Childlike and the Primitive Drawing - Essay Example

Art: Childlike and the Primitive Drawing Modern artists working since the early part of the 1900s have dedicated themselves to depicting the range of human emotions within the colors and lines of their work. The modernists, such as Picasso, focused on the emotions themselves with little or no reference to the symbols or issues of the times in reaction to the perfectionism of the photograph and the machine age. They felt that the only way to portray the realism of the subject was to break the rules of art in order to explore images of pure emotion. Lyotard (1984) describes this process as an attempt “to make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible” (78). This “something that can be conceived but not seen nor made visible” is often referred to as the sublime, a quality of transcendent greatness “with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation” (Wikipedia, 2006). The presence of this sublime element, then, inspires the imagination in a specific direction based on which elements remain visible or understandable. Its significance is in the way in which it brings attention to the uncertainty of meaning inherent in the work, such that no resolution makes itself apparent. For artists of this period, the best way to achieve this sublime element was to forget the training they received in art school in order to recapture the sense of wonder and imagination reflected in art produced by children or ‘primitives’, those who had received no art training. To understand how the sublime can be communicated through visual art, the work of modern artists Picasso and Paul Klee will be discussed in terms of their materials, subject matter, content, composition, color and impacts of context or the time period in which they were produced. Picasso’s works, characteristic of the modern abstractionists, focused on presenting graphic images of emotions without relying on true representations of objects in keeping with the childlike approach to art. In his paintings “Figures on Beach”, “Weeping Woman” and “Girl Before a Mirror”, Picasso presents each figure as an abstract collection of geometrical shapes arranged in such a way as to denote the specific emotions and feelings his figures are experiencing. This harks back to the primitive style of painting in which geometric shapes form the basis of all forms. However, the paintings convey anything but childlike messages as his use of color goes a long way toward conveying the emotions he wished to express just as the relative hardness or softness of his lines worked to establish the relative sharp or dull nature of the feelings. In addition, another aspect of his art that infuses all three of these paintings is the sophisticated concept of portraying motion or action through the representation of more than one viewpoint at a time. Thus, while he continues to present a childlike or primitive impression of his art, he still conveys complex ideas and concepts within the same art. Initial impressions of “Figures on a Beach” convey a sense of basic geometric and amorphous shapes carelessly and haphazardly tacked onto a board depicting a basic beach scene. The colors are basic oranges and blues in a seemingly accidental complementary color scheme while the forms are relatively solid and lacking in dimension. Careful and limited shading provides some sense of depth and motion, but this, too, seems more accidental than purposeful. However, the subject of the piece is anything but childlike. Movement is shown in the various placements of the eyes and nostrils of the figures and the seemingly random placement of the woman’s breasts. The confusion of straight body parts that allows arms and legs to almost become interchangeable also reflects the idea that these people are not remaining in stationary positions but are instead allowing their arms and legs to become tangled as part of their embrace. The most stationary aspect of the couple thus appears to be the more shaded upper thigh and buttock of the woman as one of the only truly recognized forms. The warm colors of the figures and the gentle shading of the beach suggest an intimate embrace full of love rather than the more livid and pulsing tones typically associated with sudden passion, indicating a more mature love underlying the act of copulation. This idea is reinforced by the smooth curves and general avoidance of sharp angles. The warm tones here are further cooled by the presence of the gently sloping blue ocean and sky of the background while the excitement of the pose is reinforced by the depiction of the triangular-topped white tower. In similar fashion, “Woman Weeping” seems to be little more than a bunch of colored paper scattered upon a surface when it is first approached. While the image of a woman’s face is immediately recognizable, the contrast between colored areas around the edges and grayed areas in the center make this impression seem to be almost accidental. Picasso’s colors in “Woman Weeping” are strong and bright, consisting primarily of earth tones suggesting the woman’s connection with the earth. At the same time, her skin takes on a yellow-green hue suggesting the illness of her spirit as the result of her suffering. Her eyes are the only white spaces not constrained in the center and spill out tears that paint a white and gray-blue handkerchief-shaped area out of the front of her face. However, because