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)
Although I am always questioning, maybe an 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. However, it is interesting to think about why and how it is different. Indeed, maybe it is not so far away after all.
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 further 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. Think about it like painting a flag or an established cartoon character. It is important that the viewer recognises the typical attributes of the theme or character and not the tendency of the artist. 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 the iconography of holy subject matter. Naturally, of course modernity changed everything.
Where is somebody like me, today then, in the context of the millenium that 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 paint 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’s a silence and 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 differnt to modern art. It can be much more like being in a library. These older paintings need some orientation. They have to be organised 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.
