I paint since I could keep any ‘marking’ utensil in my hand. But until recently I kind of ignored rules and labellings and most of all I didn’t try to dissect my work or anyone’s work in some heroic pursuit to find from where the magic comes.
Until I was struck by this widespread label, ‘raw and poetic’. Most art critics, I guess, find it handy and powerful enough to stick it to anything and anybody, most notorious being of course Picasso and Matisse.
I wasn’t sure what to do with this concept, so large it covers almost everything to the point of obstructing any other dimension. Even more awe stricken I was when told I should try find my inner raw and poetic vein. Like it was some sort of quest, an artistic goal, something that one could achieve as a result of will power and painting experimentation..
The example of children’s rawness in painting is widespread and an obvious one (or animals-I cannot help underlining the irony of a human ‘giving’ brushes and paints as tools and means for monkeys or elephants to ‘express’ themselves for a tasty reward).
I think it is just a big confusion and a pushed romanticism in a modernist disguise to try to resuscitate and make live that time of happy clumsiness mixed with buckets of enthusiasm. Not to mention nobody seems to remember or care about the different degrees of frustration as a child’s imagination, sensitivity and perception of reality evolve much quicker that the skillfulness of hands. Some degree of skill and control is there but it is the sincerity of expression that reaches us. There is no obvious message. There is only the joy of making stuff. Everything else is just interpretation.
Whereas adults using this ‘naive’ manner of painting will paint this way, in most of cases, because that freedom, that joie de vivre, that simplicity of expression feels right, not because more sophisticated means were unknown. On the other hand there is nothing childish or naive in the crude work of mentally ill adults. Maybe there are simplified lines, prime colours, unsteady brush strokes but there is nothing childish or naive in that crude emotion. Everything develops quite complex and there is always a message..
There are moments of intense synergy between emotion and the act of painting and an artist needs to be prepared to act on them. Hand becomes an extension of sensitivity maybe becoming one with the sensitivity.
It takes time to make the hands obey, catch the slightest sign of emotion, to transmit the synesthesy within.
There is nothing raw and poetic in a clumsy hand and an undecided mind.
My ‘rawness’ is a personal experience or state of mind that cannot be reached willfully.
It comes as naturally as old age.