A Question of Perception
- Me and Bertha the Bass
I’m a painter / printmaker. And I’m a musician (Upright Bass and Guitar). There are similarities between the two disciplines. (stop me if you’ve heard this)
I’m self-taught as a musician. I’ve had a few lessons and valuable they were too. But I don’t read music; when I want to learn a new song, I listen. I listen and I can usually hear what is happening in the music. And then I play what I hear as best I can.
In painting it’s very similar. I’ve been trained to see and to paint what I see as best I can.
In both it’s a question of perception. I don’t try to “express myself”; I try to play / paint what I hear / see as best I can. I think all my heroes have done that. Rembrandt to Picasso. And possibly even Robert Motherwell. They all connected with something outside themselves. In music it’s the same. Bob Dylan, the Beatles and countless old Blues men. They’ve all listened and played what they heard as best they could.
The operative phrase is, “as best they could”. I think that personal style amounts to nothing more than personal limitations. When Monet and Gauguin (I think it was these two, and if not then it was another two) went painting together and came up with two different representations of the same landscape, it was nothing more than their own personal limitations that made the two paintings different. They were both painting the same scene. They both had the same perception, but just as handwriting is individual, so is painting. And so is music. It’s always going to be differenter than another.
And that’s the reason why “trying to develop one’s own style” is ludicrous. I am convinced that we can’t make things happen, but we can allow things to happen.
Only forgers make it “just like the real thing”.
