The changing state of Painting is transformative from its source as rock, to being processed into liquid and then after application onto a canvas, dried into solid in order to defy gravity literally and metaphorically. In the latter case, it also defies The Art Top Table (TATT) who have subjected the medium to a state of exclusion from the Avant Garde by the 1980's. This is part of a process that TATT denies other interpretations and means of cultural expression that contemporary Painters reject (whilst being rejected themselves by TATT). Relegation by an elite of well positioned largely non-practitioners or Fine Art has not changed since the 1980's when I started my Painting practice. This attack on Painting only proved that even with all the status in the world, you can't shut Pandora's box let alone reverse it once it has been opened. Instead, this process actually isolated Painters and the decisions made behind closed minds of an Art Establishment (demographically very different from the Political and social Establishment). Painters and modernism just rejected, escaped and resisted (as is often the way as Painters can have a contrary nature) whilst their work mutated and evolved beyond the parameters of subject matter, tired issues and instead focussed on an intensity that exploited the confines of a finite canvas and not see it as a disadvantage but an opportunity to produce a 21st century of self-regulating variation on a new 'Modernism' of our age. in short, Painting never lost its mojo, and its new Modernist Painting worked on the basis that when it was abandoned by The Art Top Table (TATT) ironically Painters were left alone to self-generate without needing to legitimize it to the nobs. Of course TATT would not like the precedent of 'have Artist's having nothing to do with TATT' especially because 'they'll slow you down and 'influence' your skill set', nor would they like the fact that Art warriors could be firstly moderate and pragmatic but be more residually influential even if 'no one steals TATT's thunder when it comes to official aesthetic taste and creativity.
But there does seem to be a unique ongoing relationship in which tacitly TATT recognizes a challenge when it sees one. But what is unique about Painting today is that it has an unhappy and unlikely connection' of mutually sustainable distance? Individualist resistance versus centralized slow-rolling interference? An adjudicator that's biased? Or a medium that doesn't recognize authority? Or an Authority that doesn't recognize that its overbearing and centralized state power is capable of over- steering and oversharing its opinionated controlling nature? Don't ask me about woke or inverted woke and its value held by the Art 'State' or the individual!! But what I am sure is that 50 years ago the composition of TATT was immensely different from today, even if the consequences and decision making is to illuminate the trending of..... the status quo????.... of 'aesthetic balance and entertainment'???!! What?!! When did TATT become 'responsible'..... by woolly 'diversity'? Is it time to take off the blinkers in Conceptual Art - consumer Art rehab?
So why is Painting and Painters not in' Art Rehab'? Here are some reasons to be cheerful etcetera...
1. A new post Marxist dialectic that interacts and joins-up the vastly different but connected stages of both the 19th and 20th century of Modernist Painting. Welcome to ancestry, cultural inheritance, and longevity with and without decades that have been in denial of its nature as well as being independent of modernism per se! This isn't 'redacting' long periods of relative modernist silence; it just expands the nature of the unbroken chain that connects the Modernist oeuvre.
2. Painting has not varied in use of materials for eons, notwithstanding upgrades in chemicals and new components. It remains true, consistent, and transparent. It is low tech and low carbon footprint. Isn't it unique?
3. Having established precedent and learning from two previous periods of recent eras of Modernist Painting, it allows for a more methodical 21st century version of Modernist Painting that will be far more stable, and less given to adversarial division and political unrest.
3. The original human evolution preserves the Alpha to Omega of Cultural manifestation and unique human contact with the fingerprint literally on cave walls 70,000 years ago. This started the development of the original idiosyncratic human eye connection to manmade implement (brush of the artists design derived from horse hair and the like from nature) to paint, to cloth (today I use both Linen or cotton made) engineered by the human hand - you can't get much more low tech, more hands-on, more human, offering social status to Art as an integrated social contribution to an early human society or community by the human fingerprint.
4. So how does early human tribes source Paint? Underneath his/her feet! Resourced as the 'footprint of Paint' from human walkabout, where rocks and granules became the very materials that conjoin our human story and that allows us to access from a window of the future and not just of the past! Paints develop but do not alter the core composition derived from the past and probably will be made well into the future. Are we are reassured that this ancient practice is still contemporary? Ask TATT!
5. Painting has a unique significance to our human story. It is our conduit Humanity is the DNA of Painting, as Painting is the DNA of Humanity. It is the eyes that we see with in both the past, and I think, the future too! It is our conduit that we imagine and our telescope into the Universe, an evolutionary inevitability framed in the optics of science and artistic visual popularist drama.
6. Originally by photography from huge telescope's, distant galaxies emerged are seen more as abstract, but also interpreted as developing figurative spirals, snaking formations etc ready for Painters to investigate. This visually transports Painters, who have been proverbially restricted to beneath terrestrial thin layer of atmosphere, to a place to plant their feet in a new location in spatial zero gravity into the unexplored and unknown.
7. Painting today is leading the switch of the balance of power from market profiteers in the purchase and sale of Art as a commodity, to the producers. It is a seller's or buyer's market but there is no compulsion to supply the market because the supply side has a choice - 'the highway or their way!' Not much of a choice....so Painters may choose 'to not have any choice' until there is a more sympathetic environment.
8. Do I think that the supply side never has to enter the marketplace? As long as he/she retains the right to self-design and be in control of their own habitat, their craft is a craft and an Art process based upon being a practitioner, that fuses the concept of Painting being both a craft, a trade and an independent Artistic visionary. For Painters that aggregation is a distinct advantage over more techy Art; this will only become more apparent as tech becomes more Al and conceptual! It is the future baby!
