Philosophical Rabbit

Pace

Clouds
digital photo
© Brian Pike 2009

Pace

Here I come, walking through summer,
Kicking up brown dust in the sunken lanes,
White dust in the cropped chalklands,
And marbled butterflies in the pastel stillness
Of an afternoon hedgerow.

Here I come, walking through lifetimes,
Through the flickering leaf-fall of a mushrooming wood,
The perfume of rotten crabs,
And the wet, uncertain sunshine that skims the lonely moors
Above cultivation.

Here I come, walking through history,
With a steady pace that measures
December’s sullen dusks, Orion’s evolutions,
And the icy gusts that send sick leaves
Scampering across the moonlit hillfort.

Here I come, walking through myth and speculation,
Steadily striding towards at least the possibility
Of a slow, grudging springtime
Where the lambs greet the curlews.

Brian Pike
January 2009

Do the eyes have it? And if so, which one?

Bad Snowman
(Left Eye vs Right Eye mix)
digitised pencil sketch
© Brian Pike 2009

Squinting at the snow this week reminded me that I see different colours with each eye.

It’s not a huge difference, but a significant one.

I notice it especially with pale neutral colours. Through my left eye, neutral colours have a bluish tinge. Through my right, a reddish one.

[Well of course I call them 'neutral' colours, but whether they really are 'neutral' is maybe not something I'm fit to judge.]

The picture above hints at the difference I’m talking about. It's a fairly subtle one, and I can’t guarantee how well it will show up on your monitor. Whether you’re using a Mac or a PC will affect the outcome for a start.

Anyway, I have one eye that sees the world in ‘cool’ tones, and another that sees the world in ‘warm’ ones. A pessimistic eye and an optimistic one. A sad eye and a happy eye.

Normally I don’t notice, because the input from both eyes gets seamlessly combined in my brain somewhere. In fact it wasn’t until my teens that I noticed the difference at all.

Check out your own eyes, maybe you'll discover you have a similar condition. I’d be interested to hear.

Anyway it’s quite convenient to be able to experience slightly different world-views just by closing one or other eye.

Now if only my eyes were completely different from each other...

Breaking the Ice

Skating Potato
mixed media painting
© Brian Pike 2008
private collection

For me winter is a deep, dark pit that I only with difficulty scramble my way out of each year.

And nearly half of it is yet to come. The official middle of winter (Candlemass Day, February 2nd) was just a couple of days ago. The nights may be grudgingly drawing out, but there’s plenty of cold weather ahead. Let's face it, here in the Dales it sometimes even snows in June.

So I’m trying to remind myself that there are still a few things to enjoy about winter, despite the cold and the dark. Here are three:

1. When there has been snow and you know - because there are no other footprints - that you’re the  first person to walk along a certain road, alley or footpath that day. And sometimes maybe even the first person for several days.
2. Those mornings when it’s thick, cold fog down in the valleys, but you can climb up a hill into the sunshine and gaze out over a sea of cloud.
3. In a rutted lane when the puddles have frozen over and then the water has drained out from underneath, leaving big sheets of ice hanging over hollow spaces... and you can stamp through and shatter them to smithereens. All the fun of smashing windows, but none of the guilt.

Any other practical suggestions for enjoying winter gratefully received. In the absence of which you'll fnd me hunched over the fire stuffing myself with chocolate biscuits until spring.

The Big Sleep

Beached
digital image
© Brian Pike 2009

Wow,I feel that I'm waking up after being asleep for the last year.

Whatever bug I picked up in Hong Kong completely sucked away all my energy and enthusiasm. I've been doing my best to smile and carry on as normal, but really I've just been sleepwalking. Only now - more than a year on - am I even half way better.

What I used to think about people who seem to be lacking in motivation was this: why in heaven's name don't the lazy --------s just get on and do something? Now I realise that you can really, really want to get on and achieve things, even the most ordinary little jobs - and yet still somehow not be able to. It's a chemical thing. If your metabolism is bent out of shape, it can be almost impossible to turn hopes and plans into deeds.