Picasso was interested in showing emotions, he made the handkerchief transparent for all but color, depicting the woman’s gnashing and gritted teeth as they open for weeping, move against each other in fear and gnash the edge of something in anger. Her tears are also diamond-shaped daggers digging into her fingers and her own fingernails as she attempts to hide her face behind her hands. The sharp angles and jagged edges of this central section reveal the stabbing sharpness of her sorrow while the more muted lines of the periphery denote the long-term suffering this present pain will become. Again depicting a seemingly childlike image, Picasso manages to imbue his painting with a great deal of emotion and sophisticated thought. “Girl Before a Mirror” depicts a somewhat happier emotion, yet remains overall just as complicated as the “Woman Weeping” despite its childlike appeal. The bright reds and yellows and intricate patterns of the wallpaper of the room establish an energetic, optimistic outlook for the girl looking in the mirror and provides the painting with the sense of a childish imagination that is not reflected in the mirror’s image. The colors in the mirror are darkened, deep reds, purples and blues that reflect a darker self-image than reality. Her body, somewhat pear-shaped and well-proportioned as suggested by the relative sizes of the circles drawn to denote stomach and breasts in primitive geometrics, is also distorted in the mirror’s image. The mirror image emphasizes the roundness of the stomach region, bloating it larger than the original and sagging further down while the breasts are reflected as much smaller, unevenly spaced and completely unstable. What is painted with black horizontal stable lines on one side of the painting is reflected in the mirror as downward curving green stripes, indicating an emphasis on the lower extremities and a serious instability of the upper reaches. Despite the childlike approach, the painting nevertheless manages to convey the sense of a poor self-image found in many adolescent girls and even many grown women. Like the approach taken by Picasso, Bauhaus artist Paul Klee was also drawn to the easy expressiveness of children’s art. “Klee valued the ‘primitive,’ and especially the art of children. He envied their polymorphous freedom to create signs, and respected their innocence and directness. ‘Do not laugh, reader! Children also have artistic ability, and there is wisdom in their having it! The more helpless they are, the more instructive are the examples they furnish us ....’” (Hughes, 1991). Using several of the same cubist approaches employed by Picasso, Klee was nevertheless quite different from Picasso in that he purposely included many signs and symbols in his paintings, allowing them to take on more of the dreamlike qualities of the surrealists and focusing more upon the meaning of the message behind the image rather the emotional content of the image. “Many of his paintings are a form of writing: they pullulate with signs, arrows, floating letters, misplaced directions, commas, and clefs; their code for any object, from the veins of a leaf to the grid pattern of Tunisian irrigation ditches, makes no attempt at sensuous description, but instead declares itself to be a purely mental image, a hieroglyph existing in emblematic space” (Hughes, 1991). Such approaches can be seen in his paintings such as “The Golden Fish”, “Comediennes Handbill” and “Diana in the Autumn Wind.” In “The Golden Fish”, Klee depicts a single yellow-colored fish floating in a sea of near blackness. While the figure is definitely a fish as indicated by the presence of fins, eyes and a tail, it is easily also the form that would be drawn by a small child, strangely stiff and solid in the center of the painting. Surrounding him is an aura of blank black space in which nothing occurs. Around this aura, however, there are several reddish fish of various shapes and sizes, most seeming to have more definition and shape than the first, but all seeming to have somewhere else to go as they are all swimming toward the outside edges of the painting. In deliberate violation of the rules of composition, all of these fish are swimming out of the frame directly toward the corners. Yet, despite the rules that say such lines are taboo as they tend to take the eye out of the painting, the arrow-like bodies seem to have the opposite effect and force the eye to remain firmly locked in the center upon the golden fish. The golden fish itself has several shapes barely visible on his body that do not seem to have the rhythmic pattern of fish-scales. Pioch (1995) suggests these are runic symbols. “The great fish draws the mysteriousness of his secret world into significance. We may not understand the significance, but it is there” (Pioch, 1995). With this information, the meaningless blue scribbles denoting the waters of the sea also take on a deeper significance as it is noticed that they do not all follow the typical smoothly curved patterns of ripples and water movement but are instead depicted water and land plants, jagged motion next to curved and several places in which full letters seem to have been scratched into the paint. Through this depiction, the viewer is able to glean the idea that there is a hidden message within this seemingly simple and childlike depiction, but what the message is remains hidden in the depths of its impenetrable darkness. “Comediennes