237.Chocolate, strawberry and pistachio in glass bowl (Schokolade, Erdbeere und Pistazie in Glasschale)

237. Chocolate, strawberry and pistachio in glass bowl (Schokolade, Erdbeere und Pistazie in Glasschale), 2025, Öl auf Leinwand, 15 × 20cm, (Darryn Ansted)

It is mainly the motif that interests me when I work, rather than the effects of paint. I remember reading about a scientific study that basically said that we know/decide if we like something before we know what it is, aesthetically speaking. There is some spontaneous eruption in vision that we respond to aesthetically, and then we set about trying to understand what we are seeing. I can identify with that sentiment. This fun-fact was often in the back of my mind as I gave classes on art and art history. There is something so immediate and sensational about seeing and art that is not cognitive at all. However, that is not the end of the story. We come back to things armed with better knowledge of what they are, like this song or that flower and so on. Then our aesthetic pleasure is deepened. So, there’s an immediate sense response, and then when we see something the second time there is an informed (?) sensory response. Some songs thrive on that second listen. However, I don’t think it is even something that can be completely controlled by the artist. Actually, I am just pursuing the motif and in the process the painting becomes an aesthetic object.

I am probably more on the second-listen side of art. Although I am always using painting as a form of questioning, I nonetheless hope that appreciation of slower, quieter things comes through my work. I was talking to someone recently about icon painting. It is very different to how I paint. It is even slower. However, it is interesting to think about why and how it is different to everything else out there.

As I understand it, and my understanding is poor, icon painting is much less about the artist and more about the artwork itself. The icon is seen not as a representation of something holy but actually holy itself. It is seen not as a copy after someone else but rather as a dutiful ushering-on of an existing tradition (carried on from one practitioner to another). Perhaps icon painters even see their work as having a reflection, direct or indirect, of a higher being. In this belief, naturally then the mark of the hand of the individual artist is to be concealed. Like painting a flag or even a cartoon character. It is important that the viewer recognizes the typical attributes of the theme or character and not the tendency of the artist. All Bart Simpsons are the same Bart Simpson. This is a self-effacing sense of identity that we associate with the Middle Ages in the western art history cannon, when it was even seen as a kind of hubris to leave residue of the artist’s personality on holy subject matter. Modernity changed everything.

The millennium has seen this change from an art of humility to an art of heroic individuality. The art of heroic individuality seemed to reach a peak and subside in the 1950s and early 1960s. After the late 1960s it was more desired by contemporary art that an artist would be (returning?) to using art as a form of questioning rather than broadcasting. This sense of art ‘as a tool of investigation’ is the artistic culture in which I studied art (in 2002). I think it might be quite hard-wired into me now. When I pursue a motif, I am questioning: What happens here? How does this work? What can be seen?

I paint with a modern brain however I nonetheless very much appreciate pre-modern painting. There are a silence, a stillness and a sense of lived time in medieval and early renaissance art and also icon painting. This kind of quality makes it completely different to modern art. It can be much more like being in a library. These older paintings need some orientation. They have to be organized as to where they sit among the old traditions. Slowly then, they can be read like a book. It is very different to the modern tendency to have big, immediate impact. I am probably more on the second-listen side of art but these ice creams maybe less so.