If there’s a weird beast by definition, the artist is it. I’m the son of an artist and nephew of another. My family history has a constant stream of dichotomies, and one side is full of artists and the other full of accountants. Dad’s side is the artistic side, but Mum’s does have one well known artist, the Dutch landscape painter Jan Van Goyen.
Being an artist in Australia can occasionally be compared to being an intellectual at an abattoir, but Australia is positively dripping with art. It’s the Australian image which hides the culture. Foreigners generally don’t know where to look. When Dad started training, it was a real seminal period for Australian art. Norman Lindsay, who I consider the front man and best spokesman for the rise of truly independent, genuinely Australian, art, was receiving the piglike disapproval of the puritans, and the snide asides of others. It was a battle he was to fight for decades, but he won, unmistakably, and while he was at it won a fight for the recognition of independent Australian art in Australia. At the time, he had the support, however ineffectual, of his audience and other artists. It was a defining issue, and my father in his teens and twenties was thrown into the melee.
Dad’s artistic career does reflect a few of the most basic facts of being an artist. He studied at RMIT (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), and graduated with one degree which would now be a string of degrees. RMIT taught its students everything. Dad learned technical drawing, and a range of commercial techniques, as part of his training. That must have been a considerable help, given that art and technical accuracy are pretty much codependent.
He then studied at the Riemann School in Berlin during the 1930s, saw the Nazis come to power, loathed it, and came home. He painted a picture of one of his heroes, H.G. Wells, which Wells signed when he came out to Australia in 1934. As far as I’ve been able to find out, it’s the only painting Wells ever signed, a big thrill, too, need I say, for a young artist at 24. I still have the painting. It’s a good indication of Dad’s early style, and it’s pretty much modernist, which might have been what appealed to Wells, using the most up to date compound colors, (new pigments were arriving en masse) and a pretty competent, may I say, rendition of the subject.
He became a commercial artist, working for Dunlop. This is another part of the artist’s reality, the need to eat. In Australia, the art market is pretty small, and it was a lot smaller in the 30s. Very few people could earn a real living as artists in a country of five million people spread over as many square miles, where the only markets were crammed in to a couple of relatively small cities.
The positive side of this form of art is that there’s always a demand for good technical artists. Dad’s work was now dealing with the new magazine printing techniques, and he did a lot of the standard work which is synonymous for that era, color printing then being a novelty. A vast amount of development of style relates to exposure to technology as much as techniques, and artists generally spend as much time understanding and exploring new art as they do creating their own. It’s a sort of symbiosis.
Being an artist with a job wasn’t such a bad idea in the 1930s, either. The Depression bit hard in Australia, and was still going when the war started. Dad’s first marriage was underway, and he was doing pretty well, in a nation really battered by drought, Depression, and a decade of severe economic damage.
Came the war, and Dad enlisted, to fight in the Middle East with the Rats of Tobruk in all of their desert campaigns. He returned with what was to become TB, a skin infection donated by the desert, called “desert sores” and to a failed marriage. Of course, being an artist, he’d also done a lot of sketching of the war years, and in a fit of public spirit, had offered his work to the War Museum. The museum thanked him for his offer, but said it couldn’t accept his work because he “wasn’t an accredited war artist” despite all his years of active service and combat.
Do artists get frustrated? Yes.
Official imbecilities regardless, he returned to his work as a commercial artist, and in the boom years after the war, married my mother, and set up as a freelance. This status of free spirit is where the artist is quite likely to develop in any possible direction. A “temperamental artist” is a self-explanatory statement. In some cases, if there’s no temperament, there’s no artist.
A further element now re-introduced itself. Dad’s brother, another artist, generally acknowledged by all as a truly brilliant man, (even by those on speaking terms with him) in any field, was living quite near. This was Dad’s older brother, and as a relationship between two artists it was as close to pure artistic neurosis as any relationship could hope to get. They had tremendous rows, in one case, and I add this incident purely as one of many, pouring sherry over each other in a fit of mutual pique.
This is where the family perspective on The Artist gets a word in. The family’s view was:
(a) It was a waste of sherry
(b) It was a bit hypocritical, because neither of them drank sherry.
(c) Someone would have to clean it all up.
(d) It was just another meaningless bloody tantrum.
Temperament definitely does have a lot to do with the working of the artist. Whether it serves any useful purpose otherwise is highly debatable. Dad was known to be a genuinely nice guy, but had a tremendous temper. His brother was known to receive people who’d driven 30 miles in pouring rain to see him and close the door in their faces. In different versions of this slightly erratic environment, both I and, I’ve since discovered, my cousin Moira, learned about Art.
One thing I remember well, and with much affection, is that the art, when it happened, did get things into some sort of order. The sheer sense of peace that pervaded when Dad was working was a sort of Nirvana. It was as though something was going right, which as a teenager was for me quite a revelation. I’d heard of things going right, just never believed it.
