When in Doubt .....(comment on the art of painting)
At various times during my working life I have dealt with other professionals who have used slogans as useful reminders in their day to day dealings. A solicitor once told me that his favourite motto, when dealing with contractual matters was, “if in doubt, always spell it out”. An accountant colleague had the habit of reminding me that, “my own money would always be the cheapest money I should ever have”. In the context of painting, many artists refer to the maxim of, “saying more with less.” This essentially means making a simple, economical statement, without overdoing it. In theory, this sounds all very well, but putting it into practice can be much more difficult, because deciding what to leave out of a painting can be as equally important as what goes in. On this point, the late Rowland Hilder suggested that, “... it is better to paint great areas of nothing and then add a main feature that is really well painted.” (Painting Landscapes in Watercolour, 1982). In practical terms, these decisions can often more easily be made in hindsight, so sometimes we have to go through the whole painting process at least once, to determine what is going to be unnecessary.
Such doubt and uncertainty are inevitably part of any creative process, so it is essential that we learn to adapt to it, as with the rarely perfect conditions in which we have to work. At times, this can make painting feel like a delicate balancing act, hovering between achieving something which might bring us somewhere near to our original expectations, on the one hand, to utter disappointment and frustration, on the other. Although I am not certain that any of us will ever get to a stage when we will be entirely satisfied with all that we produce and growing creatively means that we will always have aspirations which seem beyond our reach. So we look for certainties, but in reality, there are very few of these, with our materials being one of our only true constants. Perhaps, in the midst of such uncertainty, it would be beneficial to learn to just become more tolerant of what we do, warts and all, accepting, as Alan Bennett so aptly put it in a recent Radio interview, that whatever our approach, or ‘style’ of work, it is, “...simply the sum of our defects.”
On those occasions when we do produce, what we might call ‘milestone’ paintings, which feel somehow to turn out to be completely ‘right’, in which we seem to surpass anything we have produced previously, even they themselves, just a short time before, may have also appeared to have been on the edge of collapse. So a single mark, or touch, can have the almost miraculous power to rescue an otherwise failing painting. So we must also learn to develope a willingness to tolerate mistakes, as the unavoidable part of an unpredictable learning process. Another solution might be to think of each painting as simply a stepping stone to the next. Once in a while we might get a good foothold, now and then it will feel a little slippery, but we will always have the freedom to move in any direction we want and at our own pace.
Unlike the law, paintings don’t need to be ‘spelt out,’ because they have a voice of their own through which, (if we allow them), they will articulate their own language. If we wish to paint pictures which speak with clarity, then we must be certain, in the first place, of what we really want them to say. Otherwise, we may be in danger of painting several pictures in one, (think of this as the visual equivalent of the inaudible sound of a number of people talking at the same time), or we inadvertently finish up painting the life out of our subjects, as if in some way trying to compensate for our uncertainty.
I recently observed such a situation during a painting demonstration. I watched an image being brought to life from a variety of energetic, preliminary marks on the canvas, only to then witness all this initial vitality slowly ebb away as the painting became more and more ‘finished’, or in this case ‘finished off.’
In some respects painting is about searching for solutions within a myriad of possibilities, for which there are very few certainties, yet all of which we have to be prepared to risk each time we pick up a brush. But, whatever our creative quest, simplicity will always be a wise choice.
To use a musical analogy, the most memorable tunes tend to be very simple ones and just because a composer has the entire piano keyboard at his, or her, disposal doesn’t necessarily mean that he, or she, needs to use all the notes to create beautiful music. So too with painting. Perhaps we might then consider another slogan which would also be useful here, namely, “when in doubt.... ....simply leave it out!”