Five Stories
photo collage C. Ascher
Art making isn’t just about sudden
ideas, immediate visual stimulation or pop-up images. It’s a process: it’s a
sequence of thoughts and a series of actions that explore the ways feelings,
ideas or inspiration can be married to medium through gesture to go extract the
deepest personal meaning they represent. The aim is expression, but it’s also
connection, it’s showing, but it’s also sharing.
I recently invited member artists of
a local association to create work for an exhibition in response to the theme
‘Fire’. Many of the participants went with the first image that came to their
minds as they considered the theme. They approached Fire as an object. Among the works submitted were various versions of these
images: cats contemplating a fireplace, people sitting around campfires,
still-life images of objects illuminated by candlelight or lamplight.
Others, however, took the creation
process further to consider other possibilities. One painter showed a dragon
spewing fire, in another’s work a phoenix burst into flames, in a third,
candles burned as if for a religious ritual. There were numerous forests being consumed
by yellow and red flames (a propos given the forest fires that raged in western
Canadian provinces this summer), and volcanoes erupting. They rendered Fire as
a subject, broadening it
Then there were images that dug further
still not just to describe Fire as an objector or as an action but to capture sensation
or emotion. One painter rendered a flamenco dancer at the height of her passion.
Another represented hot peppers as they waited on plates or in a shopping
basket. A third captured the wisps of smoke from a dying – or igniting - oil
lamp wick. A fourth pictured Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire”. Another showed the
burning of a funeral pyre in India, a Sati (or Suttee, a banned practice where
a widow burns with her deceased husband).
Some abstracted their Fire. They
focused on the way that reds, yellows, blues and other colours interact as a
fire burns, on the movement of the flames and on the transparency of the smoke.
Neither on object nor subject, they rather focused on expressing the elements
of fire through their medium, oil, watercolour or acrylic for instance, and
through their usage. The painterly technique itself is what conveyed the
image’s meaning.
During a critique of their
exhibition, many of the artists revealed that they had little direct or current
experience with fire. Candles and fireplaces or memories of long-ago campfires
were about the limit of their contact. This led us to a discussion about the
levels of thinking involved in the interpretation of an idea in art. As seen
from the descriptions above, artists have many choices in considering how they
will approach a subject: form the common (or popular), to literal (or
descriptive), to representational (descriptive + subtly experiential) to
interpretative (personally and expressively experiential) to conceptual (or
philosophical and universal). Or all of them combined.
It’s important for artists to
understand their relationship to their subjects, just as they understand their
relationships to their tools, media, techniques and styles. There is a difference
between the image, sensation or emotion that arises out of artists’ lived
experiences (being burned by a match as a child, or causing a fire or falling
in love before a fireplace for instance) to a subject suggested by observation,
contemplation or a call-for-submissions (watching a cat laze before a fire or my
imposing a fire theme on artists who have little current or personal experience
with it). In other words, are artists approaching their images as an expression
of personal truth or as a contemplation of a more objective truth, or both?
The most successful images long-term
combine lived/felt experience with a broader, more profound understanding of
what that image might convey beyond the obvious or the expected.
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