{"id":844,"date":"2009-10-10T09:21:15","date_gmt":"2009-10-10T09:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=844"},"modified":"2024-07-19T13:04:44","modified_gmt":"2024-07-19T13:04:44","slug":"the-zen-of-sunday-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/the-zen-of-sunday-painting\/","title":{"rendered":"The Zen of Sunday-painting"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In his famous account of learning the piano as an adult<\/a>, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger refers to a book by psychiatrist, Marion Milner, a pseudonym of Joanna Field.\u00a0 Milner was the sister of Nobel-physicist Patrick Blackett, and great-neice of Edmund Blackett, the architect of colonial Sydney.\u00a0\u00a0 Her book is an account of her attempts to paint and draw, and to learn to paint and draw, as an amateur artist.<\/p>\n

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I am not enchanted by her artwork, and I find her Freudian accounts of artistic creativity and its barriers both implausible and untrue to life.\u00a0\u00a0I believe Alfred Gell’s anthropological account of art to be far more compelling – that artworks are tokens or indexes of intentionality, perceived by their viewers or auditors as objects created with specific intentions by goal-directed entities (the artist, or a community, or some spiritual being).\u00a0 These perceived intentions include much else beside the expression of feelings<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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But Milner’s book is replete with some wonderful insights, many of which express a Zen sensibility.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Herewith a sample:
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But if willed effort to create a “good'” picture or a “good'” person only, so far as I could see, led to something which had a counterfeit quality, surely this did not mean that one should never try to learn what a good picture or a good person was like?\u00a0 It seemed rather than one must do two things.\u00a0 One must certainly work at hammering out internally one’s ideal, know as far as possible what one wanted or liked. But then one must forget it, plunge into a kind of action in which the acting and the end were not separate”\u00a0 [p. 92]<\/p>\n

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Also it now seemed possible to say more about where the learning\u00a0of the rules did come in, in learning how to paint.\u00a0 For the beginner, the chief obstacle emphasised is his lack of skill in managing the medium.\u00a0 Thus he is often expected to spend a long\u00a0time discovering and learning the laws of optics, finding out how certain arrangements of shapes and colours produce certain regular\u00a0effects on the eye.\u00a0\u00a0 If one is going to be a professional painter probably this is all right.\u00a0\u00a0 But for the Sunday-painter I thought it was not at all all right, at least not for me; for one might [page-break] spend a lifetime of Sundays and get very little way, if one did not\u00a0also how to become more used to taking the plunge, more able to\u00a0throw the rules to the winds and forget the separateness of oneself and the object.\u00a0\u00a0 I thought of children’s drawings in this\u00a0connection, how often with so little knowledge of proper methods of depicting visual experiences they can yet take the plunge and the\u00a0results delight us.\u00a0\u00a0 Probably they can do this because the plunge itself is less of plunge to them, since they live so much of their \u00a0lives, through play, in a state where dream and external reality\u00a0are fused; it is a familiar element for them, they are like birds and can live both on land and in the sky without complicated\u00a0machinery to get there.” [pp. 92-93]<\/p>\n

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Thus the phrase “expression of'” suggested too much that the feeling to be expressed was there beforehand, rather than an\u00a0experience developing as one made the drawing.” [p. 116]<\/p>\n

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Now another question had to be answered about the free drawings. For the fact that the ideas in them were obviously in part\u00a0 determined by the circumstances of a Freudian analysis did not, I thought alter another fact; that was that they embodied a form of\u00a0 knowing that traditional education of the academic kind largely ignores, and one that I myself was unaware of using\u00a0– until I\u00a0 began to study the drawings in detail.\u00a0 But when I had done this there had been no doubt that many of the drawings did represent thinking of [page-break] some sort, reflections about the human situation, as well as the experiences with a medium.\u00a0 So, the question arose, why had it not been possible to think out such ideas directly in words?\u00a0 This raised a more general question of thinking in the private language of one’s own subjective images,\u00a0as against thinking in the public language of words.\u00a0 It also brought to the fore the problem of the academic and over-linguistic\u00a0bias of traditional education.” [pp. 122-123]<\/p>\n