9. Paint materials are extracted from natures resource that is 'home grown' self-sufficient and sustainable because it enables, more than most Art media, to get its hands on terra nostra itself. Only perhaps sculpture and ceramics share such cheek by jowl proximity to earth materials that human hands grasp as a privilege.
10. In the UK we have been enjoying a unique mass growth in Practitioners who are leading the Painting popularist phenomenon of the 21st century.
11. Who are largely self-taught and aren't influenced by the myopia and careerism of UK Art Colleges, whose Curriculum tends to not include Painting and Drawing..... which are staples right? We live in a self-taught UK agenda!
12. Do we have to exhibit? No one wants to be living and working without contact to others, but ironically, there are more Painters who reach an even larger public online! You don't have to get on the treadmill when you can use the internet on a very low-tech level, just putting images online, and if you get a nibble? Why not? Garret life today still means you don't have to get stuck in a queue for Gallery space or Museums (perish the thought, I'm not that old) or auctions. Plan for a Retrospective and wait until all your ducks are in a row!
13. No one should be under any delusions - garret life today means you'll have to take welfare benefits to not starve! Perhaps that is why there are more Painters today!!- But in the 21st century UK, child poverty and hardship in general is still present in spite of welfare intervention, so you have to take your own social and financial relegation and wing-it like everybody else! If you join the non- joiners, be wary of the politics that will follow you wherever you go!
14. Being the Outsider does mean you're locked out, but it could be even worse... you could be locked-in!
15. Locked-out means you can become part of a community! In fact this is how society actually begins - exclusion!
16. We change states too! Just like the medium of Painting! This is an evolutionary step into the future, and a reminder of how we got there from the past. Change as many tenses as you like........past, present, future are all in for how Painting symbolizes (for me) the changing demands on Painting and Painters. Rocks and granules, liquid then solidifying...... perhaps Paint will have more usage in space because it can be transported in many different states, but at the moment just based upon temperature???
17. Painting focusses in pressurizing information or emotions etc on a specific framed barrier which the Painter has to grasp and then to break-out of self-imposed as well as external dogma to explode onto the canvas by a cathartic existential break through (just as this process may be a precedent for other Art media) to change states from one state to another form of transformation! This is often painful and illusive, but we endorse the necessity of cul-de-sac constraints and 'burn-out' to reach a critical moment beyond the short-termism of 'Form' set by TATT in the 1980's. Of course, TATT were partially right to think that the medium of Painting was only decorative and derivative, but they were wrong to write-off 2 to 3 centuries of modernist exploration in Painting and wrong to settle for the easy explanation. TATT itself was the helpful idiot and just a stepping stone for the 21st century arc of Painting. Even those who thought that the medium was just regurgitating ideas and just an inevitable 'already crossed the Rubicon moment in history' to asset strip Painting for a more tech, Al idea Art assemblage or melting pot of the latest ingenious way of showing us showing ourselves by consuming Art by mobile phone instant Art! Art by' the holiday snap or the selfie' is now, but for how long? The chase is on, the race has begun! That's not Art! That's what we all consume by the right advertising method! Vanity is us, all of us are Vain!
Wouldn't you prefer a handbrake turn turbo charged to work, that has not just sneaked under the radar but has painted your face by implacable resistance? Isn't it time to heat-up TATT, and seeing those guys find it too hot? By maximizing the intensity to trigger a break-out or mutation to self- liberate by bursting the bubble of 'Form', we are aspiring but may overuse the scientific metaphor to make an Artistic point? By launching away from the oppressive claustrophobia and into discover the unknown space (and proverbially 'grounded' to do so) without the instability of previous 19th and 20th century versions of Modernism, new images will be sent back and overtake unexplained life here and away from life on earth! Aren’t the most well-known images of earth are taken from away from the terrestrial overcrowded clamour in space? So, we have learnt more about earth from looking from outside of it? Mutation and its offshoots have created our own human evolution story; were we meant to discover outside our own terrestrial limitations? Were we meant to asset strip the future by shackling the medium of Paint to the past? Mistakes and their consequences make-up our cultural practice, but it is from such cultural wrong turnings that we learn that we are going to do it all over again!
18. Painting can be universally adopted as a collective appreciation of the individual individualizing the way our universe is seen as accessible and always changing even if the fundamentals sustain us - much like Painting!?!
19. Painting has re-emerged perhaps as an arbiter between the repetitious and the non-derivative! How? Because it is inexpensive and yet not cheapening the only qualification that you need to be a Painter time. In time, the sustainability of both the figurative and the abstract can't but be a responsibility of the individual Painter, that he/she has to take-on! Cyclically, Painting will be relevant and be so because it is not a disadvantage but an aggregation to use the 'precedent'. Release by this existential catharsis may be like pushing the hyperspace button to career-off in an unpredictable way, but it future-proofs its continuity and its cyclical longevity! But the cultural pendulum may swing when society is not aware of it until it's done its most destructive work (welcome to other unpredictable terrifying issues like recessions or Pandemics etc). Having said that nothing is more predictable than human unpredictability, and that can be intercepted because forewarned is always a guilty secret that someone wants to over-share or confess!
Why do you think (like Painting returning to rediscover to move on) Nasa wants to travel back to the moon after 50 years etc? The answer is simple, it involves discovery and new knowledge to eventually allow humans to planet hop into the future! Just because it's been done before it doesn't mean that it couldn't take humans to pursue a completely different trajectory and change the direction of human understanding.... even if it’s on the same part of a revisited moon??!!!!
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