Adrienne Braes Atkinson

Although primarily a painter, I've always seen myself as a 'maker', a worker in various creative fields such as graphics, photography, theatre and film, and I try to draw on the skills and experience acquired in the workplace to inform my painting practise. However, I find it virtually impossible to produce a neat description of that practise, so I describe my work simply as an attempt to make a series of considered creative choices which I try to approach with some vigour and passion, and which hopefully will result in a visually lucid piece.

I use photography, print, collage and acrylic as well as my preferred oils to produce the works. I find oils the most pleasing and possibly the most challenging and I love the manner in which the painter and the paint alternate control throughout the work process. I'm also careful to respect the intrinsic properties of paint by producing work that can only be achieved using this unique and ancient medium.

Neither will I attempt to describe in too much detail the content or meaning of my work as I'm aware both my own subconscious and the personal referents of the viewer play equal parts, but I hope that although my work inevitably contains subjective elements it might also express something of the universal without resorting to simple illustration.

Paintings are small things. They're low tech, handmade, unique, desired and difficult to produce. And paint itself is a malleable and seductive medium, one that man has long used as a tool to convey and express what cannot be put into words, thus fueling our ongoing love affair with it.

Originally from Scotland I now live in central Italy and have a son and a daughter.

Working notes of a XXI century painter. (scroll down)

Why would anyone attempt to explain verbally what it is their visual art attempts to convey? Why not rather explain who they are, why they make art, and let others decipher the work?

Why not?

Some contemporary conceptual artworks are ostensibly easy to produce, requiring few ‘making’ skills. In contrast, the more traditional acts of drawing, painting and sculpting are extremely complex. Conceptual work is of course often realised using conventional techniques, but it can also be completed without the hand of the artist ever having come into contact with the final object, the assumption being it’s the idea that counts and that man’s unique intellectual sentience alone can reveal profound truths.

The notion of the ‘big idea’, the mainstay of conceptual art, has been with us a long time, but are there in fact any truly ‘big ideas’ remaining, big enough to satisfy our considerable human ego, or has the death of God and humanity’s growing awareness of our smallness in the universe rendered that quest somewhat absurd? Are we floundering in a state of post God angst, not yet quite adjusted to fully accepting our redefined modernist role as simply the serendipitous result of a primordial soup rather than something superlative, something created in His image?

“Man made God in his own image, so it’s natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man’s made a beautifying mirror too, in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just and wise. It’s his idea of himself. ”Graham Greene ‘The End of the Affair.’

In the early twentieth century Duchamp came up with a truly big idea by utilising the readymade, forcing us to question the very nature of what art is, and his playful insight has remained constant and at the core of art practice ever since; but how long and how often can that brilliantly simple idea be explored, recycled, reworked? And has Duchamp’s ingenious clarity of thought ever been bettered? At what point does the anxious object, identified by Harold Rosenberg all those decades ago, cease to excite the requisite anxiety?

Conventional art forms such as drawing, painting and sculpture which require considerable ‘making’ ability, can also feed our human self love, not solely by the glorification of our unique sentient skills as in conceptual art but, while still celebrating and exploring that sentience, expressing it in objects created by equally unique hand skills. Indeed, what gave Duchamps use of the modern readymade such impact was it’s startling contrast to the abiding hand made.

And what of beauty? In order to convey any meaning intrinsic to an artwork, a viewer must first be enticed to look, and then must be held and intrigued by

what he/she sees. Our love of all things human, that fascination with what we think, produce and achieve, both intellectually and practically, can at times tempt us to imagine we’re almost divine, and is at the very heart of what we perceive to be the arts.

Even in the exquisite pared down minimalist beauty of modernist design, architecture and countless conceptual artworks there can still be recognised the formal rules of dimension and composition based on Vitruvian values which are central to both Classical and Renaissance art. Le Corbusier famously viewed the home as a machine for living and the elegantly sculpted furniture of Eileen Gray achieved its pure beauty by sticking rigidly to the dictates of the human form. Many flagship twentieth century buildings place as much if not more importance on how we’re affected by the ambient feel and sound qualities of the built space as to how pleasing to the eye we find the physical structure.

