Our time provides us with an opportunity for a Post Renaissance experimentation in Paint beyond replicatory skills, with the freedom to express but with a degree of discipline but not relying just on your own technique. We are the opposite of realism, but we retain the assumption of the intentional and the improvised. It is free verse but of a visual nature, free-lance improvisational and a visual version of verbal history and even the optical type of stand-up wrapped up in the human condition. So, satirical, Surreal, and semi-abstract; and what does that look like? Perhaps if we hypothetically can refer to 3 different Painters who have the same technical ability but paint the same subject matter with variety of outcomes but are compared by a 3rd party and then contrasted by a 3rd party of a 3rd party.......now if you fuse the all of the above, you have the starting gun of today's Modernism by Paint.
But isn't it more interesting (having gone through all that paraphernalia,) how and why and when the Painter made their decisions and what they didn't respond to or react to!!? Landscape and portrait, figurative and abstract affords so many more opportunities for the Painter, free of determinism, constriction, and conformity??!! Of course, the issue of likeness is at the heart of, and soul of Painters as is the tension between what is progressive and retrogressive- the Painter can be exacting but not bound to exactitude, no slave to linear or binary criteria. Accuracy and not over production menace and not gorish, transformative but not overwhelming, the best/the worst, the predictable/unpredictable, the unreal/surreal, alarming / comfortable, the pendulumic/static, neither East, West, North or south, the cynic and the utopian, the academic and the self-taught, no brakes no accelerator just the many gears, without frontiers and with limitations......I could go on, but I think I've made my point!
We live in an era of paradox, the heresies, lies, misquotes and slander, the access to social media and the addiction to it, the new open spaces and the new ways to homogenise or control them......but we do live in an era of Halloween where we do fancy-dress and indulge with a knees-up between the end of the Summer holidays and Xmas, and perhaps we prefer it to Bonfire night? But aren't the British more Gothic than Baroque, more summer solstice than Equinox, more traditional menace than the supernatural?
But Art is less 1990s YBAs flamboyant and more grit with TV wars and the new Popularist charismatics ready to manipulate Western versions of a 'Proletarian conservatism' now active on every level. In fact, aren't we devoted to the new interactive reality on our phones as we spend more time on social media than teenagers spend at school, where social media has become an addiction of our times as their new cyber child soldiers! Yet the more orthodox versions of today's reality TV ('Traitors'), and the sport of Darts and the revival of Snooker has massive audiences, distracting us from war torn Gaza and Ukraine, but glued to news of Trump's new America! But isn't 'manifest destiny' the new nationalist political bug (originally from Chinese 2 systems used to justify its incursion into foreign international Capitalism) now in Russia, India, the USA and all major players? And isn't the role of the state becoming alarmingly and more aggressively more intrusive, .....again from China? What would freak-out the Chinese Communist Party the most would be a genuine contemporary Marxist revolution that would leave CCP members with a lot to explain to its new Marxist more orthodox revolutionary state! Egg on face time!...or would the CCP have to organise a swift counter-revolution to protect the good name of the CCP and then justify it by claiming that Marx was 'wrong about the likelihood of global Capitalism and subsequently the inevitable domino effect of global revolution, but and was just offering 'some guidance or a bit of advice'., tale it or leave it etc'.....???!!! Marx was right to say that some countries may not be so amenable to Communism, and their pet (Russia) may claim that the Bolshevik revolution Oct 1917 may have been a precursor to the only possible sustainable state that could endure Marxist Revolution and flourish was Communist China, but that it would have to flex its economic muscles towards Capitalism and Liberal Democracies by Chinese 2 systems of nationalism and Imperialism to make Chinese Communism 'inevitable 'again!?? Now that is a landscape and a series of portraits that merge individuals and terrain together for our age of Painting, where our version of Modernist Painting may be the very Surreal semi-abstract experience people are already engaged with!!? Well, this is the age of the absurd parenting the gullible!!!!!
Comments