Once more into the breach dear friends, once more.....

OK, back into this chapter....you know one reason I claim this book to be the book to end all books is because its PRACTICAL and LOGICAL and based on KNOWN HUMAN BEHAVIOR as I have found it over my lifespan of 145 years.....or so it seems....




Now let’s explore a bit further.



Pic 1

Long curved lines, short compact marks, rectangular shapes, angled lines, semi-circles stroked on with warm light grey, dark blue grey, black, pastel blue then left thick and some thin makes the assembly energetic, pulsating, vibrant and random to the eye. But does it communicate anything? No. Does it exhibit skill and knowledge of the craft? Yes, there is certainty and sureness in the marks and in their application. There is strong indication of a skill hand. The assembly seems to have a message!



Pic 2

The dominant mark is the line. Drama is created by intersecting lines rising and falling to the right. Some thick and some thin, some weak some strong. The backdrop is bland and relatively lifeless with seeping coolness imparted by a changing soft blue/grey without definition.

Short marks and dots of white, high yellow and blue impart a sprinkle of light energy. There is no message.



Pic 3

More marks of variety making for large blocks of a dominant color. Again the shuffle of grays in the background hedged in from the left by thick vertical lines composing a rectangular area of a middle tone blue grey. The deep grey yellow is composed of a series of marks aligned in an off the vertical direction left to right. Short lines of blue and white haphazardly break up the uniformity. Nothing is communicated. But there appears to be certainty and purpose in the execution and control of the diagonal high key yellow separating the dominant yellow area from the dominant blue area .The seems to be meaning in a greater projection of what is shown.



Pic 4

Ah hah! The 3 pictures are part of another painting. In isolation the three groups of marks convey no comprehensible message. They are a jumble of marks without clear meaning. If each was framed, lit and given pride of place in an important location there would be an inferred value awarded by its embellishment however there would be no value through the painting’s propensity to communicate a clear message.



When viewed in a total context these random extracts make sense and have recognizable meaning as they join with other marks. They become marks with a purpose. Each and every stroke on the canvas had deliberation, thought and direction which only become apparent when viewed at a distance and in total. Had the strokes not had these qualities the painter would not have succeeded to the extent he has in communication with his fellow man. The greater the knowledge, skill and dexterity the person who makes the marks has the greater is his skill in soliciting an emotional response from the viewer.

Hold on-is that right?

Here we walk back into the crocodile infested waters again. Can the skill, dexterity and knowledge of the stroke maker be that good, or that bad that his assembly fails to communicate? At what point does it change from good to bad, or bad to good? The answer is above. In the 3 outtakes I sought to find merit and meaning. I identified what I thought were aspects both technical and emotional but discovered nothing that connected to anything I could recognize or relate to. There was no emotional response to any part of my life-reality. If I was disposed to finding, in my imagination, some sort of meaning then I suppose I could-if I was so disposed!

Let’s go a bit further and look at some marks on boards that could be one form or another.



This mark has meaning STOP- Crocodile Infested Waters



This mark has no meaning $^8H )+bRQ mmmmY KUYTR

Yet it means the same thing- according to the maker of the mark!



It doesn’t matter how long I look at that as a picture(assembly), on a board attached to a stick in front of me, and the clear blue water it is sitting in, it doesn’t give me enough meaning(=warning) to prevent me from going into the water for a dip! Even if I was the best symbologist, code breaker and art critic in the world any meaning I was to extract from the marks would have no meaning unless that meaning prevented me from entering the water.



So there is a point where bad mark making is simply that-bad mark making; doesn’t matter if the marks were technically well done, showing great skill and dexterity. As an assembly there was no relationship to any circumstances or experience that would cause the viewer to respond by not entering the water. Of course this is predicated on the assumption that the viewer is not suicidal!



Maybe the message is partly revealed with the ‘mmmmY’ being somehow a code for ‘STOP’, in which case the viewer might not enter the water. In other words a connection is made and a response is solicited- an association is made between ‘mmmmY’ and the water in which the board stands. So the mark has relevance. But only if our viewer doesn’t enter the water. In other words the marks must generate a response that is logical, rational and predictable.



If another viewer was to happen along, look at the assembly on the board, shake his head and enter the water what can be said of the person who made the mark? If 100 people were to do the same, what can be said of the sign maker? Whatever is said of him would be the same irrespective of the apparent skill and finesse he had executed the marks with and irrespective of the adornment surrounding the board!

