Reviews
Artist's Statement
18/04/2008
From 2007 Catalogue
There’s a limit to what you can say about paintings. They express themselves in their own language which doesn’t translate exactly into words.
Growing up in East Kilbride many years ago much of the immediate world felt obvious and banal and yet at the same time full of a strange potential energy. In that time it was very easy to feel the enormous pull of the world outside and inside of another territory, equally unknown, and these two would resonate with one another in an incomprehensible way.
To produce art is to often question its purpose, “What is art for?”
Recently I read a quote from Susan Sontag in which she said, “What saved me as a schoolchild in Arizona, waiting to grow up, waiting to escape into a larger reality, was reading books...To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.” This hits many of the marks for me, though of course these are not merely the dangers of a provincial childhood - “national vanity” and philistinism are seemingly everywhere, at any age.
Art is prefaced by hunger; it moves to meet a feeling inside. If the shallow world of advertising images, game shows and facile materialism was enough then we wouldn’t need art. But it isn’t and we do. Time and again people turn towards art to feed something inside, something perhaps difficult to locate or define but which is insistent nonetheless.
The arts (music, books, painting) allow us to connect outside of ourselves (to a “larger reality” as Sontag says) in my case through pictures, through the works of Rubens, Leonardo, Bacon and Freud, and also paradoxically inwards towards our internal life.
And painting? The “language of paint” is an easy phrase but difficult to pin down. I believe that there can be a reality in it which whilst not as precise as verbal language (ie its meanings may be less clear) can be as powerfully authentic. By this I mean that it can return us forcefully to the reality of our own lives. To wake us up, and help us feel the real stuff, not the shallow, lazy, obvious stuff. It can make me feel alive at a precise moment in time. It can make me feel the wonder that I felt walking the streets of East Kilbride at sixteen, awe-struck by everything. And it doesn’t need a name.
Alan McGowan 2007
Growing up in East Kilbride many years ago much of the immediate world felt obvious and banal and yet at the same time full of a strange potential energy. In that time it was very easy to feel the enormous pull of the world outside and inside of another territory, equally unknown, and these two would resonate with one another in an incomprehensible way.
To produce art is to often question its purpose, “What is art for?”
Recently I read a quote from Susan Sontag in which she said, “What saved me as a schoolchild in Arizona, waiting to grow up, waiting to escape into a larger reality, was reading books...To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism, of inane schooling, of imperfect destinies and bad luck.” This hits many of the marks for me, though of course these are not merely the dangers of a provincial childhood - “national vanity” and philistinism are seemingly everywhere, at any age.
Art is prefaced by hunger; it moves to meet a feeling inside. If the shallow world of advertising images, game shows and facile materialism was enough then we wouldn’t need art. But it isn’t and we do. Time and again people turn towards art to feed something inside, something perhaps difficult to locate or define but which is insistent nonetheless.
The arts (music, books, painting) allow us to connect outside of ourselves (to a “larger reality” as Sontag says) in my case through pictures, through the works of Rubens, Leonardo, Bacon and Freud, and also paradoxically inwards towards our internal life.
And painting? The “language of paint” is an easy phrase but difficult to pin down. I believe that there can be a reality in it which whilst not as precise as verbal language (ie its meanings may be less clear) can be as powerfully authentic. By this I mean that it can return us forcefully to the reality of our own lives. To wake us up, and help us feel the real stuff, not the shallow, lazy, obvious stuff. It can make me feel alive at a precise moment in time. It can make me feel the wonder that I felt walking the streets of East Kilbride at sixteen, awe-struck by everything. And it doesn’t need a name.
Alan McGowan 2007