HOME Eye Of The Beholder

It was said (I think of Picasso), that first he learned the rules of painting and then he broke them. He had a starting point, and everything he painted after that had a reference to the rules, even if it was only to break them. You could say (if you like) that he was trapped for ever by the rules.  It appears that some modern painters never learn the rules at all. They have no reference point in that direction. They want to start again at the beginning, without reference to anything. In essence, they want to reinvent the wheel.  What they put down on paper or canvas is not even related to what they can see with their eyes, but merely to the materials they use, their brushes, their scrapers, their trowels, and the colours and consistency of their paints.  They dab it on, they splash it about, they walk upon it and ride bicycles over it. Then they stand back and ask themselves what they have got, carefully avoiding the most obvious answer, "a mess", or, if they have been particularly industrious, "a ghastly mess".  Instead, they try to see shapes, suggestive of what they call the "inner reality" in it, and name it accordingly. If they have a little imagination and a lot of brass neck, they claim it gives form to non-material or non-visible things, a clear contradiction of terms.  People who can paint, paint. People who can't, pretend they can. It is easy to see who can't paint at all (blots and splashes), people who can almost paint (recognisable shapes), and people who can paint (reality as near as it can be represented in two dimensions).  Although their market is not as wide as that of the real painters, the pretenders can often sell their collections of random splashes for higher prices. I remember seeing what appeared to be a blank sheet of paper on The Late, Late Show many years ago, sell for £3000. Some viewers claimed they could see a faint rectangular shape on it, but, even so, it is surely possible to get rectangular shapes cheaper than that.  Even that in-between group, the Almost-Painters, have had their successes, most prominent, perhaps, being Louis Le Brocquy, who illustrated an edition of The Tain with black blots of ink in the vague shape of humans and bulls.  If you are one of the many people who let their eyes shape their opinions in the matter of paintings, you will never want to buy, or even look at, more than a hundred paintings. If, on the other hand, you let your mind pose as a critic, millions are at your pleasure.  Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but vanity is certainly in his mind.