Did the message get through, that is the question?

Well...its getting interesting now and I hope you are enjoying the direction I'm leading you....

Holiday Reading....

Now it seems that most of the world that I interact with have gone somewhere else because there is little to zero happening around me.....it must be the rundown to the 'silly season'.....so that being the nature of things I think it best I post something non active and a bit cerebal.....so some excerpts from my book.....

I'm going to start with what is a painting?

SECTION 1.

'a radar on the landscape ahead'

Making a Mark and Making a Painting.

Where do I bloody start?

Let’s start by defining the subject of this book-painting.

What is the broadest definition of a painting we can give?
Answer: A painting is an assembly or combination of marks on a surface. The person who does this, with some apparent result is generally referred to as an artist/painter.

Does that mean that anyone who marks a surface is an artist?
Answer: In the very broadest sense the answer is, yes.

So the elephant who put paint on a sheet of paper at Nong Nooch village in eastern Thailand is an artist? According to this definition, the answer is again, yes. And that is exactly how Jumbo was described as I watched him slap paint around the other day during a very popular elephant show. After his painting was completed and sold to a fascinated Japanese tourist for 250 baht ($6.24) the elephant then went on to kick a soccer ball into a soccer net. Technically, I suppose, he then became a soccer player- otherwise known as a footballer- when that happened. People gave him bananas in appreciation for both endeavors- or was it consideration! And technically, I suppose, also the $6.24 consideration made Jumbo a professional artist as well, since it was money in exchange for a work of art.

Jumbo painting up a storm….

We will return to Jumbo later. Technically though, Jumbo doesn’t give a crap about the words-‘artist’ or ‘footballer’ or ‘professional’-all he wants is bananas! And the $6.24 cash payment converts to quite a big handful of bananas-technically speaking!

These definitions are too broad for me. I want to tighten them to make them more as I really view them. Anyone or thing that kicks a football into a net and receives consideration is not by my standards a professional footballer; nor is anyone, or thing, that can put a mark on a surface an artist-even though they get money!

But one thing so far is 70% right-any mark or marks on a surface is a painting, I suppose, if it conveys meaning and generates a response from an on-looker.

Now, I’ve got a zillion response buttons. Responses to do with shape, color, direction, size, position, tone and so on. Responses that spring from a stirred emotion.

If I was stirred by a mark made by a human then it has a connect value in as much as it was generated by a fellow human with a zillion response buttons like mine tied to an equally broad range emotions as mine. The mark, in other words, has an emotional quality.

Whoever put the marks together on the surface is connecting to my emotions through the ‘mark’.

If the mark, that I am responding to, was done by an elephant or a monkey though I would not take serious the connect value of the mark because it originated from something that does not have a human or sufficiently human-like emotional grid. I may see it as a humorous though!

Some people believe that because they see behavior that imitates our own in monkeys or elephants then such animal doodlings are therefore genuine art. My question to this is: Does that art reflect the history of mankind, or the history of monkey and elephant time? Does it spring from an emotion?

So a monkey combs the hair of its offspring; a female elephant about to give birth seeks out an ally to help her-actions which we relate to since we engage in similar behavior. We interpret the monkey to be maternal and the elephant chosen to assist to be a friend. Both emotionally based behaviors.

The question now is does the monkey or the elephant have the mental facility and manual dexterity to represent that emotion, or any other emotion, as group of marks on paper(=a painting), that we can understand and then relate to? The elephant in the show went through a series of movements with 2 brushes that were loaded with a selection of paint and given by his human assistant. The end result was some green trees with brown trunks. The elephant was rewarded with another handful of bananas. To jump from the picture of trees to saying that the elephant sought to connect to us an image of trees that was in its head, at that moment, is a major stretch. He was taught to do something that WE recognized. He didn’t have a clue what he was doing other than doing something to get a bunch of bananas!

I would call the art work that the elephant did just that-an art type of work, rather than a work of art. It should be seen in the context of the nature of the creative intelligence which delivered it. Until we can, like Dr Dolittle, actually talk to the animals the message is really only an ‘interesting or funny’ mark.

An event by way of a mark but without a message as we know it is simply a response to a physical requirement-just like the elephant taking a dump before it kicked the football was a response to his feelings of an imminent crap attack. For the Jumbo there was less emotion behind the painting then behind the dump. Both are nevertheless marks of interest! For jumbos fellow elephants the dump had more communication value than his ‘painting’.