To Paint is to Love Again

For someone who has undergone tedious art studies, there is something almost irritating about listening1 to Henry Miller brag about his incompetence as a painter, and how envious his painter friends are of him. “ Painters seem to be intrigued by my easygoing devices. Now and then, one will say to me: ‘I wish I had the courage to do that’, as if it had taken courage on my part. When I explained that it was because of sheer ignorance, sheer inability that I made the houses as I did, the answer usually is: ‘No matter, you had fun. It makes a picture just the same.’ “2 Fun is important. I can see that my own paintings become worthless when I’m not having fun, if the work becomes a chore instead of a happily devoted focus, a childlike absorption in the task. “ How many, many times I have tried to imitate or copy the work of a child! (…) Time and again someone has walked in on me during a painting jamboree and exclaim: ‘What joyous colors! What freedom! You must be having fun!’ But is the joy of a child like man? Never have I noticed a child at work expressing this sort of joy. The child is too intent on what he is doing to absorb, to be aware of any accompanying emotion. Whatever the child does, whether expressive of fear, horror or anguish, the effect on the spectator is one of joy. The work of a child never fails to make appeal to claim us because it is always honest and sincere, always imbued with that magic certitude, born of the direct, spontaneous approach. “3 Dubuffet is a good example of a painter attempting to get close to the quality of works produced by children — or wrongly-named “crazy” people, and even animals: “ Haunted by slides, by flashes in the living water, how fascinating would be the work of a trout, if trout painted. That of the serpent — if serpents delivered their works to us — obsessed with burning stone. (…)And no matter what object they painted, and even if it were, for example, an apple, the trout would put in its cold runs, the serpent its stone (…). Men, we are passionate about works made by men like us, we eagerly seek in them the traces of the spectacles that populate our gazes at all times, of our obsessive daily apprehensions, of what, throughout our lives, falls under our senses at every step. And that is: a torn poster, a piece of sheet metal that shines, rusty iron, a muddy path, a lid painted with coal tar. (…)traces, trails, coincidences, (…)that’s what the painter must record and fix and assimilate and reproduce in his works, even painting an apple. “4 Whitney Claflin directly embeds these traces of human life into her paintings. Notebook paper, nails, a lost earring. When the canvas itself is a fabric scrap, it’s the tacky armchair that the rest of the fabric was used for, and all the life of the people who slipped into it that are invoked. Her painting process is a game of discoveries, sometimes a very long game: a painting started can drag on for months, a year in her studio before she finds the solution. Sadie Benning literally began her practice with a toy: a child’s camera received as a gift in adolescence. In her painting, the play remains: the paintings are puzzles of wood and resin, or collages of colored paper gouached and then cut out like Matisse. At work, I’m sure Whitney and Sadie have fun. Perhaps not all the time, and the process leading to the playful aspect of their works is sometimes surprisingly long and technical, but joy is caught there at some point and remains. It’s all a story of freedom. Naïve artists are free because “ a naïve person is indeed someone who transgresses rules they don’t even know “5 One can doubt that Françoise Lapeyre ignores all rules of art — she relatively respects those of perspective — but having, like Miller, privileged writing and claiming to be a “Sunday painter”, she therefore suffered neither its teaching nor its obligation, and like him she paints in periods, according to her good pleasure, before and after her career in the publishing world. Li Shan is also self-taught and also put painting aside for about thirty years, but her painting is “naïve” only under a contemporary Western gaze. Painting still lifes and landscapes in China in the 70s was anything but naïve, or dangerously so. Under the cultural revolution these themes were considered bourgeois art and threatened Li Shan and her Wuming (No Name Painting Association) group, who met in secret to paint outdoors. 