boundless joy of the naive, the musical symphony of paint on canvas - I personally prefer to be transported by the works of: Rothko, Twombly and Pollock respectively.


I ask only this that you do not judge a painting by its print the print and the painting are as different as two works - you can only tell if you might like a painting by its print you need to see it in the flesh for you to say you do not, or maybe more humbly that it says nothing to you. Print cannot capture anything but the image of the painting just as being a portrait by David Bailey would never capture the person that is you - it comes down to what might as well be called the soul of the piece, just as the vital spark of identity, which differentiates you might as well be called your soul. The photograph and the photorealistic painting in that respect cannot capture the movement that these forces involve they cannot capture the soul, the animated essence which is us. They are not numinous enough they leave too little for the observer to do they are explicit in the way pornography is, they do not have the suggestiveness of eroticism or the understanding that is not stated. Maybe I go too far but as in narrative it is so much more satisfying if you are pushed off on a trajectory and you complete part of the arc of the story yourself - a buzz in the head post cinema or the contingencies considered after reading a short story. Maybe you prefer a slasher movie to suspense, thriller or film noir - where the shadow implies the horror just in the way a painter might leave the light having painted the dark as what remains or could just paint in white on a black field. Personally, I would prefer to paint all of the shadow leaving space for the lighter tones and painting them too, because I do have some sympathy despite the introduction, for Clem Greenberg’s position; the practitioner paints because it involves paint.


Maybe to get back to speaking of painting more directly we might take an historical journey? It has been convincingly demonstrated, by David Hockney, that Canaletto made the first chemical photographs in Venice. They are photographs because they were made with a camera - the camera obscura. Instead of a photographic slide he erected his canvas where light was focussed from a lens in the window from the scene he was to paint. This scene is a moving one with the day: the passage of the gondolas, the movement in the market place etc. It has been shown that this movement has been reproduced with the same character reproduced in the painting a couple of times, presumably having forgotten that that person has already been painted or maybe showing off the ‘high-tech’ nature of the reproduction that they are truly imitations of live. These painting are of course painted with perfect perspective, because the paintings are chemical photographs painted by hand. It is humbling that it took 200 years to invent photography as we understand it.


When modern photography was introduced it of course had a dramatic effect on painting, much of which, was dedicated to landscape and especially portraiture. Once the ‘realist’ impulse was fulfilled by photography, artists looked for other ways of seeing. The effect seems to have been to make the subject more and more arbitrary, more about the ‘way it was told in paint’, until I guess the transition was made and someone was brave enough to not include any specific subject; the person this is usually attributed to is Wassily Kandinsky.


22


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