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There are thousands of people out here "trying to be artists". But one cannot "try" to be an artist. One simply is. And the only thing true artists are "trying" to do is avoid starvation.

14th February 2012

A friend came to dinner a few nights ago. She was at the table opposite my painting "Angel: Self-portrait beneath Sophie Munch". Sophie is propped on a chair in my sitting room. My friend spent quite some time peering distractedly beyond me, and by the cheese course was driven to ask about the girl who was so fixatedly staring at her from across the room.

I explained about Edvard Munch's own painting of his sister "The Sick Child", the work that first brought him notoriety (see the Sophie Munch page on this website). I explained how I started painting my interpretation on Munch's Birthday, and how I had based my own face in the work on a photograph of me taken in Munch's studio. I talked about my passion for Munch and the origins of the Sophie painting. And a question was raised - an old chestnut in the history of art - do we need to know the story to get the most from the artwork?

Many artists and critics proselytize about this. A fair number advocate that works (literature, music or art) must speak for themselves. This position is championing an idea (possibly neo-platonic) that art has an intrinsic logic or message accessible beyond any clue about the maker, the inspiration or the context of its creation. In some cases this is close to valid. Those cases are when a work possesses a near-exclusive universal quality that might be tuned into by all. Yet even so (think Mondriaan for example), there remains a factor emanating from historical context that adds weight to the fullest understanding of the works. Few would have guessed how indebted Bridget Riley's Op-art abstractions are to the classical tradition had she not told us herself (as recently demonstrated in a National Gallery exhibition).

My portrait of Sophie does have a haunting and haunted quality. Seen without explanation, or title, it possesses a pleasing mysteriousness. It dominates a room. So art can have a power simply by tapping into a shared human understanding. By telling the story in part or in full, we strip away some of the pleasing mystery, yet add a pleasing contextualization. We also guide our audience into the emotional space wherein the work was created. That space is where I prefer to operate, and where I search for satisfaction in falling for the works of others. Take Arshile Gorky's hugely popular: "The Artist and his Mother" (either of his two versions): without the title it is an arresting image, with, it takes on added poignancy. Learn about Gorky's life however and the work is heart-breaking.

So, pass the cheese knife please and ask for more stories.

9th December 2011

I've been looking at a photograph of Gerhard Richter taken in his Bismarkstrasse studio in Cologne during the 1980s. He stands in profile, cleanly dressed, not a single splash of paint on his shoes. His hands are spotless. With an outstretched arm he holds a soft brush taped onto a long stick, extended to around half a metre, and that brush is pushed onto a wall-hung canvas almost two metres square, displaying the makings of a yellow and grey abstract composition. His hair is neat, his glasses Designer.

Richter has very deliberately chosen to be portrayed like this. The photograph is one of many carefully posed shots that illustrate his long creative career. Every photo-portrait is equally clean and styled. The contrast to painters such as Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud in their shambolic workspaces could not be greater.

This photograph of Richter helps me unpick the complex feelings I have towards his style. Many Richter paintings have loose-seeming or blurred brushstrokes, or rich impasto, mimicked or used for real. At first glance one might suspect an expressionist at play, tapping into inner emotions before spontaneously adding marks to the canvas. Yet even with Richter's most improvised-seeming "squeegee" abstract works, order seems to be present. Order of the sort the studio-set photographs of himself portray.

And that order knits together all of his work - from photorealism through to sculpture and monumental abstraction. He works on any creation until an effect is achieved and he himself disappears. He paints himself out of his works. In the current Tate Modern retrospective just one self-portrait is on display. That small painting shows a defocussed head and shoulders, eyes cast down, sombre in dark jacket and tie: a rare ghost of the man whose artworks are filling so many rooms. This "absence" might explain why some regard his output as commercial or decorative. The effects he encapsulates are often moody, brooding or coolly striking, but not visceral or heartfelt. They are exquisitely-crafted visual vignettes that even when based on family photographs seem depersonalised (a quality Richter would undoubtedly be very happy with).

