IX
alutations uncounted, I said not a word to Beatrice and this is where
the story of our history might have ended were I an ordinary person meeting an
ordinary other. My extraordinary situation was that I was floundering adrift in
a grey and endless ocean, casting about for a reason to begin my strokes in one
direction or another. She was no rescue ship that would pluck me from the waters
and take me someplace safe and nor was she a passing liner that I could hail for
succour. Beatrice was as a small bird beating her wings furiously to find a
shore of her own and I could take my course by her. Perhaps this guide had no
better clue than I as to where salvation lay but she was attending to the task
with such determination and vigour that even were we to each fail in the quest
there would be salvation in the undertaking.
Hailing the guide was out of the question. Dare I distract
her from her purpose? Would we not both perish were I to call her back to share
in my fate? No, she was on her way and I could but watch her glide into the
distance or chart my path for her own. It would take epic efforts on my part to
match her pace and I could not delay. I hadn't time to drown in the salt sea of
my own lonely plight but must begin immediately to reach the unseen shore.
This one encounter left me staring despairingly at my own
creative works. The doom was not their lack of quality as much as their lack of
aspiration and motivation. They were entirely superficial. I didn't yet know
what they needed to make them otherwise but I did know that the solution was not
platitudes of emotion, wit, experience or novelty. None of these things could
make art no matter how earnest they were. I did not yet know that intelligence
was the source of art but I did know that cleverness was not.
Nothing about Modernism invigorated me and so I was wracked
by the idea that perhaps art was not my calling. It would not matter, it seemed,
if that were the case. I was arbitrarily in art school. Beatrice's performance
told me that I must be a creator but it did not answer any questions about what
needed to be created or why. Arbitrary or not, Art school was where I was and I
would find a means to fully explore the form before abandoning it as I had
abandoned Creative Writing. I was then struck, quite forcibly, by the idea of
pursuing art as I had pursued Literature since stepping off of that creative
path.
I had applied to my reading the principle of regressive
enlightenment which is based on the concept that literature, and even mankind,
are not wholly evolutionary. We are not advancing to a point that invalidates or
even diminishes what has gone before. Milton and Chaucer are still worthy of
study and, more importantly, appreciation. On the other hand, works of
literature are inspired and coloured by previous works such that to appreciate
the context of one you should understand the former. My rule of thumb therefore
was that every time I read a book that referenced another work I would then have
to read that work. I had to abandon the idea when I started reading Umberto Eco
for obvious reasons. The practise took me though through all the Russians, the
French, to Stendhal, Goethe, Livy, Herodotus, Montaigne, Cicero, Moliere, and
certainly the list goes on and on. What is relevant though is that by walking
this path through time I became aware that art does not march forward. It
dances.
Thusly did I delve into Art History and so Art itself,
seeking for a truth that embraced equally both past and present. There had to be
some Philosopher's Stone that could unite all the arts into a single alchemical
property. My pursuit of the question 'why' had taken my to tracking down the
'how'.
This was not an overnight change nor was it entirely
conscious. It was impossible to see the effect that the performance had had upon
me from my own immediate perspective.
My first Madonnas came from this period. My search was
showing me hundreds of artists painting thousands of Madonnas and each of them
approaching the subject with a different perspective. It took only a single
attempt to show me how useful these could be as exercises in composition and in
particular the relationship between foreground and background. With a Madonna
and Child, the artist is restricted to keeping the figures in repose and the
spirit must be passive and restive. The artist can therefore look for ways to
enhance this passivity or instead find ways to bring the whole of the piece to
life with vibrant compositional tricks all the while maintaining stillness in
gesture. Similarly, the painter can seek to bring bright colours in which
counterbalance the reserved and quiet tone. All of these things though must be
done with some subtlety in application and integrity must be maintained ere the
overall mood is lost.
One of the attractions of the Madonna and Child is that it is
a subject matter that absolutely requires beauty. The love of the Mother and the
Child toward one another is made apparent by the sublime beauty that the artist
can create in the scene. Balance, order, and unity all work together to make a
piece which, ideally, comes across as cleanly beautiful and so spiritual.
Modernists would be so proud of themselves when they
discovered abstraction that allowed them to explore all the pure aspects of
painting but what so many of them failed to understand was that artists had been
effectively doing same thing for hundreds of years. Different staples of art
allowed for different variations in composition and technique for the artist to
explore. That there were figurative elements added another level of complexity
and possibility but did not trap the artist. Not the good artists at least.
The other thing about a Madonna that makes them fascinating
is that the artist really has the opportunity to explore what he believes to be
the ideal woman. It is not the sexiest or cutest woman but rather it is the
ideal woman as mother and care giver and he must have this ideal woman pour out
her love onto a child that is clearly not himself so it becomes the ideal woman
that loves another more than she could ever love him so it is an unselfish
perfection that he is painting.
I became aware of this only after I had first begun putting
the image Beatrice into my paintings as the Madonna. Being a young man without
much experience with women, I had feared that my attraction to this woman was
based on something sexual but it was through my incorporation of her into my art
attempts that I came to realize that she was occupying a distinctly non-sexual
and even unromantic in my heart. She was definitely something more than a
typical divinely perfect muse.