Chris Appleby: Works Past & Present
by Andrew Brewerton
Marks blue and fade into one another, and even the freshest drawing has uncertain moments where the texture of the paper confounds the sense of a mark, or a group of marks converge into a dark confusion, or a mark moves so lightly across the page that it is not securely visible. No image is composed in any other way. (1)
…first and last, pictures are not the narratives of art history: they are stubbornly illegible, weirdly silent, “meaningless” artifacts where all our best attempts at understanding fall apart. (2)
This brief essay begins as though by epigraph to jump-start a writerly dilemma in introducing a rare showing of works by the English painter Chris Appleby, pictures in an ostensibly figurative practice that proves unusualy resistant to linguistic assimilation, already wary that - as Braque’s Cahier repeatedly cautions, ‘De^finer une chose, c’est substituter la de^finition pour la chose.’ or ‘Le conformisme commence a la definition.’ (3)
At first brush, these works might appear to present the very lineaments of figured pictorial narrative. Our encounter is with recurrent motifs pictures on paper and board, or occasionally in small painted sculptural assemblages, including human and animal characters (a lieutenant, Lilith, Peter Quince, an ass, an unicorn and others) invented or deriving from sources as diverse as Shakespeare and film noir, (4) epinoia and kabbalah, or Giordano Bruno and movie Westerns.
They occur in interchangeable snapshot scenari: stage platform settings, cityscapes, an orange grove, a chariot, a barque. In their jarring complexities, as with pulp, American comic book, or film narrative forms, they conjure, alloy and enmesh moral, political, psychological or erotic possibilities, for which there would here however appear no prior screenplay. (5)
On occasion, words and names are scratched-in as a kind of hand-drawn floating ‘sgraffito’ cartoon caption. Such words occur as disembodied oneiric voices, hardboiled or half-remembered – the gumshoe voice-over, or a garbled dream of A Midsummer Night’s Dream – for, unlike Shakespeare’s ‘rude mechanicals’, Peter Quince, Nick Bottom et al, Appleby’s unspeaking figures seem fated to perform a dumb-show of recurrent, seemingly unspeakable nightmare.
The rendering of these barely scripted figures is unsophisticated, the path not of illusion but of picturing, (6) and it is in this context that our epigraph invokes James Elkins’ counter-narrative interest in ‘what happens in this inchoate half-light between the splendor of rational representation and the darkness of nonverbal marking’, providing a useful caveat, in which:
Inevitably, pictures are used to tell stories about people, places, institutions, historical events, and many other things, and it can come to seem as if they are principally opportunities to tell those stories. (7)
but where, rather:
To elide the crucial moments of darkness, when the picture, in all its incomprehensible, nonlinguistic opacity, confronts us as something illegible, is to hope that pictures can deliquesce into sense. (8)
In this metaphorical half-light, in which figures cast no shadow, it would seem advisable therefore to proceed gingerly, as though an exercise in indefinition might in this case create the kind of theatre in which these pictures may speak not by narrative overlay or linguistic assimilation, but for and of themselves. Which might forestall their forced deliquescence (significantly, an alchemical term) into ‘stories’, or the delusion of this untimely sense.
We should begin by saying, therefore, what these pictures are not. Despite their overt preoccupation with stories, they are not illustrations, for instance – altogether lacking in prior narrative coherence, plot, sequence, shape or linear purpose, however recurrent their figure-motifs may be.
The human and animal figures we encounter would here appear more icon than character, closer in emblematic form to abstract or allegorical personae: the cast of some undisclosed theatre of alchemical exchange. At root the lieutenant (sometimes it’s O’Rourke, sometimes O’Kiff (9)) is at best a stand-in, ‘one who takes the place of another’, a substitute or deputy, from the etymology of the word in the French, lieu (place) + tenant (holding).
The lieutenant knows too much or too little, as a number of titles or words embedded within the pictures imply. The Lieutenant Had Been Asking the Wrong Questions; The Lieutenant Had Been Poking His Nose Where It Didn’t Belong; The Lieutenant’s Question Had Gone Too Far – the figure of the lieutenant, tied to the stake on a stage platform, an arrow through his heart, is, in the artist’s hand, poised somewhere between execution and sacrifice, embodying a relationship to knowledge as the tide-mark of ignorance, suspicion and wonder.
These are naive, though by no means innocent, characters formed neither by narrative nor yet as signs. Their naive rendering occurs not as affectation or mannerism, but is experienced, rather, as a textual quality of the image: the carefully pictures weighting of figuration in paint, graphite, clay slip, print collage, gold and silver leaf and other materials on paper, board or gesso ground, in nothing less than a fully working aesthetic betraying scarce patience with sophistry or contemporary fashion.
