So I'm standing at the bus stop outside the hospital on my way home tonight, looking at things. After eavesdropping, it's my favourite occupation.
I end up looking across the busy road at an unremarkable stretch of greenery - except, given that it was a November evening, foggy and dark, it could properly be called blackery - lit in part by a streetlamp. Utterly beautiful. A feathery mass of foliage in orange-greys where the streetlight caught, and the unlit foliage masses dark blue grey against a steel grey sky lit faint orange by distant sodium lighting.
'How would you paint that?' I wondered. Which is what I do after I've spent a while looking at things. I try to work out a way to paint them. Mostly I start by working out how I'd mix the colours I see, then go on to work out how I'd apply them - working out my painterly algorithm, as it were.
The rule of the game - there is only one - is simple. Whatever means I devise must convey to the viewer of the painting, as closely as possible, the exact physical sensations of vision I experienced while looking at the scene. Which is a pretty tall order, and fraught with compromise and work-arounds. But it's the rule.
Take a picture? Yeah, maybe, but not to copy. As I have said, cameras lie, but they do have their uses. Work from memory? Memory lies too. Memory is the fiction our brain concocts, from scraps of reality and as much truth as we can bear to know. I don't want to paint a memory, I want to paint the thing as it is.
So if I were to paint such a subject, it would be from direct observation. Imagine then, that I have my easel and palette conveniently to hand, along with some means of illuminating both without compromising the scene. I would then mix my colours to match the exact hues and tones of what I see...
Except that the tonal range and colour gamut of paint on canvas is never going to match the full tonal range and gamut of what's in front of me. Working between black and white, I have to compress all the tones from full dark to the brightest glare. Working with pigment - coloured mud - I have to reproduce fragmented light.
I have done various kinds of painting. At school, I was an Impressionist who had the good fortune to be taught how to do measured academic drawing. At art college, I was an Abstract Expressionist, twenty years after it was fashionable, who screwed up his degree by trying to become a realist painter in the final year. After art college I stumbled through surrealism and photorealism and finally settled on the Great British Tradition Of Landscape Painting. I've covered a lot of canvas. Fortunately, most of it hasn't survived. I made damned sure of that.
What has always concerned me is this desire to paint things as they are, and the sheer difficulty involved in that. The terrible truth is that painting has its limitations, and the better you know them, the better a painter you will be.
Painting is perfect for capturing still life, for example. A non moving subject, arranged as you wish, the lighting controlled, and the game, as it were, rigged - all things made convenient for the purpose of capturing the appearance, the qualia, of the subject. Tabletop space, with nothing accidental, or too difficult to describe in drawing.
Painting begins to stumble when you paint a living thing. A portrait - as close to painting a still life as you can get when there's a human subject - is still possible, with the rule applied. A moving subject? Forget it. The world is a verb, but a painting is a noun. Any attempt to get around that by formal means is doomed to the remainder bin of history, an oddity outside the mainstream of painting.
As well as lacking the dimension of time, painting is also embarrassed by its lack of arguably the most important dimension of space - depth. We may paint the beautiful street, but we can never cross it. We may, with the magics of perspective and colour recession conjure a simulacrum of depth - and in fact we'd better, if we don't want to bore the viewer rigid - but we're better off sticking to what we do well.
Anyway. Enough of that. I can say that this is a splendid time of year to be looking at things, since fog does marvellous tricks. It arranges things by depth, like stage flats in graded tones of grey. It turns trees into grey masses sparked through with autumn leaf colours, blurs the edges of the coloured masses so it looks as if someone already painted them. Enjoy it while it lasts.
