WHY I STOPPED PAINTING

JOHN KEANE

I have recently re-read George Orwell’s short essay ‘Why I write’, a very honest account of both his own and the more general motivations that lead any artist to take up the tools of their trade. This has, in part, prompted me to ask myself why I have put down the tools of my trade. It is now over 18 months since I picked up a brush to paint, largely coinciding with the outbreak of Sars Covid-19 that has wrought havoc and misery across the world, and still continues to do so. I think that both the pandemic and my own cessation of artistic output are more than just coincidental, and, as it has with so many other things, the pandemic has provided both a catalyst and camouflage for the change in my own life. Now that the world is slowly and cautiously emerging, we hope, from the worst ravages of this disease, I find that in the resuming niceties of social interaction I am obliged to tell friends and acquaintances I have not seen for some time what I have been up to in the meantime, and answer the question I dread, ‘Have you been working?’. I mumble and stutter and dissemble in reply (words like ‘indefinite sabbatical’ escape), and attempt to make a convincing account of how my time has been spent usefully whilst the world virtually stopped and the days and months blurred into each other with no visible landmarks to measure them. Sometimes it is thought that as a ‘political’ artist I might have been spurred into some profound offering on the nature of the last year and a half. But in fact the opposite is true.

When Lockdown 1 was announced an exhibition of new paintings of mine, under the title ‘Flat Earth’, was scheduled to open in London. Within 2 days of opening and an abandoned private view, the gallery lights were switched off. As any artist, I’m sure, will tell you, the staging of an exhibition of new work is more than just an enterprise. It is an emotional investment which is anxiously seeking a return. Orwell cited the first of his four great motivations for the writer in creating their work with his customary candour and honesty:

'(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity'

As I read these lines again I also have to put up my hand and plead guilty. After all that time alone in the studio conceiving and creating these works of such coruscating brilliance and insight there is a craving for that brilliance and insight to be recognised and celebrated. And best of all, bought. The closure of the show was a blow, only slightly mitigated by the fact that return to normality might resume before too long. We cannot know whether recognition and celebration (and sales) were thwarted by the pandemic, or if the show having run its proper course would have made me feel energised to get back into the studio. But if I’m honest, I suspect not, as for some time my thoughts had been leading me to a certain realisation. When, six months later, things looked more encouraging the show opened again, but in reduced form and under a new punchy title, ‘Viral’. But again no private view, no event, no feedback, and gallery visits only by appointment. As if released into a vacuum, I felt it had gone off at half cock. Those thoughts that had been hovering in my mind over the past two or three years as possible courses of action if things did not change for the better began to feel like the obvious thing to do.

It its now nearly forty years since I was able to renounce my previous short-lived careers as cleaner, waiter, civil service clerk or scenic painter to make a living solely from the sale of my own work. It has been a good run - better, probably, than for many who set out with the ambitions that I had as a young man. But also not as good as others. There have been ups and downs, but I’ve made a living doing what I chose to do and what I loved doing (most of the time). However in recent years, for whatever reason, there has been an unmistakeable downturn, in the sense that the disappointment generated after the emotional investment of producing and showing work in the end eclipses any gratification. To some extent all shows end feeling like failures (Orwell said as much about books), and getting back into the studio and starting to climb that mountain again has become progressively less appealing. I no longer have the stamina of my youth. Orwell again:

'One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention.'

Staging exhibitions in recent years has also frequently brought to mind Einstein’s famous quotation:

'doing the same thing repeatedly, and expecting different results is the definition of insanity'

One decision I did make many years ago, which demonstrated a rare astuteness and foresight on my part was, fed up with the whims of landlords and the uncertainty of leases, I bought myself a beautiful studio space in a semi derelict building in what has turned out after many years to be a location of prime real estate. Not long after I moved in Jamie Oliver opened a restaurant round the corner and the surrounding derelict warehouses became luxury loft apartments. With the result that it is now clear that the equity of my property portfolio is vastly in excess of that of my artist’s portfolio. The reality is I would actually be materially better off not working than working. Such is the nature of world we inhabit, the irony being that it is often such aspects of this world that have fuelled in my work a critique of what these values demonstrate about our society.

At the time I first began showing and selling work on a sustainable basis, in the early eighties, the art world was a different, more modest place. As the Thatcher years instilled and made respectable a new materialism in society (and yes, there is such a thing as society) the art world in turn became marinaded in the heady atmosphere wafting from the newly deregulated City. Wealth by its very nature is an abstract concept and needs to find tangible assets to park itself and grow. And where once old masters might have been the place for newly acquired capital to soak itself up, now for the younger and cooler it was contemporary art. And ludicrously astronomical prices reflected not the quality of the art, but the sheer concentration of wealth needing to find a home. This home, of course, needs to be protected. Artist values and prices need to be protected, and inflated. Museums and galleries, of course, provide a function for this.

