We do not begin work as soon as we disembark in a strange country to the conditions of which we have to adapt ourselves. And each day was for me a different country. – Marcel Proust
Art is born of humiliation. – W.H Auden (to Stephen Spender)
During my five years at Seoul’s Sangmyung University as ‘Professor of Western Painting’ (in the end I walked out, but that is a story for another post), other foreign lecturers from art schools in the UK or US would visit on exchange programmes. One of them, preparing his installation, suggested that artists from the West enjoy an advantage, in their initiation into the Korean environment, because its strangeness affords the freedom of an ‘innovative’ response. This struck me as lazy thinking; an artist ought to be impressed by the strangeness of everything everywhere. And if, for the last thirty or forty years, art has been nothing if not ‘innovative,’ then I’m no artist. I associate the word with certain corruptive ideas.
Some of the most visible and appreciable differences about Korea arise not so much in culture or matters of form as from the trauma of the last hundred and fifty years: annexation, subjugation, division (proposed by the Japanese fifty years before the Americans), war, famine, dictatorship; an ongoing chain of calamities that commenced with the outcome of the Russo-Japanese war. At the same time, some of its most diverting aspects are those I imagine a traveller finds anywhere; that in some intimate way retrace my own past in a distant place. But, for someone who draws, lack of familiarity with the subject can be helpful. I expected stimulation from the irrelative, by which I mean strangeness. I hoped it would be good for me; in the event, I am not sure how well it has worked out.
Twenty years before leaving the UK I visited a small gallery to see the work of a local group of painters I was getting to know, some of whom had been students of Dennis Creffield. He in turn had been a student of David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic in the late 1940s, along with Dorothy Mead, Cliff Holden, Miles Richmond, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach (the last two of whom he called ‘giants in chains,’ their work petrified as ‘product’ in the shrine of public acclaim). The gallery was unattended but for an elderly invigilator; since I took an interest in the work and lingered long, we fell into conversation, during which I was free with my opinions. I then realized that the man was Creffield himself (then about the age I have reached at the time of writing). On learning this I became less forthright, which he noted and reproved me for. This was the only occasion on which he and I talked at such length. Fortunately for me the meeting took place just as I decided to give up my stone-carving and restoration business in order to return to painting, and was lamenting the time I felt I had lost. Creffield, whose publication of English Cathedral drawings had dazzled me a few years previously, took the view that, on the contrary, my experience of working so closely on the fabric of those structures, touching them, learning about them, was an invaluable one for a draughtsman; he even envied me. Bomberg ‘had felt that the cultivation of tactile values was crucial in helping him disengage from ordinary perception and discover a more intuitive way of grasping reality.’* In the statement provided with his drawings Creffield describes himself as ‘of the progeny of Cézanne’ – who, like Van Gogh, put gravity back into painting after the impressionist experiment – and adds:
‘The medieval artist’s idea of the perceptual was as of a faculty of imaginative understanding. And so in his art space, time and distance are not governed by measurement but by the relative significance of the constituent parts…
‘I am not interested in creating an illusion of reality – nor in making a symbol of it. But in trying to find a substantial form for its substantiality – an image of actual experience – the wound unbound.’†
In Korea I set out to find motifs among which to pursue the same; a majestic mass of nature, mountains, impressive buildings. I wished to immerse myself in my subject as purely as Creffield. There is nothing damaging about being in thrall to a teacher, if he be one among several competing influences and one proceeds thereby to work towards an independent critical identity. But for Creffield, growing up and studying in post-war London with his love of Wittgenstein and English cathedral builders, the subject was anything but ‘irrelative.’ I too loved those buildings, which was why I became a stonemason; I too loved my country, in a way I could not acknowledge until I uprooted myself from it. Korea and its architecture (the little that was left to stand in front of, by the twenty-first century) was the exotic; in it I saw my uprooting. Love, in a comparable sense, took nearly half a lifetime. Nevertheless, drawing advanced my knowing and understanding.
For the first year of our marriage my wife and I lived in Samcheong-Dong, half a mile from Gwanghwamun, the outer gate to Gyeongbuk palace. The western-style Japanese colonial government building, eighty years old, deliberately imposed on the native aesthetic and ousting most of the ancient structures in the compound, was demolished in 1996; their painstaking restoration then began and is still in progress. Venturing out with my drawing materials (charcoal and paper) at six in the morning, I began with the first of the two inner gates standing behind Gwanghwamun (the outer gate) which in those days it was possible to access freely from the street. This gate is Heungnyemun, which was therefore entirely visible (the third gate, Geunjeongmun, stands beyond it). I was not yet aware that Heungnyemun stands on the site of the colonial building that displaced it, or that its reconstruction had been completed only recently. Twenty minutes into the drawing I was approached by two Buddhist monks from the nearby Jogyesa temple, grey-cloaked and bearded, who studied my work, excruciatingly, while I apologized for the crudeness of the drawing and my poor Korean. But, finding that I was British, all they really wanted to know was whether I supported Manchester United Football Club. Working in the English landscape, even in London, I was used to being given a wide berth and left to get on with it. But the monks were the first in a series of passers-by whose inquisitiveness did not recognise that whatever I was doing was not unserious but required concentration.
Sungnyemun, formerly one of the eight gates in the historic city and the oldest wooden structure in the country, a mile from Gwanghwamun, was destroyed by arson one night, by a known miscreant, before I made any undertaking to draw it. My failure was a serious dereliction (I had had three years) but so was the decision by Lee Myung-Bak, the former mayor of Seoul who won the presidential election, to relax security to the site. Typically he rushed the construction of an ersatz replacement, declaring that it would be ‘better’ than its predecessor. This could not be; the mature native pine used in the original, available when repairs to war damage were made in 1961, was harder to come by, the requisite skill likewise. Fresh paint soon peeled, new timbers began to split. During the conflagration firefighters did not know where to direct the water, aiming it uselessly at the roof until experts in historic structures, roused from their beds around the country, phoned in the correct instructions. In the morning people gathered at the ruin, many weeping, some in penitent prostration; children left notes of apology to their Cheosun ancestors.
