Wilderness Painting: Apologia Part 1

Like many representational painters, I am reluctant to talk about my paintings, in part, because of the inability of words to convey visual ideas, but mostly because art’s strength and appeal exists at a more basic pre-verbal level, that primordial experience of the natural world that becomes the source of language and meaning. The American philosopher, Charles S. Peirce noted that though we create language, language also shapes us, and our ability to think. In order to remain vital, languages must be fed through authentic experiences of nature, which have traditionally been conveyed by poetry and representational painting. With out being nourished from experience, language becomes an enclosed self-referential system, in which meaning becomes arbitrary and ideological.  In the past century in particular, this cross-fertilization between the arts and language has broken down. In my current work, I try, from an artist’s perspective, to examine some of the reasons for this breakdown, and to offer my own approach to art, which I call wilderness painting.

Today and for most of the past century, poetry and representational painting have declined and with them language and meaning.  Not surprisingly, almost all the key philosophers of the twentieth century, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine, Nelson Goodman, Dewey, and the logical positivists, have been preoccupied with the problems of language and meaning. Quine and Goodman, the most recent of these philosophers, leave us with a solipsistic worldview:  for Quine, ontological relativity, where estranged people try to entangle others in their own web of belief, and for Goodman, a place were we create our own worlds.   During this period, society has also been presented with abstract art with little or no visual appeal, but accompanied with long discourses by critics on their justification. 

Tom Wolf, in his book “The Painted Word”, describes these works of modern ‘art’ as illustrations to the text, which is the real work of art. Or as Michael John Angel, my art teacher, would say, “the problem with the art world is that people look at paintings with their ears.” If we are to appreciate the preverbal power of representational painting to connect us to an experience of nature, we must reverse the order of thinking, and see art as informing language. Art being primal and basic form of perception cannot be subject to the fashions and ideologies of the day. 

But most ‘fine art’, today, has become a franchise of the fashion industry, preoccupied with trends, ideologies and social commentary, but neglecting its true subject—nature.  “Imitate nature” was the advice given for centuries to art students, and it was the love of nature that set apart every great artist.  But how does an artist imitate nature? 

Writing in Samuel Johnson’s paper The Idler (No. 79), Sir Joshua Reynolds states that if this imitation of nature is a mere mechanical copying of the “literal truth and a minute exactness” of nature, “in which the understanding has no part”, then “Painting must loose its rank, and no longer be considered as a liberal art, and a sister to Poetry.” Plutarch called painting  “ silent poetry”.  Reynolds appeals to this elevated view of painting on the grounds that painting like poetry has “power over the imagination”, and  “attends only to the invariable, the great and general ideas which are fixed and inherent in universal nature”.