"Between the idea / And the reality / Between the motion / And the act / Falls the Shadow" wrote TS Eliot in The Hollow Men. Yeah, I had one of those Shadows. And I'm only just getting back into the sunshine.

Mind you, now I'm finally awake I find the world is in such a dodgy state I almost wish I hadn't bothered. I guess whoever's running it has been dozing too.

Enjoy Art, Get High?

Voyagers
digitised pencil sketch
© Brian Pike 2008

Art and Opium

In a  press release headed 'Thirst for Knowledge’ may be Opium Craving Professor Biederman of the University of Southern California claims that we are literally addicted to knowledge. Every time we grasp a new idea, we receive a little chemical ‘high’. And he goes on to speculate that this explains why we enjoy art.

He says: “The 'click' of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances. The brain's craving for a fix motivates humans to maximize the rate at which they absorb knowledge.”

So maybe that’s why it’s so hard to switch off a soap opera or stop watching a bad film. It may be  tripe, but we’re just wired up to need to know what happens next.

But where his theory stopped making sense for me was when he went on to say that “the same mechanism is involved in the aesthetic experience... providing a neurological explanation for the pleasure we derive from art.”

The more you see it...

Now I agree that Biedermann’s findings may play some part in explaining why we like to visit new art shows, listen to new music and watch new films. It’s all new stuff, and new stuff gives us a buzz.

What it doesn’t explain, though, is how come we continue to enjoy the same old novels, pictures, films and music for year after year. You know, those favourite books, paintings, movies and songs that you’re still crazy about, no matter how many times you read them, look at them or listen to them.

Because Biederman specifically says that the more we see of something, the less we’re drawn to it. Things that are fresh and new give us a big whack of opiate, but not things that we're familiar with. According to his theory, every time we re-encounter the same artwork we should like it a little less. But that just ain't true.

Art grows on you

I used to run a class about modern art. At the start of the course I would show my students 30 slides of paintings and ask them to rate how much they liked each piece. After several weeks of studying various artists and art movements - including the 30 artworks in question - I would ask my students to rate the 30 paintings again. In every case they liked them a lot more this time round than they did first time round.

So Biederman’s claim to have explained the pleasure we get from art is fatally flawed. The experience of enjoying an artwork is a lot more than just the thrill of seeing something novel. Every time you watch a news report on TV you see something you've not seen before - but watching the news is nothing like engaging with a work of art.

I would go further, and say that Biederman hasn’t just failed to explain our experience of art, he has turned the truth on its head. The appeal of art doesn't depend on what you know, it depends on what you don't know. At the heart of a work of art is mystery and bafflement. But hey, that's another post. Maybe.

Missed Vocation

Offering Bananas to the Moon
mixed media painting
© Brian Pike 2008
private collection

I like to think that if I had been born into a pre-modern society I would have been the guy in the tribe whose job it was to carve devotional objects and make up religious rituals. Rather than having to hunt or whatever.

In the here and now, being an artist seems to be the next best thing.

Three Theories of Time

Two Theories of Time
mixed media on paper
© Brian Pike 1997
private collection

Hours

Hours
Are filthy monkeys.

They creep in through a window that’s ajar
And steal things
    Sometimes just food
    Sometimes a valuable earring
Then scramble away across the rooftops
Hissing and bickering.

At dusk they squat on the guttering
And defecate on passers-by.

Brian Pike
March 2008

A Step in the Left Direction

Mouse Defecation Competition
pencil sketch
© Brian Pike 2008

The word on the street

I have a real headache with left and right. I just can’t seem to tell which is which. Don’t ever ask me for directions.

It may sound crazy, but what I have to do is look down at my wrists. I know that the one wearing the watch is the left-hand one.

Most people can’t understand why I’m so incompetent. After all, I’ve had plenty of time to learn my left from my right. So what’s wrong with me?

And in case you were wondering, having a problem with left and right isn’t the same as having a poor sense of direction. Actually I have a pretty good sense of direction. And I’m fine with reading maps. So it’s not that I don’t know where I’m going - it’s that I never know whether to call the place I’m going ‘left’ or ‘right’.

