signifier are arbitrarily assigned to music - it is not representational. Even onomatopoeic sounds have no universal agreement among different languages.


Appropriately, the photorealist article in this volume, has included a self portrait of the author in the text. For myself, however, If I want the sound of a nightingale the simplest method is to record and sample the sound of a real nightingale because what I would add by synthesising this sound is only my hand. As I have said we should not have an expectation that music is representational and as much as you think it might be, it never is - even the donkey serenade, even the song of the nightingale singing in Berkley Square. It is a play on the emotions to evoke a feeling and the same applies to the plastic arts - if they do no do this they do nothing. So when I want photorealism what I find simplest is to take a photograph, again what is added by the human endeavour but the labour of the endeavour?


Anyway, with regard to abstract painting somewhere in the universe I am certain I can take a photo of a real object, which will look like any particular abstract painting. The phenomena might be within an organism, at the microscopic scale, sections of geology, up to the cosmological scale of galaxies and man made structures. In a certain light and exposure given enough time, I could reproduce every abstract painting photographically, I am sure, or at least, a competent enough photographer could. Presumably once this pointless exercise had been achieved I would merely have to paint from the photograph and my painting would be photorealistic. Even without this exercise if we are concerned in photorealism with trompe l’oeil then if you accept my premise then all art is photorealistic.


If you don’t accept my premise then I would suggest you need to get out into the universe more, see photomicrographs, or the work of Andres Serrano (whose work has been used for album covers by Metallica, where many may be familiar with them), look at the night sky with a telescope; look at old walls, as Leonardo Da Vinci advised, for inspiration. These are all non-figurative, not lanscapes, they are not still life really, they are unrecognisable as anything, at the human scale, they abstract a subject in possibly much the same way a scientific paper is abstracted by its summary. They sum up a subject, or they do so without reference to anything we are familiar with in or at our scale, they are abstract but the eye should not be fooled into believing they are just blobs and the eye should not be fooled into believing that the work of Marc Rothko is just smeared paint or Cy Twombly’s are just paint blobs and mark-making or Paul Jackson Pollock’s are splatters - they are that act of secular transubstantiation, I mentioned: of pigment into spirit, oil into geist, canvas into shroud and activity into artefact.


These works need to be witnessed not by an eye wary of Emperor's new clothes; they need to be experienced and if you do not feel the experience then turn to some other religion that is fine. Many paths exist and many ways exist; art is bigger it is a cake and eat it feast, if you want a painting so it looks like a door that you could walk through it, then that you can have; if you want a portal through, which you feel an empathy with the bottomless despair with the exhilaration of the melancholy, the


21


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