To the studio: painting the informal everyday
This week Antone Martinho-Truswell, the Dean and Head of House at St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney, published an article that, in some ways very convincingly, argued against the informality and comfort-focused way of 21st Century life, in a self-confessed ‘unpopular view’, suggesting that highly formal rituals and ceremonies can make life more democratic. I don’t wish to analyse the article in depth here — you should read it yourself as Martinho-Truswell puts together a compelling case. My main point to the contrary, is that we should not so willingly dismiss the informality and ‘comfort’ many have come to value about modern life. There can be rich and valuable ceremony in the informal everyday.
To this day, Frank Auerbach has worked from the same studio space in North London since 1954, painting almost every single day for more than 65 years. The subjects he paints are people and places within his almost immediate vicinity, making numerous versions of places such as Mornington Crescent, Primrose Hill, and Hampstead Road. We know that since the late 1970s at least, he has made several paintings entitled To the Studios that represent his view from the street and steps leading into his studio, in an alley of Camden Town.
If we compare To the Studios (1979–80) with To the Studios (1990–1), painted ten years apart, the colours are changed, but the application of paint and the dynamic vivacity remains the same. The crisp incisions of line, cutting through layers of pigmented matter that flood the surface of these paintings suggest that there is an urgency and vitality, emerging from the embedded time within the loaded paint, that tempts the proposal that in every representation it is as though Auerbach is looking at this scene as if for the very first time.
This is only partly true. Auerbach has said, in an interview with Catherine Lampert in 1978, that each particular experience is a totally new one, and this can even change mid-way through making a painting with the slightest change in movement or light, but also Auerbach’s knowledge of the characteristics of a place or person is built over time, through deep rooted familiarity. For Auerbach it is not about repetition, but seeing new-ness through accumulated familiarity.
I think that revisiting or re-painting the same place, or person day-after-day, year-after-year, is not in itself ritualistic or celebratory, nor is it a formal procession, but an acknowledgment of the trivial, the seemingly ordinary, and the comfort and informality of where one has chosen to live and work.
Looking at Frank Auerbach’s paintings makes me long for the commute to work, that I currently cannot do because of COVID-19 and social distancing. Auerbach’s work creates an urgency for looking longer and more intently at the people and places that have become so familiar to us that we almost become desensitised to the subtly changing microcosm in which we have chosen to exist. To be less passive is surely needed at this time — to recognise more, observe more, and pay more attention to the small details that inform our worldview — and crucially, how this changes over time.
Martinho-Truswell ends his article with a post-script relating to the current COVID-19 pandemic, hoping for a new world that remembers the importance of formality and ceremony.
But I do hope this crisis, which is, underneath the medical crisis, a social one, will provide a chance for reflection on how we interact, and that a global community resuming its usual business will embrace the opportunity to repair our broken institutions of formality and ceremony. In short, I hope we all come out of quarantine wearing our Sunday best, ringing bells, lighting candles and burning incense.
To some extent I couldn’t agree more with this closing sentiment — if only for that word ‘formal’. I think what Martinho-Truswell is arguing for should be seen as part of a much-needed slowing down of society, that would inevitably have more room for the rituals and ceremonies sometime missing from the everyday, both formal and informal. I’ve probably used teapots and cafetières more in the last 6 weeks than I have for the last 6 years — and I really hope that trend continues, because it’s a deeply rewarding and pleasurable experience to just put a little more effort and ritual into everyday acts such as making a brew. I think it’s important to remember however, that the feeling of observance and liturgy I can sometimes have when using a teapot, having a candlelit bath, or lighting an incense stick, doesn’t necessarily need to involve attires or rites of an Oxbridgian dinner party or meeting of the Freemasons, for it to have the feeling, character, and satisfaction, of the ceremonial. And more than this, as discussed, can we not make the trivial more ceremonial — can we be more observant and less passive within informal rituals such as our morning commute, or interaction with familiar faces on the street? Perhaps I should make more of an effort to get to know that person, who’s name I forget, that I say hello to at the bottom of my road almost every single day.
It is the most ordinary, everyday stuff, that Frank Auerbach appreciates most in life and what he sees as the force and potentially hidden subjects behind many great paintings. It can be said that behind every piece of high art, every renaissance masterpiece, and every deeply symbolic religious painting, there are hidden trivialities; artistic devices such as live models in the painter’s studio and ordinary everyday artefacts used as visual stimulus. It is from the material that is closest to hand, that many painters make their work from. This could even open new interpretations into what some paintings really mean for the artists that painted them, despite their presented narrative. Is it really possible that deeply visually-minded people such as the most well-known renaissance artists could paint a live model standing in for Venus, or the Virgin Mary, without inputting the portraiture and subtle nuances of the sitter? When we see a painting of the Virgin Mary, we’re actually looking at a portrait of the artist’s model, probably someone who was close to the artist at the time and definitely not the Virgin Mary herself — how does that change the formality of the subject at hand? It is when we start unpicking the fabric of formal art such as renaissance altarpieces that we find they are laced with the informal, the trivial, and the ordinary.
These facts, the solid floor beneath our feet and then, these things on the table — that’s the stuff of painters. This recalcitrant, inescapable thereness of what I call everyday objects, which to people with an imagination seem about the most amazing thing.
- Frank Auerbach in conversation with Catherine Lampert, 1978.
Perhaps the slowing down that we are witnessing at present could spark an artistic appreciation in all of us for the beauty and pleasure in everyday activities and the deceitful simplicity of ‘thereness’ — the informal ceremony of the everyday.
