RICHARD SWANN ART

Elena Shvarts described being a poet thus (roughly translated):  ‘The poet is an eye, linked for an instant to a howling god…  A gouged eye on a bloody thread, for a moment filled with all the pain and glory of the world.’

The average Artist Statement reads thus:  ‘I have adopted process directed formal strategies as a mediating filter for juxtaposed paradigms in an ongoing questioning of definitions, eschewing outmoded conventions of representation to disrupt posited standard systems of experience.’

Given a choice between the two I’d settle for a bloody eye filled with pain, or indeed paint.

It doesn’t matter if artists can’t write about what they do, any more than it matters if a musician can’t do anything more than monosyllabically mumble their way through interviews.  Nice if they can, it’s like being allowed to snoop around their house and see what sort of tea towels they have.  What’s problematic is structures of words that are compensating for the art being crap.

At art school back in the 80’s there was a lot of emphasis on a constant questioning of what you did, the idea being this would improve the art you produced, with no room for complacency, no acceptance of low standards.  All well and good, but the danger was spending more time on justification than on doing, more time pondering the purpose of art than getting good at it.  There didn’t seem to be much tolerance for doing what you just felt you ought to be doing, or for motivations for creating art being bloodier, earthier, more visceral than could be put into formal structures of art jargon.  (To be fair generations of students have got round this by doing first and then thinking up justifications after.  With the connivance of their tutors if the results are any good).

So, here’s a painting.  It doesn’t have any justification.  (More alarmingly it doesn’t have any eyes.  I may put some in later).  It’s just a painting of a cat, from a photo taken at night, a smear of paint to represent a moment waiting for a delayed train when something from a world without work or commuting prowled past.  Not by any means full of all the pain and glory of the world but I’m trying.  For Elena the muse may have run with the wolf, for me it’s asleep on a sofa next to a flea-bitten cat, and you have to work with what you’ve got.

 I like the blue line though.