The Future of Art

I discovered art as a teenager, the age of fourteen or maybe fifteen; and by art I mean fine art; and by fine art I mean painting. I vaguely recall being taken to see the Dalí exhibition at the Tate back in 1980, and I was given Painting in the Twentieth Century by Werner Haftmann for Christmas, 1982. From this point on I began to regard certain paintings as though they were pieces of music in terms of how important they seemed - or what they said to me, if you prefer. Marc Chagall's I and the Village had at least as significant an impact on me as that first Joy Division album. Art - by which I still mean painting - seemed like this alternative universe with its own parallel history, its own languages, and I found it very exciting.

Having fixated on Italian Futurism, I myself took to painting in a  style heavily derived from the work of Fortunato Depero. I attended art foundation course, and then took a fine art degree at Maidstone College, although most of this course of study - if that isn't too generous a term for my four years of pissing about and mumbling - was dedicated to time based media, specifically film and video. I had unfortunately lost most of my enthusiasm for this mode of expression by the time the course came to an end, rudely depositing me upon the doorstep of the rest of my life.

I returned to painting from time to time over the years which followed, gradually developing the sort of ability which I probably should have picked up at art college, and doubtless would have done had I not spent all that time chasing what was ultimately an artistic dead end, at least for me. I didn't even manage a life drawing class, because I was seemingly developmentally a couple of years behind most of my peers and was mortified at the thought of having to sit there drawing a nude woman. I mean, a real nude woman - what if I got so aroused that I spunked my pants? Whilst I really wish one of my tutors had sat me down and forced me to learn how to draw and paint properly, obliging me to learn techniques taught in art schools at the turn of the previous century, I have only myself to blame. Art education at the end of the twentieth century might be caricatured as a load of bollocks about self-expression bypassing the requirement for actual talent, but I see it as having had more to do with the motivation of the individual. If you really wanted to learn, you could go a long way, but if you didn't have it in you then it probably wasn't meant to be. I suppose for myself it's simply that my timing was out.

Another factor might be that I realised I didn't actually have much interest in or sympathy for the contemporary art world as it was by the time I graduated. In terms of art history, by the end of abstract expressionism - excepting rare outliers - fine art became something else, divorced from ordinary life. It became an exclusive club founded on inflated sums of money, wearying novelty, something with its own private language which defies criticism and the identification of nudist emperors by looking down its nose and declaring that obviously you don't understand. It embraced the new purely for the sake of the new.

One of my wife's friends is an artist, and a contemporary artist, meaning that's how he makes his living. One of his pieces was a spunk-stained sofa, an old living room couch upon which he did what I feared would have befallen me had I taken a life drawing class; and this he sold as art. We attended an exhibition of his work, by which point he'd moved on to conceptual pieces wherein a model of, for example, a microscope or a pair of binoculars, is made from wood physically cut out of a painting - oil on board - of a subject pertaining to the resulting model, the image of a bacterium or else something seen from a distance. It was amusing and quite clever, but I need more from my art than amusing and quite clever, and this wasn't sufficiently amusing or quite clever enough to dispel the conceit of Spunky Couch or whatever he'd called it. Not everything has to have the sledgehammer populism of Soviet propaganda, but Spunky Couch struck me as a smug man marching up and down a street with a placard reading you are stupid! Such art supposedly defies our expectations, asking why a man can't slap one out over his sofa and then stick it in a gallery, but as soon as we answer, we're told that we don't understand because we're too vulgar. Art creates its own elite, generates its own audience inculcated with the correct responses.

At the other end of the spectrum we have Painting with a Twist, a corporate chain of venues as much as painting classes for people who probably won't end up ejaculating over household furniture.

Invite your friends, sip your favourite beverage and enjoy step-by-step instruction with our experienced and enthusiastic local artists. You'll leave with a one-of-a-kind creation and be ready to come back again. We also host private parties for every occasion. From birthday and bachelorette parties to corporate events and team building, we'll help you celebrate your creativity.

I have a cousin-in-law - if that's an actual term - who regularly attends Painting with a Twist. Paints, brushes, and canvas are provided, and although I gather you're welcome to do your own thing should you feel so inclined, generally the group will follow the lead of the organiser, painting whatever subject has been picked that week. My cousin-in-law has an arts degree of some description, and yet regularly returns from Painting with a Twist with a fresh irony-free canvas depicting Winnie the Pooh or characters from The Lion King, so whatever her artistic awakening may have been, I'm guessing it probably wasn't Marc Chagall's I and the Village - or indeed anything I would recognise as art on my terms; and somehow I can't help but feel that this is where Spunky Couch and its like have brought us - that same retreat into the safety of the soft, rounded, and childish as is currently promoted by most contemporary media right now, the same rebellion against intellect and qualification we see in the political sphere - because we don't really need to grow up in order to be dutiful consumers. In many ways, it's actually better that we don't.

