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.

Art inspired by Music

This week, Fred Child, on the public radio programme, Performance Today, (http://performancetoday.publicradio.org) was talking about the public selecting a piece of music to which the poet, C. K. Williams, will then write a poem.

This makes me think back to artists who use music to inspire them. Henri Fatin-Latour was inspired by Hector Berlioz to do a whole series of lithographs. Marc Chagall used many composers' music as springboards for his art: Mozart's Magic Flute, Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake and Stravinsky's Firebird, among others. Jazz has inspired numerous artists, from Matisse onwards.

Music has already inspired me to create art, particularly silverpoints. There is somehow a similar feel between a fine silver line and the purity of a soprano voice, particularly in some early choral music. This is a silverpoint drawing I did some time ago, entitled "Spem in Allium (after Thomas Tallis)". Drawing in silver is as risky a one-time-shot as singing - if you get it right, it is marvellous. If not, well - try again!

Spem in Allium (after T. Tallis)

Colour in art, colour in our eyes

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humblebaek, Denmark, has just opened an exhibit entitled Colour in Art. They combined works from their own collections with others lent by major collectors, Werner and Gabrille Merzbacher, to explore the role of colour in art and thus in daily life.

Colour underpins most artists' concepts in some form or another. The most obvious domain of colour in art is in paintings, done in many media. The perception of colour has changed considerably over the last 150 years or so, as societies and cultures have evolved. There has also been a huge evolution in the actual production of pigments and types of paint, which have increasingly allowed more brilliance and a more flexible approach to the creation of art.

Colour choices can be very personal, as we all know from the famous example of art to match the sofa demonstrates. Every choice we make in decorating our home is involved with colour in some way or another. So it is is no surprise that for an artist, the absence of colour (in a monochromatic work) or its presence - and in what fashion - both dictate a great deal about the creation of that particular work of art. Once created, artwork will then appeal to people through the colours used, to a great extent, whether the collectors and viewers realise it or not. Moods are created through a certain spectrum of colour, and people respond to those harmonies, even if only subliminally.

The Fauves - Andre Dérain, Henri Matisse, Raoul Dufy, Albert Marquet and others - used a bright, almost strident palette of broken colour to evoke the brilliant light and intensity of colour in the landscapes of the French Mediterranean coast. Nothing downbeat at all. By contrast, Picasso's Blue Period paintings are almost monochromatic and convey deeply gloomy and sombre sentiments. Picasso's close friend, Carlos Casagemas, had committed suicide in Paris in 1901. This affected Picasso deeply, and the resultant paintings of that period use colour to convey the melancholy and resignation he experienced.

The exploration of colour intensified as the artists of the mid-19th century began to move outdoors from their studios (mostly set up with northern constant light). They then got all excited about conveying the brilliance of light and its ever-changing qualities, when they worked plein air. After the Impressionists had pushed out the boundaries of colour use and perception, the field was wide open for everyone to experiment. Thus the Fauves and everyone else who followed, up to our time...

Meantime the development of new artificial pigments, types of paint binder and their presentation in the marketplace were following a parallel explosion. This is explored in the Louisiana Museum show, Colour in Art. There is also the interesting dimension evoked of the commercial use of colour, for logos, advertisements, etc., and the same colours used in art. As is cited in the article on this exhibit on ArtDaily.org, the blue which Yves Klein developed for his famous brilliantly intense canvases would be unlikely to be confused with the blue used in the logos and names of the United Nations, the European Union or even Nivea cream. In other words, context of culture influences our perception of colour. I am sure that in our digital (and globalised) age, where colour is intensified even more than previously, even cultural perceptions are constantly evolving.

Nonetheless, there is another dimension to colour, particularly in art. I found it an interesting juxtaposition to read about the Colour in Art exhibition and very soon afterwards, to find the following quote by Marc Chagall on Renée Phillips' Manhattan Arts International website: "In our life there is a single colour, as on an artist's palette, which produces the meaning of life and art. It is the colour of love (my emphasis)".

Something for us to think about....

Living Longer as an Artist

Years ago, I remember seeing a wonderful film about Marc Chagall in which he came across as a vigorous, delightful man, even though he was by that time well in his eighties. At the time, I was impressed at how, clearly, being an artist was an invigorating, rewarding way of life that kept one healthy and vital.

Little did I realise at the time that I would myself become an artist - I was a linguist, a writer and many other things but not yet an artist. However, the more deeply I became immersed in the world of art, the more I found it to be deeply satisfying and rewarding. So it was with amusement and interest that I recently read of yet another study which confirms that creative people live longer. In fact, they apparently live on average seven years longer than the average population. And that is not all. More sexually attractive, more charismatic, and better at finding new ways to solve problems: artists are no longer just regarded as bohemians, apparently!

The aspects of problem solving make a lot of sense, in fact. New ideas being formed show up as activity in the front part of the brain, which in turn are changed and assimilated by the memory and experiences part of the brain, found in the centre of the brain. All this activity means that the various neural connections are activated and enhanced. Everybody can be creative, artists don't have any exclusivity in this domain, and everyone can enhance their brain activity. If you go for a random walk or do something you don't normally do, avoiding any preconceived plan or pattern, you open the way for new ways of seeing or reacting to the world about you.

Interestingly, this ability to embrace new concepts and then assimilated and remember them has also led humans (and a few other primates) to be one of the only species able to perceive reds and yellows in the colour spectrum. It is theorised that man watched fruits turning red or yellow and learned that that was a sign of the fruit being ripe enough to eat. In turn, the fruits evolved to ensure that their signs of ripeness, reds and yellows, were clearly visible: they would then be eaten and their seeds disseminated for furtherance of the species.