PAINTING. TIME. PAINTING
When the surface of the painting seems to be just painted, a return to the material, paint takes place, only after a durable scrutiny; the shades (like in nature) become apparent, and the colours become profound and enticing, and I believe that the aim of materialization of the painting and the form is achieved in the picture. The poor becomes rich and … new vision is born
I did not place a full stop after the last word in the heading intentionally, using the device of Rainer Maria Rilke who points to the divine, eternal nature of his hero in his famous verse «Orpheo, Euridice, Hermes», by the absence of stop after the last name. The same concerns painting which, as art, will exist forever, whilst one may put a stop after the virtual games of the entertainment art, with every reason.
What need makes us resort to the art of painting? Why is painting, like no other kind of art, is so close to life? Why painting, emerging in life, becomes not only a part of the world, but a world in itself (the frame of a picture is a symbolic sign of this autonomy of involvement), while music, for instance, being a world in itself, becomes a part of the vital world only for the moment of sounding, and in architecture the affinity to the vital world prevails over the world in itself, etc.?
Life is a complicated category in virtue of its unselected abundance. It may be recreated only by way of choice, selection, harmonization. Painting is a cognitive art in which the cognition by the artist of the world and of himself goes in parallel. In the process of cognition poetry, for instance, uses the particulars (unlike science that operates with groups with major coefficients); painting reduces a group to minimum, the landscape – to a state, battle scenes – to relation of groups, the portrait - to relation of parts, the figure – to relation of the form and the background, etc.
Thus, painting is a method of limitation with emphasizing the contours and setting a balance of parts of the whole so that the particulars within the whole would never be forgotten and would not be an end in itself at the same time, serving the whole, meanwhile the whole would be a constituent part of what makes the artist's expression of his world.
The specificity of the artist lies mostly in selection of masses and their distribution in a particular group. Thus, painting is a way of selection and harmonization. The artist like a madman is distinguished by exclusivity of choice. The child's painting is of the same nature: exclusivity of choice. When a choice is made, one feels dramatically the form of what he sees, and gives birth to a notion. Our specific means are applied to it: the form and the paint. The whole spectrum of pictorial devices works here: the rhythm, the contract, the interpretation of the form, the due feeling of colouring accord spread over all axes of the canvas plane, etc.
The process is painting is complicated. Naturally, the principle of harmony, balance and others, like the choice (the importance of either of them), changes for thousand of reasons – historical, social and other, but the harmony becomes clear if not at once, then further on: from Greek statues to a Negro sculpture – one just has to realize the principle of balance.
Normally, when we talk of poor or insignificant works, not so much as the drawing or the colour are weak, as is normally voiced, but the thought, while the thought is always projected upon the notion which is a sum in its turn: the colour plus the form. And these colour and form must be chosen from the amorphous mass of the visible, transformed (choice from the selected) and harmonized in the picture. Conception of idea, notion, creation of emotion, non-standard use of the material, new technologies, etc. do not represent a thought in its artistic interpretation.
The spectator perceives the painting as a gulp, both the form and colour together. The likeness of life and painting is defined by the fact as well that in life, in virtue of centricity of our vision, we are surrounded not only by forms, but rather by surfaces painted differently. Painting represents as well the harmony of painted surfaces limited by contours.
Painting undoubtedly is aimed at man who seeks it, such people probably are contemporaries or descendants of the artist. But perception and comprehension of the painting require imminent work and certain qualification of the spectator, his participation and immersion. It is only then that the painting starts opening its world to the spectator, becoming visible and seen. Not many people are capable of such emotional perception of painting; the artist is usually hidden from the eyes of his time and perhaps the eyes of the subsequent times. The artist is always a solitary unit, no matter how time treats him being a zero relative to the artist, it may only add or not add its zeroes to him. Any time is valuable, characterizing the results of activities of the people who cognize, who lived in it. In all other respects it is rather banal, and every subsequent generation makes use of achievement of previous units. The ideas contemporary in time are as a rule not noticed by him or are traced with mistrust; it has always been engaged in treating what was modern some time earlier, presenting it as up-to-date, this was the topical arises … Often this "topical" aims at shocking, bringing the previously modern ideas to artless grotesque. With the imminent loss of depth of the preceding ideas and forms, the art topical of the time starts exaggerating their external, well-read parts, to become spectacular and cover most of the spectators. A show always causes a process opposite to the natural vision. The natural vision supposes gradual disclosure of what is hidden under the cover of the external, giving rise to discoveries having no limits in nature. Raising such vision with truly modern painting brings a man to the state of the artist which was experienced by all people in childhood. The entertainment art pours out what must be hidden, onto the spectator, and this undisguised "concealed" imminently is simplified and banalized in this process. Such orientation of the vision makes it move round across: track the plot, perceive the idea, get surprised with emotions, be astonished by the devised etc. Thus, the more painting becomes spectacular the more it loses in terms of art. One may conclude from all this: painting as art and as a show are not purely different spheres, they are opposite, antagonistic.
The task of the truly modern art is harmonization of life; life is always on the brink of danger when the balance is disturbed, the art always balances it. Our time in which entertainment art constitutes over 90% needs a mighty counterpoise, and the smaller it is the further it must be from the centre, being more remote from the topical. This way I treat the truly up-to-date painting and its present task. Setting such tasks in my creative art, I dare to hope for my affiliation to the vanguard of the army of modern painting, no matter as an officer or a private or a missing soldier…
The commencement of my conscious creative activity was, in my mind, the period when I felt a tormenting need in synthesis which grew and led me to selection of my own group of forms and search of means of their embodiment. The form of human body attracted me most of all as a form having a maximum of plastic combinations with a minimum of modules making it. In this selection the subject is reduced to minimum not to hamper the dramatic relations of the form and the background and the parts within a form with interrelations making creating a plastic image.
