It’s a good question, posed either generally or personally. The reason it’s on my mind is that my wife asked me yesterday why I paint. When we discussed her question it became clear that she didn’t have in mind some notion of a general capacity for aesthetic experience, but something rather more specific than that.
Another way of putting the question would be to ask (as she did) for whom am I painting? Am I doing it primarily for myself or for others? The stimulus to her question was the piece on which I am working at the moment, which she thought was possibly too full of private meanings to be of interest to anybody else. She was good enough to be warmly complementary about some of my other work, and its appeal to a wide public, but she confessed that she was deeply puzzled by my going to the effort of spending a great deal of time and effort to create a piece that probably requires a crib sheet in order to be taken in by anyone else.*
Her question is a good one, because quite a large proportion of my work might be said to fall into this category, and I have been thinking about it off and on throughout the day. It seems to me that this is far from being a unique problem. A big exhibition of the work of William Blake has just opened at the Tate Gallery in London, and if anybody might have asked himself her question it is Blake, a great deal of whose work was pretty well unintelligible unless accompanied by some kind of explanation. (Who on earth, for example, was Urizen supposed to be, or Enion?)
At the opposite pole of artistic communication I suppose we might place those artists who work securely within a set of conventions entirely familiar to their public. This probably applies to the majority of artists, ranging historically from the long tradition of religious art in the Middle Ages, whose work generally conformed to quite explicit rules, and whose subject-matter was a feature of general culture, to the majority of popular landscape painters of today.
It struck me, thinking about it, however, that it isn’t necessary to opt for one or another of these positions. It is possible to create one’s own public. This has been a recurring feature of art throughout history. Work that at the outset requires explanation before it can be appreciated becomes, in time, entirely unproblematic from the point of view of the general viewer. Movements such as Impressionism, Cubism and Abstract Expressionism have all had to go through this process. It is never an easy process, however, and its success cannot be taken for granted, especially if one is considering the work of an individual artist rather than a group.
I don’t have an answer to my wife’s question, and I don’t suppose that it will result in a dramatic change in the material I paint. It does make me reflect, however, on how I might need to think carefully about the circumstances in which some parts of my work are presented, and the need I might have to communicate about it in other ways. At another level I find myself redirected to think about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s comment about the impossibility of a “private language” …. but that’s another story for another day.
*The piece in question is actually the last of a series of seven, devoted to the theme of creation and creativity. So her puzzlement is even more understandable.