Sunday, August 05, 2007 Covington: Every Picture By Gary Covington Looking In
ONE: the great yellow and orange and greeny-blue swirly canvas - painted by Mandy Echevarria - featured in the Pull-Out pages a couple of weeks ago.
Two: a 1930s hardback devoting a color plate each to 75 of the world's greatest paintings, the text concerned not with the facts that the artist only had one ear or died a pauper but rather with what the viewer can learn from the painting.
I must have splashed poster colors about at junior school but junior gray cells have long gone -- I can't remember. High school yes because there I found out what fun art was. Not especially painting -- I couldn't paint my way out of a paper bag -- but all the other stuff. We moulded clay, treadled a spinning wheel throwing pots (literally sometimes -- all over the room). We drew, colored, made lino cuts (engraving on the cheap), carved potatoes, stamping the resulting pattern on sheets of paper, and glued together sculpture from whatever junk was at hand. Art afternoons -- the last lesson of the day -- were noisy, messy and boisterous good fun.
School left behind, earning a living, and art and paintings were forgotten until I found myself working in London with its dozens of museums and galleries. My favorite was the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, stuffed with superb ship models but also room after room of stupendous paintings.
The 17th and 18th century rooms were the most impressive. This was when painters thought big, laboring away at canvases the area of a sala wall. Admirals, twice life-size, gaze out unconcerned while behind them floor to ceiling battles rage; cannon roar, smoke billows, the foe is vanquished.
Greenwich also possesses a collection of expedition paintings from the days when explorers took along an artist or two to record places and peoples. The skills of these mostly unremembered men are astonishing.
Forget photography, no photos could do justice to the scenes these men put on canvas; no photo could have captured the atmosphere or the reality as these paintings do. It sounds silly I know – what could be more realistic than a photo - but images today, whether filmic or digital, are concerned with the technology. Getting the picture as sharp as sharp can be, the colors bright and beautiful. A photo of a sunset, no matter how spectacular, cannot hope to compare with an accomplished painting of the same and I'm starting to babble but if you have the time, the inclination, look up the work of William Hodges who sailed with Captain Cook on his voyages of discovery and you'll see what I mean.
My next lessons on the appreciation of and learning from paintings was when I began to travel and encountered what today would be called, grandly and unnecessarily, contemporary ethnic art. Much of it is impressionist and primitive and startlingly similar to those extraordinary cave paintings of southern Spain which were executed three millennia ago.
It fascinated me that the modern day successor to those Stone Age painters could, in a few minutes, uses few colors and even fewer brush strokes, produce a perfectly recognizable African scene. There was the baobab tree, a hut, a woman carrying a pot of water on her head, her silhouette true even to the typically jutting rear end. Each year--in whatever country and thinking it absurd to dispatch cards of snowy Dickensian scenes from the sahel or the tropics -- I'd get one of the local artists to produce my Christmas cards; postcard-size original art.
It was Christmas cards too which introduced me to Filipino paintings. This is going back a bit but there was a series of cards--good quality--depicting the works of several of the nation's better known artists. One--his name forgotten--painted in what I can only call an Australian style. There was the peculiar harsh light, earthy country colors, all detail smoothed and rounded and not a coconut palm in sight, but the viewer could see what the man was getting at; the scenes were Filipino scenes, the viewer just needed to bend his eye a bit.
Many years and many pictures on I'm of the opinion that established Filipino artists have painted themselves into a corner. The spark has gone. Modern work-- albeit in different mediums-- a rehash of the old stuff.
"Ha," you're thinking, "who am I to give an opinion, a non-painter if ever there was one." Well, I'm the guy who looks at a painting, peers into all the corners and tries to learn something; of the I like what I like school
and never mind whose signature is scribbled at the bottom.
Which is why I like that great--it's five feet by four--maelstrom of a canvas by Mandy Echevarria. Is it the right way up? Mother and daughter? A bit like a techni-color Edward Munch isn't it?
