DICK POUNTAIN
If a picture is worth a thousand words, just imagine the combined power of images in the hands of skilful social campaigners
If a picture is worth a thousand words, just imagine their combined power when in the hands of skilful social campaigners.
Pictures mean as much to me as music does. I love paintings and used to regularly visit galleries in London before Covid-19 closed them. Before that, I was spoilt by living for some years in a region of
Italy that was within 40 miles of half the world’s greatest paintings and the birthplaces of Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca and Luca Signorelli. While I don’t paint myself, having failed to bond with watercolours or oils, I love to play with digital images. I could never consider writing a novel with pen or manual typewriter, and similarly I can’t imagine painting in any medium that doesn’t have an undo option.
For many years I’ve been creating fractal art using two main tools: Sumo Paint and Zen Brush. The latter emulates a Chinese/Japanese-style calligraphy brush that you can use on a tablet with either a finger or stylus: the original version was greyscaleonly, but the recently released Zen Brush 3 has gorgeous colour and very realistic watercolour effects.
I sell my works via the Saatchi Art website, but this has so far singularly failed to make me rich – at least they cost me little in time and money to make. The US abstract expressionist Philip Guston once observed that, “The great thing about painting and drawing, as opposed to thinking about it, is the resistance of matter”, but it’s precisely that resistance that makes experimenting with canvas and oils so expensive: it confines lesser artists to garrets, and while overcoming that resistance makes a few of them great, I’ll just stick to dabbling on the cheap.
Which brings me neatly back to one of the recurring themes of this column, namely that “bits aren’t atoms”. I love to remind you that while you can order a pizza from a picture on your screen, you can’t eat the picture. That observation was true long before the computer age – you can admire a lobster in a Willem Kalf still life but you can’t eat it, and that painting was made using pigment particles suspended in oil, not bits. Representations of any kind – whether bits, paint or words on a page – aren’t the things they represent, even if modern technologies conspire to make us forget that.
I’m a great admirer – I wouldn’t say “follower” because he didn’t want to be followed – of the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana. He’s not much remembered nowadays, and was never popular in England or the US, where linguistic philosophy still rules. His major mature work The Realms of Being proposed that there are four realms: “matter”, which is all that exists and of which everything is made; “essence”, which consists of configurations, images and representations of matter; “truth”, which contains just that subset of essences that actually correspond to material things; and “spirit”, by which he meant the intelligence of living creatures, via which they perceive and process essences.
We can never see matter directly, only perceive images of it, and that these images correspond well enough with actual material objects – so that, for instance, we don’t bump into trees or step off cliffs – is thanks to evolution honing our senses to fit our particular niche well enough.
Most important of all, essences can’t do anything. They can’t affect matter directly: there’s no magic. There are indeed dreams and imaginary objects, but these can only affect the world of matter if they persuade us to move, to do something. Santayana’s doctrine of essences applies not only to the inedibility of digital pizzas, but to everything we do, and it’s a powerful tool in these times of digital imagery, deepfakes and fake news. For example, saying that we are “in control of the virus” doesn’t affect the transmission rate of SARS-CoV-2 one little bit: only doing stuff – such as vaccinating, hand washing, social distancing and maskwearing – can do that. “Make America great again” does nothing to increase the wellbeing of Americans unless accompanied by policies that affect the material world. Sticks and stones do indeed break bones, but words do not (although they can incite people to use baseball bats to do just that). A painting can change the world only by inspiring people to do something, like go on a crusade or resist a dictator. In his recent book Narrative Economics, the US economist Robert J Shiller attempts to apply a similar doctrine to the “dismal science” of economics. He notices that people’s economic behaviour is not governed solely by self-interest, nor by rational choice as current orthodoxies would have it, but by the stories people tell themselves, or are told by their friends or the media, about what is happening in the world and what that might do to their own future prospects. Take hoarding loo roll for example…
Representations of any kind aren’t the things they represent, even if modern technologies conspire to make us forget that
A painting can change the world only by inspiring people to do something, like go on a crusade or resist a dictator