And in that one Bismarkstrasse photograph, the element of removal is symbolized: by a paintbrush lengthened to push the artist from his work

18th November 2011

Yesterday I went to watch the film "Melancholia" written and directed by Lars Von Trier. Appropriate as I've been buried in a very precious gift in recent days: the four volume catalogue raisonné of Edvard Munch's paintings. If any artist specialized in the theme of melancholia it was Munch. The film is rich in allusions to art, including explicit references to mighty works such as Bruegel's "Hunters in the Snow" and Millais's "Ophelia". Munch is seemingly absent. But the entire Scandinavian mood, the coastal, island-strewn setting and the simmering anguish screams Munch. At the apocalyptical finale I was even reminded of Munch's enormous painting "The Sun".

Let me express one straight opinion here and now: I believe this film is an artistic masterpiece. Von Trier claims he wanted "a clash between what is romantic and grand and stylized and then some form of reality." The danger of beauty creeping in was something Munch and many other 20th Century artists grappled with and Von Trier says, "it's hard to smuggle in a bit of ugliness. So I think the film is slightly on the edge of plastic." Watching, I was reminded of Francis Bacon's beguiling expression "exhilarated despair". I was also conscious of somehow being in the presence of an ultimate artistic elegy - to death: final, total. An ultimate release. No ugliness, simply grandeur - and a simple after-image on the black final screen: human spirit. Once there, now gone.

Sorry Lars, but that is beautiful. "The style is polished," he has said, "but underneath the smooth surface, there's content. And to get to that you need to look beyond the polish." This could be said about all great art - which is just what this extraordinary, hypnotic and strange film is.

6th July 2011

He made a name for himself with cryptic scribbles on large surfaces. He understood the power of emptiness. He liked making paintings that looked like they should be touched, stroked; as a plasterer might stroke a wall, judging his technique by feel: chalky fingers after a long day. A white beach when the tide has left, flat, the odd bit and bob dotted about: little clues plonked by an ocean that has pounded the same spot for longer than men have written words. He learned to work big in New York. He took prairie-sized space to Rome and sparsely filled it with squiggles and doodles. He painted a smug glow that says: "I love this. I love this knowledge pushing us onwards like a crisp wave, I love this Mediterranean light, I love the flotsam and jetsam of antiquity." He walked away from a place where his hands left signs of his toiling, like a cave-painter leaving an impossibly ancient home. Now just by his works shall we know him. (Cy Twombly 1928-2011)

i.m. Cy Twombly 06.07.11
coloured pencil, lead pencil, gesso and ink on paper
14.3 x 12.2cm

4th June 2011

Right now (18th May - 30th June 2011) at the Richard Nagy Gallery in Old Bond Street, London, some fiftyish exquisite drawings by Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) gathered from collections around the world are on display. The show's theme is "Women", and every one of the almost universally erotic works has passed through dealer Richard Nagy's hands at some point. For so many iconic drawings to be gathered in a private gallery is astonishing. Even more astonishing is the genius of Schiele's graphic skill. The exhibition allows the viewer up close, and every stroke of Schiele's pencil or sweep of brush can be examined.

Viewing the works, as an artist, some hint at how he achieved his effects can be gleaned. It appears he drew with a steady, deliberate and confident hand, sometimes establishing shape with a single controlled thin line before making similarly controlled heavier marks. Where second lines are adjusted left or right an off-register shadow remains. The shadows suggest movement and give his figures an electrical sense of "life". More important still is the sinuousness of his final line. As though by intuition he is able to suggest the weightiness of flesh by simple graphic outline. So a key element is what he chooses to leave out. When gouache or watercolour shading is added it is rarely to represent contour or the fall of light. His sweeps and daubs of paint are more for compositional highlighting, or again to evoke a shimmer of movement. His outlines are often broken, leaving short sections undefined - a missing cheek, spaces where arms should be. And sometimes the lines cross, so that one feature is partly visible through another.

By these methods his figures not only breathe with life, but also seem deconstructed, reduced to assemblages of subatomic particles. At times he subtly adds hints of bold colour beneath or upon the drawn outlines (orange, green, blue) and to me this presages Bacon, and even Warhol.

So when we look at this collection of assured, arrogant, sometimes unsettling naked and semi-naked female forms (plus a small number of explicit self-portraits that hang with it) we are looking at a tide-change in the history of art, continuing graphically where Degas left off and created in an act of paring down and distorting elements to the essentials, a development that would come to dominate representational art far into the future.

