17
Painting as making real

The Prose quotations given here as chapter headings are from a book published in the United States in 1930. The book is concerned with the implications of scientific studies of creative experience between people and groups of people, whether in industrial, social or political relationships. I have quoted extensively from it because such formulations did seem to provide most cogent intellectual statements of some of the very problems that I was struggling with in private feeling and action. But there was one fact the implications of which I could not easily ignore. It was the fact that I had first read the book many years before making this study, even though, when choosing these chapter headings, it had seemed that I was reading them for the first time. So the question arose, why had it been necessary to wait for the experience of the free drawings before becoming able to make Follett’s ideas part of daily living? Now I thought the answer was indicated in certain passages of Follett’s which seemed to leave out the one fact which in my own experience had turned out to be crucial.

‘We are seeking something which does not exist,’ says Follett, and also that we are not willing to face life as it is. But why? Should we not also ask why we do this, not only deplore the fact that we do it? The answer surely is that we are seeking something that does not exist as an objective reality just because it does exist as a subjective one. Thus there are moments when ‘life, the facing of difference, stops for us to enjoy peace in the sense of a cessation of differ-ence’. There are moments when subject and object do seem to become one. And the mistake we make surely is not in believing that such moments exist, but in not realising their subjective quality, in not recognising them as illusions, even though vital illusions.

There was also the following statement:

Since such a philosophy explicitly maintained that we are born at home in the world, it implicitly denied the possibility that being at home in the world is something that we have to achieve. So also it ignored the possibility that we do only achieve it by a willingness of someone in our original environment of persons, in the actual home of our infancy, to fit in with our dreams. It ignored our original utter dependence on someone who would temper the implacable otherness of externality to fit our needs, temper it for us until such time as the external did come to grow happily significant.

Follett’s book gave so much richness of thought that it seemed churlish to ask for more. Yet it did seem here to assume a reasonableness in people that could not so easily be taken for granted. It did not take into account how the poet and artist in us, by their unreason, by their seeing as a unity things which in objective reality are not the same, by their basic capacity for seeing the world in terms of metaphor, do in fact create the world for the scientist in us to be curious about and seek to understand. In fact it did not deal with that function of the creative arts by which they provide a half-way house to external reality, that function by which they carry on, throughout our lives, the role that in our infancy had to be filled by a person, their function in providing a perpetual well for the renewal and expansion of our psychic powers.

My own experience, not only with the free drawings but in earlier experiments, had certainly shown how essential for anything but blind living was the emotionally coloured image, as well as the intellectual concept. Thus it was not until I had given up looking for direct help, either from intellectual concepts or factual observations of the external world, and concentrated first upon images, that I had begun to live at all, in any real sense. It was by following up all the apparently unconnected, but rich and sensuous and many-coloured images that the mind continually deposits on the shores of consciousness, like a sea upon its beaches; it was by studying ‘what the eye likes’ rather than what the reason affirms and verifies, that I had at last become able to use concepts to elucidate everyday experience and so become able to begin to live reflectively rather than blindly. Thus although Follett’s statement might be justly considered to describe the goal of maturity, its ignoring of the nature and intensity of the struggle by which such maturity is achieved might lead to certain dangers. It might mean that those responsible for directing rational policies of reform, from whatever political angle, might unwittingly destroy conditions of life upon which the very roots of our sanity depend. In their enthusiasm for objectivity and hygiene they might advocate a so excessive diet of planned rationalism for the young that in fact would defeat its own ends; the result might be that deceptive lip-service to reality which only hides a deeper madness.

Having reached some idea of what function the arts might be fulfilling, it was now possible to see more what Cézanne might have meant when he said: ‘Réaliser: tout est là!’ Having seen how it could be that the artist, by embodying the experience of illusion, provides the essential basis for realising, making real, for feeling as well as for knowing, the external world, it was now possible to look further into the artist’s role to see how it is that he adds to the generally accepted views of external reality; how in fact art creates nature, including human nature. Thus it seemed to follow that the artist is not only one who refuses to deny his inner reality, but also and because of this, is potentially capable of seeing more of the external reality than other people, or at least, more of the particular bit he is interested in.

Looked at in this way, how inadequate the phrase ‘Art for Art’s sake’ became; it was rather ‘Art for life’s sake’. So also it was now possible to pay more than lip-service to the statement that real life is always more full, richer, potentially, than the experience of any art; because I could now add that it is through art that we can come nearer to realising this fullness and richness. Thus the original doubt as to which was more real, the common sense world or the transfigured one, could now be answered: the transfigured world was the real one, potentially, because the mystery was then in the developing living facts evolving under one’s own nose, not in some far away fairy-land. The mystery was that of the natural not the supernatural, for it held within it its future as well as its past, all its unrealised potentialities, all its ‘becomingness’, whether inside us or out.

Now also it became clearer how it was that the discovery of the method of the free drawings had made possible the acceptance of this fact. In all the years before happening upon the free drawing method I had had doubts about the relative value of a contemplative attitude to life as against an active one; for it had seemed that only in the contemplative state did the richness of the facts become apparent; as soon as active purposes appeared the facts seemed to lose their vital essence and become the mere instruments of those purposes. But now it was clear where the mistake had been, it lay in thinking of contemplation as essentially involving sitting still and action as being essentially purposive. What the method of the free drawings had embodied was something that could be called ‘contemplative action’; and it was this, whenever achieved, which brought back the full sense of the significance of the facts as more than instruments of one’s private purposes.

There was another result of this study. I could now begin to learn how to paint. At least I could take the risk of covering canvases and being dissatisfied with the result and going on to try again and even of getting professional help. And this seemed partly because I now knew more or less, or thought I did, what I was trying to do; it was also because having recognised the necessity of both illusion and disillusion, I no longer expected a painting to be a magical solution to every problem of life, and so no longer made the half-admitted demand that every picture should be a masterpiece or it was not worth doing.