Taking turns

I think my problem may have something to do with the way mental processes are portioned out between different parts of the brain. In most people it is the left hemisphere of the brain that specializes in reading and speaking, and the right hemisphere that specializes in doing visual stuff - like seeing patterns and dealing with spatial relationships.

Clearly my right hemisphere is making a good job of sorting out spatial relationships, because I can find my way from A to B as easily as anyone else. But when the time comes for my left brain to translate that route from A to B into words… well, it’s then that things start going wrong.

Dylsexic?

I’m also wondering whether my difficulties with 'left' and 'right' are connected to the fact that I experience a kind of temporary dyslexia when I’m drawing or painting.

Normally I’m a fluent reader, and I don’t have any problems with spelling. But quite often when I’m drawing or painting and I break off to write something down - a note about colours, for example, or a picture title -  I find my spelling has gone completely haywire. Sometimes I can barely write coherently at all.

My guess is that during the time I have been concentrating on visual images I have shifted into ‘right brain mode’ and I can’t immediately get my left brain - which normally takes care of writing - cranked back into normal operation.

Similarly when you ask me for directions to the post office or corner shop, my right brain clicks into gear and starts picturing out the route. But with only limited mental resources at my disposal (I probably have a very small brain) this puts the left hemisphere at a disadvantage when it comes to reporting the right hemisphere’s findings.

What about you?

I would be interested to hear from anyone who has the kind of left/right problem I’ve described, or who experiences shifts between right- and left- brain dominated ways of functioning. The shift is probably something we all do to some extent, but maybe people who work with visual images do it more often, or to a greater degree, than people who don’t.

Anyway, I used to feel a bit embarrassed about not being able to tell left from right. But if it’s the price I have to pay for being able to draw and paint then that's fine by me.

When the Chips are Down

Charge of the Light Brigade
(Potato Re-enactment)
mixed media painting
© Brian Pike 2008

I listen to music all the time when I’m working. In fact I don’t believe I could work without it.

Sometimes a fragment of music becomes inseparable in my mind from a picture. In the case of ‘Charge of the Light Brigade, Potato Re-enactment’ it’s a theme that appears ten minutes or so before the end of Nielsen’s 5th Symphony.

Actually I don’t listen much to European classical music. And I’m not especially keen on the rest of Nielsen’s work, apart from his Violin Concerto - which conveniently happens to come with the 5th on a terrific recording by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (BIS, 1987).

But there’s something about the 5th, and this particular theme. I’ve no idea whether Nielsen meant it this way, but for me -  especially the way it’s performed on the GSO recording - it exactly captures the feeling of a pointless charge into battle against invincible odds. It canters bravely forward for a minute or two, then trips over and falls apart.

All the time I was working on this painting I was either listening to Nielsen’s 5th at top volume, or singing those few bars maniacally. Or both.

Altogether I got very emotionally attached to the picture, which I have come to regard as a definitive self-portrait. That dumb little potato with the hat and sword, that’s me.

Of course it seems ludicrous to attach any kind of significance or importance to a picture of two potatoes. But then I keep telling myself that we live in a crazy world, and maybe crazy pictures are as good a way as any to respond to it.

Well, maybe not as good as writing a symphony.

The Map is Not the Territory

Colour Notes
digital photograph
© Brian Pike 2007

Before I start a painting, I always make colour notes - a detailed plan about what pigments I will be using, and how I will be building up the different paint layers.

The funny thing is that I very seldom follow the plan. On the spur of the moment I’ll put a blue where I said I would put a red. I’ll turn a night-time ambience into a daytime one, or paint clouds into a sky that was going to be clear.

But although they might seem to be pointless, the preparatory notes are crucial to the process. Writing them is one of a series of rituals that help me achieve the right kind of mind-set for painting.

And these barely legible scribbles also establish some solid ground from which I can explore my thoughts about colour. Faced with a blank sheet of paper, the possible permutations are infinite. Just where do you begin? But if you start with a particular colour scheme then at least you’ve got something to say ‘no’ to. No, not  ultramarine blue; it needs to be cobalt. And so on.

