Patrick Cullen explains the enduring appeal of paintings requiring only to be looked at
I showed some paintings of flowers I had done recently to a friend. He said he quite liked them but they appeared to create a problem for him. He seemed to feel that flowers were no longer a subject for serious artists, more one for Sunday painters. Yes, he agreed, there had been wonderful art in this genre in the past, but surely art progresses, certain things cease to be part of the zeitgeist. Shouldn’t a contemporary artist address subjects relevant to the times we now live in?
This set me thinking. Two things: when and in what sense were flowers ever relevant? And what kind of pressure do we artists put on ourselves in order to live up to that title: a serious artist? What if I’d been a song writer or a poet and had shared something new I’d written, would the question of whether it was art or not have even crossed my friend’s
mind?There is a problem with the English use of the words “art” and “artist” which has different consequences for those working in the visual arts than for those artists who don’t, e.g. writers, musicians etc. A writer, novelist, playwright, poet etc., would usually define what they did by one of these terms. Musicians, composers, singers, instrumentalists (pianist, etc) similarly. Unless they have the massive ego of The Artist Formerly Known As Prince, they would probably not chose to call themselves an artist (or Prince for that matter). This leaves the judgement as to whether what they produce is art to others, and frees them of any responsibility to always aim that high. But painters, sculptors etc. are automatically enlisted as artists and what they do art, because of the two distinct uses of these terms in our language. Art is both a highly qualified description of work in any creative medium implying a level
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This linguistic quirk puts painters and the rest in a subtly different relationship to “Art with a capital A” than their writer or musician counterparts. This had something to do with how my friend related to my flower paintings. If, thereby, a bit more pressure is on painters to live up to the artist epithet at all times, another pressure must surely result if the way “serious art” is defined in our culture undergoes a shift as it has of late in the visual arts. If we judge what our society deems to be important art by the winners of our leading art prize, the Turner, then surely many painters, let alone a painter of flowers, must have wondered from time to time if what they do is still regarded as art at all. After all only two painters have won it in the last twenty seven years and only a handful have even made the short list, this for the prize named after Britain’s supreme painter.
But wait a minute. In 2005 the Turner Prize did actually short list Gillian Carnegie, someone who not only applies paint to canvas but works in a broadly realistic manner. If that wasn’t enough she even paints flowers and rather beautifully too. Somebody was surely having a laugh. Given the Turner’s knack for controversy perhaps it was done with half an eye for the publicity that it provoked. But why should it have created such a stir? Because contemporary artists are assumed to be in the business of challenging
Nobody was able to describe convincingly how these innocuous paintings achieved all this, but the message was clear: whatever Carnegie thought she was up to, her work was chosen because of all the challenging, conceptual talking, interrogating, investigating, unloading and reloading etc., it succeeded in doing. Putting aside the question of how much academic investigation a painting can really undertake on its own, there can be little doubt that without all that intellectual baggage, real or imagined, Carnegie would not have caught the judges’ eye. Implicitly, had she been reckoned to have painted flowers in a more straightforward way, celebrating their beauty and fragility in the manner of a Bonnard or a Manet, rather than at one and the same time challenging and subverting such notions, she wouldn’t have had a cat’s chance in hell of making that shortlist. Which should not really surprise us given the current dominance of all things conceptual; what is interesting is how much in the process is being dismissed as amateurish or as not serious art.
In the past many of the great painters turned at times to the subject of flowers. Each found their particular language but the spirit in which they did so was one of accepting the natural beauty of this subject and celebrating it in a way that brought pleasure. Great originality of approach marked out the best of these but the idea that they should interrogate why artists paint this subject in the first place would not have occurred to them. Van Gogh thought and wrote a lot about painting and waxed passionately about sunflowers, irises, almond blossom, indeed about most of his subjects, but the thought of him ruminating on the psycho-social constructs determining his aesthetic evaluation of flowers or their relevance to the socio-political matrix of his day is ludicrous. He was highly intelligent but not, fortunately for us, that sort of intellectual. He painted flowers because he loved them, intensely, with something approaching a religious fervor. He was so moved by their beauty that he felt compelled to try and distill something of his feelings in paintings. In the process he was doing something much more interesting than “following the conventions of representational painting”. Nor did he confine himself to conventionally beautiful motifs.