An introduction
There are people who cannot feel they have acted, accomplished anything, unless it be in spite of themselves. – Paul Valéry, of Edgar Degas
On page 411 of Saul Bellow’s novel Humboldt’s Gift – in large part a meditation on the doctrine of Rudolph Steiner, which I first read in Whitgift School library while failing my A-levels – the narrator Charles Citrine observes: ‘Actuarially speaking, I had only a decade left to make up for a life-span largely misspent. There was no time to waste even on remorse or penitence… it was up to me to do something, to give one last favourable turn to the wheel, to transmit moral understanding from the earth where you can get it to the next existence where you needed it.’
It would have neither pleased nor surprised me to know that within fifty years I would look back from the same standpoint with similar ideas about redemption. I was, like David Copperfield, an ingenuous character with ‘a certain freshness… and capacity of being pleased,’ but also troubled, by nothing that anyone could see or name. I suspected that the trouble would stay with me; it did, as I relate elsewhere. At the end of Trinity term in my final year a small room at the north-east corner of the ‘quad’ became a careers information centre, with an alluring array of boxes, brochures, reams of typed sheets and coloured folders; paths through the wood stretched in all directions. Supposedly equipped with reason and purpose, I was to select an aim, cross out each assignment in turn, step from stone to stone. My shadow held in a rhombus of sunlight forged across the parquet. Somehow it felt as though I were already out of time; chained up somewhere remote, unable to free myself and get in the swim. The master who presided over the ‘centre’ was nonplussed: ‘Is there some vast mysterious scheme you’re engaged in that no-one knows anything about?’ In so far as he or the others thought about it, I was expected to become a writer, or some sort of artist. In the event I went on to study painting, spent some years as a nursing assistant in the psycho-geriatric wards of now-demolished hospitals, worked in local theatre productions, ran drawing classes, repaired stained-glass windows, became a stonemason, then a curator, and in middle age emigrated to South Korea, where I continue to draw and paint.
I am presently at home in Seongbuk-Dong, a district in the north of Seoul, on the last morning of September. I have been in the country twenty years. The air is clear and the small mountains Gae-Un and Cheon-Jang – three miles eastward – dark and distinct. Small particle pollution, largely from ‘the world’s factory’ on the east coast of China when the wind is westerly, is acceptably low in the early autumn but in other seasons frequently removes all the pleasure one might otherwise find in being here, and makes my work impossible. At those times the air carries a disagreeably sweet, sandy odour; for perhaps as much as a week the mountains will vanish into the murk and in the bedimmed midday it is as if one were standing at the bottom of a pond, or the moon arrested in its orbit during a full solar eclipse. The average concentration has increased appreciably since my arrival. But by contrast with the strongly community-minded response to the Coronavirus crisis, relatively few acknowledge this additional hazard by wearing masks, although it is estimated to contribute to far more deaths. North-east Asia is one of those areas in which climate change brings heavier rainfall rather than drought, but both badly affect Korean farmers; in Cheorwon, seventy miles north by the DMZ, my widowed father-in-law goes on growing sweet potatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, pumpkins, watermelons, cabbage, tomatoes, red beans and rice in increasingly precarious conditions. I used to help with cutting and threshing, and would bring my drawing and painting paraphernalia. As I stood in the fields at the end of the afternoon, pondering whether to substitute cadmium red for ultramarine, tank training in the next valley would make the ground quake. Intra-Korean tensions tend to ease during periods of progressive government in the South, but there have been few of these since the end of authoritarian rule, some thirty years ago. An imbalance discernible in everything reflects the endlessly protracted division of the peninsula. This effectively began in 1945, when the American military government proscribed the Korean People’s Republic in favour of the more conservative Korean Democratic Party. The Koreans of my generation were the last to take an active interest in prospects for peaceful reunification (not always fanciful). It is already several years since I found that my first-year students at Sangmyung University were not only wholly uninterested in the subject but didn’t know when Korea was divided, nor why, nor by whom. My wife remarked: ‘When I was young, either you knew all about the division of the country and who started the war (the official version), or else you had to be a spy.’
Golden eagles will appear above the farm, flying out of, or returning to, the demilitarized zone. From my mother-in-law’s grave at Mook-Ryeon Park in Moon Hye-Ri, Oh-Seong mountain in North Korea is clearly visible; the fourth layer and the palest, but with distinct contours. Back in Seongbuk-Dong, crows dance on our roof and feed on persimmon, fallen there from our single tree. The dancing is followed by a long and patient conversation. They pause to hone their beaks on the edge of the gutter, as though ardently naysaying. This intercourse must be shaped in some way by the acute deterioration of their habitat, diminished food sources, the disruption of seasons, this filthy air. ‘Love’ is not a word that I overuse, but I would ask why we must be permanently dispossessed of everything we love, of the absolute right to go on loving it as it was. It is as a painter that I put the question in this way; painters have been around for tens of thousands of years. The kind of painting that interests me is an act of love, purely responsive.
