Art?

[Beanz]

@Greenbeanz - Posts 31-35 (bear in mind I am totally ignorant of anything to do with art)

I can understand the brilliant skill involved to create the picture but see nothing other than their literal form. They have no emotional impact on me whatsoever.

What do you see?

For me they represent particular moments in English painting and while none of them move me, on a lump in the throat level like some works, they do none the less make me feel something. Take the first portrait of Edith Sitwell as an example. There is the poet herself and the painter in the room but there is also a third presence and that is the canvas itself. Please excuse me if this sounds pretentious and long winded because it is something very difficult to explain with words. The point of a painting is to acquire a life of it's own. It is not a photograph and many people who see it will not even know what the person it depicts looks like, or who they were, or what happened to them. The artist can never hope to capture all the qualities of the person or scene in front of them but they are nevertheless endeavouring to capture the aura or essence of both the moment in time that they have spent painting, the subject and their own emotional response to it.

Edith Sitwell was an odd looking women with a beak like nose and a propensity to dress eccentrically. She had a terrible abusive childhood but exuded a great deal of empathy and was not judgemental toward others, even those like her parents who treated her appallingly. What Lewis(the painter) manages to convey brilliantly is this humanity while at the same time making her almost ordinary. She always saw herself as distinct, odd and apart from the crown but the painter has seen through this and even with his metallic intellectual and angular approach softened her appearance. He started it in 1923 and did not finish until 1935. Post first world war when abstraction, futurism ,cubism etc had thrown the art world into turmoil. Here is Sitwell speaking





She was a lovely old bird and her poetry was pretty full on. The angular nature of all the paintings is a natural response to the mechanisation of the world and the brutality of international war as evidenced in Wyndham Lewis Shell shocked and Nevinson's gunner so the paintings are interesting from that point of view too. They are an articulation of soft vulnerable bodies in a hard steel world. I may be projecting all of this but like music I believe that paint is just a medium that artists can use to express emotion. We are emphatic creatures and when we hear someone like Johhny Cash sing of loss with a crack in his voice we feel a little of that pain. When I see a great painting like this one of Francis Bacon by his close drinking and gambling buddy Lucian Freud




I can see not only Bacon's world weary cynicism and a small resemblance to a young Harry Redknapp, but also Freud's empathy for him, his willingness to be unflinching and unflattering in his depiction of him, his frustration at not being able to capture the danger of him.