As for the validity of the ideas about what I was doing when painting, whether they held for other people and in other times and places I did not know. Probably not. Perhaps some people could paint without needing to have any clear idea about what they were doing and some found quite different ideas. Probably the particular idea that served to spark the creative process could vary widely and depended upon one’s own particular experience and moment of existence in history. Certainly it could not be an idea that was entirely uninfluenced by other people’s ideas, since one does not live in a vacuum; but it did not entirely depend for its usefulness to oneself on other people’s verification. The point surely was that one had to select and eliminate from all the variety of ideas about what the artist is doing, in order to fashion the idea that did in fact most effectively unify one’s own particular approach to living. Thus I had certainly had to eliminate certain ideas absorbed from the intellectual climate of the epoch I had grown up in. And it was not only nineteenth century ideas about painting as pure representation that had had to be shed, it was also nineteenth century (and earlier) ideas about the efficacy of thought by itself, as an omnipotent God. Thus I saw now that the very first drawing I had done, after beginning to think about painting methods consciously at all, the one called ‘The Mills of God’ (Fig. 35) with its omnipotent Cleopatra’s Needle had been a symbol of thought that believes itself a power apart from action. And although it was the job of psycho-analysis to show how such a belief can develop in the individual in infancy and be clung to in adult life, clearly there was a deadweight of social ideology as well as personal need to be broken through before one could completely shed it. Thus it seemed to me that the study of the method of the free drawings had, in fact, led me to become aware of a struggle which was not only personal and not only to do with painting, it was essentially part of a contemporary struggle in the whole social world. It seemed to be in essence a struggle to slough off the old caterpillar skin of an outworn ideology about the relation of thinking to doing, of mind to body. Thus this study had led to the becoming aware of a revolution in man’s attitude to his own thinking, a revolution that had been going on around me all the time, but which I had been failing to see the significance of.

Incidentally, I noticed now, and only now, a striking example of the split between inner and outer and the attempt to keep them artificially separated. I noticed the significance of the date when the free drawing ‘Thunder over the Sea’ (Fig. 9) had been made, with its great Indian war drum loom-ing in the sky. The date showed that it had been only a matter of days between the making of the drawing and the bursting of the storm of war over the whole of Europe. So the storm, which all this while I had been treating as a private and inner one, was not only that.

There was also another reason why it was now possible to paint. It was because there was one central fact that made it seem worth while going on, whatever the objective value of the pictures to other people. It was that I had discovered in painting a bit of experience that made all other usual occupations unimportant by comparison. It was the discovery that when painting something from nature there occurred, at least sometimes, a fusion into a never-before-known wholeness; not only were the object and oneself no longer felt to be separate, but neither were thought and sensation and feeling and action. All one’s visual perceptions of colour, shape, texture, weight, as well as thought and memory, ideas about the object and action towards it, the movement of one’s hand together with the feeling of delight in the ‘thusness’ of the thing, they all seemed fused into a wholeness of being which was different from anything else that had ever happened to me. It was different because thought was not drowned in feeling, they were somehow all there together. Moreover, when this state of concentration was really achieved one was no longer aware of oneself doing it, one no longer acted from a centre to an object as remote; in fact, something quite special happened to one’s sense of self. And when the bit of painting was finished there was before one’s eyes a permanent record of the experience, giving a constant sense of immense surprise at how it had ever happened: it did not seem something that oneself had done at all, certainly not the ordinary everyday self and way of being.

Having made such a discovery about a different way of being, the question arose, could not educational theory and practice somehow find out more about it and come to make more deliberate allowance for it; rather than concentrating so much on the way that stands apart and only tries to give an objective detached account of what it sees? In fact, I suspected that if education did manage to do this, one of the results would be not a lessening of the objective powers but a strengthening, once the needs of their opposite had been given recognition.* And not only this, was it not also possible that this different kind of sense of self that grew out of creative concentration had bearings upon one’s relation to the whole mass of other selves that one was in contact with? This sense of union achieved in attempts to create a work of art, this transcendence of separateness, might it not have its parallel in the union with other people that working together for a common purpose achieves? Thus the illusion of no-separateness between self and other, which is an illusion so far as bodily life was concerned, is not necessarily an illusion in the social sphere. Many years ago I had read somewhere, with a feeling of both incredulity and yet hope: ‘The separate ego-entity is an illusion.’ Obviously the separate body entity is not an illusion, and one undoubtedly has to establish and accept this basic fact before one can go any further; otherwise one has no solid ground on which to build one’s sanity, one may allow oneself to believe one has the body of Helen of Troy and the brain of Einstein. But once that is established the demarcation of the boundaries of one’s spiritual identity are not fixed, they do not have to remain identical with one’s skin. Thus was it not possible that orthodox educational methods increased the hate resulting from the primary disillusion, not only by not giving enough scope for the aesthetic way of transcending that hate, but also by not giving enough scope for the social way: the way of spontaneous co-operation in enterprises undertaken together for the good of everybody who is taking part in them?

Now also it became clear what was the meaning of one of the free drawings which all this time had remained obscure. It was called ‘Bursting Seed-pod’ (Fig. 49) and it had obvious symbolic reference to a personal theme of producing new life. But I had never felt satisfied with this explanation, it had given no sense that the drawing was now fitted into its place in the whole series. But now it did fit in; for I saw it as a picture both of the epoch I was living in and my own relation to that epoch. I saw it as showing the irresistible thrust of life that was giving birth to new ideas and also how these were bursting through the seed-pod of the old world that gave them birth.