I deem that reading of an image in the picture is a process developing in time, originating from the initial perception of the whole form as a gulp to perception of depth of the space created in the picture and returning again to perception of the form and its surface. The movement of the eye over the surface of the form enhances the reality of the space and returns one to a new reading of the form, finishing the image conceived by the artist or seen by him.
Creation of the form and its sign is a lengthy and tormenting process following which I come to an unprecedented simplicity that sometimes scatters, but I tend to believe in this very form and prefer it. At times such forms look quite absurd, but this clumsiness, contains beauty, as it seems, which I would not be able to express otherwise, in some other form: this supposes my resources exclusively. The completed paintings start living their own life and I myself become their spectator – possibly a spectator not prepared for their perception.
In order to feel the beauty of the form profoundly, I need mighty resistance, therefore, when making figures, I attempt to make them somewhat stumbling, complicated for perception. Awkward movements always help to perceive the own plastics of the form more profoundly, enhancing it hundredfold. I believe that the spirit may show in inarticulate forms its individual intimate substance more powerfully than as if it would use the standard forms.
The form in painting is always a sign saturated with content, all of the history of art if finally a history of metamorphosis of signs. The content of the sign may be literature, psychology, emotion, idea, etc. The painting begins when the content of the sign is colour, paint, with inherent potentialities. As far as the potential of the paint is limitless, painting falls into a category of eternal arts. Therefore in my canvases the content of sign is a paint that makes this sign into a form, and the form into image. In my work I urge to achieve the colour matching the form so closely as to become its surface, so that it penetrates into it so deeply that their separate existence would seem impossible.
The groups selected by me in reality are forms of human bodies, mostly of children and females. Further begins the process of their transformation to sign, the so-called choice within the selected aspect, bringing the plastic sounding to the condensed accord. Creating a form sign, I work with the relationship of its parts; working like this, I am guided by a feeling that I experience when observing a real form. The conscious change of the form parts in creation of a sign lets me release the beautiful that is opened for me in a real form and must be rendered in the depicted form. The perception of a form always develops with time, the eyes runs through its different sections with a different speed. The form sign ends in such temporal spans. One part of the form always disposes me to reading and perception of its other form, I try to feel or guess the striving of each part to be particular relative to the other parts and the whole, and help it, accelerating or retarding its movement. At the stage of raising the form sign toward the volume, I already trace the topographic spatial interrelation of parts of its surfaces.
In the process of the very painting, in work with paints, sometimes I can not figure out myself what is a prerequisite for which: the form for coloristic symphonism or the colour for the form. For a long period I was alternatively an attorney of the form before the colour and an attorney of the colour before the form, until they get coupled in one image.
The colours of surfaces of coloured things in the natural world (everything is coloured in the nature, everything being a surface) and the paints of the surface of the picture are always a result of their personal history. And the history of things in the natural world is created by a law of regularities and by an occasion, just as the history of surfaces in the painting. But an occasion will never occur in chaos, as chaos is a crowd of occurrences. For a visionary manifestation of an occurrence, a system in necessary. Currently I may record a coloristic formula of the painting in advance, in all of its development, to the final result. But the creation process often requires sharp turns within the framework of the system. The process of making a picture often reminds of seizure of a fortress, when initially a strategy is conceived thoroughly, with further reconnaissance in force and final storm by final colours. Sometimes such seizure is achieved only after several attempts, but the quality of the painting only gains strength in this case. I feel relief only when the paint in the picture becomes a part of the form and the coloristic accord of the whole painting begins pulling one's look inwards. At the same time the final colours in the picture must look dry, restrained and rich. Then the work is completed.
We live in the epoch of dematerialization of life, when things and materials are getting replaced by the ideas of things and materials. The position of really modern art is permanent opposition to one's epoch. In this sense I see the global tasks of modern painting not only in opposing the entertainment art but also mainly in materialization of the dematerializing world, opposition of the revelation of the material to things-ideas, compositions-ideas, etc. In painting this is return of colour and form to their resuscitating origin – to substance, paint, and turning of the matter into the substance of the image.
But one can not just apply the differently coloured substances-paints onto the plane and create a scenic picture; they must be matched in harmony, this process is complicated and needs individual discoveries. Natural coloured surfaces are already included in the harmony of existence, and their emanation is a result of complicated internal and external processes. The same way the emanation of canvas surfaces is a result of complicated processes designed by an artist. The finished surfaces in the picture, like surfaces in the natural world, must look utterly clear, severe and, at first glance, – restrained. To achieve this, a complicated work process is needed. My painting starts with what in end with the others - creation of pictorial surface. Further the work is aimed at its hiding, concealment.
The creation of colour sketch of the painting implies already an in-depth coloristic accord, through the search of paints that will work within the surface colours. I call these primary paints я partisan colours; they work as if from the rear of the visible colour of the surface, which is extremely important both in terms of depth and complexity and creation of inner harmony of canvas parts.
Every preceding work over the canvas is isolated by priming, therefore there is no physical or optical blending of paints in my painting; a history of painted layers of the picture may be traced. Colours working behind the priming are active and not complicated. Every external colour spot has its intrinsic colour rendered in certain relation to the other colours of the surface. Such «partisan» work-out is started over the glued and ungrounded canvas. The canvas is primed in the process of painting, performing as well the role of insulator for painting layers. As a result of painting, the inner colours start sort of sticking out of the external ones, generating additional hues in them. The final, outward colours are created as colours of different complexity.
When the surface of the painting seems to be just painted, a return to the material, paint takes place, only after a durable scrutiny; the shades (like in nature) become apparent, and the colours become profound and enticing, and I believe that the aim of materialization of the painting and the form is achieved in the picture. The poor becomes rich and … new vision is born
