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3. Art marks
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3.2 Abstraction
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Before the days of
photography the artist had to be employed to encapsulate nature.
What was asked of him was at once simple and very difficult–he was required to
show precisely what was in front of him, no more and no less. Yet these shells,
these flowers, these insects–so painstakingly delineated–they carry with them an air
not so much of reality but of super-reality (the distinction was to be recognized when
someone invented the term "magic realism"). When we hold the real, the identical
shell next to the shell in the drawing, the product of nature pales before the product of
man. In order to make his drawing the artist has had to comprehend the shell fully.
His whole intellect has been engaged. And inevitably such effort leaves its traces.
When we look at the drawing, however dull we are, we grasp the structure, the
colour, the pattern, more firmly than ever we could from the shell which we hold in
our hands. It glitters before us in the cold light of intellectual analysis.
Then, as we look, the
reality begins to diminish. It is the shell which we hold that is
real, after all. The totality of intellectual commitment is as betraying, and as
seductive, as the total commitment of the emotions which Palmer asks of us. The
artificiality of this so- called "scientific" approach can be seen if we turn from a
seventeenth-century drawing of shells to a bouquet of flowers as painted by Monet.
Here the veil of the atmosphere shimmers between us and the intricate forms of
petal and stamen. We are now on the brink of being convinced that all we apprehend,
or need to apprehend, are the effects of atmosphere and light.
Even amidst the anti-naturalistic
gestures of modern art the obsession with nature
remains. We listen to the visionaries, who try to persuade us that nature at its most
seductive is only a projection of our own thoughts and desires; we listen to the
scientific analysts, who try to persuade us that we can penetrate the secrets of a
firmly external reality. Since the discoveries of the Impressionists we have also had
to lend an ear to those who want to replace one kind of scientific vision with another,
more comprehensive one. But the one thing we can never see whole and complete
is ourselves as we stand in nature. This may be one of the reasons for art; and the
basic psychological dilemma that plagues the artist. |
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Wind torn island
Nicholaas Oswald Roos
was born near Kimberley in 1940, where his father was a
farmer. He therefore grew up in a rural environment and as a child became
intimately acquainted with the landscape. In 1950 the family again moved, this time to
South West Africa (Namibia), and Roos, then ten years old, got to know the
Namibian landscape which would later play such an important role in his art. Over a
period of nearly thirty years Nico Roos has grown in stature as an artist until today, at
the age of 53, he is to be regarded as one of southern Africa's important artists.
As a student at the University of Pretoria
his professor in Art history requested him to
write a paper on Adolph Jentsch. Jentch introduced him to the world of philosophy,
and also explained to him how he applied his Eastern philosophy in his painting. In
these days Roos's own painting revealed strong sylistic influence form Jentsch's art,
and even today we see certain elements in Roos's work which remind us of
Jentsch's "handwriting".
He was influenced indirectly by European masters such as Picasso and Braque, and
especially by the brilliant Graham Sutherland, who was to have such a strong and
lasting influence on the work of Roos.
Roos's earliest paintings (from the period of approximately 1965 to 1967) reveal a
romantic vision of the Namibian landscape, strongly influenced by Jentsch. Many of
the scenes he paints are landscapes of the imagination.
From the sixties
onwards Roos's concentration on the outward appearance of nature
decreased, while we find in his work an increasing spiritualization. We see him in
these years struggling to reveal the intrinsic characteristics of the South African
landscape in an individual, personal manner, as his work becomes more and more
abstract. Some of the intrinsic qualities of our landscape which Roos captures in his
paintings are the following: its rough textures, the predominance of earth colours, the
staccato rhythms and sharp light and dark contrasts caused by the fierce sunlight,
and predominantly sombre mood and even dramatic qualities which we find here.
This predilection for the dramatic can also be traced back to the influence of Graham
Sutherland's art.