1 April 2011

What is the moral responsibility of the artist? A major exhibition comes to Tate Modern this month promising to sharpen the focus on the political dimension in Miró's work. The exhibition will include the burnt-canvases series (Toiles brûlées) he created in 1973. These five torn and scorched remnants, intended to be viewed from both sides, have been interpreted as both political statements about Franco's regime and commentaries on the commercialisation of art. Miré himself talked of an "assassination of painting" in his work.

Yet for me, the power in Miró will always be his compositional expressiveness. I see him as a conduit through which the building blocks of the universe are channelled and given emotional colour. He is a prism, and the shape of the connecting arc between his conscious and unconscious mind filters pure white light into a unique spectrum. His artistic conjuring tricks are instinctive. Any polemical element inspiring the taking up of his materials seems quickly subsumed by the unfettered emotional wave guiding his hand. And this for me is the true artist at work.

Society appears cleaved into two strata. Those with power and those without. Those without strive, knowingly or otherwise, to gain power; those with strive to keep it. Keeping power involves keeping doors shut and protecting an exclusive world. Gaining power involves battering doors down (usually by stealth, as Machiavelli pointed out). Morality is the sister of politics and the two toil with the powerful to invent universal justifications for keeping the walls and doors in place.

But outside the system are the true artists. Their rôle is to observe through a clear lens, one unskewed by compulsions to progress through an unending sequence of portals. So true artists are history's genuine commentators. If they have a moral responsibility at all, it is to seek unprejudiced clarity of vision. Doing so, of course, has often been dangerous. The powerful are ever wary of those with a moral obligation to operate beyond society's strictures. Rothko understood this, and talked of the clever ways artists in the past had disguised their genuine expressions behind what society decreed as acceptable artistic conduct.

So, the artist is a reactor reacting for no other reason than the truth of his art. A blessed person: for, who in their right mind would not relish flying free above those doors, escaping from the maze most are forced to haunt by the drive to seek power throughout lifetimes that are short - and ultimately meaningless.

28 December 2010

Background music. Always playing. Setting a mood. Setting teeth on edge. Setting silence running. I can read books in the midst of it, or work at the PC. And at those times I fail to notice it, like the thatcher on the roof oblivious to his radio, or workmen prodding their drains. Yet in the studio, creating art, music creeps forward and inhabits my soul, freeing instinct from its cage, letting emotion's wild dogs roam.

I always have music playing. And it enters the fabric of my work. Pieces chosen are often random, chanced upon, picked from the shelf without a thought, haphazardly thrust into my creative universe via Radio 3. The importance of music cannot be overstressed. It pushes rationality aside. And creating art to it becomes a dance, a reverie.

What fascinates me is how difficult, atonal musical pieces suddenly make sense when creating art, how a seeming cacophony can match something delicate, or a mood-piece be a soundtrack for violence. So there is, as Rothko so often implored, a profound link between music and art. Not a simplistic link in that both share rhythm, mood and colour, but a deeper link - a bridge into the creative catacombs of the mind.

2 December 2010

From the tiniest scale to the most ambitious, being an artist is about making decisions - thousands and thousands of them, and often (most often) negative decisions - to "not" do something. An artist has endless ideas, in his head, or even jotted down in books or on the backs of envelopes. Enough for many lifetimes. The first decision is which to pursue. Gavin Turk has talked of this. And Magritte found moving from concept to execution tiresome. Munch said perhaps the best wall to hang his amorphous "Frieze of Life" was one belonging to a castle in the air.

And when the work begins, every small step is a decision. Many have tried to allow such decisions to be controlled by the unconscious (Picasso, Bacon), something that requires a journeying into what I call a "zone" - a state in which instinct conquers rationality. Every dab of paint, line, addition of scuptural element; every choice of dimension, tone, what to put in. And the ultimate decision: when to stop. When to say the work is done.

So an artwork is a representation of a period of time, a series of choices made, a slice through an artist's life - it is four-dimensional. That, for me, is what makes it captivating, and what makes it a "work of art".