Four Sturges

Well, we had the Three Esses the other week, and now it’s the turn of the Four Sturges. Just think Ronnie Barker.

As a child, I loved to draw. I still do. Drawing accompanied most of my passing fads and phases, all my visual obsessions, from shabby sheds to space rockets, from steelworks to stadia, from battleships to bridges – always bridges. Subject matter came in waves; I would have an idea about something, a temporary passion to pursue, to illustrate on paper. I’d get on with it for a while, and before long it would burn itself out.  A fallow period would ensue until the next enthusiasm took hold.

My problem was that my desire to draw was constant, it was an urge almost physiological in its intensity. But every now and then I would be stuck, sat at the dining table ready with paper and pencil, mind’s eye constipated; I’d turn to my parents and wail “I don’t know what to draw”. They would offer helpful and plausible suggestions – something we had noticed on a walk together, an episode in a story I’d read, a seaside pier we had strolled along. Well meant, often imaginative, and dovetailing with my known visual interests, but these suggestions were never any good. Never. Eventually I learned not to ask; I knew that the inspiration had to come from within, it could only come from my own mind. What I didn’t realise, for a long time, was that such patterns of up and down, peak and trough, boom and bust, are perfectly natural. To try and resist them is unwise.

At present I feel I’m emerging from a spell of “painter’s block”, having long ago switched my primary allegiance from pencil to oils. This follows a spell of activity at the end of last year, so it’s not unexpected. I’m in the fortunate position of not having to worry about it, being an artistic unknown. I’m due to exhibit locally at the end of this year, but that’s a long way off at present, and I feel no pressure. A few ideas are starting to gel, but for now I don’t have to do anything.

Nevertheless, I can see how it can be a worry. An acquaintance of mine, modestly commercially successful in the art world, wrote to me before Christmas to say that he is due to contribute to an exhibition at the end of March. He said he was currently  several works short, and was evidently struggling and concerned. Clearly, he wasn’t enjoying his chosen activity, which had become a chore rather than a pleasure.

Success, achievement, can bring with it commitments which can be uncomfortable and unnatural to accommodate. Urges can’t be forced, and if they are, the outcome is likely to be unsatisfactory, wooden, stage-fraidy, self-conscious, boring. You see it with poet laureates, the moment they are crowned.

You also see it every summer at the Royal Academy. Every year I tell myself it will be the last time, but I’m always there again next year, groaning and wishing I hadn’t. Once more I see the well known names, the Academicians, hogging the prime wall space. Because I like landscapes, seascapes and townscapes, I know which artists’ work to seek out. It saddens me, how painters who - when they were more or less free to do what they wanted, weren’t famous, and had no commitment to actually do anything - were brilliant, but now that they are expected to perform, to contribute, and they churn out the same old same old every year, only with increasingly insultingly greedy asking prices. But far worse, they paint with no evident enthusiasm, only boredom and slapdash “this will have to do”, even hints of self-parody. Not all of them are like this, but those that are have become, in short, POFs, Precious Old Farts, the consequences of the forced urges hinted at in today’s blogpost title. Where is the satisfaction in that?

I detect a natural progression. A creative theme emerges for someone, develops, gets better, gets very good, gets recognised, gets desirable, gets wanted. It becomes a product, a proper artistic artefact. More is demanded. The theme or style or concept, whatever it is, peaks and plateaus. Sadly though, in due time, the urge starts to dry up, while still the product continues to emerge, ever more routine and lacklustre. Natural decline and death are resisted. Quality and interest level fall away simultaneously. The expectation remains, but the inspiration wanes, disappointment sets in. Is this a happy state of affairs for the artist or the viewer? I believe not.

 
In a way it’s a paradoxical situation, because many people are at their best if faced with a deadline, or if their process of production is constrained in some way. In general, though, it seems to me much better if one can be free to produce whatever, whenever, however one wants, or not at all. I’m in that lucky position; no one is interested, and if I don’t want to, I don’t have to. Four Sturges are surely worse than none at all.