26 December 2019
Fractal secrets shared in front of the hearth
imagined three step sisters ready for a grand ball. But my imagination is both eccentric and historic. Anyway, I like them as a trio because for a painter like me, it’s the delicacy of these clouds that excite me.
There is a certain kind of cloud that appears in a particular sort of pale sky, usually with a bit of humidity in the air that evokes all the lacework done by millions of women all over Europe over the centuries; rich and poor women, the sisters and nieces, the hired hands and the dilettantes too, all of them sitting around the hearth and sharing of secrets.
And these small shredded clouds, like secrets themselves, are fragments that dissolve into thin air during the tumid moments before dusk swallows them up like a giant whale in a fairy tale. On the beach at dusk it’s a marvellously gentle light and and an unassuming one too. In this gentle light ancient secrets can speak to painters and drunk poets but also small dogs and wild children too when they romp deliriously into twilight.
And these are the types of clouds which take me to Painting. For a long time I have thinking about how pieces (or planes, if you wish) of a whole picture are fastened together one to another. I realise that I’ve spoken about this before because it’s a mild obsessionof mine.
I got into a conversation with a guest at a dinner near Dieulefit with a scientist from Scotland one summer evening years ago. I was peppering her with questions about fractels and the Chaos theory for some reason. Eventually by the time the strawberry tartes appeared on the table for desert she suggested to me a book to read aptly titled ‘Chaos’ by the then NYT science editor James Gleick. When I got home I immediately ordered it then quickly devoured.
It’s all about fractal connections (and disconnections) but measurements too, and it traces the history of this new thinking which sprang up around a few eccentric scientists working on the Atomic bomb in Los Alamos in the late 1960’s (L.S.D. was also involved). But anyway, I have always been frustrated at how mathematics rounded everything off to the nearest .09. It drove me crazy. Even as a small boy looking at the sky I had already empirically understood that infinity was ever-present all around us and that nothing could be nicely reduced down to an even and perfect equation. Like many children I used to watch clouds endlessly as they swirled across the sky, appearing and disappearing, cartwheeling and somersaulting into one another like in a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. Looking at clouds and leaves in the world of plants, was the easiest ways to witness the fractal behaviours in the Universe. And so, for me, when painting certain cloud shapes in the sky, the fractal connections manifest immediately.
In painting, the importance of how planes (and shapes) connect to one another is an essential element. But also in all Art, Architecture, Music, and even as a girlfriend once advised, in love affairs too. Every painter has to deal with this whether they know it or not. And moreover I should say; whether he or she is conscious of it, or not, for I can see that lots of artists do not seem to place an importance upon it. And yet, they are still constrained by its importance nonetheless, for the successful unity of a painting is always still grounded in how the sum of its parts click into each other like Lego creating an energetic whole.
Of course the subject matter in a painting is extremely varied and uniquely different and it will be composed of materials depicting a multitude of various elements that deserve different treatments; the skin, bark, stone, wood, glass, flora, hair (human and otherwise), and the air itself, the most popular element that holds so many pictures in its light grip. In a unified painting, all these diverse elements desire to be connected to one another with great subtlety, or not purposely so. Painters of every age in history had to learn the delicate craft of bridging these often disperate elements on a picture plane.
In the popular genre of landscape painting these variously bits of fractal foliage equally work to attach disparite elements of a picture together one to the other; the fields to the trees, the hills into soft mountains, the chimney smoke into the air overhead. In a landscape, their terrestrial logic is tactile.
But these studies are mostly concerned with painting the sky which is ephemeral. In the end, it is basically just coloured air and gaseous clouds which require a deft but patient hand.
Whether one looks at an 18th century marine-scape from Holland or an abstract 20th century work by Willem de Kooning, the unity, or lack there of, is cemented by the manner in which each brushstroke of paint, both literally and figuratively, attach to one another.
The really, really great painters do this extremely well, whereas the lesser among us seem to limp along with uneven ambiguity. So I hope that these three studies above, whether limping, or in a ‘Gavotte’, reveal a tiny fractal system at work in some fashion or other, successful or otherwise.
No comments:
Post a Comment