6 We no longer really know if her paintings are impressionist, shanshui, academic or avant-garde in style, or if the question is even relevant. No genre or style is subversive in itself anymore, it is now according to the context and intention with which the artist works that it can be — or not. In the lineage of the Sino-Japanese pictorial tradition where calligraphy and painting were originally one and the same practice, Naoki Sutter Shudo uses kanji in his paintings. But his autodidacticism and his impertinence towards ancestral rules could lead these paintings to be described as brut calligraphy. The choice of characters refers to rather simple and rather existential notions or questions, and their style varies, sometimes nonchalant or mistreated to the point of becoming illegible. The painting is like the portrait of a notion that concerns him and its name, rather than a real exercise of the practice. Anne-Lise Coste (Uruk) also works her canvases through writing. Poems or repeated words are rudimentarily tagged with spray paint, often repeatedly, sometimes to saturation. More recently, small-format works scribbled with a ballpoint pen are prayers addressed to the forest, to water, to the beloved, or simple lines meditatively traced freehand, as Agnes Martin did in her inspired days. “ It is not necessary to be a believer to find inspiration. Art revives inspiration and awakens sensitivity, that is its function. “7 Geneviève Asse also did not work when inspiration did not come to her. It is often a single line or two that orthogonally cross her blue field, sometimes interrupted in their course or crossing each other. These canvases capture something of space, of light, coming from the meditative contemplation favored by the retreat of her house in the Gulf of Morbihan. “ The idea is independence and solitude; there is nothing religious in my retreat. “8 In Jean Hugo, the need for retreat that favors long time, contemplation, or even meditation is openly pious. He left Paris and the coolest band in the city to go south to paint landscapes imbued with fervor. If some scenes were of explicitly Christian iconography, there is not really a difference in treatment for a plate of fruit or a chair lying around in his studio. Rilke writes about Cézanne’s apples and bottles: “ of these things, he makes his “saints”; and he forces these things to be beautiful, to signify the whole universe, all the happiness and all the magnificence of the world “9 Perhaps Ulala Imai makes saints of toys and stuffed animals from which she forms small armies of paintings, or just spirits, in an animistic tradition. “ It is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe the opposite is true. A child gives his doll or his lead soldier a magical breath of life. The artist animates his works in the same way that the child animates his toys. “10 Or perhaps it is just a simple tender tribute paid to a few banana peels, vestiges of the morning chaos, after the children have left for school. “ To paint is to love again. To see as the painter sees, one must look with the eyes of love. His love is not possessive: the painter is obliged to share what he sees. Most often, he makes us see and feel what we ignore or against which we have immunized ourselves. His way of approaching the world aims to tell us that nothing is vile or hideous, nothing is banal, flat or indigestible if not our own power of vision. “11 Rosa Bonheur never tired of the “minor” subject of animal painting, thus overturning the hierarchy of genres in painting, and that of social genres by imposing herself as a woman in the front row of all career honors. Her style of the most conventional realism, which made her sought after and decorated by the successive regimes of her eventful century, Rosa Bonheur is far from a Courbet overthrowing the Vendôme column. But what is the role of chance in environment and temperament in what makes the style and taste that the painter instinctively develops clash or not with his contemporaries? “ If man has something to give to art, it is himself, and what he borrows from outside must be reborn within him. But if you neglect the divine breath that must make your canvas vibrate, then you have felt nothing and your work will remain inert. “ she says12. Does Van Gogh not write in a less doctoral tone very similar things in his letters? Were they not doing the same thing, with a temperament and a vision differently appreciable in their time? One can always refuse decorations. But that is a question for later. In the studio, “ the sanctuary “ 13 something else is at play. “ To paint is to love again, and to love is to live intensely. But what kind of love, what kind of life can one hope to find in a void cluttered with all imaginable instruments, all possible profiteers, the latest comfort, all useless luxuries? To live and love and express that through painting implies being a true believer too. But then one needs something to adore. “ 14 In an era where hatred is gaining so much ground, continuing to paint requires a certain form of faith, and painting with love is a position. The choice of the object matters little and belongs to each individual. The terms faith and religion are corrupted by dogmas and it is valid to reject them. But the existence of the feeling precedes their invention and survives it, it gave birth to the first manifestations of what we call “art” and is perhaps more relevant than ever. “ Face to face with a world founded on brutal materialism where everything is evaluated in terms of material well-being and where religion, having lost much ground, is no longer the great dispenser of spiritual values, [ … ] I believe that today more than ever the artist has this para-religious mission to fulfill: to keep alive the flame of an inner vision whose work of art seems to be the most faithful translation for the layman. “15 Louise Sartor