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The Tiny, But Mighty Stroke
The history of painting, and quite possibly all of visual art itself begins with a stroke – some kind of physical stroke. Possibly that innovative stroke was made with a finger, that most primitive and essential artistic tool, as some ancient soul drew in the sand, or with a stick, or a small rock as someone drew on a larger rock or chiseled into piece of wood. By the time that cave paintings begin, art is more sophisticated as there are paints or dyes, and possibly even brushes fashioned from animal hair and sticks, much like the brushes we use today.
I went to the online dictionary and looked up "stroke". It began with: "a vigorous movement, as if in dealing a blow,” then far down the list finally comes: “a movement of a pen, pencil, brush, graver, or the like.” The definition I like best is,”a single or minimal act, piece, or amount of work, activity, etc” This activity or movement implies space, as movement can only occur in space and as such time is visually implied and involved, as any movement extends over the time it takes to make it.
For me a stroke is an essential, single unit of activity. By that definition strokes are essential to every form of art. They are also essential to elementary physics as the tiniest essential waves/particles of M theory and string theory can all be viewed as strokes. An artists paint stroke is a wave when it is made and then a “particle” in an overall work. The sometimes a wave and sometimes a particle phenomenon also describes those most elemental strings or branes of physics.
I define art, and this is not my original idea, as: “a form of inspirational communication that is created for no purpose other than to be experienced for itself.”
The most esthetically beautiful hammer remains essentially a tool created to do a job other than be admired. The same can be said for cars, watches, furniture and anything else that boasts great design. A newspaper article may be well written, but its purpose is to inform not inspire. An advertisement of any kind, whether in print, TV, radio, etc., is a tool for selling a product. Architecture without purpose other than to be itself is called sculpture.
A painting by Van Gogh has no purpose other than to be itself. The same holds true for Shakespeare's Hamlet when produced on stage or a quartet performing Bach, or an Alvin Ailey Dance performance, or novel by the Brontes or Hemingway, or poems by Dickenson or Tennyson. They are what they are. These works and performances have no intended use but to be experienced and inspire us. The previously mentioned works not only inspire us, but in their time they were innovative. Innovation, a special form of originality, is a hallmark of great art.
If a stroke is an essential unit of activity (wave movement through space in time) then not only is our physical universe built upon it (M theory) but so are all of the arts. Obviously painting uses the stroke. Sound is produced by movement upon some kind of instrument, including the human voice, which produced more strokes (sound waves), this applies to music and spoken performances. Dance is all about movement and each move a dancer makes is a stroke.
In music and literature strokes are also used to create symbols that can be used to create the work. For instance, alphabets are made of written strokes that combine to form letters (symbols for sounds, ideas or both), which combine to form words. Written musical notes are also symbols that are used to inform and classify sounds to be made. Choreographers also use symbols (such as arrows) to create their dance routines.
With the exception of calligraphy and micrography, which are written design forms where the image is meant to be read, artists did not use symbols to create art until Word Art. Word Art is also meant to be read, but any imagery is created in the viewers (reader's) mind, thus it is a form of Conceptual Art. Sure, artists painted symbols, but those symbols, such as a rose, open book, snake, etc. could be comprised of many strokes, they were not strokes themselves. An arrow takes two strokes to draw, while I can make a simple note with one.
Written language began with symbols. Thus, written literature has part of its basis in visual art. For instance, hieroglyphics were symbols that had meanings. When phonetically written language was invented, letters lost most of their symbolic significance but it became much easier to read and write.
Of course, the spoken word and music can be conveyed and brought down for generations through the memorization of sounds, including words. Our histories are filled with ancient legends and music that were later recorded in written form.
We can memorize a song and sing it to someone and they can learn it too. We can memorize a poem and convey it likewise. We cannot convey a visual work of art through sound or writing that symbolizes it. Visual art can only be fully conveyed for generations through an image. An example of this is the Ark of the Covenant, which we can guess at, perhaps very near to accurately, as it is described in the words of the Bible . However, until archeologists unearth something with an image of the ark (or the ark!) we will not be certain.
While the creative arts of sound and motion, music, literature their performance developed symbol-strokes to record and pass down their works, visual artists – the very artists who could not exist without visual strokes—declined to use symbol strokes until now. Perhaps this divergence occurred since the other artists primarily worked with sound waves (literature was transmitted by speech before I became written) so using visual (light waves) representation was easy, whereas using sound to symbolize the visual is only now being explored scientifically through instrumentation.
