Encompassing a review of important paintings worldwide—both classical and modern—this exploration assures that anyone can understand and admire art. The reader will find increased appreciation for paintings, greater knowledge of different artists, and improved confidence in this brilliant exposition of painting in all its forms. The keen art collector, serious student, and occasional gallery visitor can all benefit from this journey of exploration through the centuries and across the painted world. This enduringly popular guide was selected as the best art book of the year by national and international newspapers and magazines and awarded the 2006 Montana Book Award for Contemporary Culture.
Encompassing a review of important paintings worldwide—both classical and modern—this exploration assures that anyone can understand and admire art. The reader will find increased appreciation for paintings, greater knowledge of different artists, and improved confidence in this brilliant exposition of painting in all its forms. The keen art collector, serious student, and occasional gallery visitor can all benefit from this journey of exploration through the centuries and across the painted world. This enduringly popular guide was selected as the best art book of the year by national and international newspapers and magazines and awarded the 2006 Montana Book Award for Contemporary Culture.
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Overview
Encompassing a review of important paintings worldwide—both classical and modern—this exploration assures that anyone can understand and admire art. The reader will find increased appreciation for paintings, greater knowledge of different artists, and improved confidence in this brilliant exposition of painting in all its forms. The keen art collector, serious student, and occasional gallery visitor can all benefit from this journey of exploration through the centuries and across the painted world. This enduringly popular guide was selected as the best art book of the year by national and international newspapers and magazines and awarded the 2006 Montana Book Award for Contemporary Culture.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781877551833 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Awa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 136 |
| File size: | 710 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
How to Look at a Painting
The Award-Winning Book That Inspired the Acclaimed Television Series
By Justin Paton
Awa Press
Copyright © 2005 Justin PatonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-877551-83-3
CHAPTER 1
The art room
THE BEST THINGS always happened in the art room. Way up at the end of the hallway, with stencilled wallpaper and a plaster ceiling that set it apart from the rest of the house, it was one of those rooms that had been designed to be used only 'for company' and had ended up being used hardly at all. The company always liked it better at the other end of the house, where the fire was going and the kitchen was handy.
By the time I was old enough to notice it, the room had turned into a kind of warehouse for all the objects no one could find a use for, but couldn't quite bring themselves to throw out. There were pottery gnomes, unused beach towels, a prickly sofa bed. There was a trunk that contained photos, internment camp diaries, and a World War I issue knuckleduster. There was a carpet square positioned to hide the chipboard patch that marked the spot where, thrillingly one summer, someone had stepped right through the borer-chewed floorboards. There was a china cabinet through whose windows you could see yellowing strata of the Auckland Weekly News, an ageing pottle of (remember this?) 'Slime with Worms', a bag of stringy Christmas tinsel, and a black tin box full of keys.
But what made the room were the paintings.
We called it the art room because paintings covered the walls from ceiling to floor. Somewhere in the midst of running a dairy farm, raising a family and coaxing a colossal flower garden into a yearly outburst of colour, my grandmother, Phyllis 'Paddy' Nash, had taken up painting. A latecomer, starting in her sixties, she was untrained and, I guess, pretty close to being what those in the professional art world like to call an 'outsider' or (awful phrase) 'innocent eye'. That's just a snooty way of saying she painted the things she liked, and did so for no grander reason than that she wanted to enjoy them all over again.
As a gardener, the things she liked most were flowers. The walls were a blooming barrage of hydrangeas, fuchsias, big floppy magnolia blossoms. The effect might have been oversweet, had she not had an equally strong taste for the gruesome, the lumpen and the all-out silly. Turnips and old sneakers received the same attention as jasmine and winter roses. One of her showpieces depicted a 'beaut big rat' (her words) caught in a trap. And her rendition of a pair of holed-out underpants blowing on a clothes-line was reportedly the cause of frowning debate among the selectors at the local art society.
Between the dead rat, the underpants and the blazing hydrangeas, you could say that my grandmother had art's big themes covered. At the very least, those three paintings came close to encompassing her philosophy of life – a mixture of southern-gothic humour, Irish fatalism and deep-dyed optimism. Things die, but there's laughter along the way, and regular blooms of beauty.
Did we tiptoe into the art room as kids, like miniature tourists crossing the threshold of a lofty museum? Far from it: most of the time we paid the paintings little attention. We had our own schemes and projects to be getting on with, and it would be a long time before painters started to outrank comic artists in my own childhood pantheon. But the room wouldn't have been the same without the paintings – that we knew. Nailed with what-the-hell abandon into the 'good' wallpaper, they charged the room with a tingle of possibility and permission that no other space in the house held.
It was as if, through some wonderful slip-up, the room had found itself without a purpose – uninhabited, out of service, up for grabs. Here the rules that held sway elsewhere could be bent or ignored or monkeyed around with. You could build a blanket fort and leave it standing indefinitely. You could run a biro tattoo parlour without fear of interruption. You could up-end things, rearrange the furniture, dig down through the layers of family stuff. In sum, if you wanted invention, speed, foolishness, flights, falls, curiosity, wonder, arguments, misbehaviour and a general excess of joyous noise, the art room was the place to go.