It had an impact on my own abilities, too. As a kid, a despairing teacher had tried to teach me perspective. I didn’t get it. I was quite unable to get anything done the way it was taught, and slightly more than embarrassed, I told Dad about it. I swear, in ten minutes, he taught me so thoroughly that to this day I can’t even remember why I couldn’t do perspective in the first place. I’ve since discovered that this is the mark of a true professional, to clarify things that well. Art had struck.
Domestically, as you might have guessed, the artist is very much an acquired taste. My small, tireless, koala-like blowtorch of a mother was the perfect foil for Dad. Chalk and cheese, in many ways, but they could always communicate. That seems to be the real issue with artists, the need to be able to communicate, and know they can. Emotionally, artists seem to require both a shoulder to cry on, and a kick in the backside, usually simultaneously.
The real artistic temperament isn’t a tantrum machine. Those can be ignored safely, as long as you’re sure they are only tantrums. The fact is that every work is a challenge, and the real cause of the problems will be among the mountains of issues which appear with each piece. Or among the tides of people who seem to insist on not only existing, but being visible, perhaps even audible, at the time. The creative mentality, in any medium, doesn’t like distractions, and apparently doesn’t feel any need to consider their feelings or any right to continuing to exist. Any irrelevance, be it small talk, bills, medical procedures, or the end of the world, will be met with a level of surliness at best.
The mystery of artists as a species is that they manage to exist, themselves, at all. A less well defined group of people would be hard to achieve, even with a lot of license given to definitions, and a stoic disregard for etymology or the proper use of language to describe a mob of professional ratbags. They’re children, clowns, thespians, obsessive, compulsive, selfish, rude, witty, perceptive, insular to a degree which has yet to have a mathematical equivalent, and more. They’re inspired, contemptuous, insufferable, arrogant, humanistic, noble, stupid, wise, ignorant, selfless and selfish.
Honestly, they’re easily as bad as musicians and writers. It’s as if they’ve decided to become their palettes. An eternal mix, never quite enough. Describing the personality of an artist through their mediums probably isn’t too far off. An artist can be “oily”. Anyone who knows the mentality of oil painters will understand. An artist can be said to be in a watercolor mood, the general idiom of a wash with lines and tones about as useful as “impossible” as a character reference. As for egg and tempera… I don’t want to think about it.
Some artists have a lot in common with their brushes, too. Shaggy, neglected, ossified, lost in the turpentine… all reasonably good navigational aids. The studio, the artist’s own Valley Of The Kings, can be another indicator. Here the Great Work, which has been slowly irritating the artist into finishing it. There the casual aside, some collection of ideas which might never be considered. In various places the remains of a meal, a portrait, and perhaps a secretive looking sketch which looks interesting and will never be mentioned, even if it catches fire. The work of immediate relevance will have taken up the actual work space, and the event horizon of related media and equipment will form a circle around it.
It will be noted that there are two sides to the work in progress. The artist, cheery soul, will be able to tell you in detail what’s wrong with it. There is no such thing as an entirely satisfied artist. Everything is subject to criticism. Non-artists don’t understand that this principle extends into the rest of the world, and are shattered, sometimes, when they discover that everyone as well as everything, gets that level of criticism.
This level of analysis might be intolerable for others, but it’s necessary. The artist on the subject of any work, either done, or under construction, is judgmental to a degree that no court could possibly tolerate. That’s wrong, that could have been done better, this is horrifying… That degree of subjective vivisection isn’t fishing for compliments, it’s the natural work load of a person forced to look at their own work from that perspective. It’s where the “temperament” serves a useful, vital, in fact, purpose. Because visual art demands a level of quality, the artist really must approach the work this way. Being hyper self-critical isn’t a form of “integrity” in that sense. It’s essential. Integrity, in fact, is based on that understanding, rather than some obscure code of ethics or desire for martyrdom. It’s a practical form of honesty, and it works.
The other side is the dream of glory. The blue sky approach to life is a form of greasy intellectual farm machinery by comparison. The Great Work is the real issue here, treated like a newborn, warily handled with clinical care. But the big ideas, dreams, visions, and anything else that can fit into an artist’s brain, will carry through to anything else being done. Artists have no real qualms about attempting the impossible, let alone the unlikely, or merely difficult. It’s beating the challenge that matters.
That’s one of the unknowable factors in any work of art, the real degree of achievement, relative to the abilities of the artist. A work might not be the greatest technical art since Da Vinci, but for that artist, represent a massive improvement in all facets of their work. A wild color scheme may confuse the viewer, and terrify the gallery’s owners, but represent the release of some volcanic power in the artist, and some encouragement from their work, reinforcing the talent. It’s quite maddening, really.
At age 28, some gene said “Paint!” and I’ve been painting and drawing ever since. I’m inclined to doubt if there is any great rationale to art. I think art’s within the person, and like any inherent trait, it’s as much unavoidable as it is inspired.