views are universally shared; it is the way we all see, though we
can never know for sure that others see exactly what we see. It
is looking out from, and looking in toward, the invisible interior
that shapes and reinforces our common--yet often intensely individualistic--artistic
humanity.
Copyright
© 2000 Max Podstolski All Rights Reserved
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