Age naturally induces a subtle shift in one’s horizons. But over the decades I have lived, since C.P. Snow’s mid-century Rede lecture on the ‘Two Cultures’ and its excoriation by F.R. Leavis, the lustrous future on whose threshold those of us born into the post-war English world would retire to bed each night, expecting without question to find ourselves a step nearer it as day followed day, has receded and vanished. The legacy of that mini-renaissance proved more fragile than we could have believed. If it did not seem inevitable then that the dissolution of the political consensus in Britain and the adversarial rationality that replaced it would return us, eventually, to grotesque levels of inequality – which quell creative promise like nothing else – accompanied by the advance of catastrophic environmental ruin, there is no reason to doubt it now. My reader is more likely to be of the generation that inherited this legacy than that which bequeathed it. A boomer blogger had better have something useful to say.
To the Everyman, the transformation in climatic conditions has been obvious since the turn of the century. Twice as long ago, it was precisely forecast in research by the very industries responsible. It appears that the data was unconscionably suppressed. Under the acceleration of that change, the telescoping of scale from the perpetual to the quotidian, the developing crisis has been coextensive with my own life, blundered away and run to waste. But humanity’s perilous faltering derives less from a want of self-conviction than the unwillingness to hold power to account. The trimmers, carpet-baggers, demagogues and dogs-in-the-manger who became the leaders of my generation refused to heed the warnings and sought to ensure that the world’s citizens, even in a country as wealthy as mine, are denied not only the opportunities that I squandered but also the recourse to protest. Meanwhile, within a score of years, few will remember Earth’s aeon of climate stability. What of memory, or myth, when Nature’s rhythms are devastated?
The author and activist Naomi Klein exhorts us to ‘marry our passions with need’ in respect of the climate emergency. It is a century since artists like El Lissitzsky, in the age before television, found it possible to think that their work might change the world. A world of today in which that belief could still be entertained, even momentarily, would of necessity be kinder and fairer; more knowing, secure and habitable. It is the world that was to supersede the unsustainable one into which we were born, and which we not only expected to see but believed was our due, and would be content to leave to our successors. But what use is a passion like mine against the apocalypse we have chosen instead – easel painting, in an age where the practice has fallen into desuetude and drawing is an incomprehensible language; when it is, moreover, incumbent upon all who recognize the urgency to do what little we can? The late Polly Higgins set an inspiriting example, a student of fine art who became a barrister and devoted her last years to ecocide law. Since I patently lacked the aptitude to do anything of the kind, it never occurred to me to try. She was born some years after I first picked up a pencil.
Jean Baudrillard declared that ‘art presupposes that all problems have been resolved.’ Although this remark was risible when it was made (in 1987, at the Whitney Museum of American Art), the scale of the problem we now face might seem to lend it validity. The parameters of the post-1945 international order and its laws, as Higgins would have seen, have begun to be shoved aside by powerful states. The knowledge of law by as many people as possible, assuming their determination to resist, would afford more direct and practical routes to the possibility of effecting actual and positive change. But I do not see that any of them should be required to stop drawing and painting, or not to start in the first place. It might have been news to Baudrillard, but art – certainly drawing – is a function and mode of inquiry as natural as the desolating systems we are trapped in are perniciously unnatural. However, a general degradation of imagination has had a damaging effect. This was observed twenty years ago by the painter Miles Richmond, who said of his own work:
‘My painting is an attempt to encounter nature without thought, hope or fear. What am I if I strip away all my thoughts, hopes and fears? Good question. Nothing very much, maybe nothing at all. If I can reach this point of being no-thing-at-all then nature too will join me as no-thing-at-all. Then I can look at nature on a level playing field which is where we all were before we started thinking and putting nature in its place, the place where we wanted it to be: outside us, something to be used and exploited, even exploited to make art.’*
My late father – a contemporary of Richmond – returned from the war in Europe and voted for Clement Attlee, knowing no-one then under thirty who would have dreamt of doing otherwise. For him every human life was an opportunity to ‘raise the standard.’ His part and that of his comrades-in-arms was to ensure that this would never again be prevented by poverty, sickness or conflict. He lived long enough, beyond the Rio Conference, to become profoundly concerned about what was happening to the planet. Yet what we now face was then more easily mitigable. Among his collection of books I first encountered the ‘nature-mystic’ Richard Jefferies, Thomas Hardy and the impassioned eloquence of John Cowper Powys, ‘a kind of English Proust’ (as described recently by Iain Sinclair) whose verbosity had palled on him slightly by then but who has always been, for me, irreplaceable nonetheless. I mention Powys because his diaries, like those of Van Gogh, incited me to keep my own, some portion of which is transcribed here. Many such artists would have seen, long before the desperate need to bring governments to act on carbon emissions, that technology’s rapid heightening of our conscious power to intervene in a world only imperfectly understood in that consciousness threatened a dangerous imbalance.