The art world is indeed a murky and mysterious place. Although, technically, it has been the pond that I have been fortunate to swim in and feed for most of my life, I have never understood it, and I still don’t know how it works. If it is a pond, then I have been splashing around in the backwaters, on the margins, not really making any waves but gratefully swallowing any morsel thrown my way as I watch, often in disbelief, sometimes in admiration, the antics of fatter fish, nurtured and basking, in the sunnier pools of the main stream, shocked occasionally by the crassness. Patronage from the art establishment is something that has largely passed me by me throughout my career. You can search in vain to find a single work of mine in the collections of the Tate, Arts Council or British Council. I have never been approached by the more prestigious public art institutions and galleries to show work.The Royal Academy is a club I have never been invited to join (but then again, I’m a bit Groucho Marx about these things, anyway). I have survived in spite of these institutions rather than because of them. I dare say my work has never fallen within the prevailing orthodoxies of art practice that wax and wain over the years, presided over and policed by the Curatocracy. Perhaps they just don’t rate me, perhaps they’ve never heard of me. Who knows? But actually, it grates.

I was once a war artist. I was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum - it was a fantastic gig and I am hugely grateful to have been asked. Human moral values are what prompted me to pick up the brush from early on, even perhaps before I realised it. Life and death. Violence and ideology. The value and the cheapness of human life. The willingness to kill other human beings, the justification for so doing. I am fortunate. I am of a generation that never had to take up arms to defend family, property or way of life (in contrast to my parents’ generation). But when I was young I decided to pick up a brush in an effort to understand why some people do. This made my work political. Again, Orwell:

‘The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.’

However political art is not necessarily an easy sell. Atrocity and genocide are not great crowd pleasers.

Over the years projects - some of my own making, some by invitation - have taken me to many parts of the globe. Central America, Northern Ireland, The Amazon, the Middle East, Africa. All extraordinary adventures involving extraordinary people. But I have been most of that time, five days a week, nine to six, in my studio. Being an artist was not for me existing aloof from the world out there, watching terrible events on a screen, but rather endeavouring to engage with it, dip my toe in it, somehow to understand it. And maybe, thereby, in some puny way, to help it:

'Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.' (Why I write, motive IV)

It was substantially through exposure to art that I came to evolve values of my own. Views of the world, as it is, as it might be, that I absorbed in my formative years. Painting, literature, film, music. This art was powerful, and sometimes it even wielded power. After all it was more likely the Beatles not the Bomb that brought down the Berlin Wall.

I have been fortunate in having rich and varied experience throughout my working life. I have exhibited regularly in private, and occasionally public, galleries. I have been appointed professor, held academic posts, but never had to rely on teaching. The two most exciting and gratifying experiences without doubt have been my brief collaborative excursions into live music theatre productions. And over the years, many people have liked my work enough to shell out their hard earned cash. No-one, so far as I know, has bought my work to park their cash and watch it grow. It would be a stupid investor who did. Nevertheless, there has been much work which, for whatever reason, remains in ‘the collection of the artist’. Quite a mountain of it - I have been very prolific and a good deal of that work is on a large scale. Much of it would not now pass the scrutiny of my increasingly critical quality criteria. But there is a substantial volume of it which I would stand by, even be proud of. However there is quite a lot of it, and it takes up space. It can sit in storage for the time being, but ultimately it will demand attention. And I will not be around for ever to accommodate it. I would not wish it on my children to have to process it. Under the prevailing circumstances, it seems that that, really, is enough, for now at least. It does not justify adding to. Someone will eventually have to ‘deal’ with it. It’s not that I’ve finished being an artist, it’s just that I don’t feel the justification for bringing work into the world that may not have a home to go to. Like orphans needing a home.

My output has largely been stimulated by my responses to the political world around me, and my disillusion with producing art has also coincided with political disillusion. I count myself as an optimist, but perhaps I was just born into optimistic times. These times seem to have passed. Now we live in populist times. It may not be just chance that the last painting I produced, called ‘Entitled Number Two’, was an image of our prime minister celebrating election victory with a plastic turd stuck to the canvas. It is a cheap joke. But it is also more than that. It is recognition that in the face of despair we can perhaps be comforted by cheap jokes. And it is indeed about despair. But it celebrates vulgar humour, a bitter humour, and word play (‘Untitled’, followed by a number, is often used by artists who cannot or will not think of a title for a work. Our prime minister by birth, by education, is ENtitled, and a number two - a shit - geddit? Oh well.) It is the humour of last resort.

