PRE -SCHOOL PAINTING

Let's imagine an art which is “pre school.” Because . . .  we have all been to school. It's the

place where they teach you the world. What it is, who you are, where your place is inside it. We

have all learned to identify, to name, to move around in the space of things. Phenomena are

not  only for our use, distinct and wide in their variedness—they are there with our use: through

our usings.

Let's imagine school is this organising principle. In school, even with its wild animals, nature

(raw in tooth and claw) becomes our friend, though one we revere and respect for its powers.

Those potencies that we harness in our turn.

We grow, learning, discovering, adding to a cache of knowledge. We see art and we know

how it calls for that old reverence, the ancient care which preserves us and marks our

fascination. For we never entirely “lost” a certain way of looking. Both raw and innocent in its

simplicity, unguarded in its gaze, without fear.

Suppose—let's try to do it—suppose that our schooling and all our knowledge, all our will to

comprehend, all our gathered and updated repertoire of facts and signs and links, everything

constituting a man's relation to all that exists “out there,” was closer to a kind of loss in fact. A

capitulation.

Supposing we return to that trace of the raw we think we retained. Did we? Didn't our fears

immure us? We gained a place at a cost. Almost as if we had abandoned a world.

 Smooth paintings? Or “rough” ones? People see pictures and domesticate them. We use a

school vocabulary. We re-enact procedures of choice, of judgement. We esteem and

callibrate. A History of art (we learned one at school) enables us to locate and recognise by

analogy. Comparisons emerge “naturally.” But the comparisons and the assessments are of a

certain shape and tone and form. They are reflective of received doctrines and malleable

versions of our visual, cultured past.

Imagine suspending the commentaries, the banalities of criticism. Imagine doing without (even

doing away with) the analogies, the parallels, the perceived similarities. When we connect to

pictures at the first level we are feeling. We are seeing. We are encountering. Not thinking.

Feeling, seeing, encountering.

What I feel is this: my own personal reaction and relation to the stimulus. It calls upon elements

that I house within me. Maybe we could call it a “matrix.” It is the bricolage and jumble of

emotional states and animal surging that art authenticates.

What you are seeing is this: your love of the coming-into-light, into appearances, which nature

enacts on us every day. With every dawn or storm. Every sunset. At night, closing your eyes,

the arrival of the visible continues to deluge you.

What we are encountering is: our first, original, true placing within the world. The world—before

school made of it THE WORLD—the world as a vortex, a tintinnabulation.

Before school I was myself. At school I learned distance and categories. After my learning 

was completed I walked the earth's byways and grew strong. I saw paintings and I wept. I did 

not expect or comprehend the longings those pictures activated in me. An echo arrived one 

day. And thereafter there was only one language: that of painting and picture-making.