Leonardo Towards Concise Form in Painting: A Memoir Author(s): Alva Source: Leonardo, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1969), pp. 1-9 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1571920 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 09:43 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Leonardo. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.109 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 09:43:21 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Transcript
Leonardo
Towards Concise Form in Painting: A MemoirAuthor(s): AlvaSource: Leonardo, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1969), pp. 1-9Published by: The MIT PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1571920 .
Accessed: 15/06/2014 09:43
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
.
The MIT Press and Leonardo are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toLeonardo.
http://www.jstor.org
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Leonardo, Vol. 2, pp. 1-9. Pergamon Press, 1969. Printed in Great Britain
TOWARDS CONCISE FORM IN PAINTING:
A MEMOIR
Alva*
Abstract-From his earliest attempts as a painter the author has tried to reduce the design in his compositions to the barest minimum. A similar aim controls his handling of colour. He believes a patch of colour should 'tell' and be a unique statement on its own within the design of the whole, avoiding repetitions and over-all patterns. He regards all colours as equals, including black and white. The only criterion in his choice of a colour is its value in creating a design and atmosphere demanded by the subject.
In his searchfor a more effective expression he began in 1943 a series of black and white studies. Concurrently with these black and white studies he attempted to develop a more concise form in his paintings without neglecting the ideas behind thepictures. He believes that the creation of meaningfulform can only be success- ful when the signs forming a composition stem from the idea of the composition itself.
I. INTRODUCTION
The painter, like all men, is born into what appears to be chaos. He can react to it by creating in his work with paint on canvas a world of his own, according to his experience and the outlook he develops.
I believe that, in comparison with the past, we are living in an age of over-powering profusion, if not confusion. Our world is bursting with sensations and appearances and many a wondering spectator is overwhelmed by the various assaults made con- tinuously on his senses. From this plenitude of experience a painter has to select those facets and aspects of life and nature that seem of particular importance to him and to present them in an aesthetically satisfying form.
But I do not believe that it is sufficient only to select; it is essential to discard those aspects of reality which are superfluous and extraneous to a subject. To achieve this aim, I have tried to reduce my designs to the barest minimum. Sometimes I have painted the same subject again after a long passage of time, with the sole object of further simplifying its design. In regard to the use of colour, I feel that a patch of colour should 'tell', i.e. it should be a unique statement on its own within the design of the whole. That is why I avoid repeti- tion and over-all patterns of colour. My quest for concise form and use of colour has lasted for some fifty years.
*Artist living at 41 Borough Grange, Stanley Gardens, Sanderstead, Surrey, England. (Received 29 January 1968.)
II. MY FIRST SIMPLIFICATIONS
The first seeds of the idea of simplification were sown when I was a boy in school. I was lucky to have as an art master a man of exceptional qualities. His name was Geismar and, for his time, he was a man of advanced ideas. (I am going back to the early years of this century, before World War I, to the period from 1909 to 1914.) He was the only teacher of any consequence I ever had and he was always very kind to me.
The curriculum at that time consisted of drawing plants and plaster-casts with charcoal, and model- ling the drawing to a high degree of three-dimen- sional verisimilitude. After I had struggled with this method for a time, something within me rebelled. While I was trying to comply with my set task on the top sheet of my drawing pad, I was at the same time working on the sheets underneath, making drawings of my class mates and even of the teacher himself. I drew with simple lines, paying little regard to shading and modelling, as I had been doing before taking drawing lessons. One day I got into such a mess with my drawing of a plaster-cast that my teacher, making his round of inspection and seeing the trouble I was in, turned the top page of my drawing pad and said "try again". Instead of the empty sheet of paper, he saw a gallery of human heads. I anticipated the worst. Then, while shaking with fear (because in those days the cane was still used), the teacher, having browsed through the rest of my drawing pad, instead of punishing me, started correcting my line drawings! He told me
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that if that was the way I wanted to draw, I should do it more positively. He crossed out unnecessary details and filling in, and said that I should restrict my drawing to outlines as far as this was compatible with the subject. From that day on, I became one of his favourite pupils and, even after I had left school, he continued to give me his advice.
