A moment of complete happiness never occurs in the creation of a work of art. The promise of it is felt in the act of creation but disappears towards the completion of the work. For it is then that the painter realizes that it is only a picture he is painting. Until then he had almost dared to hope that the picture might spring to life. Were it not for this, the perfect painting might be painted, on the completion of which the painter could retire. It is this great insufficiency that drives him on. Thus the process of creation becomes necessary to the painter perhaps more than it is in the picture. The process in fact is habit-forming.
- Lucian Freud
What rings particularly true in Lucian Freud’s statement is not so much that a piece of art might spring to life like Pygmalion’s sculpture of Galatea, but the hope that it might be perfect. What might a perfect picture look like? Monet succeeded in painting one with Soleil Levant (Sunrise); It's painted deftly and transmits the joy he must've felt while painting it, as well, it transports us to that hazy morning in 1872. Although perfect to me, it may not have been perfect to Monet, otherwise, as Freud says, he may never have felt the need to paint another.
I have yet to execute my perfect picture, but occasionally I have a perfect day in the studio. On those days my brain, body, and the material all pull together to produce something worthy of making the ghosts of art’s history proud. I live for those rare, perfect days. Most, however, feel comparable to the movie title Live, Die, Repeat (a modernized retelling of the fates of Prometheus and Sisyphus), which is to say that each day begins with hope and a plan, but usually ends with only incremental growth, and sometimes in utter defeat. Then it is repeated. Likewise, each new piece carries with it the potential to accomplish what the last one didn’t. My husband, Dion Kliner, says he wakes up every morning an optimist and goes to bed every night a pessimist. I enter my studio an optimist and leave a pessimist, but with hope. The painter Philip Guston said it beautifully when he compared his studio ritual to the Hasidic Jews who get up to dance in the spirit of despair, but dance, nevertheless, they do.
While the subjects of my paintings and drawings can be considered under a common heading of the natural landscape, shrubs and forests are commonly held to exist at opposite ends of a spectrum of interest and attention that runs from the banal to the sublime.
In my paintings I have concentrated my attention on an aspect of what I would call the banal natural landscape, the ordinary shrub. "Banal" and "landscape" aren't usually thought of as going together. Landscape, especially in Canadian landscape painting, is usually thought of and represented as romantic, mysterious, majestic, picturesque, anything but banal. Think of Emily Carr, Toni Onley, and The Group of Seven. And though the aestheticization of the everyday (pejoratively known as the banal) is a well trod path (from the mosaic table scraps of Sosus's 'Unswept Floor' from 2nd century Pergamon, to Edward Ruscha's book of photographs, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, to Giorgio Morandi's still lives of vases and bottles, to Alex Katz's portraits of his wife, to the monumental Ballon Dog sculptures of Jeff Koons), it moves through principally urban and domestic terrain. What is generally overlooked, however, are reprsentations of the banal in the natural world.
Adapting a snapshot aesthetic similar to street photography to my painting practice, I have hunted the neighbourhoods of Vancouver for those overlooked, supporting characters of Canadian landscape - the "wild," unmanicured shrubs growing in parks, vacant lots, and at the sides of homes. What makes the shrub an ideal vehicle for the banal is its freedom from kinds of literary, cultural, and historical references and associations that encumber trees, flowers, and even vegetables.
After painting, I need to draw. Painting is an active, assertive process, drawing is methodic and meditative. The German author Goethe recommended that we must "...retire from the world from time to time, for the world with its lewd and superficial activity interferes with the awakening of the best." For me, the site of that retreat and awakening is the forest. Unlike the common shrub, forests provide their own narrative. Forests are the romantic backdrop to our culture. They are sublime, and revered. When pillaged for profit, their loss is mourned. A tree reaching skyward is enlightenment of mind and spirit. As a stump, or shattered by nature, it is death and the fragility of life. They hide the innocent and protect the guilty. Looking into a forest from the outside is to peer into the unknown and unforeseen. It can trigger the age old response so ingrained in our psyches, don't go into the forest alone.
A solitary tree packs a very different punch than a lone elderberry bush.
On Houseflies
The object is almost irrelevant, though not completely. Although flies come saturated with descriptive and cultural references, there's nothing spiritual, or emotional, or intellectual about my fly-as-subject. It was there when I found it. Yes, they are flies, there's no mistake. But in an odd way it only comes into focus secondarily, after it's understood as a series of marks. When it defies this route and the object of the work is seen first, it nevertheless very soon crumbles into intricacy and the sensitivity of just marks. The expectation of narrative that recognizable objects bring, is frustrated.
In Towards a Newer Laocoon, Clement Greenberg wrote that 'Literature's' corrupting influence is only felt when the senses are neglected. With the flies, the senses are not neglected and the literature that would fill these images otherwise is held out. Yet the drawings gain by this, the more so for their silence in the face of literature. Further on in Laocoon Greenberg has a passage that becomes applicable when "poem" is replaced by "drawing," "poet writes" with "artist draws," "reader's" with "viewer's," and "poetry" with "art." Adjusted, the passage reads:
The drawing still offers possibilities of meaning - but only possibilities. Should any of them be too precisely realized, the drawing would lose the greatest part of its efficacy, which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities by approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling over it. The artist draws, not so much to express, as to create a thing which will operate upon the viewer's consciousness to produce the emotion of art.