I have made drawings of, or from, other sections of the city wall, around the home we later moved to in Seongbuk-Dong, north and east of Samcheong-Dong. I also took my sketchbook into the markets around Euljiro and Dongdaemun, and worked from the roof of the university while teaching there. I tried to draw in the grounds of Gyeongbokgung and Changdeokgung, while tour guides used loudspeakers, entirely unnecessary and audible in every corner of the site, while escorting a group of perhaps two or three visitors through it. I then had a bitter altercation with an Australian tourist who claimed the right to stand at my shoulder for as long as he pleased, because he had paid the entrance fee. Our wives separated us before traded insults led to blows.
This is a noisy country, perhaps just in a way I’m not used to. Even when I’m not trying to draw, the rails are blown up under every train of thought, as it were before it can leave the station. Sudden, completely unexpected crashes make me jump out of my skin, while no-one around me appears to turn a hair. Nothing of any considerable weight or mass, once picked up, is placed back on the ground, but must be thrown. A reckless cursoriness, certainly a shocking disregard for safety, bred in the frantic pace of industrialization, has long become the normal mode in which to go about anything, whether or not terrific haste is really justified. A landscape painter from the relatively sedate English Home Counties is therefore put out to find that Seoul is not quite like Godalming, or the Côte d’Azur. One is tempted to think of Beethoven trying to compose during Napoleon’s advance on Vienna. All the same: ‘If they could make more of a racket, they wouldn’t be Korean,’ remarks an older French friend whose patience is still continuously tested, despite his having lived in the country long before I knew the first thing about it.
In Hard Lines I mention my wife’s former tutor, who laboured to secure me the post at Sangmyung University. He had been appointed the first curator of the National Museum of Art at Gwacheon at the end of the military dictatorship, although he eventually gave up the position owing to constant political interference. Towards the end of the Roh Moo-Hyun government – at which time I had been in the country three years – it happened that he was on good terms with the curatorial team at Gyeongbok Palace, and so able to arrange my access there on days when the grounds were closed to tourists, allowing me to draw the buildings uninterrupted.
The English cathedrals are modelled around the human frame and built with stone, the geology of that country being unusually diverse. A Creffield drawing is remarkable for comprehending the commanding verticality of those monuments in a complete expression of the subject:
‘…it is possible. To look up and look down… to unite these separate moments of time and physical movement, by means of the continuous imagination of memory.
‘I do not look at the cathedral as if through a letterbox – neither do I draw it so.’†
But the Korean buildings do not stretch into the sky, nor press down on the earth with such force. Instead they seem to have alighted on it, wings still unfolded. They are made largely of wood and their contours follow that of the landscape, blending into the mountain layers. But drawing the mountain, as tough as that may be, is not as perplexing as drawing one of these structures. A mountain has height and mass, like an English cathedral, which sooner or later enables me to solve the problem, after a fashion; in drawing it, I become conscious of my own mass. Standing before these buildings one doesn’t feel that connection in gravity, in relative mass; their ethereality can’t be internalized in the same way. Although Geunjeongjeon, for example, in the centre of the Geongbokgung complex, does loom over one, which is why I attempted so many drawings of it, the essence of the thing is not in its height; in being drawn, it is neither quite like a mountain nor a large boat. It came to me that with persistence I might discover how to create a gesture – as Creffield calls his drawings, after Wittgenstein – that comprehend its mechanics, dimensions and volume as effectively as he did with those thrusting masses of stone.
But in the attempt I was continually driven to make horizontal lines, rather than vertical ones, being sensible more of volume than weight, and because the structural components were layered, rather than stacked. The tendency of horizontal lines is to close down the form because they recede into the picture space, rather than advance out of it; vertical marks bring the mass forward. But to look up at this spectacle and treat it as though it were the west front at Wells is to idiosyncratically miss the point; its grandeur is stated in different terms. After blundering through a number of drawings I understood more about how the building is assembled, but if I found myself starting to formulate – when the eyes became tired and attention slackened – I erased the marks and looked, and paused, until I could re-engage more intuitively. I was trying to draw, not to construct. Eventually something of its ‘substantiality’ seemed to look back at me from the drawing; that is to say, not a description, caricature or anything I had negotiated or imposed upon it, but something extracted of its tangible presence.
Unfortunately, just as some small progress became evident in the work, the officials who granted me special access to the palace buildings were replaced by others. Administrative personnel tend to change throughout a hierarchy with the arrival of new chief executives; politics infect everything. The privilege was not extended at the end of the agreed period, and I have never returned.
Soon afterwards we visited Cambodia, where I drew the Siem Reap temples; these, built of sandstone, are again very unlike the Korean structures. This time I used graphite on watercolour paper. An account of this experience is found in the Addenda.
Two or three years later at Deoksan, an industrial area of Seoul south of the Han river where an artist friend had a studio, I made another charcoal drawing, and an oil painting, from the roof of the building. But I was only now starting to discover how powerful pencil drawings can be, regardless of their size, and to make fewer large works in charcoal. As the failings of those turgid charcoal drawings became more obvious, I began to accomplish much more with a fine point on a small scale.
It has taken me most of my life really to understand what Picasso meant by claiming not to seek but to find, and how seldom I can say this for myself.
*Richard Cork, David Bomberg (Yale University Press, 1987) p.266
†Dennis Creffield, English Cathedrals (Arts Council of Great Britain, 1987) p.7