The encounter tells something about the incumbent naiveté that may of necessity be involved in any approach to new ground: of the struggle to form, and to make a pictorial language; and of the resistance of the subject. These appear issues of technical necessity, not of elective choice. They evidence Appleby’s private disquiet over the condition of contemporary paintings, with the ‘problem’ of abstraction, and with what he calls ‘the nausea of just doing what you know’. (10) They make of painting a way of making your way, in a world such as ours.
But even assertions such as these seem premature in their resort to biographical alibis, labels and definitions, lacking appropriate attention to more fundamental questions of pictorial representation, and the physical act of painting. For, after all, pre-empting the viewer’s hunger for interpretation, “What is a figure? A faint webbing of paper fibers and remnants of chalk; a mass of sticky oil…” (11)
Typically, these marks appear to have been applied quickly and with very sure touch. Appleby’s drawing has loosened and unlearned the strong technical formation of his student years at Bourneville and Wolverhampton Schools of Art. In their composition, iconography and chromatic range, the works trail rags of remembrance of late trecento and early quattrocento masters from Duccio (c.1255-60 to c.1318-19) to Domenico Veneziano (c.1410-61) and especially Fra Angelico (c.1395-1441), and to much earlier Byzantine and Russian icon painting.
This history, together with intense affections for Shakespeare, film noir, and the news print of our time is, always we sense, for Appleby the material ‘to hand’: knowledge worn lightly and unselfconsciously in a yearning, primary regard for the painted image as artefact. An icon is a finely crafted construct, laminating successive surfaces laid down in wood, linen, gesso, bole, gold leaf, paint film and, finally, glaze or varnish. Icon painting involves a parallel process in which the internal layering of visionary or meditative experience and perception is simultaneously performed or enacted, for:
To paint an icon is to bring about a transformation of matter that is only real as a result of a transformation in the inner being of the painter. (12)
Were there a grammar of icon painting (there isn’t) then the traditional dative case – to and for the divinity – is in Appleby’s practice more an ablative – drawing by, with and from the material – a difficult and exacting case of abstraction from the figure.
Despite appearances, the works gathered here are not really descriptive or otherwise representational of some other subject, story, material, transformation or purpose. Appleby’s paintings, from their outset, in and of themselves, are that transformational purpose. Risky. Playing for real stakes. True risk comes by instinct, of itself, or else it is merely a form of gambling, and this is perhaps the unease that attends the artist’s impatience with ‘easy abstraction’ that has by contrast nothing to lose.
This is nowhere more apparent than in Appleby’s use of gold leaf, neither as tinsel decoration or cheap dramatics, nor to intensify, but gold inducing the light of abstraction and alchemy, in paintings such as Escape from the City or O’Kiff’s Witness.
That sense of personal and technical risk for Appleby is primarily “a being issue, a live issue”, which he likens to musical improvisation, to theatre and to alchemy. In their performance, these works are not theatrical, they are theatre: “You can dramatise your work or it can be the drama of what just happens.” The artist is unusually explicit in these terms:
The theatre is like the alchemist’s crucible… For me, conjuring up an image is a part of that alchemical process, as well as a physical object. It is a dramatic object, it includes psychology… The painting studio is a theatre. (13)
This is not for Appleby a studied or theoretical position, still less a metaphor. It draws directly upon formative, even visceral experience in the artist’s employment during the seventies as a ‘rude mechanical’, or stagehand artisan and prop maker at the Wolverhampton Grand Theatre. That stage, as a constructed space he describes as ‘uncanny’, with its deck, wings, flies and traps and ‘devilish’ spaces, with its fourth wall, is for Appleby the crucible of powerful forces alloyed with language and performance, psychology, memory and meaning, It is at the same time headspace, theatre and cosmos, as Shakespeare said ‘the great globe itself’.
Matter, in a mineral range of pigmented materials from clay wash to gold leaf, from ground colour to reflected light, is the limned and liminal stage upon which Appleby attempts this kind of transformation, in performance – that is to say, in the act of painting. In the making of a new work the painter, like the alchemist, thinks in materials and through successive material transformations in a process of constant flux (14), both internal and external.
In the radical engagement of their pictorial tendency to abstraction, they lose the plot, stray from their slender narrative intent, held together by surface tension in the picture plane – the bright meniscus over liquid semantic possibility. As Braque wrote, “Ecrire n’est pas de^crire. Peindre n’est pas de^peindre. La vraisemblance n’est que trompe-l’oeil”. (15) As poetics, iconographically speaking, in Jonathan Culler’s terms:
Icons “differ markedly from other signs”… because an indeterminate part of their function is due to cultural conditioning. Icons cannot even be said to make sense until there is a reasonable account of “the way in which a drawing of a horse represents a horse” (16)
Le peintre pense en formes et en couleurs, l’objet c’est la poetique. (17) This is a significant preoccupation of Richard Wollheim’s essay ‘Pictures and Language’ (see note 6 below), what he termed ‘seeing-in’:
Seeing-in is the natural capacity we have – it precedes pictures, though pictures foster it – which allows us, when confronted by certain differentiated surfaces, to have experiences that have a dual aspect, or twofoldness: so that, on one hand, we are aware of the differentiation of the surface, and, on the other hand, we observe something in front of, or behind, something else. We can see things in clouds, in discoloured rocks, in wind-blown sand – and so surely could our remotest ancestors, if they had the time for such games. (18)
Wollheim’s account of pictorial meaning leaves intact “as the bearer of such meaning the visible surface of the picture. It does not transpose meaning either into the head of the spectator or into the head of the artist.” Meaning, arising in complex ways including perception and perspective, rests ultimately however in the layered painted surface.