Darcy Mann
- Lucian Freud
What rings particularly true in Lucian Freud’s statement is not so much that a piece of art might spring to life like Pygmalion’s sculpture of Galatea, but the hope that it might be perfect. What might a perfect picture look like? Monet succeeded in painting one with Soleil Levant (Sunrise); It's painted deftly and transmits the joy he must've felt while painting it, as well, it transports us to that hazy morning in 1872. Although perfect to me, it may not have been perfect to Monet, otherwise, as Freud says, he may never have felt the need to paint another.
I have yet to execute my perfect picture, but occasionally I have a perfect day in the studio. On those days my brain, body, and the material all pull together to produce something worthy of making the ghosts of art’s history proud. I live for those rare, perfect days. Most, however, feel comparable to the movie title Live, Die, Repeat (a modernized retelling of the fates of Prometheus and Sisyphus), which is to say that each day begins with hope and a plan, but usually ends with only incremental growth, and sometimes in utter defeat. Then it is repeated. Likewise, each new piece carries with it the potential to accomplish what the last one didn’t. My husband, Dion Kliner, says he wakes up every morning an optimist and goes to bed every night a pessimist. I enter my studio an optimist and leave a pessimist, but with hope. The painter Philip Guston said it beautifully when he compared his studio ritual to the Hasidic Jews who get up to dance in the spirit of despair, but dance, nevertheless, they do.
While the subjects of my paintings and drawings can be considered under a common heading of the natural landscape, shrubs and forests are commonly held to exist at opposite ends of a spectrum of interest and attention that runs from the banal to the sublime.
In my paintings I have concentrated my attention on an aspect of what I would call the banal natural landscape, the ordinary shrub. "Banal" and "landscape" aren't usually thought of as going together. Landscape, especially in Canadian landscape painting, is usually thought of and represented as romantic, mysterious, majestic, picturesque, anything but banal. Think of Emily Carr, Toni Onley, and The Group of Seven. And though the aestheticization of the everyday (pejoratively known as the banal) is a well trod path (from the mosaic table scraps of Sosus's 'Unswept Floor' from 2nd century Pergamon, to Edward Ruscha's book of photographs, Every Building on the Sunset Strip, to Giorgio Morandi's still lives of vases and bottles, to Alex Katz's portraits of his wife, to the monumental Ballon Dog sculptures of Jeff Koons), it moves through principally urban and domestic terrain. What is generally overlooked, however, are reprsentations of the banal in the natural world.
Adapting a snapshot aesthetic similar to street photography to my painting practice, I have hunted the neighbourhoods of Vancouver for those overlooked, supporting characters of Canadian landscape - the "wild," unmanicured shrubs growing in parks, vacant lots, and at the sides of homes. What makes the shrub an ideal vehicle for the banal is its freedom from kinds of literary, cultural, and historical references and associations that encumber trees, flowers, and even vegetables.
After painting, I need to draw. Painting is an active, assertive process, drawing is methodic and meditative. The German author Goethe recommended that we must "...retire from the world from time to time, for the world with its lewd and superficial activity interferes with the awakening of the best." For me, the site of that retreat and awakening is the forest. Unlike the common shrub, forests provide their own narrative. Forests are the romantic backdrop to our culture. They are sublime, and revered. When pillaged for profit, their loss is mourned. A tree reaching skyward is enlightenment of mind and spirit. As a stump, or shattered by nature, it is death and the fragility of life. They hide the innocent and protect the guilty. Looking into a forest from the outside is to peer into the unknown and unforeseen. It can trigger the age old response so ingrained in our psyches, don't go into the forest alone.
A solitary tree packs a very different punch than a lone elderberry bush.
On Houseflies
The object is almost irrelevant, though not completely. Although flies come saturated with descriptive and cultural references, there's nothing spiritual, or emotional, or intellectual about my fly-as-subject. It was there when I found it. Yes, they are flies, there's no mistake. But in an odd way it only comes into focus secondarily, after it's understood as a series of marks. When it defies this route and the object of the work is seen first, it nevertheless very soon crumbles into intricacy and the sensitivity of just marks. The expectation of narrative that recognizable objects bring, is frustrated.
In Towards a Newer Laocoon, Clement Greenberg wrote that 'Literature's' corrupting influence is only felt when the senses are neglected. With the flies, the senses are not neglected and the literature that would fill these images otherwise is held out. Yet the drawings gain by this, the more so for their silence in the face of literature. Further on in Laocoon Greenberg has a passage that becomes applicable when "poem" is replaced by "drawing," "poet writes" with "artist draws," "reader's" with "viewer's," and "poetry" with "art." Adjusted, the passage reads:
The drawing still offers possibilities of meaning - but only possibilities. Should any of them be too precisely realized, the drawing would lose the greatest part of its efficacy, which is to agitate the consciousness with infinite possibilities by approaching the brink of meaning and yet never falling over it. The artist draws, not so much to express, as to create a thing which will operate upon the viewer's consciousness to produce the emotion of art.
Darcy Mann
