The South African artist William Kentridge speaks eloquently about the spark of intelligence “between one’s shoulder and fingers…that aren’t the same as one’s planning, rational thoughts.” He suggests certainty and a set plan of action is counter to recognizing something as it happens.
This recognition or openness to seeing beyond our narrow casting of relevance is embodied in materials. As we remove the interaction between the body and the physical environment—-looking through those glasses darkly Apple Vision Pro—we don’t gain insight, we just slip deeper into vivid emptiness.
When I graduated from art college I was offered a position to assist the Professor leading the off-campus Florence program. I won a Greenshields grant as well, which was precipitous since days before my flight the funding for my position was pulled. So, off I went to Florence but more reluctantly than the other participants. But this change of plans was an incredible stroke of luck it changed everything in the trajectory of my work and life.
I wasn’t tied to the studio in Florence and so I travelled to Vienna. I visited the drawing cabinets of the Albertina museum and then following my Let’s Go Europe guidebook, I found some contemporary galleries and just walked into one of them. I came across a monograph on the drawings and prints of Alfred Hrdlicka. His prints were visceral and manic with markmaking, the book was way beyond my backpacking student budget but I knew I needed to have it.
My next trip out of Florence was to Switzerland and again I just happened to walk into a contemporary gallery that had just launched a show of large-scale paintings by a French artist. The painted surface was actually thick layers of paper salvaged from billboards used in SNCF train stations.
The massive work of Jean-Charles Blais with its brutally simple figures and directness with graphic space was an inspiring visual statement. The scale and the physicality of the thick warped painted surface gave the work a sculptural presence.
I left Florence to travel North and in one of my few acts of planning, my first stop was to see the Max Beckmann retrospective in Munich. Only knowing his work through reproduction and seeing his triptych Departure in New York, I was excited to see more.
I could not have prepared for the effect this exhibition had on me. The catalog is one of my most precious books and over the years I have used it as a visual ‘swift kick in the ass’ of pure inspiration. This is not about drawing or painting like, Hrdlicka, Blais, or Beckmann, but rather understanding the presence and the energy of the work as a physical embodied language and not a purely visual or intellectual pursuit.
In each of these artists works I could see their hand and the material of the medium was central to the content. In my sketchbook drawings in 1984, I have moved to the immediacy of the ballpoint pen and there is a graphic directness that will continue to inform my work when I return to Canada. Kentridge and his use of charcoal and it’s profoundly fragile nature belied by it’s incredible graphic punch is at the centre of so much of his most poignant work.
This is the profound difference as we scroll, swipe and now pinch at some air, as we consume content. There is something necessary to be present for, engaged with and immersed in physically to inform the muscle memory of our senses and inspire the ideas and art that help make our life meaningful.
Yes! the Norton lectures, I was going to say the same to you, funny. It's so remarkable to watch him draw with willow charcoal, always in a pristine white shirt. Thanks Joe, you have always had lots to say about drawing
“This recognition or openness to seeing beyond our narrow casting of relevance is embodied in materials.” Great sentence, Joe