I am currently involved with a large-size mural project which has a working title “Artist’s Studio”.
Studio is a subject used traditionally to transform a Still Life into a Genre painting, or a Decorative Composition. Studios are normally cluttered, full of things, teeming with objects. Different objects displayed randomly, or orderly, create different planes. All these shapes and colours, textures and surfaces, lights and shadows - develop in their complexity lives of their own, each one different, none matching the next one. However, the ultimate aim for the painter is to attempt to create a unified pictorial space.
While sketching, I looked at the late Georges Braque’s Studios for inspiration, and was puzzled and delighted by the simplicity and greatness of his invention.
The painting of space has been Braque’s main preoccupation for years. He discovered that a Bird In Flight, by its very nature, animates the spatial element and somehow makes it more real.
That’s how Braque describes the result: “As I painted Studios, I was gripped by a kind of jubilation… I was in a happy state of someone to whom is revealed the harmony of objects between themselves and with man. The objects faded away, leaving me with the imprint, the echo of their poetic relationships. They no longer existed. My work was enlightened and it enlightened me. Everything became simple and full of meaning.”
So, a Bird In Flight makes it all happen. Interestingly, it animates the space in any disguise: as a flat silhouette, a toy model, an Origami, a ‘real’ Bird, a picture of a Bird, or even a kite. Associations are plentiful: with a flight, freedom and hope. Moving smoothly across the pictorial space it appears firmly positive and optimistic, light and graceful, encouraging and uplifting. Or in Braque’s own words, it makes the painted space at ease with itself, and very easy to live with.
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