It still is. Paddy's paintings are now scattered among the relatives, and new owners occupy the house and the room. But if you ask me today what I do for a living, I might tell you that I work in an art room. Of course the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, where I clock in each morning, is not one room but dozens, and the paintings the gallery contains outstrip anything I encountered in the childhood art room. Yet what I love in the newer and larger art room feels like the same thing I loved in the earlier one: the sense of potential, the promise of change, and the prospect of looking through new eyes at the world you just left.
One of my favourite times to look at a painting is just before a show's about to open. When the hang has been refined (an inch to the left, to the right ...), the bubble wrap gathered in, the conservation tables rolled away, the labels pasted up, the floor swept, and the lighting tweaked, there is often an hour or so of downtime before the barriers are lifted away and the opening-night crowd begins to arrive. The lights have clicked off, as they do automatically when no one has entered the gallery for a while. You walk into the darkened space, the lights shiver back on, and the paintings seem to leap out from the walls. Even though I've been staring at slides or photographs of these paintings for months, and paying them brief visits in studios and gloomy store rooms, this sighting often feels like the first true one. The kick of a colour, the audacity of a line, the jolting power of a detail, the simple fact of a painting's size – all declare themselves with fresh intensity.
It never stops surprising me how much life there can be in these static, often centuries-old objects. With the richest paintings we're never truly finished. They're always waiting for us, with new stories to tell and fresh perspectives to impart. Perhaps the best thing about time spent in the art room becomes apparent when you leave it, and find the world outside sharpened and heightened – tilted a crucial degree off the axis of the ordinary.
In the big, rowdy house of images we all inhabit today, television, advertising and other mass media take up almost all the available space. Painting occupies a small quiet room at the far end. Despite being the oldest and noblest of the visual arts, its relevance to our broad banded, future-hungry, technology-obsessed century isn't exactly clear. What's it for? Why is it still here? Hasn't it been rendered obsolete yet? Decommissioned? Downsized? Just as there was always a threat that the art room I knew as a kid might be commandeered for some dismally sensible purpose, there will always be someone around who wants to evict the painters and give their space to other, less troublesome tenants – an IT company perhaps, or a human resources consultancy, or a franchise operation, or an office-full of brand managers. Call this book a tale in praise of the art room and its contents.
Do you have an art room? It might be the front room of a rural house, or a two-room dealer gallery up a flight of graffiti-webbed stairs, or a prefab garage in a suburban backyard, or a museum so large you measure your progress not in footsteps but in furlongs. In the end, it doesn't matter where the paintings hang. The art room that matters most exists in memory. This is where you hang the paintings that changed you. When ever new paintings come into view, they trigger romances and rearrangements. Many of the newcomers are sent into mental storage and never looked at again. A few go straight up on the walls and stay there, glowing with accumulated pleasure.
Looking at paintings, then, is not a matter of finding something to impress the guests, or match the curtains, or increase in value at 18 percent per annum; it's a search for things worth hanging on the walls of your imagination.
CHAPTER 2Every painting on the planet
OF COURSE, THERE'S no way on earth that you can find a place in that imaginary museum for every painting you see. When I start scrolling through all the paintings I've encountered only this year, the walls begin to look raucously, impossibly full.
I saw the world's best painting of fruit and vegetables, by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio. I saw a painted fish the size of an articulated truck afloat on a gallery wall. I saw some squares of colour by Mark Rothko that looked as though they'd been breathed on to the canvas, rather than painted. I saw three cows in a suspiciously mudless paddock win first place in an art society competition. I saw a once-eloquent protest painting looking forlorn on an auctioneer's display stand. I saw a video of an American artist painting himself red. I saw some painted stripes by Bridget Riley that made my eyes feel as if they'd been hot-wired.
I saw a 'painting machine' spatter a clean white wall with gouts and spurts of Prussian blue ink. I saw one of the first oil paintings of the place named New Zealand, a bush-choked view of Dusky Bay by William Hodges, the artist on James Cook's Resolution. I saw a swirly finger-painting by a two-year-old, who titled it Ugly Mount Victoria, and a seven-foot-high finger-painting by a 48-year-old that was a highlight of my painted year. And after all this there were dozens of paintings I hadn't seen but wished I had, two or three I had seen but wished I hadn't, and very many I'd seen but not really looked at.
Still with me? I realise that having picked up a book about how to look at a painting, you may be dismayed to have already come across so many objects that take the name 'painting', but bear little resemblance to painting in the old, gilt-framed sense. The first thing to say here is that this is not just painting's problem. A torrent of every kind of cultural object is one of the unavoidable facts of life today. Sure, there are more painters making more paintings than ever before (thirty-goddamn-thousand fine arts graduates in the United States each year: I feel weepy just looking at that figure). But the same also holds true for novels and CDs and DVDs and movies – and even poems, of which there sometimes seem to be more writers than readers.
