| Philip Braham | ||
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Foreword The scientific quest for truth is inspirational, and frequently reveals structural and theoretical relationships of awesome beauty. But of course the beauty of the known, however spectacular, is no match for the beauty imagined. In its name pyramids, temples, cathedrals and monuments were built; marble became flesh and paintings were windows that looked into worlds of beauty and horror. But the twilight of the gods has passed. That we live in a rational age is beyond dispute, and the steady march of technology has changed our social and cultural perspectives radically, to the extent that we have become increasingly secularised and are deeply sceptical of all belief systems or of cultural codes whose appeal is not towards the rational. In other words, science has deposed religion and art, and their significance wanes in proportion to its advance. These are the conditions in which we find ourselves. They have been established for long enough that it is unchallenged by cultural critical thinking and the ennui that has settled allows only for the production of the playful, the self-reflective, the ironic or the sexual. Art must not aspire to lofty ideas or it will be shown to be false, or at best naïve. Some art critics, like Matthew Collings for example, believe that the only path out of the maze is through formal abstract rigour. That alone can elevate art to a level of importance and integrity, but at the cost of narrative content, associative imagery, atmospheric staging, expressive handling and virtually the entire gamut of component devises that distinguish the works he reveres above all: the late paintings of Titian. Disabling art in such a way cannot add to its ability to communicate profoundly to us, and the notion that such distillation renders a purer or more potent work is a semantic fallacy that has already been thoroughly explored by Mondrian. I believe that art can retain its significance without resorting to the amputation of its withered limbs. Its scope has shifted from the universal to the personal, so it is required to adjust its gaze both inwardly and outwardly to recognise individual experience in the context of ever expanding horizons of knowledge. Memory provides the apparatus for foresight, and is essential to progress in all fields of knowledge. By circumventing the prescribed routes and proceeding modestly, art might still touch others intimately and deeply (the opposite of sexually, ironically etc.), through reconnecting and repositioning forgotten experience in the represented image. It is the ability of an image to induce a state of recognition in the viewer that enables a work of art to communicate, but the profundity of the idea is dependent on the economy of an exchange in which the artist and the viewer are judged together. From this position the impurities that need expunged from art are sentimentality, exaggeration, decorative seduction, formal preciousness and any florid adornment that is not integral to the idea itself. Even then there can be no appeal to lofty claims, but at least the work retains honesty and that alone might lend it integrity. Those are the preconditions I have set for myself, and my work has become ever more quiet and respectful of the world as I find it. My modus operandi is that I travel alone with no planned route, through landscapes to which I feel affiliated, opening up my visual awareness to the shifts in light on the forms of the landscape. I use a camera as a notebook, but experience has taught me to be wary of the scenic: the elements that lend themselves to strong photographic images are never those that work as a good painting. The camera is useful first as a means of framing the experience, and secondly in providing enough visual reference to organise into a painting. The painting often begins months after the original research, and always through reflection, returning to the memory of what it felt like to be in that landscape and the associations it had suggested. The labour of painting is not in attaining a photographic likeness but in its departure from it. Its faithfulness is a by-product of the preconditions I set out above, and within these the real work of the painting is in the subtle adjustments of emphasis necessary to come close to the remembered landscape. Colour relationships, compositional arrangements, spatial considerations, and the quality of light all influence the atmospheric charge I seek to portray.
In the end it is a
subjective rendering of a personal world, but no less truthful than an
objective scientific one.
Philip Braham All images and content ©2008 Philip Braham |