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Such ideas about what one might be trying to do in one’s painting pointed the way to settling certain very practical doubts I had had\u00a0about the relation between painting and living.\u00a0 For years I had had to decide each week-end, should I shut myself away and paint or\u00a0should I just live?\u00a0 It was perhaps less of a problem for the professional painter who could live in his spare time. But for the Sunday-painter it brought the need to balance up the various\u00a0renunciations and gains. I had so often come away from a morning\u00a0spent painting with a sense of futility, a sense of how much better\u00a0it would have been to get on with something practical that really\u00a0needed doing.\u00a0 And I had often felt, when out painting, both\u00a0exalted and yet guilty, as if I were evading something that the people round me, all busy with their daily lives, were facing, that\u00a0their material was real life and mine was dreams.” [p. 135]<\/p>\n

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“There was another reason why it was now possible to paint. It was because there was one central fact that made it seem worthwhile\u00a0going on, whatever the objective value of the pictures to other people. It was that I had discovered in painting a bit of\u00a0experiences that made all other usual occupations unimportant by comparison.\u00a0 It was the discovery that when painting something from\u00a0nature there occurred, at least sometimes, a fusion into a never-before-known wholeness; not only were the object and oneself\u00a0no longer felt to be separate, but neither were thought and sensation and feeling and action.\u00a0 All one’s visual perceptions of\u00a0colour, shape, texture, weight, as well as thought and memory,\u00a0ideas about the object and action towards it, the movement of one’s hand together with the feeling of delight in the “thusness” of\u00a0the thing, all seemed to fuse into a wholeness of being which was different from anything else that ever happened to me.\u00a0 It was\u00a0different because thought was not drowned in feeling, they were somehow all there together.\u00a0 Moreover, when this state of\u00a0concentration was really achieved one was no longer aware of oneself doing it, one no longer acted from a centre to an object as\u00a0remote; in fact, something quite special happened to one’s sense of self.\u00a0 And when the bit of painting was finished there was before\u00a0one’s eyes a permanent record of the experience, giving a constant\u00a0sense of immense surprise at how it had ever happened; it did not seem something that oneself had done at all, certainly not the\u00a0ordinary everyday self and way of being.” [p. 142]<\/p>\n

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“The central certainty that this process [the investigation and writing of this book] does not work from purpose to deed, in the\u00a0way that expedient activities do, is easy to put into words now, at the end, but was not there with effective conviction from the\u00a0beginning . . . . There had been nothing in the beginning but vague uneasy feelings and an urge to follow certain trickles of\u00a0curiosity wherever they might lead. All the same, I have left the introduction as it was originally written, partly because books \u00a0need introductions, partly because the fact it had seemed, retrospectively, that that was what I had set out to do from the\u00a0beginning, was in itself an illustration of the later discovered\u00a0truth that activity creates purpose.” [p. 145]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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References:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Alfred Gell [1998]: Art and Agency:\u00a0 An Anthropological Theory<\/em>.\u00a0 Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press.<\/p>\n

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Marion Milner (Joanna Field) [1950]: On Not Being Able to Paint<\/em>. London, UK:\u00a0 William Heinemann.\u00a0 Second edition, 1957.<\/p>\n

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Alan Rusbridger [2002]: On not being able to play the piano<\/a>. The Guardian<\/em>, 2002-01-05.<\/p>\n

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In his famous account of learning the piano as an adult, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger refers to a book by psychiatrist, Marion Milner, a pseudonym of Joanna Field.\u00a0 Milner was the sister of Nobel-physicist Patrick Blackett, and great-neice of Edmund Blackett, the architect of colonial Sydney.\u00a0\u00a0 Her book is an account of her attempts to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,20,56,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-creativity","category-music","category-religion","p1","y2009","m10","d10","h09"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13049,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844\/revisions\/13049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}