I have stopped painting, but in a way I don’t miss it. I don’t miss the graft. In some ways it actually feels like a relief. The genesis of most of my work has been from a mixture of fascination and outrage which needed processing, and the processing was making art. But making art is a slow and painstaking business. Some of it can actually be quite boring - the bits in the middle. It’s the beginning and the end where lies the most excitement, satisfaction. And in the end, the things that fascinate and outrage me are not going to change as a result of anything I might do. I fully accept that I am the person I am because of the art in all its forms from music and drama and image that I experienced in my formative years and beyond, but I’m not convinced that anything I produce is going to have sufficient traction to make any comparable difference.

I am 67 years old this year. I hope there may yet be a good few years before senility sets in. By the time I reached adulthood, much to my regret, the British passport no longer had a box for the holder to fill in ‘profession’, in which since early teens had been my ambition to write ‘artist’. Nonetheless It became my profession, and ever since it has been closely woven into my identity - that social construct we fall back on to mix among our fellow beings. The inevitable question ‘what do you do?’ or for those who know what I do ‘what are you doing at the moment?’, is the question I dread because I’ve never had an adequate answer, and of course now even less. I can’t describe what I’m doing, or have done, when required to supply details. Now perhaps I can just refer interlocutors to these pages.

But stopping painting poses the existential question. What am I doing? What am I for? Since teenage years I have been wedded to the idea derived from reading Sartre that you are what you do. You create your purpose for being - purpose does not pre-exist. So where there was painting, now there is a - I was going to say ‘hole’, but that sounds too negative, so I shall say ‘gap’, and the moment I am not sure how that gap will be filled. I have not lost the creative urge that is at my core. But could it equally well be satiated by whittling sticks, gardening, or restoring mid century furniture? Something that does not take up space.

The world, we trust, will eventually settle down from the trauma that was Covid. But for the moment, anyway, from me:

BLUE PLANET/MOONLANDING/FLATEARTH #8

ENTITLED NUMBER TWO

January/February2020

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FLAT EARTH

JOHN KEANE: FLAT EARTH, FLOWERS GALLERY, LONDON Kingsland Road 13 Mar – 2 May 2020

FACE

NOVICHOK

EUROPEAN CANON

December 2018

Selve

Twelve Selves

Twelve Selves

August September 2016

Killing was Less Wearisome Than Farming 300x270cm

FEBRUARY 2016

Obedience

JANUARY 2016

Infinitum B

JANUARY 2016

January 2016

November/December 2015

Infinitum

September 2015

If you Knew Me, If you knew yourself

Remains (Rwanda 2015)

Feb-15

Nov-14

Oct-14

May-14

Oct-13

Jun-13

Culture, Practice and Ethics 2012

Her Influence on Political Life in Russia Was Totally Insignificant

Freedom and Authority

Intelligent Design, Internal Combustion

Under the working title Intelligent Design I explored a few ideas on the computer and in paint, inkjet and gold leaf etc. The themes not dissimilar to what I could be accused of having banged on about over the last godknowshowlong, ie War and Religion and the beliefs that this world (or the next) will be made a better place by acts of extreme brutality. Just one of many recent examples of this was the murder of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam. Other subject matter addresses atrocities from the Iraq war and home-grown terrorism.

The death of Theo van Gogh

Some of these beliefs go hand in hand with a desire to refute the science of evolutionary biology, and the theories of Charles Darwin in particular. Using the inkblot (see what you are conditioned to see) Rorschach test on the

The Peppered Moth

The Peppered Moth is often cited as a visible demonstration of natural selection at work, and therefore as proof of Darwin's theories. The evidence suggested that during the grimiest period of the English industrial revolution the moths, which rest with their wings open on tree bark, adapted in wing colour to the prevailing background. This is a form of camouflage, because bird predators would be able to find the moths if they didn't match their background visually. When the trees are dark and sooty, the moths are better off being black; when the trees are soot-free or lichen-covered, they are better off pale and mottled. Dark forms of the British peppered moth (Biston betularia), as well as many other species of moth, became common in the middle of the 19th century near centres of industrial pollution. Soot coated the trunks and branches of trees, and killed lichens. In the example shown above, if you look closely you can see repeated an image on the body and wings of the moth that bears an uncanny resemblance to Charles Darwin himself. Make what you will of this... This work and more was shown at Flowers east in the spring of 2009