9780773599826_WEB.pdf by Harry Underwood

Author:Harry Underwood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-07-28T04:44:22+00:00

5

Seeing and Making in Art

Art exists because what is seen is also felt and demands to be expressed. This is primordial, as is shown in the very earliest art objects such as votive images, which were invested with magical powers and were worshipped or propitiated. But, as these pieces are, all art seems always to have been derived from the real. The earliest form of painting, the cave art of the Paleolithic Era, was so. These effigies were, plausibly, precipitated by the remembered excitement of the hunt, and the desire to relive it in the mind. (They have the quality of a dream.) During the hunt, the hunter is pure instinct and does not reflect. But in the quiet aftermath, how could the bodies and the movements of the animals fail to recur to his mind? He might then have picked up a stick and begun to draw these images in the dust, and later again and again, for what crowds the consciousness must find expression somehow. Eventually, an inventive few might think to paint the herd on a cave wall, taking advantage of its verti-cality and horizontality, in order to depict the animals’ presence in and movement through space. The hunters are not depicted or are depicted only as stick figures, because to render them naturalistically, to create a tableau, would have been to objectify the experience, and thus to falsify it. The hunted animals are of course fully depicted, with staggering delicacy and with great sensitivity to how they appear, move, and mass in herds, because the exactness of naturalistic detail is essential to the expression of their felt beauty.

Cave paintings are often presumed to have been exercises in magic and so in a way they are, for art is a kind of magic: the herd is conjured

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into existence. But magic in the pure sense is not, as is often supposed, more primordial than art. This mistake is made because art is thought to exhibit a detached, and therefore higher-order, consciousness. The fact is that art has always expressed the experience of the artist from the inside. It originates in a heightened sensitivity to the perceived and this occurs alongside a quickening of the emotions: excitement is a form of attention. One can easily see that the paleolithic hunter was predisposed to be an artist because he was at no point lost in his experience, but was the master of it. Its conversion into art required, in addition, technical skill of a high order and an excellent visual memory, but not more.

The modern artist also seeks to capture the essential beauty of the phenomena he paints. In attacking the canvas, he concentrates on the scene before him, first taking it in as a whole and then in its details.

His gaze ranges back and forth from near to far. The vista resolves itself into planes and forms comprised of colour and tone. Some come into prominence and others recede. Finally they recompose themselves into

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