The second and obvious thing to say (this is almost a law of cultural physics) is that quantity is not quality. So the challenge for someone wading out into all this art is not just to find out how to look at a painting, but also how to find a painting worth looking at.
Like psychics reading tea leaves, commentators tend to find what they want in the current glut of art. Is the creative outpouring a sign of maturity for a small, culturally nervous country? Evidence of the talent we're always being told New Zealand harbours? Or is it merely the result of a new, cashed-up class of young professionals looking for a higher grade of eye-candy for their lofts and feature walls?
Signs of trouble for painting are easy enough to find. I could frown at the fact Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland recently dissolved its painting department and declared the whole school a multimedia zone, now encompassed by (ahem!) the National Institute of Creative Arts and Industries. (Why is it that whenever an institution cuts back on staff, it makes up for it by adding new names?) I could walk you through the national museum Te Papa's recent exhibition of contemporary art purchases and note only eleven paintings in a show of 44 works. I could bleat about the way sculpture hogs space, or the dominance of video art, or the viral spread of photography, or the conquest of the handmade by the hi-tech, or the painting-unfriendly scale of new international museums, or a dozen other supposed threats to the life of the noble medium.
But I want to make a promise right now, which is never (well, not too often) to bore you with moans, conjectures or horizon-sweeping assertions about the state of painting with a capital P. 'Painting is in poor health right now,' someone (a sculptor) said to me recently. Your immediate response, when someone talks like that, is to think, 'Right, so you've seen it all have you? Given every painting on the planet a check-up?'
Painting isn't served by that kind of doom-saying, nor by its flipside, mindless boosting. What serves it better is our appetite for, and passionate testimony about, particular paintings. Novelist Nick Hornby, in his collection of columns The Polysyllabic Spree, makes the point that books aren't only badly written; they can also be badly read. Paintings, too, are either enlarged or diminished by the quality of our attention to them. Looking long and openly at a painting is the best possible activism you can perform on the medium's behalf. What's more, it is, or should be, a pleasure.
How to look at a painting? If I thought I could get away with it, I would have answered that question with one word: slowly. But I don't and can't, so I took this trip. And first I paid a visit to my great-great-grandfather.
CHAPTER 3How to be looked at by a painting
IN AUGUST THE LANDSCAPE between Dunedin and Oamaru has a half-erased look. Winter reduces the poplars to fine fuzz and scribble, and the horizon's hardly there. As I drive up State Highway 1, thunderclouds hang in the rear-view mirror – Dunedin's weather chasing me north – and in Oamaru the town's limestone buildings are only a shade whiter than the sea fog coming in behind them. Yes, it's the right kind of day for a meeting with a great-greatgrandfather: John Paton, born 1845. There are some questions I want to ask him about ghosts and portraits, and how to look at paintings.
The Forrester Gallery is one of the grandest of the Victorian buildings that rise with sudden formality from the south end of Oamaru's main street. My great-greatgrandfather is downstairs. The building once housed a bank, and the basement contained the bank manager's kitchen and the bedrooms for his servants. This is where the Forrester's collection of paintings now resides. I first heard about the painting of John Paton in the mid 1990s, when the Forrester's director, Warwick Smith, included it in a show of paintings by a little-known artist called May Wilson Buick. Until then I'd thought of portraits as things that portrayed other people's ancestors, and the closest I'd come to John Paton was a pair of his cufflinks, engraved JP, that his grandson, my grandfather, gave to me.
For a long time the portrait remained tantalisingly hard to see. Like most galleries, the Forrester owns more art than it can show at one time, and many of its paintings hang on wire racks in a darkened storeroom. There is, however, a window with a time-delay light switch that gives you a brief view of some of the paintings on their racks. It was brilliance to hang the portrait of John Paton right there in the shadows on the first rack, because May Wilson Buick knew all about the drama a painter can extract from glimmers of light in darkness. On visits to the Forrester I'd peer in through the window at the portrait, but even with the light on all that could be seen of it were gleams: a white folded newspaper, a white starched collar, the white flesh of a sliced-open apple.
Today I'm here to see the work up close. Warwick opens the store and brings it out into the light, and the first thing I notice is that it's still black. (View this work at http://bit.ly/TZxSGs.) May Buick made her painting in the early twentieth century, but she seems to have mined her colour from somewhere back in the nineteenth. It's the black of soot, onyx, and gabardine; the black you get when an oil lamp goes out. It half-envelops every object in the room, from the red drape, to the blade-like leaves of the potted palm, to John Paton himself, who sits with the stiff-necked dignity men often have in nineteenth century photos (a result of long exposure times: if you moved, the photo blurred).
Details are buried so deep in the blackness you have to go very close to winkle them out: the strange ripple of the handkerchief in the pocket; the markings on the little butterfly on the vase. I can read the fine print ('Hearn's Bronchitis Cure') on John Paton's copy of The Oamaru Mail, and count every whisker in his beard. His mouth is open slightly. Yes, surely he's about to speak.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from How to Look at a Painting by Justin Paton. Copyright © 2005 Justin Paton. Excerpted by permission of Awa Press.
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