We need art, it is sometimes said, because it invites us to think in different ways. The film director Andrei Tarkovsky hoped that his work would elicit a sensuous or emotional response, which then stimulates thought. I am not a director and, speaking for myself, nor do I give thought to eliciting responses. If it happens, I am glad of it. But the ‘transmission of moral understanding?’ As a painter I would say that seems nearer the mark. To say that art is relevant at all, I also believe that it is more so than ever. This claim is endorsed in many broader accounts of ecological breakdown, not only by Klein but for example Rebecca Solnit and Bruno Latour in the here and now and those like the late Gregory Bateson who long ago saw it coming; none of them artists themselves. ‘What if,’ posited Rachel Carson in The Silent Spring, ‘I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?’ This is the tabula rasa from which, with difficulty, one strives not to stray in drawing directly from life.
The work can always be brought closer to perfection and never arrive there. For all the difficulty, it is a liberation. Drawing is central to everything that I do as a painter, as it once was to all components of the art school curriculum. By drawing, I do not mean the repetition of something already formulated, or an imitation of what is merely visible, but the discovery in the looking and drawing of the immediate presence and tangibility of space and mass; while all idea of time and self, everything fragmented, contingent, calculable and transitory, falls away and endless possibilities emerge. Matisse (somewhere) suggested that drawing and painting correlate respectively to spirit and sense. The physiological stimulus of colour is of course the subject of famous studies (by Goethe, and the Bauhaus master Johannes Itten); what I understand by spirit is the energy created in the collision between artist and subject, rather than egocentric assertion.
When I think of drawing, it is as a practice essentially unchanged for centuries; tens of millennia, if the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave drawings are included. Mine generally consist of marks on paper or linen made with, if not a pencil, a piece of charcoal or chalk, or a brush. I mention technology’s ongoing empowerment of a deficient consciousness. In the taxonomy posited thirty years ago by the late Neil Postman, the technology of drawing – as practised by me – is subsumed in a tool-using culture, and until the seventeenth century all cultures were of this kind. Such a culture is ‘theocratic’ or ‘unified by metaphysical theory,’ with a high degree of integration between its ‘world-view’ and the development of tools. The modern technocracies of the West that succeeded it over the following three hundred years are those in which ‘tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture’ but do not preclude great accomplishments in drawing from Rembrandt, Watteau, Delacroix or Giacometti. The opposing world-views of the technological and the traditional ‘co-existed.’ What Postman saw, and was seeking to warn against, was the subsequent ‘rise of technopoly’ (the word is his invention) in which ‘one of those world-views disappears’ and ‘alternatives to itself’ are eliminated. ‘It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral… It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant.’ He defined technopoly as ‘totalitarian technocracy.’ **
Until recently I thought it better not to show my work at all, than to do so on the internet. A drawing or painting is more than an image, more than its literalized content. Even before the internet, some art writers – John Berger, for example – appeared not to appreciate this. By contrast, Francis Bacon and Paul Cézanne, their very dissimilar lives separated by three years, understood that painting is not illustration, not primarily a visual art. Knowing nothing beyond itself – ocular, literal, ephemeral – the internet cannot transmit the qualities that reveal their shared achievement: the invention of new representations of space. For Hans Hofmann, among others, this was a mark of great painting. I will not attain to it, but in digital form my work likewise fails to breathe and speak as it does when really present, variously in the light of morning, noon and dusk. However well photographed and formatted, hues, saturation and brilliance will be falsified, in this or that monitor. Standing before a Monet or Van Gogh at an exhibition our view is now obstructed by an endless phalanx of phone cameras, but they gather nothing of the presence of the thing or its inherent and unexamined force.
Nor can I turn my hand to digital art, in the way that a painter might once have moved into sculpture or printmaking. The internet instantly smothers the power to sublimate. ‘I was born for sensation,’ said the young Powys; that is, as distinct from the spectacle. I can draw and paint a bit; if I have anything to contribute, it is this. Things on paper and linen survive, if they are cared for. But if I am going to talk about my work here, and therefore show something of it, that means digital representation and setting aside my misgivings. I am trying to have it both ways.