Handbill” is representative of a series of paintings Klee did that are reminiscent of primitive cave paintings. Beginning with a relatively primitive surface, painting gouache over newspaper, he presents a relatively neutral surface much like the cave walls or the ancient papyrus of the first writers. Yet a touch of sophistication is provided as a darker shade was laid first, providing a somewhat unstructured frame behind the lighter background of the image surface. On top of this basic surface, Klee painted a series of thick and thin straight and curving lines connected and disconnected in seemingly haphazard fashion in a design that encourages one to seek meaning. Along the left edge of the painting, a clearly discernable stick figure is detailed with a more developed torso and breeches, filled in with pink to form a heart shape, connected with an oval head wearing a triangular cap. Arms reach up and out toward the center of the image and again encourage further exploration. With this initial suggestion, the employment of imagination brings out a jumping stick figure in the very center of the page with bug-like eyes and oddly designed headgear. Another shape just above this could be interpreted as a third stick figure in the background, falling backward and kicking one leg up in the air. Finally, a series of shapes toward the bottom left of the image could be seen as another figure, viewed from the chest up, as its peers directly out of the frame. Other shapes in the image do not produce any obvious suggestion of stick figures, but they serve to convey the idea that they have a meaning of their own. They encourage the viewer to continue attempting to discern the hidden ideas while remaining frustratingly obtuse. At the same time, their jagged lines and heavy diagonals fill the image with a high level of energy and movement, keeping the eye always on the move and further suggesting the meaning cannot be found not because it isn’t there, but because of the human limitations that makes it nearly impossible to resist the pull on the eyes by other elements of the painting when attempting to focus on one. Finally, “Diana in the Autumn Wind” seems almost like a crayon drawing as a series of overlapping flat shapes slowly pulls together to form the image of a woman caught in the strong winds of the dying year even while they pull apart into ‘leaves’ of autumn. It isn’t until one notices the tiny stick-style legs toward the bottom of the shape and the small white face that emerges from the top that the figure in the middle comes together to suggest the form of a woman dressed in layers of clothing. Pioch describes it as “Leaves flying in a moist breeze are, at the same time, the Virgin goddess on the hunt, and yet also a fashionably dressed woman from Klees social circle” (2002). The idea that the painting is made with crayons is achieved by thatched lines that allow a great deal of the whiter surface to show through in much the same way that a crayon might miss covering pockets in the rough surface of children’s drawing paper. The background is covered with patches of orange and green while the woman’s clothing is depicted in blue and red, complementaries to the background colors. This is significant to the composition as it is the means by which the overall affect is achieved. “The large areas of gray within the figure result from the complementary antagonism of red and green, or orange and blue, symbolic in this context of the transition between summer and winter, growth and harvest, maturation and decline” (MacEvoy, 2002). While the image could easily be the plaything of a child lazily passing away a rainy day by filling random areas with different colors, closer investigation again shows a much deeper, more sophisticated and yet still hidden meaning within the painting. In the work of each artist, it can be seen that colors and shapes take on extreme importance in conveying the emotional content of the work. In each case as well, the subjects are only abstractly presented, allowing them to become symbols of the general rather than true depictions of real people. Solid areas of color and intricate attention to detail further refine and define the impressions each artist was struggling to convey while basic shapes, solid colors and limited shading evoke the sense of the child. The main difference between these two artists is that while Picasso focused on merely conveying the emotions felt regarding various issues or events, Klee worked to suggest a hidden meaning behind his images without actually revealing it. Works Cited Hughes, Robert. The Shock of the New. New York: Knopf, 1991. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. MacEvoy, Bruce. “Paul Klee.” Watercolor Artists. (2002). November 30, 2007 Picasso, Pablo. “Figures on Beach.” Oil on canvas. (1931). Online Picasso Project. November 29, 2007 Picasso, Pablo. “Girl Before a Mirror.” Oil on canvas. (1932). Online Picasso Project. November 29, 2007 Picasso, Pablo. “Weeping Woman.” Oil on canvas. (1937). (catalog OPP.37:019). Online Picasso Project. November 29, 2007 Pioch, Nicholas. “Paul Klee: The Golden Fish.” Web Museum Paris. (1995). November 30, 2007 < http://www.sai.msu.su/wm/paint/auth/klee/golden-fish/> Pioch, Nicholas. “Paul Klee.” Web Museum Paris. (2002). November 30, 2007 Wikipedia contributors. “Sublime (philosophy).” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. (2006). November 29, 2007 Read More