Inspiration, concision

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Flowers

 

 Mostly when I write best I write quite fast, about a thing. Or I tell a story with a very A to Z narrative. Or I just describe things or places or experiences.

 I think the weaker stuff I do involves analysis of  a culture or history and indeed that is why I do very little of it. I am not much of a researcher as I'm too easily distracted.

And I don't care enough about facts anyway. I had, as a child, when relating an event to my parents the tendency to exaggerate incidents at school, and my parents would cross-examine me to discover that really I was melodramatising for sympathy or attention. Getting a reaction was more important than truth. It probably still is, which is why it is best that I focus on trivia or fiction.

My mode of writing is based largely on inspiration, a sudden electrical charge. Or a sense of fun. It's a commonplace that a lot of ideas come when the mind is relaxed and one is engaged in some other, usually undemanding, activity such as bathing, walking to a shop, or driving on a quiet road, and this is often the case for me. 

The ideas that come in those moments are rich or curious, and its always a good idea to note them down. 

I usually write in two stages. The first is exhalation  -brainstorming- when I write down with a minimum of equivocation  the things I want to say. Then usually I wait a few days to return to this with another mental set and greater objectivity for the second stage. This is a sifting and/or embellishment stage. Occasionally there are additional digressive thoughts which I add to the main narrative.

I find having an image to anchor the piece very useful and I like the possibility that the image sets up alternative narrative chains in the readers mind which they can contrast to mine.

I try to write short pieces. Concision is a virtue in art. 

 I'm suspicious of big works of art in all forms. It's rare that they have been properly edited and thus usually contain repetitions, verbosity and sloppy craftsmanship. 

Moreover, bigness in art implies and suggest megalomania on the part of their makers or patrons. Double albums almost always contain filler tracks. Proust needs editing. Let's  not talk about Wagner.

 The cathedrals of England are fabulous exceptions to this rule. 

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Concision in Art

"Concision in art is a necessity as well as an elegance; a man who is concise makes you think, a verbose man bores you." -Manet

Discussing concision at length would be ironical, to say the least, but I'll add the following:

1. Lack of concision is a 19th century vice and and 18th century virtue. Industrial production in the 19th century and the inflated romantic ego both militate against concision.

2. Certain media are lean and encourage concision. This goes for performance arts as well as other forms of expression. Opera seems to a real culprit, as does the novel.

3. Concision requires self-assurance: if you are free to be economical, then you must be certain that your audience watches every word (contrast this with Christopher Hitchens advice in "Letters to a Young Contrarian" not to fear becoming a bore). Hence, concision is the virtue of the powerful, or those content with obscurity.

4. There has to be a culturally accessible "key" to unlock the artist's secrets or the work is merely obscure, as with much modern art and poetry.

Illustration - detail from Roundels 13

Kim's Game - work in progress 2

Pen drawing of an aesthete.



Below: Kim's Game Oil on canvas, 59 x 65 cm - stages 4 (above) and 3 (bottom)







For previous versions see:

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/09/kims-game-work-in-progress.html

and

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/08/work-in-progress.html

What has happened? I've cleaned the background, making it more uniform. The broadly triangular shape to the bottom left above he maroon oval has been refined. It reminds me of both a salt cellar and a phallus. The pink oval on the top row has been given a brown edge, which makes it seem 3-dimensional.

I am not sure if making everything sharper was really the right way to go: the gentleness of the previous shapes was part of what was appealing about them. But it is incredibly difficult- impossible, I'd say- to "go back". Paintings become more and more focused, shapes become more and more defined; insistant as you work on them- it is unavoidable.

A picture which was meant to become suggestive becomes less is as it is elaborated. And, so it seems to me, that I am best at artwork which denies equivocation.

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I am good at ink drawing because this technique has a knife-edge quality about it: there is no half-way point between failure and success. If it is good it is excellent; if not, the drawing goes directly into the bin. It isn't really possible to correct an ink drawing because you cannot erase the ink.

Oil painting of the sort above is difficult for a personality such as mine, because oil paint allows endless tampering: it can be scraped off, overpainted or wiped away, and I am unable to resist the temptation to make endless the little corrections which seem necessary but actually serve merely to reduce the force of the image.

My happiest style is akin to the quip, to an aphorism, or a rebuke. It denies regret. My paintings are like over-elaborated jokes, they are laboured: they miss the point of a quip which lies in its rapidity and surprise in a given context and not necessarily in the profundity of what is said.

Lost is concision, that much underrated quality in art. And critical here is the notion of "the gesture". There are oil painters for whom "the gesture" is an intrinsic to their vocabulary- Kokoschka springs to mind- but even so this element is less apparent in his painting than in his drawings and is more prevalant still among the draughtsmen such as Kubin, Belloc, Lear and Beerbohm who are my true companions: ironists and satirists mainly.

This sort of work is sarcastic and slight: it has wit, but sometimes lacks substance and one can become trapped in irony and that is why I shall continue to try to make oil painting work for me.