And whilst in iconographic terms it is difficult to resist the twofold reading of Italian trecento of quattrocento motifs (such as crucifixion or the flight into Egypt, the garden of Eden and ‘The Lady of the Unicorn’, seeing-into paintings such as Ah Lilith, O’Kiff’s Charge, and Lilith in the Orange Grove and Lilith and Unicorn), they are, and they are not, what they appear as echoes, stories or figurative painting.
Pictures are most interesting when… a viewer is forced to attend to the ways outlandish and routinely partly incomprehensible marks both hinder and enable whatever story the picture seems to tell. The incoherence of pictures begins here, with the admission that things are very strange indeed. (19)
Andrew Brewerton is Principal of Plymouth College of Art and Honorary Professor of Fine Art at Shanghai University
Notes
James Elkins, On Pictures and the Words That Fail Them (Cambridge, 1998) p.17
ibid., p.xii
“To define a thing is to replace it with a definition.” and “Conformism begins with definition.” Cahier de Georges Braque, 1917–1947 (Paris, Maeght Editeur, 1948) p.35, 45
The oddest pairing since Raymond Chandler names his LA pulp detective after an Elizabethan dramatist. (”Marlowe just grew out of the pulps. He was no one person”, ref. R.W. Lid, ‘Philip Marlowe Speaking’, in The Kenyon Review 31 (2) p.158)
“We’d be oversimplifying things in calling film noir oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel.” Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton’s 1955 canon, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953, trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2002)
“Now a necessary condition of the cave painting being a painting of a buson is that it should be able to cause in a suitably sensitive, suitably informed spectator a certain sort of experience. What sort? Well not, as might at first seem required, the experience of seeing a bison, or even (since there is no bison there) an experience as of seeing a bison. That is the path to illusion, not to picturing.” Richard Wollheim, ‘Pictures and Language’ in The Mind and its Depths (Harvard University Press, 1993) p.188
Elkins (1998) p.xii
ibid., p.18
Appleby has written with affection of the time he spent making frames for the artist Ken Kiff, in ‘impish conversations’: “Well, he said, ‘One can’t ignore these Americans but we’ll have English/American. We’ll glaze that picture and even have it a little way back from the glass!!’ The issue here was not a practical one… what was at stake was the reading of the picture. To look at this picture through glass enhanced the sensation of entering another world – that was the English. The dilemma should a picture be glazed should a picture even be framed – that was the American. After all modern art comes off the wall – it’s in your face.” (Strange Fruit, in an undated letter to the author, November 2010)
Chris Appleby, in conversation with the author, December 2010
Elkins (1998) p.17
John Temple, ‘The Painting of Icons’ in John Baggley, Doors of Perception: Icons and their Spiritual Significance (Oxford, 1987) p.100. Temple writes: “Tenth century theologians stated that icon painting was an actual spiritualisation of matter, a re-enactment of the incarnation, reflecting actually and not only symbolically the appearance of God at the human and earthly level.” (p.99). Appleby’s conscious engagement with the CHristian icon tradition derives however from his practice as a painter, rather than from any declared theological position, as he has said, unguardedly and without irony: “This is the main story, for me. Icons are some of the best attempts at telling a story. The Christian story is an amazing story, it’s unbelievable.” (Chris Appleby, in conversation with the author, December 2010)
In conversation with the author, December 2010
“As the substance mingle and fuse, they become purer, stronger, and more valuable, just as the soul becomes more holy. The philosopher’s stone is the sign of the mind’s perfection, the almost transcendental state where all impurities have been killed, burned, melted away, or fused, and the soul is bright and calm. Alchemists paid close attention to their crucibles, watching substances mingle and separate, always in some degree thinking of the struggles and contaminations of earthly life, and ultimately wondering about their own souls and minds.” James Elkins, What Painting Is: How to Think About Oil Painting, Using the Language of Alchemy (Routledge, New York and London, 1999) p.4
Braque, Cahier p.31: (’Writing is not describing, painting is not depicting. Realism is just an illusion.’)
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1975) p.16-17, invoked in Elkins (1998) p.12
Braque, Cahier p.11: (The painter thinks in forms and colours, the object is the poetics.)
Wollheim, op cit. p.188
Elkins (1998) p.46