Wasn't art supposed to make a difference of some description? Wasn't it at least supposed to be more than a diversion?

I've therefore decided to start again. I'm painting, and I'm painting in oils for what is somehow the first time.

That's not strictly true. Someone gave me a blank canvas, already primed and stretched back in 1987, so I borrowed some oils and had a go, but the results weren't great. Having noticed that art supplies stores now sell ready made primed and stretched canvases I bought a stack of them in 2015 and took another shot, but that was similarly a bit of a disaster because I was still using oil as though it were acrylic.  Now it's 2018, and I'm going at it again, but this time I've sought the advice of both Sean Keating and Chris Hunt - acquaintances respectively encountered at different stages of my existence, and both well accustomed to working in oils. I've decided I'm going to paint something every Sunday afternoon, something quick rendered in the general spirit of the Impressionists with the emphasis on light and mood. I'll be working from life, no gimmicks or novelties, no crowd-pleasing kitsch, no talking down to anyone, no Winnie the fucking Pooh, just good, honest painting in the hope of making the world a better place in some small way. At the time of writing, I've produced four canvases, each arguably improving on its predecessor as I ease myself into the application of new techniques, relearning how to do that which I picked up during many years of working with acrylic. Of these canvases, I've somehow already sold one for sixty dollars.

This enterprise is partially inspired by my wife and the rocks she paints, as described here. We're collectively trying to add to the global stock of beauty - or thereabouts, and to serve as an example by aspiring to do something of greater relative worth than either the kitsch or spunky couches with which we're supposed to be satisfied; and once I've generated sufficient quota of respectable canvases, we're going to start hitting the craft fairs.

With all of this in mind, we are now driving across San Antonio, just a little way down the Austin Highway after eating at a Caribbean place near where we live. We find the house easily enough. They could have come to our house, but it turns out that they're both allergic to cats. The woman produces pours - assuming that's the plural form of pour as a noun. A pour is a canvas upon which acrylic paint has been poured, allowed to mix, and then to set, forming a colourful pattern much like what can be seen in a blob of oil. She contacted my wife through facebook to propose a collaboration, so Bess is going to paint her mandala-style designs upon canvas pours. I'm here because we do everything together and I'm told that the husband of our pour artist is himself a painter, and that he has exhibited his work in galleries and should be considered a professional. He sounds like someone worth knowing.

We are invited in.

The place is full of canvases, large and colourful, abstract designs which remind me a little of Roberto Matta or satellite photographs of Jupiter's upper atmosphere, and I get talking to the guy. He took up painting just two years ago following an injury at work. He seems fascinated by the fact that I'm from England and tells me about the time he and his wife visited London. He tells me he's had his ancestry dissected by one of those companies which extrapolates such information from a DNA sample, and some of his ancestors were English. Otherwise he's also about 40% Native American, which makes sense being as he has that sort of face. There are postcards of Mexican pyramids on the wall.

'Chichén Itzá,' I exclaim happily. 'I've been to Mexico a few times but I never made it that far east.'

'It's a beautiful place,' he tells me. 'You know all of those pyramids, they are built upon a secret chamber. All over the world, they have found open spaces below the pyramids.'

I vaguely recall reading of a cave system beneath the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, a subterranean structure supposedly divided into seven chambers bearing suspicious concordance to ancestral Mexican myths of Chicomoztoc, the Seven Caves from which the Nahuatl-speaking tribes were reputedly born; but I have an uncomfortable feeling our host is referring to something else entirely, one of those things modern science can't explain, at least providing you ignore whatever existing explanation modern science has probably already given.

We talk about painting instead. I ask about the one I saw on his facebook page, three figures arranged before the Mexican national flag. It seemed reminiscent of the murals of Diego Rivera, and therefore not without promise.

'The Child Heroes,' he tells me. 'They were young boys who defended Chapultepec in the Mexican-American war.'

I recall Niños Héroes, a tube station one stop south of Balderas in Mexico City. I guess that the children would be those whom the station commemorates. If I knew the story of the Child Heroes, it seems I have since forgotten it.

He shows us the rest of his work. It's mostly representational, a little raw but not bad. The exhibitions turn out to have been stalls at comic conventions, and he shows us large canvases depicting Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and some other Batman character I don't recognise. I sigh inwardly. Harley Quinn's mouth sits at a peculiar angle, distracting me from questions of why anyone would wish to buy such a thing, let alone why anyone would want to paint it in the first place.

So much for that idea.

The meeting makes me feel bad for our hosts, and uncomfortable at my own uncharitable regard. I could lie and say it's wonderful work and that at least you're expressing yourself, but I'm not sure anyone who copies a character out of a comic book is really expressing anything, and I don't know that a pat on the head and well done, you is really fair on any of us.

I don't want that to be the future of art, so from this point on I'm going to shut up and get on with it.