It’s been reasoned by some contemporary theorists that an art object should stand on it’s own merit, speak in its own voice, impersonal and remote, removed from the persona responsible for it’s conception, but in truth we’ve summarily failed to persuade ourselves that this is indeed the case. For who can honestly say they’ve never imagined the identity of the makers of stainless steel bunny balloons, or the background buzz of real life in the Factory as Marilyn and Mao were being printed off, or the hand behind the “R.Mutt” signature. No, we’re far too enamoured of our own kind to view our efforts and achievements dispassionately, as something outwith ourselves, something other.

And despite attempts to remove all subjective elements from an artwork, it can never quite be achieved. Somehow, subliminally, there's always to be found a trace of the ghost of the artist, lurking somewhere in the work.

A second aspect of Duchamp’s big idea, forces us to ask what makes something intrinsically a work of art. Does it become so only when exhibited in a gallery or museum, or if it’s known to have been produced by an artist? We know certain artworks speak only to certain people, and that a work of art is real to those who believe it to be so and not to those who don’t, and therefore art in general must be accepted as an existential construct. I knew of someone whose cleaner threw out a treasured lump of the Berlin wall he’d salvaged in 1989. She had thought it a piece of rubbish, which of course it was. It was a lump of useless, dirty rubble… to her, while at the same time being a precious and poignant symbol of freedom… to him.

The universe, far from being created to service our human needs as pre-modern man believed, is an unimaginably gargantuan entity of which we make up the merest part and in which our tenure is terrifyingly shaky. This acceptance of our smallness has slowly infused our understanding, leaving us bemused, somewhat aimless and definitely chastened. The ‘big ideas’ we were so confident of in the past, now seem arrogantly trite and pathetically self-aggrandising.

The idea of artist as sage, teacher, savant, god, has become a thing of the past, something laughable, and the interpretation put on a work by the viewer is now as relevant and valid as that of the artist.

But we’re accepting this new model slowly. Although the quest for the artistic big idea may be in its death throes, we can’t quite let go, and we compensate for this loss by attempting to make up for it in scale.

The Arsenale in Venice is an exceptionally large exhibition facility, and many exhibitors at the 2009 Venice Biennale utilised this scale. It can be difficult when viewing so many works in such a large space to keep them individually itemised in your minds eye, and the tendency is to ultimately see them as a whole, a great wash of visual information, and in so doing to recognise similarities running through the entire body of work. If there was an obvious common thread that year it had to be scale.

This move towards physically massive works attempts to make the point that these are not for domestic consumption, are not easily produced or managed, and represent much more than mere decoration. The scale lets us know these giants are important, their size and weightiness award gravitas by ensuring they can only be housed in galleries, museums or other public spaces, thus compying with Duchamp’s gambit as to what constitutes a true work of art.

It can also be argued that the ego tempting us to crave excessive personal attention is anachronistic and surely not something of today, and that to be truly in tune with the contemporary zeitgeist one must now embrace smallness.

This is arguably more difficult for the male than the female who, throughout history, has resigned herself to less, due to the necessity of accepting the role of secondary being via the natural process of child rearing. Women in general have had to relegate any personal quest concerning a big idea to the back burner, in order to dedicate their energies to the basic stuff of the continuum of life.

Man sits in the foreground musing on the nature of being while woman remains in the background, too busy to enter the discussion.

The female voice has long been hushed, and what is heard of that voice tends not to be fully representative of the norm, being in the main spoken by those who have either enjoyed the financial wherewithal to be free to explore the world of thoughts and ideas, or for whatever reasons are not bound by the demands of child rearing and homemaking. The irony being of course, that the very handicap to woman’s self-actualisation is nature’s dictate by which woman puts the needs of others ahead of her own, as she produces and nurtures the next generation.

Traditionally, woman has been tied to the home environment, linked to craft rather than art, and apropos of this there developed a twentieth century conceit prevalent in certain factions of artistic thought which eschewed the use of a personal studio suggesting that creative work of any value should be realised out in the world somewhere, in the predominantly male territory beyond the home. Supposedly this was because creativity of the highest order should be purely intellectual and as such negates the need for a practical workspace.

This thinking also fed into the trend to produce those importantly large scale works which would be executed by skilled craftsmen to a set of specifications decided upon by the higher individual; the artisan serving the artist, the peasant serving the master, the courtier serving the king, control and power.

But this belief was wrongheaded.

Personal, private space is an essential element in the creative process because that process is intrinsically an intense, solitary exploration. The exploration must of course be informed by intellectual rigour, all creative work being an amalgam of the cognitive, the emotional and the actual, but ultimately the discoveries are personal, cannot be easily spoken, and are made alone. It may sound contradictory, but making art is a lonely pastime which has to be shared.