An aspect of the importance
of Roos's art lies in the fact that he has achieved a
unique interpretation of the South African landscape. He has stripped the landscape
of all romantic associations, has investigated its geological structure thoroughly, and
has revealed its essence completely. He depicts imaginary worlds which only come
alive if the onlooker begins to join in the game and is pre- pared to follow the artist
into his imaginary world. Only when we exert ourselves and participate in an
imaginative way in the adventure of rich colours, involved shapes and strange,
romantic emotions, does the world of Roos become reality and do we feel that we
can move around in it. That is when a space is created between our own, everyday
world and our identity, and when we achieve entry into a richer, fuller world where
something fascinating is constantly taking place - it is as if he wants to encompass
the whole cosmos in each of his landscapes. This is especially so in his so-called
"shaft paintings", where practically the whole surface of the painting is filled with a
kind of cross-section through the earth. In this cross-section intricate contrasts of
planes, lines and textures can be found, which, although largely abstract, refer to
rocks, earth layers, roots of plants and to undefined geological structures. These
works often have the feeling of a primeval world, in which the passing of centuries
has gradually altered the geological structure.
Roos's visual language has changed through
the years from a fairly simple, true-to-
nature one to a language which is comprehensive, involved and almost abstract. His
landscapes never carry symbolic elements. What he wants to depict is the more
universal experience of the landscape. In the creative process, however, the
landscape is transformed into a hyper- personal, individual vision and an individual
emotional world. Concomitant to this is his increasingly rich use of colour and his
increasingly intricate composition. Even in his smaller works we find a microscopic
reflection of the macro- cosmos. The intricacy of the works gives a richness to the
painted surface, because each element appearing on that sur- face refers to another
element or elements which appears elsewhere - a fascinating game of point and
counterpoint which, in the large paintings, possess the richness of fully orchestrated
symphonies.
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Pembrokeshire landscape
Graham Sutherland's
art (1903-1980) is rooted in what he termed the 'reservoirs of
the mind'. From this notional mental charge emerged all kinds of emotions and
impressions whereby natural forms were amplified and transubstantiated as
paraphrases of the unity of earth and people. In particular, through swirls of thread
and colour in his Great Tapestry in Coventry Cathedral we are transported to the
deeply cut rocky estuaries and bays of Pembrokeshire where he painted, turning
landscapes, rocks and branches of trees and scrub into ambiguous mysteries of
nature.
In this sense Sutherland's
great tapestry is a notional inventory of ideas about our
being a special chemical entity in a Universe where we are part of nature in
everything we do, from painting a house, to offering a prayer. There is therefore a
window into the tapestry for everyone.
Sutherland painted
what he saw and responded to what he sensed. He demands
that the viewer enter into his metamorphic world. The drift of his images is
challenging, their purpose being conveyed in oblique and apparent discord. The linear
is distorted, the individual components denied their actual identity. Nothing is
straightforward; all is fractured, coloured and placed. It is as though the motif has
been stripped, stirred and poured, and then reassembled without any reference to
the original structure. Sutherland's genius was based on the real, but that reality he
broke into pieces and then cunningly reassembled, distorting each aspect, thus
achieving a marvel of fluid form.
A meditation on Southerland's
Great Tapestry may be found at:
http://users.aol.com/corixus
He is a strong influence
on Nicholaas Oswald Roos who extracts similar metaphors
from the landscapes of Namibia.
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Bird (1955) 'One of the things I would like to think my sculpture has in force,
a strength, a life,
a vitality from inside...'
Many of Henry Moore's
animal sculptures, especially the animal heads and animal
forms, owe more to the imagination than to observation. The psychological and
mythological element is omnipresent. This differentiates Moore's animal sculptures
from those produced by the observers and recorders of animal subjects, and no less
from the Renaissance artists whose interest in animals centred round man. For
example, the equestrian portrait shows the horse as a noble extension of the rider's
prestige. Although Moore has never ceased to admire the finest manifestations of
this classical kind of art he reacted against it in favour of the art of ancient
civilizations and the primitive artefacts he observed in archeological and ethnological
museums.
