Art 1

When I was a teenager I became interested in Art. Or paintings, perhaps that's the area of the Arts to which I refer.

We all did, though. My friends and I, exploring the world, discovered Art and set ourselves to respond. That's the mission after all.

We loved the Dadaists, of course, and Cubism, Surrealism even abstract expressionism. They all seemed like visual genres that came naturally to a bunch of 70's kids spawned on Soft Machine,  Dylan, William Burroughs, Kenward Elmslie and James Joyce. Even Dylan Thomas. Even Monty Python.

I suppose we swam in it all. Our culture was surrounded by Chaos theory. From Physics to Psychology, from Freud on Dreams to Sartre. Our dose of existentialism came bathed in Dadaist playfulness.

The purposelessness it spawned was an added extra, a freeby  excuse we knew was instinctively wrong but what a great reason to reject Dryden and Pope.

So when I left University and came back to Art a second time, I suddenly found myself only semi armed. To arrive as a practitioner in any field is to have your preconceptions stripped at the door.

Having thought I'd drunk from the deepest well, I found I had just taken the medicine from the lowest shelves and didn't understand much at all.

I remembered all this earlier this evening. I found a book in my study on Tissot, and remembered buying it from the Art Book club at a time when I had barely any money at all.

I didn't understand him, didn't 'see' it. I understood it the way one grasps the way a machine is operating. But beneath the surface, I didn't understand why it was there.

And now I think I understand why. Why I had this defect and where it came from. And it seems to me so widespread a disease I must share the thought quickly, while it is still with me.

I think I was like so many young people then. I instinctively understood modern art, but had no theoretical grasp of it. Modern art spoke to me. I could and still can, look at a canvass, and relate in a pre-verbal way to the piece, engaging on a level that doesn't normally come to the surface. Yet for all that, I had little notion of it's technical foundations.

Alternatively, with the classical paintings of The Academy, I had all the theoretical understanding but no intuitive grasp at all.

I suppose that is where my fruitless obsession with Rock music left me, an intuitive responder, and I needed to fill in the blanks.