On being an older artist

 

 

An older artist has gotten used to the idea that their work doesn’t matter very much.The number of people who come to the exhibitions are down. A great many of ones contemporaries are dead.
On the closing day of my retrospective in 2016 a group of older ladies came to the show. They had been in my class in high school and it meant a great deal to me looking at their familiar faces under the unfamiliar grey hair that they had made the effort, an effort I understood too well, to come.We chatted happily about schooldays enjoying the friendship of shared history.

The style and subject matter of my early work hanging on the walls gave our reminiscences a sort of tangible significance.A couple of these friends brought examples of my early work to show me on their phones, ghost images that I vaguely remembered of the promising young painter that I had been.

This is a cycle that all painters know. I would guess that most l painters know by the fifty year mark, that the fashion which changes every decade or so now regards, what they have taken a lifetime to do as obsolete.But by the fifty year mark something more interesting should have emerged, something much more compelling and that is the artists personal style. I said to the one young artist who came to my exhibition, dragged there by his mother and eager to show me his work, that it was unreasonable to expect me to be anything other than a product of my time.I had put a big ad in the paper how come more of you young artists hadn’t comeI asked him.They don’t read’ he said’.Of course not, the very idea of an ad in the paper for a start dates me, that time is past. The intention behind the act of painting has changed.The paintings
of my heyday were intended to hang in peoples houses becoming part of their lives and that idea seems quaint now-the zeit geist of the time is completely different .Young artists don’t paint with paintbrushes dipped into paint , they make consciousness raising “projects” aimed mainly at museums where I imagine there is a daily staff on hand to dust those enormous installations.Their knowledge of art history only goes back to Duchamp.
But what does it matter?They will find themselves older artists one day, life will have eroded their hopeful arrogance into humility and they too will be grateful for the interest of a handful who shared their aesthetic, who still care.

Finally after all the changes, the experiments with this style and that, the repeated attempt to mine down to the essence of ones experience of life, in the end its being true to oneself that matters.The mining can take a long time and it persists after youth has gone and the audience for it is lost. Now my stroke hurries as my eyes blur and its less important to finish, to savour each painting as if I still had a lifetime before me.Now the days grow short as I reach September and dreams have turned into memories but one thing remains constant .The smell of the oil paint as I squeeze out the colours from the tubes, the fresh colour on the palette ,the brush dipping into it and the stroke on the canvas as I block in the new start, the hope that this will be the best one .The physical act of painting still has the power to excite me.