The Art of Improvisation, Tkachenko

Comment by Jean Detheux on July 7, 2018 at 10:26am

“Realism is balderdash! The problem with it is that it's got nothing to do with reality!” (Alberto Giacometti)

This was already obvious to me long before I graduated from Art school half a century ago, the recipes I was taught were useless when attempting to deal with what I was seeing, utterly useless when trying to draw/paint “that!”

“The visible” did not behave according to linear perspective (or anatomy), it all was, and still is, a complete mystery.

For decades, I threw myself totally “in pursuit of the visible” (see examples of that work here) and progressively, the focus of the (“my”) work shifted from “what I saw” to “what was seen before knowing what it was I was looking at” and finally, to “the seeing itself”.

When the connection is made with the seeing itself, one is then faced with an image which begs for more work (“feed me!”), but work which is not done -and cannot be done- by way of knowing!

That work requires one works “by way of not knowing” and, by definition, this cannot be done while relying on apriori knowledge.

Bill de Kooning expressed this well when he talked about “working on a piece until we lose it, and continuing to work on it until it comes back on its own!”

One of the most frustrating aspects of my (being forced to) becoming familiar with the digital Art processes is the domination of the aesthetic of “photo-realism”, not only via the type of imagery which is highly privileged/imposed/expected (Philip Guston again: “Paul Valery once said that a bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning, in a painting in which this is a room, this is a chair, this is a head, the imagery does not exist — it vanishes into recognition…. I want my work to include more” (from this article), but by the impact that aesthetic has on the very nature of the marks themselves, marks made possible (imposed) by most applications used in creating digital Art.

The very mystery that is at the core of the work is almost made impossible because, unlike what can happen when one works over a long period of time with oils (for example), the marks remain crisp and (over)defined throughout.

Working-by-way-of-not-knowing can produce a depth which is no longer that which one starts with/from when working “habitually", it is a depth that one works towards, that which one arrives at if lucky, akin to being a gift, a reward.

Once this is experienced, one sees that most of the works available today, be they still or “animated”, are trapped in a taken-for-granted space, there is no or very little mystery in what is made manifest, the taken-for-granted space confines the work in an already established environment, a “box”, there is no escaping its dictates, unless one would allow the work to die and be reborn (on its own).

However, given the emphasis placed (imposed?) by most schools on control and “how to", it can be nearly impossible for aspiring artists to allow the work to escape their control, this making it nearly impossible for them to graduate to the best part of their being, that which lives outside of the confines of their discursive mind.

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