His unorthodox counsel left an indelible impres- sion on me. It seemed to have appealed to some latent instinct in me because, whenever afterwards I attempted to draw, I frequently did not get beyond the first bare outlines, remembering his dictum: that to leave out is not as bad as to add something superfluous. It was then that I discovered that a line placed on a white sheet of paper can create a sense of space.
After I left school and was on my own, I tried many different ways of drawing but was always brought back, as if by magnetism, to the principle instilled in me in childhood-to use lines only and those sparingly. As I sometimes found these lines
too cold and bare, I tried over the years to infuse some life into them by drawing them in a more sensitive way [1].
III. SIMPLIFICATIONS OF COLOUR
When I began working with oil paints in Paris in 1928, I visited the 'free' atelier Colarossi in the rue de la Grande Chaumiere, which was still dominated by the impressionist and fauvist palette: black as a colour was taboo. I soon found that I could not accept either impressionistic vision, with its kaleido- scopic over-all colour pattern, or the grid system of cubism, as practised by most of my fellow students. So I left the atelier soon after I had joined it and my first act of freedom was to buy myself a big tube of black oil-paint, which I put into my paint box and, from then on, I have always treated it as a colour in its own right.
I could not accept the impressionist vision, which made me feel that one wandered aimlessly over the
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canvas. I needed arresting points in my pictures and here another lesson I learned in my boyhood came to my help. Not far from the school that I went to was the National Gallery, Berlin's museum of old masters, to which I was first introduced by my art master Geismar.
In this rich collection was Rembrandt's 'Man with a Golden Helmet'. This painting drew my attention more than any other painting in the gallery and it has remained one of my favourites ever since. I was fascinated by it. It differed from the usual Rembrandt portrait because in this case the face, usually the centre of interest in his portraits, is lost in a veil of half shade; instead, the main attrac- tion is the golden helmet, formed by a mass of thick impasto of golden yellow colour. In spite of this, I feel that the human aspect of the portrait still radiates in a way that is difficult to describe, as much as any other Rembrandt painting. A small repro- duction of this masterpiece, which I bought at the time, has travelled with me as a pin-up in my various exiles. It still serves as an exemplary lesson of how to create a point of interest in a picture and of the idea that an area of colour can be a focal point of a painting.
It may seem paradoxical that the 'brown' master, Rembrandt, with his chiaroscuro, should have given me the idea of how to employ colour; but he helped me to learn that selected areas of well placed colours could be highly effective and dramatic. All my life I have tried to apply this lesson (cf. Fig. 1). In my simplified way of handling colour I treat all colours as equal. My only criterion in the choice of a colour is its value in creating the design and atmosphere demanded by the subject; I do not use colour as an additional decoration.
IV. FROM SIMPLIFICATION TO ABSTRACTION
The outbreak of war in 1939 was a turning point in my career. A monograph on my work was about to be published [1]. It marked the end of a chapter. I reviewed my pre-war work and felt that I could not continue in the same way.
In 1940 I was away from my studio in London for several months and, being separated from my paint and brushes, I had to restrict myself to the use of pen and paper. A series of line drawings of heads and figures I did during those months led me to the conclusion that, if I wanted to stress the characteris- tics of my subjects, I would first have to find a way of making my form more expressive.
In 1943 I began drawing a succession of heads in black and white. Progressing from head to head, they became more and more abstract, until by1949 I reached what seemed to me the limit in that direc- tion. The first and last heads of the sequence are shown in Figs. 2 and 3. I collected in 1949 what appeared to me to be the most significant of these drawings into a folder of six lithographs, to show the development of my drawings step by step [2].
Fig. 3. 'Head', ink drawing, 22 x 16 in., 1949.
At each stage of the series of drawings of this period I also made a number of paintings, in which I tried to apply the lessons I had learned. By 1950 my paintings had reached a high degree of stylization as shown in Fig. 4 [3]. In these paintings, I followed the same principle of abstraction, in the main, as in the black and white drawings; but as far as colour was concerned, I kept to a few but large and broad colour areas, bearing in mind that each colour area had to be part of the design of the whole. Further- more, I frequently used a patch of colour to create a feeling of space, which I consider to be a vital part of a composition.
