As I tied up the loose ends with my “Green Man” project today, in preparation for the photographer tomorrow, it came to me suddenly that the way in which we have come to regard art is heavily skewed towards one aspect of it. Often both artists and critics lose sight of the importance of imagination.
On several occasions I’m sure I will have referred to David Hockney’s insistence upon looking as the primary activity which defines the artist. I have a great deal of sympathy with that. I had an interesting Zoom conversation with afternoon, however, with a friend of mine about our respective artistic activities. She is a writer, but with an interest in the European tradition of fairy stories, and in fantasy. Because of this I sent her the catalogue I mentioned in a previous post, for the exhibition by Sean Jefferson. His work makes reference quite frequently to fairy stories, and to the work of other artists such as Richard Dadd, and has a markedly surrealist atmosphere also. We agreed that these days imagination is losing out to representation …. or in the case of the visual arts to “concepts”. Thinking about this I have been struck also by the extent to which literature directed at artists, such as The Artist magazine, attend almost completely to representational genres, such as landscape or portraiture.
Reflecting on the history of art, I can’t help but express surprise at the way in which artists whose work prioritised the imagination must be overlooked in this frame of reference. Not only does it turn its back on Hieronymus Bosch, or the Preraphaelite Brotherhood, or Surrealism, but it severs the connection with the enormously important tradition of Christian art. The central events of the Christian tradition, around which western art developed for hundreds of years, can only be handled visually by the exercise of the imagination. No matter how hard you “look” your capacity to represent an angel will be only marginally enhanced. How does one approach the subject of crucifixion, and the requirement to engage with the responses of people to the sight of their friend being tortured to death, without employing the imagination?*
When I took up art on a full-time basis about twenty years ago I believed that my central interest would lie in the direction of landscape. As time has passed, however, I find myself moving away from this, and that even images that are ostensibly within that genre have a strongly symbolic element, and recently imaginative creation has cone to play an ever larger role in my approach to painting. As that happens, I begin to realise more and more clearly the primacy of the imagination in art more generally as well as in my own work .
*Even recognising that public executions remained a feature of life into the nineteenth century, I think that the cultural context of these was quite different.