Posts are arranged under two headings. The first is The Burglar, where an exposition on my drawing and painting can be found. This is not a technical manual as much as a series of notes on progress made and obstacles met, or to be overcome; the illuminations and discoveries that repay persistence; my excitement on those occasions when I come back with something that surpasses its predecessors by a tiny step or two.
In his statement referred to above Richmond also wrote:
‘The light that illuminates the mind at the same time as it reveals our subject has always been the quest. It is only the degeneration of humanism into the idea that man’s idea of himself matters that leads me astray. I must forget myself; my thoughts get in the way of seeing. After all these years painting still too often seems like creeping upstairs trying not to wake a restless sleeper. I have to watch every step. It would be so much easier if no-one were in the house!’
I hope my appropriation of this simile does not trivialize the point, which is important. ‘Not to tell,’ as Philip Guston put it; that is the great difficulty. What justification there may be for the blog as a whole consists in how good an account the Burglar gives of himself, beyond the words.
The second designation is The People’s Janitor. This title was written good-humouredly on a portfolio of my drawings by the painter Tatiana Litvinov, whom I knew for the last twenty years of her life. She and I would relate our dreams to each other. Dreams, like art, or love, are gifts that extend consciousness. To dream was to be ‘forgiven.’ Litvinov’s powerful drawings and paintings remain the strongest and most positive influence on my own work. But she was also a philologist and translator for whom literature was as indispensable as painting; someone to whom I would write, and who wrote generously in return. The People’s Janitor, or annalist/storyteller, presides over an assembly of fragments from a journal, kept over the near-third of my life spent in Korea but also beyond, of events and reflections relating to experiences incidental upon the activities of The Burglar.
Representations of my drawings and paintings are displayed amid the text. Under the Burglar these are generally studies direct from nature, set against commentary of which the same works are the subject. Under the Janitor sundry writings are placed with images more various in kind, including photographs; some simply to garnish the content, while others may be supplemental to certain of the Burglar‘s entries and duly cross-referenced.
A Life Draws Out, then, amounts to a painter’s memoir, written and regularly revised, by Jack Leavey.† And what is the use? Is it for painters to tell us what to think, or feel, about our making an end of art, life and our habitable planet? Some might have it so; I would say painting was hard enough as it is. Under our ‘technopoly,’ who now can draw like Goya? (I am not the first to ask). But I for one will try my best. I became a painter because somehow there was nothing else I could have done. The legacy of a painter like Cézanne has lasting value not only in the work he produced (the reader may not value it as I do), but in its example of a life and quest that anyone ought to be free to choose. The world has changed so fast that the proposition suddenly sounds quaint. My own returns from the quest are poor; others I know have worked harder and gone further. But this is not so much the story of a project on its last legs as a fresh striking out. It is late in the day, but never too late to throw everything in the bin and start again.
Or so we trust. The late Victorians who survived into my childhood grew up with a ‘shared set of moral values (wherein) private conscience and public duty could coincide.’ This persisted far into the twentieth century.‡ It had been recognized that an advanced society could never be an unequal one, and reforms instigated and fought for that progressed fitfully for a hundred years, before the edifice was ideologically undermined and power again began to flow to a cohort that repudiated the principle. At eight years old I was among the first people to see the earth’s hemisphere photographed from lunar orbit, freshly printed in blue and black and ever since recalled by the smell of ink and acetate. There hung all life yoked in a single and alarmingly solitary organism; a frank and firm vision of hope founded in self-knowledge. Not that I ever understood the point of manned space travel. That one astonishing image was surely enough: what more was needed? Yet those now arriving in the world find its grace nearly exhausted and its reparative cycle irrevocably maimed. Soon, I fear, there may be no more ‘forgiving dreams.’
* Richmond, Miles, statement in Miles Richmond y Ronda (Convento de Santo Domingo, 2006). What is meant by nature as regards the painter’s subject will be discussed further in the posts: ‘The physic of the irrelative’ and ‘Territory.’
**Postman, Neil, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (New York: Vintage Books, 1993)
† My maternal grandfather was John Joseph Leavey (1892-1956), known as Jack. I am his namesake. Leavey is of Gaelic origin. Revisions to my posts go on as long as I find overlooked defects; there seems to be no end to this.
‡ Stefan Collini, English Pasts (Oxford University Press, 1999).
Bruno Latour died a year after this post was first published.