What matters about the plan is not that it is right. What matters is that it’s something, anything.

Partially Blue Sky Thinking

Sky
digital photograph
© Brian Pike 2006

Every single day during 2006 I took a photograph of the sky. Just the sky. There had to be nothing in the picture that belonged to the ground.

I tried not to compose it too carefully, though that’s easier said than done. And I made a point of avoiding spectacular sunrises and sunsets. I wanted ‘ordinary’ sky.

It turned out to be surprisingly difficult. There were days when the torrential rain just never let up, and days when I felt to ill to get out of bed, less still go out and find somewhere with a clear view of the heavens. And days when I was in some high-rise city and clear views upwards seemed near-impossible to come by.

What’s more, you’d be amazed how hard it is to take a picture of the sky without a bird in it - particularly here in North Yorkshire in summer, when huge groups of swifts wheel high overhead all day long. Equally bad were the days when one or other species of insect was swarming.

I know I could easily have Photoshopped out those little blurs afterwards. But that would have been cheating. Any idiot can digitally mangle a photograph. I wanted mine ‘pure’.

At the beginning I had all sorts of ideas about what I would do with all those hard-won pictures. But it’s now more than a year since I finished the series, and so far I’ve done precisely nothing with them.

A waste of time and effort? Maybe. But as an artist you need to spend a certain amount of time chasing down blind alleys. Arriving at a dead end may not teach you anything in itself, but maybe what happens to you along the way will.

All that year I was telling myself that what I needed was a collection of 365 photographs of the sky. Maybe what I actually needed was the discipline and experience of taking them. And maybe now I should go and trash them.

With Apologies to Wallace Stevens

Cat and Bird
digital image
© Brian Pike 2007

Fourteenth View of a Blackbird

You call that black?
Try looking up a blackbird’s arse.

Brian Pike
January 2008
Check out the original Wallace Stevens poem here. 

Bugged

10,000 Buddhas Monastery, Sha Tin, New Territories, Hong Kong
digital photograph
© Brian Pike 2007

No, I hadn’t intended leaving it so long between posts.  But then I wasn’t expecting to pick up a nasty internal parasite in Hong Kong. Probably giardia, but these things can be difficult to diagnose. Two months (and two courses of high-dose antibiotics) later and I’m still not back up to speed.

One of the main symptoms has been enormous fatigue, and I’m amazed at just how much the disease sapped my willpower. Day after day I found myself postponing even the smallest jobs - sticking a stamp on a letter or changing a light bulb. Drawing and painting, which need a lot of energy at the best of times, were quite out of the question. Likewise keeping up with this blog.

The only thing I could settle down to was tinkering with sound files on my Mac - maybe because it gave me an excuse to sit with my eyes closed for hours on end. The end result was one of my longest sound-pieces to date, a 40-minute chunk of murky ambient pulses that I've entitled Infection.

Now I find that my day-to-day life tends to be reflected closely in my creative work. When I'm feeling bleak, my paintings usually turn out to be pretty bleak too. I'm hoping, though, that Infection will have channeled away most of my giardia-related woe - and made it unnecessary for me to paint a long series of melancholy pictures generally expressive of the misery of being laid low by unfriendly protozoa.

Show and tell

Cat in a Bathysphere
digitised pencil sketch
© Brian Pike 2007

Asking for it

One great thing about exhibiting in a public space - as opposed to a commercial gallery - is that you get a far wider range of visitors looking at your work. And you get to find out what they really think about it.

I’ve just been looking through the Comments Book from my show at the McGuinness gallery.

The entries written by juniors are always great fun, of course, especially the ones along the lines of “I lick the one with the rabbite”. But in general I’m more interested in the views of people who don’t like my work than those of do.

One reason is that people who like my pictures often come up to me at private views and explain why, whereas people who don’t are generally too polite to raise the issue face-to-face. Give them pen and paper, though, and they’ll happily let rip.

