A Philosophical Excursion into Artistic Materialism

"Artefacts"
Watercolour

Intimate still lifes. I like that as a term for the little paintings I make. It got me thinking, why do I paint things? Things are just things, and they don’t appear to have any special meaning.

I was pondering this as I went for a lengthy walk in the dreary autumn weather today. I had a bag in hand, and it was full of “things”, natural “things” like a stack of different-coloured autumn leaves, a bunch of rosehips, a few pretty feathers. Why this love for things? Am I a materialist? I recalled what Anne Classen Knutson wrote in her article “Andrew Wyeth’s Language of Things” (Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic, by Anne Classen Knutson [ed.]. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, p. 47): “Objects stimulate and nourish his associative imagination: in the studio, Wyeth scatters leaves, shells, and things from his childhood to trigger memories and initiate the creative process.” Now I’m a great admirer of Wyeth, but I do not claim any influence or likeness to him in my paintings, but he too shows traits of a materialist, though Knutson, I think, perceptively pinpoints a reason for materialism in art.

About a hundred years ago, it seems (though it’s really only six), I finished my Masters degree with a thesis on two materialist poets, Eugène Guillevic and Francis Ponge. “La surface du pain est merveilleuse d'abord à cause de cette impression quasi panoramique qu'elle donne…” (The surface of a loaf of bread is marvellous first because of that almost panoramic impression that it makes…) writes Ponge. There it is in front of him, a warm baguette from the local bakery, its crusty exterior slashed and baked to form a golden landscape. It’s just a thing, material, a surface. Ponge contemplates the bread, examines it mentally, opens it verbally and prods at its interior, explores the valleys and crests of its physiognomy like he’s in a strange land. The hinterland of a baguette reminds him of a sponge, and then Ponge ends his walk through the soft and undulating landscape of the loaf abruptly: “Mais brisons-la : car le pain doit être dans notre bouche moins objet de respect que de consommation” (But let’s break it: because bread, in our mouths, should not so much be an object of respect, but one of consumption). The baguette returns to simply being a baguette, a thing, but it has led to the most marvellous associative excursion through a foreign landscape, through Christian symbolism, even. “Objects stimulate and nourish his associative imagination”. Ponge is nourished artistically and literally by the material that is bread.

I can’t say all my still lifes have this depth, but making still lifes is a matter of association. Certain things in my home have meaning, and some have greater meaning than others. I find I can write more about the things that have greater meaning for me.

“Shards” is one of those paintings that stimulates my associative thinking. Blue and white porcelain is of such significance in Dutch society, in my life. I associate it with Indonesia, Chinese pottery, wealth, grandeur, colonialism, the VOC and foreign travels; I also associate it with kitsch, homeliness, small-mindedness, out-dated thinking and kitchen tiles with hackneyed proverbs.

Not an ACEO this time, but a square, tile-sized watercolour.