In this extract from ‘How Painting Happens’, celebrated writer and art critic Martin Gayford draws a parallel between the practice of painting, past and present, and explores the question: how do painters set about to make a painting?
[…] When we look at the pictures of animals and figures on the walls of the caves at Chauvet and Lascaux in France, Altamira in Spain, or other sites around the world, the oldest of which date back more than 30,000 years, two points are clear. One is that the people who made these wonderful works were not beginners. Like their modern counterparts, they seem to have belonged to a lineage stretching even deeper down into the past. This echoes something that Peter Doig said to me about the experience of being a painter: ‘You feel you are part of a tradition, even those painters who are most anti-tradition are still part of a tradition.’
The other point, which I felt as a certainty when I stood in the narrow passage of a cave in the Dordogne, looking at paintings tens of thousands of years old, is that these pictures were made by people just like us. This was immediately, intuitively obvious. These ancient arrangements of marks on rock still communicate. When you look at them, you are conscious of the way the people who created them observed and felt about the animals they depicted. That is true not only of Palaeolithic art.
More recent (but still venerable) paintings can function in just the same way. Cecily Brown mused about the way this works with images of human beings: ‘You know what it’s like when you’re in Belgium or Holland and you see somebody who looks just like a Rubens or as if they’ve just walked out of a Frans Hals painting? Humans don’t really change. That’s why art fills the void and creates a sense of continuity. Nothing really changes. That’s the reason that figurative painting is the most human thing – concerned with the body, how people look.’
Painting, then, is a language of sorts. Pictures are texts, as David Hockney has noted, ‘and they’ll tell you a lot’. But their messages are not necessarily easy to put into words. Virginia Woolf wrote of fellow guests discussing painting at a London dinner party. ‘Now they are going into the silent land; soon they will be out of reach of the human voice. They are seeing things that we cannot see, just as a dog bristles and whines in a dark lane when nothing is visible to human eyes. They are making passes with their hands, to express what they cannot say.’ However, Woolf added wryly, we ‘have been trained not to see but to talk’.
[…] Painting can be a way of transmitting a huge amount of information that would be difficult or impossible to communicate in words. Its ability to do so through time is partly the result of this dependence on non-verbal factors such as space, size, and colour. As Jenny Saville pointed out to me, when we stand in front of a painting, we are standing in exactly the same spatial relationship to it that the painter did, hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Despite all the differences of culture and belief that separate us from cave artists, or indeed from Rembrandt, when we are in the presence of their pictures, in many ways we have the same experience as they did.
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Admittedly, the pages that follow contain my own thoughts. But essentially this book is made up of what I have learnt from those who make pictures. It is composed of the words of painters, many of whom have talked to me over half a lifetime, who are inevitably determined by all manner of circumstances, professional and personal. The critic David Sylvester once told me that, ‘Critics should certainly know artists, because you see how well-educated art historians can go wrong since they don’t understand the way artists think.’ So how do painters set about to make a painting? What are their thoughts about their medium? This is an attempt to answer those questions.
How Painting Happens (and why it matters) is available now.