Art and Play

It is the time of year when we all hear murmurs of New Year resolutions that we should be thinking about.... in the knowledge that most of the good resolutions don't last very long after January 1st has passed.

Nonetheless, one resolution that I think would be good for me to try and adhere to is keeping a playful and enquiring optic about making art. Perhaps almost the attitude of "let's just launch out into space and see what happens in the art", something I often have misgivings about, especially in unforgiving silverpoint. Stephen Nachmanovich, the noted improvisationist violinist and, amongst other achievements, author of Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art, said, "Play is the taproot from which original art springs. It is the raw stuff that the artist channels with all his hearing and technique." He could just as easily have said "seeing and technique". He maintains that every time we open our mouths to say something, we are in fact improvising, and that creativity is in the same category, given to everyone.

In truth, when one is about to launch into a plein air painting or drawing, it is very much an act of improvisation. Since weather conditions, light and innumerable other aspects can change from one moment to the next, one has to regard the whole endeavour as play, as a challenge that is fun. In other types of art, the mere act of turning off the left hand side of the brain and ceasing to think turns it all into a much more venturesome affair, where there is indeed a sense of playfulness and a sense of gambling. Perhaps one of the best demonstrations of that type of art is when an artist is creating a painting or drawing as music is performed live. My fellow artist and friend, Lori Gene, epitomises this sense of play in a very sophisticated fashion in her art created alongside musicians as they play.

I always remember Marc Chagall, in his eighties, saying that every artist should retain a childlike optic on life. Indeed, his sense of play was the source of amazingly original art. Perhaps it would indeed be good to resolve to be more playful in art making as the New Year rolls in.

When is a drawing "finished"?

Sometimes when I am drawing, particularly life drawing, time runs out and the drawing can seem incomplete. But, on a second look, it can stand as a completed drawing, despite it being unfinished in some sense. Other times, it is hard to decide. I think it is a question of intent and whether the drawing makes sense for a viewer. The life study I did, on the right, was done in about thirty minutes, in Prismacolor, and it can, just, stand on its own, I believe. I would be interested in other people's views.

I did another Prismacolor study, in about forty-five minutes to draw, with this young man whose muscles are amazing, and the play of light on his back was fascinating. However, although the composition is perhaps more stable than the other life drawing, I am not sure it works as it stands. Nonetheless, I know that the next time I draw him, it will be more straightforward. Why ? Because, as Swiss essayist and writer, Alain de Botton, observed, "The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particulars".

There is, however, another way of going in seemingly unfinished drawings. I tend to do drawings that don't leave loose ends, as it were, but there are plenty of artists who very effectively leave lines, blotches, splotches, blobs and squiggles in the drawing which actually all contribute to the effectiveness of the drawing, conveying immediacy, rhythms, drama, etc. An artist whose work I admired the first time I saw it, Lori-Gene, is a very good draughtswoman of this type of drawing. Her work, frequently combining motion, sound and sight, is a wonderful amalgam of energy. She often works with musicians and orchestras as they play, and the results convey the sense of music most successfully. The whirl of lines and marks on the paper is the perfect demonstration of the "unfinished" drawing which is beautifully finished.