I’m no Old Master, nor are you

Meditating on a youthful fixation led me to reconsider what it means to be an artist.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I had an idea of my ideal home. It would be – if a country house with hillside views were not available – a place in Chester. The historic city of Chester, located on the English side of the England-Wales border, was founded by the Romans and primarily known for its historic half-timbered rows houses with arcades bounded by the (partially reconstructed) Roman city walls. Ever since the Victorian period, and the opening of a shopping arcade within the older buildings, Chester has been a destination town for the shoppers, holidaymakers and those attending the local racecourse. It was a city I knew well.

This choice accorded with what I wanted to do as an artist when I was young. When I arrived in London as an art student, I wanted to make art that engaged with the Old Masters, using the same materials and motifs but (in a Modernist rather than Post-Modernist manner) using the fragment aesthetic to mark out my distance from that lineage, as well as my admiration. I wanted to be the latest (or, if I admit my ego fully, the last) Old Master. I made drawings of figures in dark rooms, in Rembrandtian mode; I transcribed Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin. I saw myself graduating from college in London and returning to live in Chester, making art in the old style, surrounded by buildings that (if you half-closed your eyes) might be taken for a street unchanged from the Sixteenth Century. As a 20-year-old student artist I had an Old Master complex. Then I began to have doubts.

It was not that I did not think myself incapable of reaching the technical standards and experience-based judgement necessary; I changed course, so no accurate assessment could be made about my potential as a follower of the Old Masters. It was not a case of me embracing Post-Modernism or the social activism of humanitarian egalitarianism and spurning the elitism of past art. It was that I became aware that my position was self-conscious. I was thinking about myself as an artist rather than thinking solely about the art, and real art comes about when one abandons the self and submits oneself to the imperatives of the picture and conveying meanings or values. The art that I made when I was most passionate and engaged was not traditional in form. I could not honestly paint like an Old Master because what I was responding to – albeit often in a negative way – was what around me: photographs, abstract art, Conceptualism, film, music. Maybe there is a way to draw like Raphael while listening to Post-Rock or thinking about newspaper photographs (I can think of a few artists today in that field) but it was not for me. Thinking of myself not just as the latest Old Master but just as an artist at all, was not so much inhibiting me as disabling me.

This lesson was reinforced when I made paintings of trees. There are no pure landscapes in classical art, although classical art includes landscape, and there is little that could be described as landscape art before Pieter Bruegel the Elder. So, painting trees and documenting land and trees purely had no exact precedent from the Renaissance to follow. Thus freed, I committed myself to the truth of the source and the necessities of the pictures, setting aside artistic precedents.

Thinking of oneself as an artist while making art is death for art. It initiates the invidious process of being directed by expectations of what people will think of my art, how I should be as an artist, what sort of material I should be making. It is, effectively, looking over one’s shoulder, inviting compliments and exclamations. It kills vigorous art in its tracks. To make great art, the artist must abandon all expectations and thought of an audience and submit oneself entirely to making the art, doing what needs to be done, however counter-intuitive or unprecedented. And some of that art will fail. Art benefits from its maker being free in the studio and cautiously critical out of the studio, when it comes time to exhibit and publish art. Of course, that does not endorse self-indulgence or the fallacy of art at its apex being an uncriticisable expression of self. Artists must be disciplined but not self-conscious, free but not slapdash, inventive but not rambling. It is a difficult balance and if someone reading this description were to feel exasperated by such a fine subjective line being advocated, I would entirely sympathise. We should remember that great artists are truly exceptional and they can perform such delicate balances intuitively.

I realised that living in a city such as Chester would immerse me in a world where I could tell myself comforting lies about being a living Old Master. It would be actively damage both the art I made and the way I conducted myself. So I gave up that aspiration with as little sense of loss as if I were renouncing a plan to build a time machine or become ruler of the world.

What about the Pre-Raphaelites and those other artists who looked to the past? The Pre-Raphaelites, the Nazarenes, the Arts & Crafts groups and other historicist movements made art that was self-consciously retrograde. Yet what one finds with each is that they reflect the taste, aptitude and limitations of their era more explicitly and deeply than they realised. There is no danger of even a moderately educated layman mistaking a John Everett Millais for a Perugino or a Gabriel Dante Rossetti for a Veronese. They made art that comes from their own time. For the harshest critics (including conservative ones), the historicists are engaging in theatre, deluding themselves. Without going to some new raw source of content, artists risk quoting each other in ever-diminishing circles, each becoming a weaker imitation of the last iteration, meaningful content dwindling inexorably.

Artists in a living tradition produce art that addresses subjects and expresses values that need to be transmitted, using new forms and materials when available. Aside from narrative/value content and aesthetic qualities, they do not neglect the documentational function of art. Art can record our lives in a relatively neutral way (admitting that any selection implies viewpoint) but can add layers of criticism or celebration. Even if we find ourselves condemning the art produced, that art survives to tell us how it was to live at that time – be that the glorious heights of the Assyria Empire in Nimrud or the depleted materialistic of 1990s Britain, as found in Britart.

So often we see in reactionary and dissident circles scorn regarding non-traditional art. In some respects, this is understandable as those non-traditional forms have been linked to propositions of liberalist values. I fully understand these suspicions, having studied and written about this subject for 30 years. To supporters of traditional art being made today I would say, yes, by all means support the art that you enjoy and care about but do not go out of your way to attack art made by artists who are politically sympathetic but who work in non-traditional ways. If you want a living movement that generates art of seriousness and power, that art will not be one that wholly replicates techniques and subjects of the Old Masters.

In their times, Giotto, Raphael, Titian and Rembrandt were revolutionary artists who broke many conventions – that caused them to be esteemed and condemned in their own times. When vital art is made, it must include some new material or realities of its age, as it did in the age of Old Masters. Titian painted in ways that were considered unorthodox – painting without fixed compositional designs, not using underdrawing, leaving visible rough brushwork, neglecting “finish”. Rembrandt depicted light as much as describing material, using broad style and ordinary implements in addition to paintbrushes. For each significant artist (from the ancient Greeks up to today), we could point to innovation in themes, motifs, materials and techniques. If you want new Titians and Rembrandts, you will have to accept that they will be awkward customers, cussed and shocking. The art that they produce may be ugly and awkward as often as it is beautiful. After all, the truths it will assert are difficult to acknowledge as they remind us of our fallibilities.

In short, if you are thinking of yourself as the latest Old Master, then you cannot be one. If the Old Masters came about through innovation, to add to their lineage you too must be a innovator and you must be of your time. I do not say you should be an abstract painter or Conceptualist, but I do say your art will not like something made in a previous century. If you want to be a stonemason diligently following the line of your forebears then I am glad for you, but you will be an artisan (a noble enough role!) not an Old Master. An Old Master (of any era) has never been, at heart, a follower or an imitator. The title of Old Master is bestowed posthumously by others, not appropriated by the artist himself.

Although most artists today who are avowed traditionalists fight shy of describing themselves as Old Masters, it is apparent that they see themselves as in a direct line from them. Too often the Old-Master mentality in artists today a way of sidestepping the real challenge – making a vitalist art that upholds eternal values but reflects something of today. To traditionalist artists, I say that I respect your dedication and ability and I love your heroes no less than you do, but I fear that if you want to preserve and renew traditionalist values and to save art, you are going about it the wrong way. I support your right to make the art you choose. I refrain from criticising you as individuals because I feel kinship with you and admire your abilities. I was one of you. Consider my points. Join me, if you feel you can.