Painting always outruns one's ideas about Painting
Ken Kiff and Roy Oxlade, painting for painting's sake
A couple of weeks ago, I visited an exhibition of paintings by a friend I had not seen in a number of years, and was glad to have the opportunity for a wonderful and lighthearted conversation with him about painting and life. He introduced me to the work and writings of the painter Roy Oxlade. For a while prior to this I had been thinking about Ken Kiff, and so since that conversation both Kiff’s and Roy Oxlade’s paintings have been floating around in my mind.
I have been sitting in front of my screen for several hours now trying to formulate a way to talk about painting and my feelings about it, particularly in relation to Ken Kiff and Roy Oxlade. For me, the subject of a painting is not very important, and yet I am not usually attracted by purely abstract paintings (with the exception of some of Howard Hodgkin’s work). A painting needs to have space, and for me the majority of abstract paintings are too flat, or decorative, for me personally to find them interesting. However, many narrative paintings I find just as boring, for the same reason in that they only care about the ‘story’ of the painting in a flat and equally decorative way, as Francis Bacon said, in bad, dull paintings ‘the paint goes in a long diatribe across the brain’, rather than going ‘directly onto the nervous system’. It is to me exciting when an image is created out of marks, material far away from any descriptive marks: such as when Dubuffet created smiling faces out of clay, mud like pigment. Dubuffet is not passively, dully painting his idea of a face……ear here, then cheek, then nose…he is creating a real head, joyous, breathing….here is Francis Ponge in all his jolliness and made completely out of thick, messy stuff akin to cement.
One could make a list of all the essentials needed to make a good painting: drawing, space, composition, light….and yet, as Ken Kiff said ‘painting always outruns one’s ideas about painting’. We have shorthand terms for a painting which seems to have the magic : ‘it lives’, ‘it works’, and yet it is difficult often to articulate why exactly a painting is good, for some reason a certain alchemy has just taken place and the painting exists, on its own: it is not a description of something living, it has become something living, itself. It is the hard striving after this strange alchemy I think which makes painting an addiction, an obsession, for so many painters. As well as why it is so difficult to make a good painting. To try to paint at all requires failing at this task many, many times and resigning oneself to maybe, even likely, never succeeding.
And yet, despite this seemingly heavy going journey, for me a defining feature of the work of Roy Oxlade, Ken Kiff, Dubuffet as well as Philip Guston’s late paintings which I love, is humour, lightness and air. The painters’ ability to laugh at themselves and their situations: painting really isn’t that serious or important in the grand scheme of things. The resulting paintings are fun to look at: they brighten my life by their existence.
The way Ken Kiff worked was not to make any drawings or plans in preparation for paintings, or to make underdrawings, but to simply begin and let the painting lead him where it wished to go. In the 1960s he worked on six large wood boards for nearly the entire decade: scraping the tempera paint off the wood when the painting did not work and beginning/continuing again, changing the entire painting continually. There reached a point where he felt he needed to be more productive and thus began The Sequence: a series of nearly 200 acrylic paintings/drawings on paper, which he made much more quickly (Talking with a Psychoanalyst is one of these). He thought of himself as an abstract painter, because what interested him in painting was above all the relationships between formal elements on the painting’s surface, and images emerged from these relationships rather than the other way around.
I have been reading Roy Oxlade’s writings, and one thing among many others I found helpful and interesting was his criticism of the art market and art world. He made these comments:
‘Most of the leading opponents of contemporary art are also complicit within a system of market capitalism, now seen by many to be the drive behind so much collective human greed and stupidity’.
‘Aesthetics is the ground where art and ideology interact. An aesthetically aware society will be one which is receptive to an art unburdened by constraint. Art is at its truest when it flies free and is answerable only to itself. Through a strange alchemy art is free also from the artist/agent who has brought it about. The artist’s dialogue with the work, which some might call inspiration, has made it possible for the unexpected to occur. In today’s fragmented world clouded by contextual and other extraneous considerations and obligations, such disinterested art will remain hidden. Yet it is only through the potential of hidden art, one of innocence, clarity and simplicity, that it may be possible to restore the relationship between art and aesthetic’.
‘My suggestion for a reformation in art was what I called ‘a redevelopment of a basic primitivism'. (Primitivism: belief in the superiority of what is primitive. Primitive: undeveloped, crude, simple; original, primary.)’
(All quotations from Art & Instinct: Selected Writings of Roy Oxlade, published in 2010).
One of the problems with the art world is that it is fueled entirely by money. Artists who will make the galleries, the collectors money become famous, they are hailed because their work is shown in major galleries and written about in major papers and on social media. But painting is not about money - painting refers only to itself. Ken Kiff, Roy Oxlade, Dubuffet and Philip Guston all have in common a love of painting itself, a desire simply to make good paintings. In the art world, painting becomes ‘art’, but really, painting is just painting. The people who made drawings on the walls of Lascaux did not think of themselves as ‘artists’, they were just doing what seemed necessary to them at the time. Roy Oxlade talks about a ‘hidden’ art, by which I believe he means a search for painting which puts aesthetics at the forefront (the formal elements of painting as opposed to the conceptual), taking place by painters without endorsement by the celebrity art world, without a desire to become famous.
To return to the paintings of Ken Kiff and Roy Oxlade, I am attempting in my own work to learn from them in every way. In a previous post I mentioned a number of small paintings I am moving forward at the moment. I have about 30 small mdf boards as well as seven or eight large canvases, and I am continually working over all of these surfaces, dividing my hours up between them, being happy to change every formal element in the paintings as I go along, even to completely paint over and scrape back to the beginning. In this way, I hope to improve my painting. It does not matter to me how long the paintings take, even if they take years, my goal is simply to learn as I go along, to work for the love of painting.
I like that!
Thanks for this, enjoyed reading. Have also been following a similar path recently, reading Oxlade and finding myself attracted to comparable painters; Susan Rothenberg, Forrest Bess, Milton Resnick, Martin Disler, Louis Soutter..