The pursuit of the "abstract"

The quote that "painting is dead" has been apparently attributed to Paul Delaroche when he saw the first attempts in photography in 1839 and was presumably referring to representational painting. When I arrived at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1997 for my interview my portfolio consisted of mainly landscapes done from direct observation, a few portraits and drawings of ancient marble busts, also done from direct observation and some still lifes. The "studies"of marble busts and heads and still lifes are still what you need to take an exam on in Greece in order to enter the Fine Art School. They must have seen all that and thought I had a good foundation to develop and progress in painting during their four year course. But if painting was dead, then poor landscape painting was long buried and had come back to haunt the teaching staff at the Newcastle University Fine Art Department in the form of me. I did not care much for portraiture or still lifes, but I just could not think of anything else to paint other than my landscapes. I was painting from direct observation outdoors from the age of fourteen, so when I arrived there I continued to do what I did before and started painting roof tops and chimneys in Newcastle city centre. Then I ventured outwards towards the countryside and Durham.

I remember very clearly the painful expression in their eyes and later the total despair on their faces. They tried to suggest other things to paint, but in the end they just told me I had to try and paint something more "abstract" where there is a concept behind my painting and some thought put into it. I have never felt more confused and helpless in my life. I had no idea how to do that and how or what to paint that was "abstract".
In Greek the term for "abstract" painting is "afirimeni texni", which means literally distracted art. To me this term always sounded like the artist has made a drawing or painting while he was distracted or pretended to be, thus the work was not quite well drawn or measured or not meant to look well drawn or measured. In the time (sometimes years) students prepare to enter the very prestigious Fine Art School in Greece, they are taught how to measure their subject properly using as an aid a spoke from a bicycle wheel. You need to make sure your elbow is straight and extended fully forwards, while you use your thumb and top of the spoke (which needs to be held in a ninety degree angle to your wrist) to measure a very complicated number of lines. Then you need to transfer them very carefully onto your paper. The concept is that everyone admitted should be able to draw "measured" and correctly and then they can do what ever they like once they are in the Fine Art School. Surprisingly there are some very good abstract painters that come out of that school (eventually). I only took the exam once without the preparation and failed.

Anyway, towards the end of the first year I was so deflated by my failure to come up with "abstraction" that I started messing around with some three dimensional constructions. I could not quite call them sculptures because at the time I was thinking of my aunt's marble bust and figure carvings as sculptures. But the staff loved my constructions and at the end of the first year I was more or less told straight out that I was to either change from painting to sculpture or fail. So I was now a sculpture student and sculpture came to me very easily. What I still do not understand is how it was okay to do representational work in sculpture but not okay in painting. For the first proper things I made in the second year were two sets of works based on the earthquakes that were taking place at the time in Turkey and Greece. I remembered very vividly as a small child how the chimneys remained untouched on top of old fallen houses after an earthquake, so I made some chimneys on top of some steel bars. And for the Turkish earthquake I made some ceramic Mosques shaken up from the earthquake. Somehow that was abstract enough.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time there as a sculpture student and my final piece in the last year based on a giant Chess set is one of the few works I've made that I still think were good. But my inability to make abstract paintings still haunts me. Much more than my failure to draw "measuredly". I think some of the problem lies in the way I understand the word and generally how people interpret it as well. In a way it is very relative what abstract is (although I understand it is definitely not representational). Some years ago I was talking to a British friend of a friend trying to explain a verbal agreement that commonly takes place in rural Greece regarding land. Most people in Greece inherit from their grandparents small pieces of land in the village they originally come from. But as many people have now moved to cities these pieces of land go unexploited. So what they do is give the field to an agricultural person in the village who is responsible for it and for buying (most commonly) olive trees to plant in the centre of it. He buys them and looks after them for the next seven or so years while he uses the edges of the field for his own crops. When the trees are ready to produce oil, he and people from the village get together and harvest it, make the oil and send it to the owner, keeping an agreed amount for themselves. There is no money involved in this arrangement. There was no way I could make this person understand this and he kept on saying it was the most abstract arrangement he had ever heard.

So definitely there is some degree of interpretation of the term to be blamed. I have used random mark making, shadows and "the accidental" to try and produce abstract painting, but still in vain. I hope that somehow one day it will come naturally and my version of the abstract will be exciting and rewarding to me.

CHESS, 2001 Tynemouth Station, The Bridge