No tea and no sympathy

Observations from disgruntled visitors to the last show range from genteel disapproval (“Not my cup of tea”) to barely suppressed rage (“Absolute rubbish, a real con”). But simple put-downs are not particularly enlightening. What I'm looking for is analysis.

“A bit depressing & seem very expensive” is a good start, but the comment that I found most intriguing was this one: “I have painted for about five years. And I have come to the conclusion I’m trying too hard after looking at your paintings.”

Now this could be interpreted as welcoming my art for its Zen-like simplicity - which would, of course, be nice. But I think what’s actually meant something along these lines: “You lazy, talentless bastard!  I’ve worked my way painstakingly through Alwyn Crawshaw’s Watercolour Painting Course and spent a small fortune on night classes learning how to paint properly. How come your simplistic cartoon mice get wall space, but not my lovingly-rendered dahlias?”

It’s a fair question.

And not so long ago I would have attempted to answer it. But now I’m not sure there’s an answer. Except, perhaps,  that showing art is a consensual activity. If I choose to paint something, and someone else chooses to exhibit it, then why not?

Looking for love?

As an artist, the temptation is to want people to like your work. It’s equally tempting to court controversy by trying to upset people. Nowadays I feel that both attitudes are wrong

Well, not exactly wrong... irrelevant. You simply shouldn’t be looking over your shoulder, wondering what other people will think. An artwork has its own internal logic, and that’s all you need to focus on.

Mind you, once it’s done, it’s always good to hear from the critics. It’s particularly important to remind yourself that your work won’t make sense to everyone. In fact if its saying anything even slightly worthwhile then it almost definitely won’t.

Which is why I’m always relieved to get a few good tellings-off from the Comments Book.

The Lie of the Land

First Frost, October 2007
digital photograph
© Brian Pike 2007

I did an interview a few days ago, and I mentioned that my work was influenced by the local landscape. "So do you take your easel out into the Dales and sit and paint?" asked the interviewer.

Hmm. Now let's exercise some common sense here. Do my pictures of poisoned teddy bears, cats with artificial limbs and demented hamsters look as if they were painted direct from nature?

What actually happens is something altogether more difficult to pin down.

For example I took this photo because I loved all the subtle gradations of green, ranging from bright, yellowish greens through to stony grey-blue ones. And one day maybe some version of this colour scheme wil pop up in one of my paintings.

Being influenced by something isn't a matter of sitting down and copying it. In fact it's the exact opposite.

When you copy something you simply take it at face value. You reproduce its superficial appearance. But when something influences you, you let it get inside your head and change the way you think and feel.

Several of my Best Friends were Psychopaths

My Best Friend Was A Psychopath
digitized pencil sketches
© Brian Pike 2007

My picture ideas usually start as a swarm of tiny scribbles on the back of letters, bills, junk mail or whatever else comes to hand. And when I say tiny, I'm talking about the size of a postage stamp.

The final painting is just one of several - and sometimes several dozen - possible interpretations of the theme.

A Shoulder to Look Over

Paranoia Moon
mixed media painting
© Brian Pike 2007
private collection

Paranoia is a healthy and wholesome state of mind.

The question isn’t why particular individuals are paranoid. The question is why aren’t we all?

Look at it this way. On a fine day I take a stroll in the countryside without so much as a second thought. But not so many generations ago - no time at all in evolutionary terms - wandering around alone in the landscape would have been practically suicidal. If you weren’t speared by a hunting party from a rival tribe, you’d stand a good chance of ending up as a snack for the larger local wildlife.

What’s remarkable is how quickly most of us seem to have lost the instinctive fear of anything out of the ordinary. Fear that would have saved our ancestors’ lives.

I suppose to some extent paranoia is balanced out by curiosity. And curiosity is, of course, a vital part of human development. But there's no reason why you can't be both curious and paranoid. My cat manages it all the time.

So how come most of us aren’t more paranoid?

Or more curious, for that matter?

Just Can't Help Myself

Bird-Catcher
digital image
this version © Brian Pike 2007

As always, I'm desperately short of time. And yet here I am starting up a blog. Just when I should be trying to cut down on my commitments.

Oh well. Here goes.