There’s a state of mind when one’s thoughts hovers between the conscious and subconscious, allowing rational reason to interact with deeply buried knowledge and barely remembered references. Surrendering to this ‘zone’, letting accepted intellectual rationale take a back seat while allowing the more complex subconscious elements to come to the fore, is the pathway to creative discovery. But it’s no easy thing to participate in this form of exploration unless in an environment free of peripheral distractions and routine duties, and it’s a state inaccessible to many who find it fearful and uncomfortable, requiring too great a submission and relinquishing of cognitive control. It demands a leap of faith in allowing oneself to recognise elements not normally accessed in everyday life, and to enter into a discourse with them.

I don’t presume to define what art is, but a hunger to let go of familiar and comforting values, to seek out something other than what’s immediately recognisable, is what I believe defines an artist.

I find there are recurrent themes repeatedly emerging unbidden in my own work.

The interaction of genders seems to be ever present. The headless, limbless human figure abounds, possibly illustrating our energetic animal life force removed from the intellectual. I often find myself expressing the opposite of anthropomorphism by illustrating the animal traits inherent in humans. I consistently return to the issue of our relative unimportance in the cosmos, my catalogue of imagery alluding to an intriguingly chaotic world, resistant to man’s control.

Although these elements appear again and again and are obviously part of my personal knowledge and experience, they’re not arrived at through purely conscious thought.

The essential element of being is thought, but where art is concerned, the innate creative ideas and philosophies which exist in all of us can fall victim to our own over intellectualising, losing their potency and originality in the process. It’s the unique and varied insights of everyman we find endlessly fascinating, which feeds our inquisitive nature and drives us to express what we’ve sought out and discovered in media other than words.

And the media by which artworks are produced is not important, and I’ve long failed to understand the ongoing feud as to which art form is most acceptable and what material renders the idea more valid. The scale and heft of Richard Serra steel structures are full of potency and power as are the paint-laden canvases of Anselm Keifer. The magical complexity of the moving image can move us to tears or laughter as can the simplest pen and ink cartoon.

Are Grayson Perry’s images of less value being expressed on ceramic rather than canvas? Or is the message in the assemblage boxes of Joseph Cornell any less poignant because of their small scale?

I am primarily a painter, although – possibly somewhat pretentiously – I also lay claim to the more sundry title of maker. Paint can produce effects and colours like no other medium, and I take great pains to respect its unique intrinsic values. It’s exceptionally difficult to manipulate, extremely slow to work; it cannot be formulised and can never be totally mastered. It’s a truly contemporary medium because of its lack of precision and by the very fact that it’s not a pure science. When used properly it can have a life and voice of it’s own which compliments that of the painter, and it can encourage the leap of faith I spoke of earlier by helping us meander and explore the fascinating cornucopia of images and information accumulated through life and learning, elements thought to be lost but in actual fact filed safely away, deep in the psyche.

Despite being a profoundly creative process that has facilitated some of our greatest artistic achievements and historically spoken in one of the loudest voices, painting also lends itself to small scale work. The ‘smallness’ of drawing and painting allows one to work privately, in a small space, with limited and affordable materials and tools. It can conform in equal measure to the domestic and the public and as such is a truly egalitarian medium, available and accessible to all who aspire to have a creative voice.

This accessibility to everyman however, has perhaps also led to its devaluation as a leading contemporary art form. Creative ability lends certain kudos to those who possess it, and the easy availability of modern art materials has encouraged countless individuals who, although of dubious talent attempt to prove the contrary by having a go. The plethora of often competent but mostly vacuous art exhibitions bears testament to this. Crude, accessible sentiment dominates and although pleasing to the eye, the vast majority of this ubiquitous fare has no real bearing on our lives or intellect on any profound level. Henry Millar amusingly described the hordes of hobbyist painters he encountered in Paris in the 1950’s as, “Cunts with paintboxes strapped to their backs. A little talent and a fat wallet.”

But mere decoration or skilful draughtsmanship alone should never be confused with art.

A truly great painting is the ultimate handmade, a tangible object fashioned by man from an intangible thing - a thought, a moral, an idea. It satisfies our need to possess something we find beautiful, justifies our admiration of all things

human, but most importantly it wakes us up and enlightens us by revealing some aspect of our world or existence, however small, in a new light.

Adrienne Braes Atkinson

October 2010