Machines of Flesh and Blood

The peculiar thing about my paintings is that they’re not really mine. They’re 50/50 collaborations with my wife, the mosaicist Emma Biggs. I do the painting but she conceives the layouts and thinks up the colours. We share equal billing. We never vary the roles — she never paints and I never question her decisions about the colour. Often I’m working blind as it were, unable to see why certain sections of the painting are the way they are, and sometimes only really getting the logic long after it’s finished.

“Logic” is perhaps misleading, since the paintings aren’t about ideas, they’re purely visual. On the other hand there is such a thing as visual intelligence. We think about how to make the paintings look good, have a focus and seem to have a light turned on inside them. We aim for something as carefully structured as late medieval frescos. The way they relate to my writing is that they embody the values that I find important and serious in art, which really are visual values — the very stuff that has been thrown out by the art world over the past 15 years or so, as art has striven to become more like popular entertainment.

On my own I never got far with painting. When I went back to art school to do an MA, the tutors said I needed to see an idea through and not keep piling on different ones, which merely resulted in meltdown. Perhaps because of my experience as a critical observer I allowed too many possibilities. With these paintings, though, I’ve separated out the aspect of judging whether my decisions are right and handed it to someone else. – Matthew Collins writing for the UK Times

The above statement came from a British art critic that also dabbles in painting. The purpose of the article was to prove that a critic could also be a working artist. Unfortunately, I believe the concept backfires for the simple fact that the “artist” described above is just a flesh and blood machine. Creating is about making choices and he does not do that in his specific role as painter. He proudly refuses to take responsibility for making decisions in his work. Where is the commitment to an idea? Where is the danger of gambling acceptance for an aesthetic decision? The point of the article was to prove critics are qualified to judge art; instead it seems to justify my belief that most critics are too far removed from the creative process to mandate taste, much less quality. - DN