A few years ago, I happened across the following paragraph in Nietzsche’s “The Gay Science”.1 (I hesitate to refer to this book, which contains passages of vile anti-Semitism and sexism. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day, and there are other passages in this work that are remarkably thoughtful and prescient.)
The attraction of imperfection.–Here I see a poet who, like many a human being, is more attractive by virtue of his imperfections than he is by all the things that grow to completion and perfection under his hands. Indeed, he owes his advantages and fame much more to his ultimate incapacity than to his ample strength. His works never wholly express what he would like to express and what he would like to have seen: it seems as if he had had the foretaste of a vision and never the vision itself; but a tremendous lust for this vision remains in his soul, and it is from this that he derives his equally tremendous eloquence of desire and craving. By virtue of this lust he lifts his listeners above his work and all mere “works” and lends them wings to soar as high as listeners had ever soared. Then, having themselves been transformed into poets and seers, they lavish admiration upon the creator of their happiness, as if he had led them immediately to the vision of what was for him the holiest and ultimate–as if he had attained his goal and had really seen and communicated his vision. His fame benefits from the fact that he never reached his goal.
I was profoundly encouraged by this passage when I first read it. What it says is that the value of a work of art is not determined by how closely the artist was able to replicate the original vision that motivated the work. What makes a work successful is the “lust” the artist feels for the vision, the burning desire to recreate something that exists only in the artist’s mind.
Years later, I feel that the passage is a remarkably accurate explanation of the experience of an artist. When I start working on a painting, I have a mental image of what I want to create. This image, however, is not photographic; it feels precise but is in fact fuzzy. Indeed, it is not an image. Nor is it an idea. At one point, during a road trip, I was getting lots of what I used to call “ideas” for paintings, and I tried to hold on to them by writing them down, so that I wouldn’t forget them. What happened when I returned home is that I was only able to work on the images that were the strongest in my mind. Nearly everything that I put into words lost its magic. It was as though putting the fragile and volatile vision into words made it disappear, like a snowflake on a bare finger. Since that experience, I no longer put my visions into words. Instead, I do a small, rough sketch in a sketchbook. In this way, I avoid translating the visual into the verbal.
For many people learning to draw, the challenge is to see things two-dimensionally. People who did not draw as children seem to find it difficult to turn something three-dimensional into a two-dimensional image, and what seems to help them is to recognize that the image we see with our eyes, the image that is projected onto our retina, is two-dimensional. When I am working from imagination, however, I am almost always working three-dimensionally. There is some two-dimensional thinking that goes into creating a pleasing composition, but most of the rest of the time, I feel as though I were sculpting rather than painting. I develop the buildings, objects, and people in my paintings on a two-dimensional surface but thinking three-dimensionally; I cannot think two-dimensionally because I am not actually looking at an image and don’t have an image on my retinas; I am building up whatever it is I am drawing or painting out of nothing. I believe, or hope, that when a viewer looks at one of my paintings, they can sense that the painting was built three-dimensionally, and they, too, build a three-dimensional image in their minds.
During the course of a painting, as I am mixing colours and applying them to the support,2 I feel a great sense of delight as I produce things that look real. Creating a convincing feeling of sunlight and shade is especially satisfying. For long periods during the painting process, therefore, I am on a high, floating on clouds. I feel that I am creating the best painting I have ever painted. As the painting approaches completion, however, I almost always feel disappointed, sometimes severely. I feel that the painting is not what I had intended, that I was not able to reproduce the image I thought I had in mind, and that the work will not produce the effect on the viewer that I had hoped for. Sometimes, a painting goes through a stage where I feel that a colour choice is wrong (one of the greatest difficulties of working from imagination is deciding on the colours of things), and, after a struggle, which may last a long time, I come through, feeling that I have won the battle. But even then, the end of the painting is usually disappointing. It takes a few days to a week before I no longer see the painting as a failure.
I think that what is going on is that while I am working on the painting, I am working towards that fuzzy vision, and what I see when I look at the unfinished painting is the vision rather than the painting. As the painting gets close to completion, however, what I see is the actual painting, which can never match the vision, since I have not actually seen the image that I am trying to create. However, the painting, in spite of not living up to the original image, is an honest attempt to capture that vision, to make it real, and to give the viewer a sense of what I have in mind. As time goes on, I grow to appreciate and love it for what it is, even though it is never exactly what I was aiming for.
When I first started working on paintings from imagination, I worried about getting things right. For example, shadows always had to make sense given the geometry of the space in the painting, the direction of the sunlight, and the perspective. I then did some paintings in which I intentionally made the perspective or shadows incorrect, and I realized that the viewer cannot, in fact, recognize flaws that are subtle. The following painting, for example, contains intentional perspective errors, but I bet you would not have noticed if I hadn’t said anything.
Even after this discovery, I continued to feel self-conscious about the choices I was making in my paintings. If I made something a certain colour, or if I violated a standard rule of painting, I wanted to make sure I was doing so for the right reasons. Then, I heard an interview with Japanese dancer Kaoru Okumura, in which Okumura commented that Americans always want to understand everything in a work of art. When they see a dance performance, they go up to the dancer afterwards and ask what this or that specific move meant. Okumura’s gentle response is to ask them how it made them feel to watch the dance. I realized that I, too, having spent most of my life in the United States, was trying to understand everything. I finally accepted that I do not need to understand everything, not in other people’s works of art, and not in my own work. This freed me immensely. I could relax, trusting my subconscious, and relying on my artistic instincts, which I have worked so hard to hone. Understanding everything can only result in a shallow painting.
Recently, I had the opportunity to see Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” on the big screen. The film is a series of evocative images held together by a plot that is full of holes. It is the images that give the film its power. In a 1994 BBC interview, Hitchcock says:
What is reality? I don’t think many people want reality … in theater or in films. I think it must look real but it never must be because reality is something none of us can really stand at any time. Where sometimes one gets a little, gets into little difficulties with the American people is that they want everything spelled out, you know, exactly, and they worry about content. I don’t care about content at all. The film can be about anything you like, so long as I’m making that audience react in a certain way to whatever I put on the screen. And if you begin to worry about the details of what are the papers about that the spies are trying to steal, well that’s a lot of …, no I can’t be bothered about what the papers are, what the spies are after …. I often run afoul of critics who criticize content instead of the technique.
I used to worry a lot about making the details of my paintings “correct”, as they would be in the real world. But that, as Hitchcock says, does not matter. Correctness in the details is not what makes a work of art great.
Going one step further, I recently realized that not only was I holding my work back by insisting on understanding everything in it, but that I was holding it back also by constraining it too tightly to my initial vision. I had heard writers talk about how they would start a novel without knowing everything that would happen in it, and how they would allow their characters, as though they were autonomous people in the real world, to determine the unfolding of the story. I had never understood this, but recently, I have been having a similar experience with my paintings. I start the painting based loosely on a sketch, and I then allow the painting to lead me where it wants to go. It is still too soon to say how this method will pan out.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 133. ↩︎
- A support is what the painting is painted on. My paintings are typically on panel, linen mounted on panel, or linen. In the latter case, the linen is stretched on a what is called a strainer. Increasingly, I favour panels because paintings in art museums painted on stretched linen or canvas a century ago are full of fine cracks, whereas paintings painted on panel five centuries ago look like they were completed last year. ↩︎