Statement

After more than 20 years, I believe I have achieved two goals that should be of concern to any serious artist, regardless of style. First, I have developed the technical skills to paint nearly anything-blinding light and absolute darkness are naturally excluded-in a manner satisfying to my personal taste. Second, I know why I paint what I paint. Without this knowledge, it's easy to wander aimlessly, looking for another way to circumvent lack of skill; or painting anything and everything without regard for the sense of personal connection that makes the work meaningful.

In my years as an artist I've painted everything-portraits and figures, landscapes and cityscapes- but still lifes have been with me from the beginning. When the dust settled after my years of painting diverse subjects in diverse styles, I found that my first medium, watercolor, remained the most challenging, and still lifes the most rewarding. No doubt settling down with a house, wife, and garden aided this transition, as I discovered such rich subjects right outside my studio walls.

The challenges of painting are the same no matter the content: getting the right shape in the right place with the right edge quality and color. That seems to me enough to keep one busy for a lifetime, never mind wondering what to paint. Once that's been more or less decided-at least for the time being-the artist can really get to work. I love to paint, garden, and cook, probably in that order. I vastly prefer painting directly from life. Composition is key to my work. I like to study my subjects with some degree of intimacy. Still life is a natural with these predilections in place.

In any case, for any mature artist the subject is really only pretext, an excuse to get on with the endless challenges of painting. The artist is a juggler tossing pictorial problems. Drawing that twig or vase-there's one ball. Getting the placement right, two. Edge, hue, value, chroma-there are a few more. Eventually they become almost innumerable in their complex subtlety. How do you describe the air in the space between a twig and its shadow? What is the best way to catch that glint of blinding light? How can paint-with its mere 10 values-cheat its way to making the viewer believe the lie in front of them? To tell the viewer by pictorial design that the painting was inevitable? Nothing moved, altered, or left out without disturbing the balance of the composition.

My goals are not to shake up the world with jarring content, nor to be an innovator. Variations on a theme have fascinated artists for centuries, and I see myself as a member of a guild that goes back to the cave painters. I see the measure of art as weighing against the best of all time, not merely the trends of the present.

The anthropologist Gregory Bateson saw evolution and learning as the great stochastic processes, utilizing rigor and imagination to reach a desirable end. Rigor, without which there is no structure; imagination, without which there is no adaptation. Much modernist art is imaginative; relatively little displays rigor, either in execution or intellect.

To borrow from the painter William Allik, whose yardstick is Peter Brueghel the Elder, modernism seems most concerned with annexing new things into its repertoire. A half-finished container of chow mein, Art? Well, I didn't know that, but hey, it's in a museum so it must be. Personally, I think this kind of expansion of territory bears the same resemblance to art as a politician's campaign rantings to the making of actual civic policy-that is, not at all.

I judge my work by the standards of the ages. Very few of my paintings make the grade, but I am a member of the guild. Its aims are truth, beauty, and the eternal. The actual portrayal can be a lie, ugliness, and a mere moment of time, but if the deeper qualities exist, they do reveal themselves, and we are the lucky beneficiaries.

© 2010 Donald Clegg, NWS
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