A Forest Painting and Reflections on Meaning and Mystery
I had almost decided to show this new painting without writing about it. The reason was a particularly pleasant encounter.
A customer, Robert, had ordered some prints online and came with his wife to collect them. He had an imposing presence, with a strength that seemed to come from his whole personality. At the time of our meeting in 2021, they lived in Dubai, and he had recently run a gallery in Spain whose architecture impressed me. Robert was also a painter. Although our work was quite different, we understood one another from the start. He knew Chinese antiques well, and since I surround myself with them, we had plenty to discuss.
He had looked at my blog and questioned my habit of discussing and interpreting my own paintings. He would never do that, he said: each viewer should discover a work’s mystery for themselves. Why explain it away?
I understand that view. When I started the blog, I also wondered whether writing about my own work made sense. Yet I do not think a few comments necessarily destroy its mystery. Nor does explaining a thought reveal how to reproduce the painting. The technique I have developed offers many possibilities, but it remains difficult to control.
So what is useful to a viewer? The title alone? Perhaps less than the context.
Environment
After a series of open landscapes—sky, mountains and water—I made this work as a counterpoint. It moves into the forest, a smaller, more mysterious world. The underlying ideas are similar, but the setting changes how they are felt.
Philosophical questions tend to enter my paintings, so I would like to mention one here. Paul Watzlawick’s familiar proposition can be translated as “One cannot not communicate”. In an interpersonal situation, even silence and inaction can convey something.[1]
Response
I remember the considerable response to his writing, although to me there is something of old wine in new bottles about the thought. Still, it offers a useful starting point. The moment I put a painting online, I am already communicating with you. I can leave it at the image or add some of the ideas that went into it. I find the latter worthwhile, provided viewers remain free to respond in their own way. What you see and what Ms Li in Shanghai sees may be quite different.
Applying that thought to a painting may shift attention from isolated forms to their relationships. How do the main elements respond to one another? What do the small details contribute? For me, these exchanges help the whole painting work. Abstract pictures that rely only on effects often leave me wanting a stronger thread of thought.
Conceptual Structure
What is the structure behind my own work? It is difficult to describe in a few sentences, and neither necessary nor possible to dissect every part. If a comment gives someone a way into a question such as communication, that is enough for me. The rest belongs to the viewer.
A Chinese signature might be read as a trick: “Look, I can write Chinese too!” It might also suggest an exchange between Chinese and Western ways of thinking within the painting. Neither response is something I can control.
I am also interested in whether something less obviously beautiful can say more than a conventionally beautiful subject. A bouquet of red roses makes an easy appeal to beauty; finding beauty in a rubbish bin is a different challenge. Someone else may find humility in the painting, or mindfulness. Writing about the work need not close those possibilities.
Footnotes
[1] Paul Watzlawick, Man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren: Das Lesebuch, edited by Trude Trunk, second edition, Hogrefe, 2016, pp. 13–14, “Die Unmöglichkeit, nicht zu kommunizieren”. See the published reading sample (PDF). The English sentence above is a translation of the short German formulation. Its application to painting here is my own. ↩
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