Drawing for Moore is
an obsessive activity embracing studies of form of various
kinds, ideas for sculpture, and what may be described as inspired doodles. Even
within the limited subject of this book the drawings display such diversity compared
with the consistency in his sculptural treatment, that it is necessary to distinguish the
main kinds of drawings which here take their place alongside the sculpture under
thematic headings.
There are the rapid
notations of domestic animals — goats, sheep, cows — made
during stays in the country: 'part of my student studies were animals in action'. We
see the continuation of this practice in the studies of goats in a notebook dated 1921.
The now famous Sheep Sketchbook of 1972 has familiarized the public with Moore's
superb skill in his more deliberate studies from life of his favourite animal. Affection
for and insight into the nature of this creature are implicit in all the drawings, which
are mental as well as visual reflections on the various stages of the life of sheep.
They are not difficult to appreciate.
Moore's studies of
bone form, however, demand an imaginative participation from the
viewer, a basic interest in form. They include 'transformation' drawings in which
partly invented bone shapes become a pretext for incorporating other figures or
objects. Some of the Elephant Skull etchings are based on direct observation, others
extract from its convolutions the sculptor's own analogies - caverns and corridors,
even a fantastic creature, the Cyclops - that engage our imagination. We marvel at a
mind so inventive, a hand so assured.
The kind of drawing
grouped under, but not limited to, the heading Fantastic and
Fabulous Animals comes closest in spirit to much of his animal sculpture. One might
label it 'the alternative vision' — what the mind, perhaps rather the unconscious
mind, of the artist discovers. 'I am conscious of the psychological and associational
element in my work,' says Moore. So alongside the fantastic we find also the dark,
the horrendous, unambiguously expressed.
Moore's art is far
from simple; it incorporates many aspects of both his life and
background. First, that of his home, a mining town, grim but friendly, with the
Yorkshire moors not too far distant. There among the grazing sheep and outcrops of
rock Moore would pick up and study a sheep's skull, the breastbone of a bird. 'Since
boyhood I have always been interested in bones.' Not for him as reminders of
mortality but because they have once served a function, borne living weight. As for
the rocks, they are the bones of the earth, the underlying structure on which the
sculptor insists in his interpretations of human and animal form. It therefore comes
as no surprise that among his many variations on the reclining form he should have
invented a Reclining Figure: Bone 1974 carved in Roman travertine - the material that
most resembles bone texture. In Goat's Head 1952 he celebrates the hardness of
bone, its knobbiness; in Standing Figure: Knife Edge 1961 the fineness of bone
combined with tensile strength; whilst in his Elephant Skull etchings he explores its
structural miracles.
Moore's sculpture continually
reminds' us of growth and pressure from within: in
tappeals to him: 'Mexican sculptures have a cruel hardness that is the opposite of
other qualities I like in European art.' Everyone who knows Moore's early Reclining
Figures is aware of the sculptor's debt to the Chacmool Aztec carving which inspired
it. Moore found the multiplicity of view that he favours in other pre-Columbian
carvings, such as the Plumed Serpent.
Bird's head with serpentine
tail; Scythian 5th-4th century BC; gold.
During one of my conversations
with Moore, as we considered other animal
portrayals of the past, Moore was attracted by the Bird's head with serpentine tailof
Scythian origin — a masterly summing-up of the essence of both creatures in a tiny
gold ornament. Ancient Egyptian carvings combine stylization with natural
observation, as illustrated in the Head of a Cow, carved in alabaster. This animal,
deified through its association with Hathor, the protectress of women, has been
carved with evident affection . Moore commented: 'the sculptor has perfectly
captured the soft docility of the young cow. The Egyptians had a great feeling for
animals, and this is one I love.' In view of the tenderness with which Moore has
drawn sheep, one is not surprised that he also admires the Head of a Eweexecuted
in baked clay five thousand years ago.
Head of a ewe; Sumerian,
from Babylonia c. 2900 BC
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