I’ve many drawings of groups of people I’d like to work up into paintings or prints but have been having trouble getting started. Composing pictures of a group is a new and tricky territory, especially when you’re personally interested in telling a story or conveying a social hierarchy or relationships between characters. I sulked over some of my efforts, before remembering that I can’t be the only person to have been troubled by this before. I remembered the wise words of the Gentle Author, who after feeding me and watering me on a bleak day, accompanied by the restorative power of a black cat on my lap, advised: ‘ you must study and learn from the best, only the best, of your field’. So on my occasional civilised Friday evenings sketching sessions at the National Gallery I’ve been on the look out for advice from some of the masters. This painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump by Joseph Wright of Derby (1756) never fails to astonish me and every visitor that steps into room 34. It tells the story of a scientist demonstrating a vacuum to a family, with members of all ages gathered round. In basic terms, the fate of the cockatoo (presumably the family’s pet, its cage open to the right) echoes the cycle of life around the table, from innocent children, an excited boy, young lovers, a steady father, to an old man contemplating his own mortality. We have joined the family at a pivotal moment.
I am constantly bored by many modern painters that work from photographs slavishly. Looking at this painting reminds me that something beyond realism, something richer, can be achieved through observation and careful study that can never be captured by a lens in a single instant. Wright’s skill is much more than his technical ability. The true realism in this painting is not just the Caravaggio-like play of light and shadow, skin textures, fabrics or details. Rather, it is the relationship between its characters. I tried to tease it out by sketching the painting.
There is an enormous storm of tension and energy in the room. Virtually every figure is directed towards the bird, yet all are different in their poise and expression. The light from a single flame, hidden behind a glass, ties the family together. If you were to follow each of their respective gazes, there would a tangled web across the room. Only the father and son to the left, and younger sister, are truly watching. The lovers are distracted with each other, the scientist looks out towards us, the viewer, inviting us into the claustrophobic room. The middle-aged man and girls form an intimate and protected ring, the oldest man is lost in thought contemplating a skull. The bird appears to cry in appeal to the audience.
These three are difficult to capture, mainly because of the elaborate arrangement of their limbs. The girls’ hands are especially delicate, the older sister’s draped around the younger’s neck, and the younger’s in return gripping the elder’s sash. The elder’s left arm protects not only her face, but her entire body, from the event. I like that the older man’s body can be seen virtually all the way around the two of them like a protective cocoon. The girls are not unlike my sister and I, I tend to be more emotional about things but I’m fairly sure Eleanor would be brave, if not stubborn enough, to watch the whole thing through.
These two are exquisite. Newly engaged, they only have eyes for each other. I love their shared knowing look. Her black lace choker shows of her milky white neck, it seems a sensual choice of colour against the conservative pale blue. His right hand is hidden, I like to think it is folded under the left and tucked away, perhaps reaching for her hand, out of view. These two sitters married and were later painted by Wright in 1770, here are Mr and Mrs Thomas Coltman below.
There is so much more that could be said about the Experiment and Mr Wright but I’ll leave that to the art historians. But for now I’ve much to muse on and many ideas to try out for myself.
I’m a big fan of the BP Portrait award and try to go every year but I also am disappointed by the hyper-realistic, photo based trend of painting that seems to be growing. There is so much life in the paintings you have shown, and your drawings, so much for the viewer to use as a jumping point for the imagination.
Here here to all the above, and to Sally’s comment re the over-use of photographs as an aid. I too saw the BP exhibition and was dispirited by what was on offer, with so many artists herding down the route of relying too heavily on photographs instead of on their own unmediated observations of reality. To me, using photographs rather than studying and recording the model directly with a drawing or painting, has resulted in this particular show in a weird sense of cloning, with the same ideas and techniques turning up over and over again. I had an overwhelming sense of ennui as I saw work after work where all the energy had gone into faithfully recording each hair and every pore in the skin.
The camera sees quite differently to the human eye and I can’t fathom why painters want to surrender their autonomy to the mechanism in this way, because in so doing many of them are completely relinquishing their own artistic freedom. Imagination grows stale, replaced with a mechanical process mediating the world. I begin to wonder whether they even know what ‘s going on, perhaps being so familiar with the photographed image that they can’t distinguish it from the reality of seeing WITHOUT a mechanical intervention. The human eye has evolved such a miraculous process of seeing that I can’t imagine ever personally wanting… as an artist that is… to replace it with the mechanical shutter. For me photography is photography, a marvellous medium and an art in its own right, and painting is painting. While I can see that judicious use of a camera can expand understanding of the subject (and in David Hockney’s case, filter reality into something uniquely and magically his own) replacing the human with the mechanical can have catastrophic drawbacks, many of them on view in the BP exhibition.
I’d just like to add that there was work I found to be interesting and rewarding in the show, though too little for such a big exhibition. Mark-making by the human hand will always be a fascinating and rewarding subject, both to practise and to observe, and I for one would always rather see the human eye at work underpinning any artwork, rather than a camera lens.
(David Hockney’s fascinating book ‘Secret Knowledge’ is both insightful and a breath of fresh air through the arcane world of artists who historically… and in secret… used optical aids. Many curators and art historians were aghast at what Hockney brought to light, because they themselves hadn’t spotted what to him, as a painter, was the blindingly obvious. Using mechanical help with observation clearly isn’t new, but in the past the means to do so was cruder and required more skill from the painters than is needed with modern technology. It strikes me that the cruder the technology, the more the artist has to work to make good the deficits, and that alone adds tens of thousands of judgement calls to any process of making a painting, something relinquished by any contemporary artist with a digital image and a projector. I recommend Secret Knowledge. It’s a marvellous read.)
Clive, Thank you so much for such a full and considered response, I think you’ve upped this from a comments place into a real forum for debate! I must look at Hockney’s book. Funnily enough I recently watched a documentary called ‘A Bigger Picture’ which showed Hockney re-tracing his roots in England, painting giant landscapes at speed. Made just a few years after ‘Secret Knowledge’ he continues to muse on the subject of photography and the Western art world’s pre-occupation with realism since the 1420s. He dismisses photography as a method which forces an artists to look through a window, ‘a window on the world means you’re cut off from it… You want to be in it, no disconnected!’ This really struck a chord with me, and I thought about how my own drawings these days tend to curve and bend at the corners, wanting to enwrap me and solidly locate me.
It’s frustrating as an aspiring artist to see realism dominate many modern commercial galleries. Personally, I know that with enough practice I have the observational skills to produce this kind of work, and it certainly seems commercially viable, but every bone in my body tells me it’d be selling out and prentending to be something I’m not and leaves me cold! What’s a young artist to do?