This divergence led to dissimilarity. Where the other arts focused on the smallest movement, sound and word, and built work stroke by stroke (sound vibration by vibration), visual artists tended to focus on the overall idea of a work: the narrative image and the strokes served that. No one was focused on the stroke itself, which had no intrinsic meaning.
Even so, things went along just fine for visual artists for centuries, until science began to make discoveries about light. These discoveries not only ushered in Impressionism and hence, Modern then Contemporary art, it also resulted in photography and motion pictures. A photograph is a kind of one stroke artwork; the shutter opens and closes in a stroke to make an impression of the image. It is a one unit of time record of light. This understanding is elaborated upon any movie film as each frame is a one stroke unit.
Thus through photography one stroke could give birth to a full narrative or meaning.
Instinctually, artists then began to focus on the unit(s) of a piece rather than on the whole. Pointillism is an example of that.
Many of the greatest modern visual artists are known and recognized for their strokes; for instance, Monet, Van Gogh, Pollack and Rothko.
Now think of the stroke as a unit, so that the unit of paint applied by Andy Warhol's silk-screens are each a stroke, made all the more obvious and significant by the vibrant strokes of paint he slashes beneath the black of the stroke make by the screen. Pop art also has Roy Lichtenstein with his dots and slashes of color strokes. Again a stroke is an essential singular unit of motion or activity. So suddenly we are using all kinds of media and strokes are butterfly wings (Hirst) and torn collage pieces (Raschenberg) or glass (Chihuly) or metal (Calder) or pills, string, twigs, yarn, hair, etc., and even words and symbols such as numbers pi.
Strokes could themselves embody meaning and be symbols in visual art.
With that in mind, do the strokes need to be seen and distinguished for them to have meaning or is the meaning intrinsic?
In reality is an atom of oxygen less present in water because we cannot visually distinguish it from the other hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a glass of water? No. The meaning of the combining of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms is intrinsic: water. Even if heat or cold is applied changing the form to gas (steam) or solid (ice), the meaning and presence of the hydrogen and oxygen is intrinsically understood by most high school graduates. We may focus on the reality our senses perceive, of the water and it's temperature and taste, but the underlying reality is of the atomic compound structure remains.
Any artist who wholly uses meaningful and relevant language symbol-strokes to create an image is creating an image that can be told (or sung/chanted/rapped) as well as seen. Of course, to fully convey the significance of the strokes it helps if the viewer is informed as to the texts (letters) used for the strokes, assuming that the strokes may be painted over, glazed or somewhat obscured by other symbol-strokes to create the image.
In the visual arts, and absolutely for painting, for an artwork to exist it must have some kind of a stroke unit. Focusing on the stroke, selecting a stroke that has intrinsic (such as a pill) or symbolic (such as a numeral) meaning imbues the work with an added layers of communication.
Every tiny stroke is every painting refers to the moment in time when it was created. One looks at a painting by Rembrandt or Van Gogh and recognizes that some of the strokes were previous to others due to their being overlapped. That is recognition of time.
Time is a concept addressed by science and most religions. Religions deal with the concept of time as eternal and also as now. Meditation, used in all the world's great religions and lesser known ones too, focuses on being in tough with a Greater Source (insert any word you use) and being present in the now.
The tiny but mighty stroke always references the now. Even if a person is not full conscious of it, it is impossible for any of us to do anything (make even the smallest unit of a movement, such as inhale), except in the now
Hillel asked, If not now, when? Jesus proclaimed, The kingdom of heaven is at hand (our hands are in the here and now). Lao Tsu said a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (a small motion unit made in the now).
Using symbols-strokes (strokes with inherent meaning) further puts the focus on the now, the small moment, rather that the “larger picture.' Each moment and action, no matter how brief or fleeting has meaning and significance, as does a symbol-stroke. All of our creative power as human beings (also as artists) is contained in each and every moment of now – in the stroke, the wave-like breath of now.
The now is teeming with possibilities -- possibilities for our creations. It is also comprised of many wave-like motions (branes, pre-particles) that combine, and then combine some more to create atoms and then matter and energy as we recognize it. Although reality appears solid, and in times of trouble, amazingly solid and unmoving, according to elementary physics, it is made of waves that are also able to be understood as particles. As waves – energy – the universe is pregnant with possibilities in every moment.
UnGraven Image Art theory is about portraying the understanding that understanding, of the now and it's infinite possibilities through the symbol-stroke.
August 13, 2007 |
