New Acquisition - 'Winchester 2'

 So, herewith, the new painting. Gentle and therapeutic in these difficult times as well as, I think, 'art' without being ground-breaking or challenging. There's a lot to be said for doing traditional things well.

It's an extravagance in these financially shrivelled times, I dare say, but it's only the second actual painting I've ever bought and it is guaranteed the repay the investment by providing its price in enjoyment, especially when I hear how much sports fans pay to see short-lived, often disappointing, made-to-measure sport.

It might have been the rosy tint on the brickwork at the centre of the painting that drew me in, the reflections in the water are almost as much of a regular feature in a certain sort of painting as rhyme is in a certain sort of poetry, but it's part of the composition with the trees on either side, the welcome lack of human figures that we are told are good to have but certainly aren't compulsory and so it has a quiet geometry about it as I carve it roughly into twelve blocks of colour in the most elementary of art appreciation exercises.

As with the recondite task of writing about music, words are
what painting is free to go beyond and not have to 'mean' anything and so, to a writer, they are like a day off from work, like it is for those cricketers who prefer playing golf or those poets who really wanted to be pop singers.

 

Frank Clarke is genuinely local, it having been the annual exhibition of the Portsmouth and Hampshire Art Society. As happens when discovering about any creative artist, one 'quite likes' most of their work but it is one item that stands out, makes them special and draws you in to the rest of their work. It's a mighty long way from the Portsmouth and Hants Society to any short list of all-time favourites and there's precious little coherence to be found in my favourite painters, even taking the elements of colour, composition, quietness, geometry and subject matter- but not all of them at once- from Winchester 2 and trying to look to find such reasons to believe. Someone like me finds it hard to live without such things, though, even if 'all you have to be is any good'.

So,

Top 6 Painters

 

Vermeer, without a shadow of a doubt from the soft light he uses, is the greatest. Most immediately for the quiet but also for the composition, the untold stories happening elsewhere but, when you see them in real life, for the paint. The art of poetry is about the use of words and painting's about the use of paint. After 350 years the detail and the way he did it are gently amazing. It can't have been a real world any more than Bach's Well-Tempered Klavier is a real world but it reflects on such a thing from a refined distance.

Maggi Hambling is entirely the opposite in many ways, passionately applying the paint to the canvas and often allowing it to run down as if the intensity of the moment cared less about such precision than Vermeer's. It's involved with life and love and sex and death, war, climate change, something vaudevillian. And panache. We are grateful sometimes that that's all it is and that she can only bring a fraction of her real-life lack of compromise to the paintings.

 

Mark Rothko went to the other extreme by gradually becoming less figurative, his blocks of colour seeping into each other and getting darker until they stopped generating a pulse, went black and he committed suicide. Entirely inappropriately, one might think, he's grouped with Jackson Pollock as an Abstract Expressionist which only goes to show how much use such labels are. Jack the Dripper painted chaos and killed himself inadvertently in a big, flash car whereas Rothko painted dark meditations. The only thing they had in common was the booze.

The dark side of Walter Sickert was only that he was for a while suspected of being Jack the Ripper. He was a sort of Whistler, maybe a bit French, which was a good thing at the time, and like Degas, but it was his Brighton Pierrots, a print of which remains the main feature of my front room, seen in the Ashmolean, that sprang him into my big league for its evocation of downbeat, end-of-season, poorly attended showmanship. His Ennui is a dreadful insight into a 'relationship' and, like so much of his work, achieves something that poetry probably couldn't.

We could flood the market with contemporaries of Vermeer, like Pieter de Hooch and Carel Fabritius, in the same way that one could readily provide a Top 6 of composers that concentrated on Bach, Handel and Buxtehude and it would be hard not to. However,

leaving out Rembrandt would be almost as much a crime as leaving out Shakespeare from a list of writers. Like Shakespeare, or David Bowie or the Beatles in pop music, he seems to set a standard that gets taken for granted and so doesn't feel like a personal favourite. But it's the time that passes, isn't it, in the self portraits, perhaps even the courage needed to record its effect but, still, the paint. What he says and how he does it. There doesn't need to be much more to any sort of art appreciation than that.

Which leaves us with the free hit, the sometimes unlikely sixth choice often done because, quite honestly, one last choice isn't enough when there are so many deserving candidates left.

They queue up like customers trying to get served in a busy bar, hoping to catch the eye. One isn't supposed to extend a Top 6 by crediting near misses but they are my rules so I can break them. It feels as if I ought to have another Old Master, maybe Titian for his blue and longevity, but more likely the Brueghel of The Fall of Icarus, as per Auden. Marc Chagall has been a long-time favourite with his dreamy people and farm animals floating above the Russian shtetl, it could be Canaletto with his busy scenes of Venice or Hieronymous Bosch and his nightmares. Or, if we want more quietness,Vilhelm Hammershøi, who is also a choice exhibit in the front room. I don't even know yet but I've just gone back and put Hammershøi in bold, impressed by his monchrome and forgiving how he seems to me to have got the shadows wrong in the print I have. 

 

And, while I was doing that the big bang at the front door was two books landing on the food recycling box. Not many houses in this street had deliveries of Nikolai Leskov and Ronald Firbank books today, one wouldn't think and so now at least there is some 'summer reading' with which to fend off the heat.