Most of my post-war paintings have a mat surface. This makes it possible for the viewer to see the picture, and not himself, as is frequently the case with glossy paint, particularly in dark paintings. A mat surface can be obtained by using lean oil paint on canvas with an absorbent ground. Ready-made oil colours are far too greasy; they contain an excess of oil to ensure a long shelf life.
About twenty-five years ago I started grinding my own colours, using only the minimum amount of pure linseed oil. The few shades of colour I buy ready-made, I squeeze before use onto some blotting paper which absorbs most of the surplus oil and I
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then add some dry powder colour to the paint. As a diluent, I use turpentine exclusively. If all these precautions are taken, the finished painting will have a mat surface.
V. THE FINAL PHASE
In the early 'fifties, having again taken a studio in Paris, I re-assessed my work and found that my constant drive for simplification had made my design too linear and angular. I therefore decided to return to the freer handling of the brush, which had been one of the main features of my pre-war way of painting. By restoring a more personal touch to my brush-work and by loosening the brush strokes, I could infuse more life into my paintings; taking care not to lose the conciseness of the form.
Whenever the problem of the form had to be studied afresh, I returned to the head motif (cf. Fig. 5)
and, without resorting to studies in black and white, I made my signs directly in oil paint. A painting is not only made of paint, it should, I believe, be created in paint. Every artist thinks in his own medium and I think foremost in shapes of paint. Using a large brush freely and loosely, I tried to form my subject with as few brush strokes as possible. Figures 6 to 9 show my technique of drawing freely with paint, which I evolved in the 'fifties and have used ever since. This liberated brush technique enabled me to give a greater variety of characteriza- tion to my images, without sacrificing the over- riding principle of a concise form [6]. The trans- figuration of natural appearances into signs, as practised by me to-day, is as far as I can go towards a concise form.
My paintings have been criticized for being inhabited by signs, which seem to be living a life of their own. This may be so but a work of art is the child of imagination, as seen and felt by the painter's
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'inner eye'. Hence the leaning towards fantasy. Nature supplies only the raw materials and the painter acts as a sort of crystallizer. This process of crystallization accounts for the deviation by the painter from the outward appearance of the subject, which is irrelevant as far as the completed work is
concerned. What matters to the spectator is the painter's synthesis; he transforms his observations into his own crystallized symbols, as the bee converts the nectar into honey.
Were it not for the bee, we would never know the taste of honey.
REFERENCES
1. Alva, Paintings and Drawings, Introduction by Maurice Collis (London: John Lane, 1942).
2. Six Lithographs, Introduction by Y. Haezrahi (London: St. George's Gallery, 1949). 3. Alva, Recent Paintings and Drawings, Foreword by Sir Herbert Read (London: The
Bodley Head, 1951). 4. Alva, Images, 12 Serigraphs (New York: Serigraph Gallery, 1954). 5. R. V. Gindertael, Peintres et sculpteurs d'aujourd'hui: Alva (Paris: Edition Signe, 1955). 6. Waldemar George, Les metamorphoses d'Alva (Paris: 1966).
Vers une forme concise en peinture: mes memoires
Resume-Dupuis le debut de sa carriere de peintre, l'auteur a, dans ses compositions, essaye de reduire le dessin a sa plus simple expression. Son utilisation des couleurs repond au mme but. Il pense qu'une tache de couleur doit 'parler' et etre en elle-meme un temoignage unique compris dans la composition de l'ensemble. II faut donc eviter les repetitions et les motifs developpes a l'exces. Il considere que toutes les couleurs sont sur le meme plan, y compris le noir et le blanc. Le seul critere suivi dans le choix de ses couleurs est leur valeur creative par rapport au dessin et a l'atmosphere exiges par le sujet.
Dans sa recherche d'une expression plus efficace, il commenqa en 1943 une serie d'etudes en noir et blanc. Parallelement, il essaya de mettre une plus grande concision dans ses ceuvres, sans pour autant negliger les idees qui les inspiraient. En effet, il croit que la creation d'une forme significative ne peut etre reussie que lorsque les signes qui la composent emanent de l'idee de la composition meme.
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