Natural Abstract Art The Nature of Visual Reality
Barrie Dale
wildhaven.co.uk
Our senses tell us what we need to know; they do not tell the truth. What we see is not what is there. If we look at a block of glass, a block of perspex, and a brick, our eyes might tell us that the brick is the one that differs. But perspex is the the exceptional one. Returning to the brick, our senses tell us that it is solid and heavy. These are delusions. A brick consists almost entirely of empty space, and it appears heavy only because the rest of the universe is clinging on to it. When Huxley dosed himself with mescalin, all the ‘gatekeepers’ in his brain were disabled, and his perception changed completely - he saw more vividly and profoundly, so much so that he would have been incapable of mundane everyday tasks. The drug was enhancing the ‘intensity of his experience’. Our senses, under the control of our brains, deceive us about what is really there. Do artists paint what they see? Stone-Age artists were at one with Nature. They produced drawings and sculptures of the creatures around them, from a deep, intimate, knowledge and understanding. Their work was fluent, exuberant, energetic. But they often used abstraction to emphasise the ‘Intensity of their Experience’. They almost certainly ‘saw’ the emphasised image. When Turner was painting ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’, he was not painting a steam engine; he was painting the idea of a steam engine. You might argue that his image told you more about steam engines than you would gain from looking at an actual steam engine.
Rain, Steam and Speed. JMW Turner. National Gallery, London
When Turner produced his late painting of the St Gothard Pass it was not a view of the pass; it was an expression of his feelings about the pass, seen as a whole, not as a series of separate views. It was the overpowering immensity of the mountains that he wanted to express - the ‘Intensity of his Experience’. When Cezanne painted his numerous renderings of Mont St Victoire he was painting what he felt about the Mount, rather than how it appeared. In Picasso’s famous painting ‘Guernica’ we see several of the unpleasant manifestations of war, all in one image. War as a concept. Then, when he painted a portrait, we find several different aspects and several different moods of a person all expressed in the same image - someone seen in their completeness. Picasso found Stone-Age art inspiring. When he drew an image of a bull he contrived to make it more ‘bull-like’ than a real bull, by emphasising the bulk and the horns, deemphasising the limbs, and putting in construction lines. This is precisely how Stone-Age artists emphasised the bullish-ness of a bull - expressing the ‘Intensity of Experience’ when confronted by a bull. It is the bulk and the horns and the one-ness of the whole that matter; the limbs can be discounted. So there we have the crux of the argument. To make things appear more real you have to depart from reality. You have to intensify those aspects that, in terms of your experience, make the most impression. When I photograph, say, flower at high magnification a succession of images appear, almost all of them meaningless (except in the botanical sense). But sometimes an image appears that seems to mean something. How to identify such an image?
Through Flowery Meadows up to Distant Clouded Mountains. (Flower of Geranium Pratense)
Barrie Dale
wildhaven.co.uk
For me, the process seems to be sub-conscious - the capture triggered by a deep-seated desire to be there; experiencing whatever scene is presenting itself. In the case of the three images shown here, I wanted to be passing through flowery meadows up to distant clouded mountains; or watching a space-craft approaching one of the moons of Saturn; or be on a sailing ship becalmed on a glass-like sea.
Spacecraft Approaching Enceladus. (Petals of Phalaenopsis)
Painted Ship upon a Painted Ocean (Conrad). Petals of Phalaenopsis.
Barrie Dale
wildhaven.co.uk
The glory of Natural Abstract Art is that, while base entirely on Nature in the real world, it can take you to situations you couldn’t go to and can’t imagine.
Barrie Dale
wildhaven.co.uk