On Not Being a Futilitarian

  

 'Sontag was among the first critics
 to write about the intersection
between 'high' and 'low' art forms,
and to give them equal
value as valid topics...', 

I found this quotation (see  below) - by the magnificent Susan Sontag -  on the brilliant Brainpickings Website which provides insights from  all kinds of writers and writing. I turn to Brainpickings when I need something inspiring to spur me on in my life and my writing. Take a look at   Brainpickings    

My favourite phrase here is ‘I choose not to be a futilitarian.’ Being somewhat depressive I have to avoid the company of negative people, whom I shall now - following Susan Sontag - call futilitarians.

Susan Sontag quotes From Rilke:

'… the great question-dynasty: … if we are continually inadequate in love, uncertain in decision, + impotent in the face of death, how is it possible to exist?’' Then says ...

'...Yet we do exist, + affirm that. We affirm the life of lust. Yet there is more. One flees not from one’s real nature which is animal, id, to a self-torturing externally imposed conscience, super-ego, as Freud would have it– but the reverse, as Kierkegaard says. Our ethical sensitivity is what is natural to man + we flee from it to the beast; which is merely to say that I reject weak, manipulative, despairing lust, I am not a beast, I will not to be a futilitarian. I believe in more than the personal epic with the hero-thread, in more than my own life: above multiple spuriousness + despair, there is freedom + transcendence. One can know worlds one has not experienced, choose a response to life that has never been offered, create an inwardness utterly strong + fruitful.'  

Hockney, Bright Splashes of Colour and Directionality

There is something about directionality.
I come down to London to visit daughter Debora and the lovely Sean. Once here I go up to town on various days to the RA to see the Hockney Exhibition; to have lunch at Villandry  with my agent Juliet; to research  Victor West at Kings College. Then tomorrow I will, reluctanlty,  go home back up North.
The Hockney Exhibition is about scale. It is after all entitled The Bigger Picture. The Royal Academy is architecturally suited to these massive paintings and montages of paintings; the magisterial enfilade of tall rooms leading through (directionality again!)  large archways from a central hub is so well suited to this blazing collection of recent work which is admirably and appropriately contextualised in earlier work showing us how Hockney arrived at this high point in his career where his consummate skill and massive imagination here addresses trees and landscapes as  living, writhing, sensate things. Or in one case dying things in - my favourite series - paintings of a felled tree - the clean,  curved, greeny yellowy logs lying alongside their stumped parent beside the road leading through the trees.

The impact is astonishing. As the milling crowd enters the central hub there are gasps of appreciation at the long perspectives, the enormous canvases, the original rendering of the familiar. The eye is invaded by the vibrant, electric blues, the pulsing purples, the gorgeous greens, the tender yellows, the teasing greys. Then - most - dramatic- the reds and oranges that  bring a shimmering transatlantic echo of the Grand Canyon right into  the Yorkshire Dales.

Then there is a change of scale and you have to move right in discover delicate treats in terms of Hockney's artist's notebooks - large, small, fan-shaped. These are full of the  notes, drawings and inspirations - clearly the genesis of the larger work. These books  are testament to the fine draughtsmanship upon which the artist bases the flaring creativity that surges into his  experimental expression in the large canvasses,  projections and collages. The notebooks are set under glass covers but above them on screens you can see them -  the delicately wrought drawings.

Then there is a section on the way he uses iPad as drawing/painting tool. This is very interesting and does indeed bring his method up to date. However for me they are less personal and than the drawing or the painting: something of  a veil between the see-er and the artist.

No small view can do justice, though, to the larger than life painting of this artist. Interestingly the paintings and drawings are full of directionality. Repeatedly Hockney takes you down the same roads and pathways through landscapes, down woodlend paths, through a hole created by overhanging trees in woodlands, along motor roads, up mountain escarpments, through clouds hanging low between mountains.

 I love the direction, the energy, the vibrancy, the youth of this exhibition. It inspired me to think of my own directions.

I hope you manage to see this exhibition if you go up or down or across to London.