One of my tasks today has been to select a couple of pictures for a group exhibition at the South Square Centre, which will celebrate twenty years of the Unit 9 group. I’ve decided to put in one picture which dates from roughly that time and a relatively recent one. (Both of them, by coincidence, will feature pools of water.) I was discussing this selection with my wife, after lunch, and she commented that she finds that with the older one the scale of the pool is unclear, and for that reason the picture is rather unsatisfactory. It is (apropos of yesterday’s post) ambiguous.
Later in the afternoon I was working in the garden, repairing a path, and it occurred to me quite suddenly that there is a difference between saying that something is “ambiguous” and saying that it is “enigmatic”. In the first case the object (or statement) in question has more than one possible meaning. If we say that something is “enigmatic”, however, we are claiming that its character or meaning is obscure or puzzling. The difference might make an important difference to our response in the case of works of art.
As an example of an “enigmatic” picture you might like to look at my Aquila. I think that this exemplifies as well as anything else I’ve done Bob Dylan’s line, “Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”
If you want to check out the difference between these examples, the picture entitled Pool can be seen in the “gallery” labelled “Paper Puddles”. Aquila is in the one entitled “Holy Stones”.