A Painter's Quandary

Sometime ago I was sitting in the garden of one of Lions Bay's waterfront properties. The garden in full May bloom; the day sunfilled; Howe Sound glittering; the mountains still snow-capped. I recalled far off art student days when one revelled in such experiences, painted them with fervour and did so for many years later. The essentials of many a painter or poet were still in that garden. Monet, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Group of Seven were there to be seen. Keats also was there and Al Purdy was everywhere else; one could hear his unforgettable voice.

But now, although we still react to such sunfilled days with considerable feeling, some of us now have little desire or need to paint them. It has all been done before.

In the 1960s, painting as we knew it arrived at a terminus when a plain black painting was exhibited and met with much acclaim by the art critics; a plain black painting, no other colour was included; it was deep funereal black, marking the end, indeed the death of progressive painting as we had known it since Giotto (c1267-1337) to the 20th century. A century firmly established with many "isms", all bent on destroying or replacing that which had been accepted for years in society and the arts. None more readily than the Italian Futurists' manifesto (1909-1912) with their emphasis on violence in a fast moving, machine driven world. A violence which found full expression in the Great War (1914-1918) and in the early murmuring of Communism and Fascism, both ultimately intent on replacing established orders at the cost of millions of lives.

The arts did not directly cause the horrors, but the finger of most of the "isms" was definitely on the pulse of the real world - and it still is.

One has to ask if amid this ongoing change the role of the painter is slowly being diminished, especially if the collapse of Modern Art is considered with the fragments that lay at its feet forming into Post-Modernism, each fragment pursuing its own end, at long last free of the restraints, in fact the tyranny of pure abstraction. This indeed was what many had hoped for, but with it came a lack of concerted direction - a strength of singular direction which ironically was what Modern Art had. Momentum had been weakened; the spectre of the Black painting was hanging there, and is still there as a reminder.

One fears that painting in the future could easily fall into a category comparable to that of collecting vintage cars, when people pursue them, collect and exhibit them with understandable enthusiasm and satisfaction, as something of historical significance which can still be enjoyed in the present, whenever that present is.

Surely the next step could be to go on from the terminus of the Black painting, to change stations so to speak, for another branch dealing visually with that which is starting to emerge in the 21st century; one can only guess how that future will unfold. We could see the role of the visual artist being mentally and socially transformed as she or he is absorbed into that which is emerging in technology, cyberspace, electronics, physics, come what may; where brushes and paint are redundant. So whereas today we hang a painting of a street in Paris which is in fact an illusion contained in a frame, hanging on a wall; we could in time come to be in a position to just activate a device and find ourselves in a street in Paris, with the city's architecture, sounds and smells all round us. The sensation will be of actually being there, but of course it will be an illusion. On top of this we could have holograms of people of our choice, programmed to our needs lurking in the house. It would be intensely exciting, or it could be bereft of sensibility: a complete technological dehumanization redolent with the superficial; the culmination of a fall which started with a symbolic apple a long, long time ago. The solitary trademark on the lids of many laptops of today does not go unnoticed in such a context, especially as quite a bite has been taken out of it.

One sincerely hopes that we will still have gardens in Lions Bay in which to seek solace, but Keats, Monet and the Group of Seven might have fled by then knowing what we have lurking in the house and how we have been to Paris.

In spite of it all, painters of my ilk will stubbornly pursue a progression in painting that is surely there to be found, and only hope that we will not end up mummified in a future anthropological museum as an example of a breed long gone in the past.

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