Of Expressionism, emotion and green sky

Retreating storm, Fiordland

An Expressionist wishes, above all, to express himself… (an Expressionist rejects) immediate perception and builds on more complex psychic structures…

Antonín Matějček (1910) -Czech art historian

In the sense that these pictures reflect the individual ego of their creator, they are expressionistic

-Peter C Bunnell

All stories begin somewhere.

This particular one began one warm afternoon in a cafe in Martinborough, New Zealand, sitting outside in the garden area, sharing coffee and art with a good friend whose painting I admire.

Several posts ago, I wrote an allegory, or rather an extended metaphor, likening photography and its development to settlement within a valley, and relating the story of how a cataclysmic event (read: PhotoShop) erased some of the mountains at one end of the valley, allowing the inhabitants of the Valley to realise that there was a new and potentially scary way of doing things. I wrote how some pretend that nothing had happened (film users), how some went out a little distance and used what they had learned in a slightly different way (PhotoShop as a tool to tweak reality), while a crazy few vanished over the horizon, laughing hysterically and doing their own thing, uninformed by any sense of aesthetics, (art) history, or even purpose. But out there, in the Grasslands of Possibility, they discovered HDR and played happily if in an uninformed way … Fortunately, Ian, whose target identification skills are constantly improving, chose to” play” (many thanks, Ian), and produced some wonderful questions. Eva, whose dedication to accuracy is ferocious, picked me up on one or two factual inaccuracies in my article on Impressionism (now corrected) and I promised a response about Expressionism, an area where I feel more at home.

Back to the cafe and a sunny day.

Steve, whose career as an artist has not necessarily been the traditional one, where he has combined being a family man, a commercial fisherman and an artist, has probably forgotten more about art than I will ever learn. I had brought along my laptop, to share landscapes I had been making while on the road, to get his thoughts on the direction in which my photography was trending. I sat there, sipping my flat white and watching the other people in the cafe, while he moused and clicked his way through my collection. After a time, he looked up, stared me in the eye with that fiercely perceptive look he can get at times, and said:

You know Tony, you’re really an Expressionist.

There is enough of the maverick in me to fiercely resist being labelled, but I have to admit to feeling a certain warm sense of belonging, the same feeling you get after being on the road for weeks, when you turn the corner for home under the blue-grey blanket and see the golden glow from the windows in your house. It’s really quite nice, in some ways, to be able to define yourself. But it can also be a trap as well.

Of course, while I had done an art history course, it had been some years previously and I really hadn’t taken out my notes in quite some time. I had a vague memory of studying Expressionism, but no real sense of what the term might mean. So it was time to go back and do some catching up, to look at the key tenets of Expressionism as an art movement, and to see where and to what degree there was a fit between expressionist art and my own work. At the time that Steve said this, I was surrounded by “Impressionist photographers”, and I confess to a certain warmth at the thought of being able to put my own stake in the ground. What artist doesn’t?

Pinning down Expressionism is much harder than putting a ribbon around Impressionism. But there are some key tenets which appear to be consistent across the broad spectrum of what constitutes expressionist art:

1. In its broadest sense Expressionism refers to any art which raises subjective feelings above objective observations. The paintings seek to reflect what is going on inside the artist rather than the reality which he is observing. Not all expressionist artists threw their art history choice out of the cot. Artists of the Die Brucke (The Bridge) movement, established in 1905, sought to make German art bridge to the future. One of its leading exponents, Max Beckmann, attempted to create his own bridge, “to link the objective truthfulness of great artists of the past with his own subjective emotions”.
2. For many expressionist artists, it was not necessary to render result which was either aesthetically pleasing or which paid homage to that which had gone before. The leader of the other major expressionist movement, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Knight), Wassily Kandinsky, believed that with simple colours and shapes, it was possible for a spectator to perceive the moods and feelings in the painting. As a consequence, he moved towards abstraction. He also saw a relationship between the spiritual and art. In his work: Concerning the Spiritual in Art he compared the spiritual life of humanity to a larger red triangle similar to a pyramid. According to him, it was the artist’s duty to lead others to the top by the exercise of his talent. Later he would attempt to produce work which synthesised painting and music, where yellow for example represented middle C.
3. Freud and Jung’s theories were of great interest to the Expressionists, Jung in particular. These theories found themselves woven into the work of a number of the Impressionists.

Suffice it to say, the radical theories of the Expressionists, influenced as many were by the theories of Nietzsche, who stated that “Art is the proper task of life”, were not popular with the Nazis.  Adolf Hitler would later say:  anyone who paints grass blue and sky green should be sterilised”.   The Expressionists were out of favour. Beckmann left Germany for the USA …

Expressionism thus says that it is OK to depict the inner life rather than outward reality. It is not the same as surrealism, which is about dreamscapes and metaphors, to put it crudely. The subject is still depicted, but it is the emotions of the author and his/her response which takes centre-stage and the aesthetics follow behind playing servant to the master.

So am I an Expressionist? Yes. And No. what came to resonate at the time was the comment I would often hear, and which, no doubt a number of you have as well.

Is that the way it was?

As a landscape photographer, we have the option to attempt reality. I say attempt, because there is no real way to realistically depict a scene. Any attempt at reality is simply an agreement or collusion between a generic audience who agree upon a definition of what constitutes realistic representation, and the artist who uses techniques and processes which fall within that agreement. The willing suspension of disbelief on the part of an audience or readership. Plus, if I avoid increasing saturation or contrast, if I choose a particular white balance which will concur with what that audience expects to see, then supposedly I am being realistic.

But why bother? Why remain in the Valley and simply change my crop, or plant it in such a way that the neighbours approve? It seems to me it is rather like making sure you keep your hedges neatly trimmed and your grass mowed and bedding plants weeded, so the neighbours feel the values of the properties on the street are all kept to their optimum. Why not strike out and try something radically new and different?

Each of us has that option. Each of us can choose to remain where we are and produce work which meets the criteria of that generic audience. Or, having accepted Bunnell’s thesis, having decided that it is okay” that these pictures reflect the individual ego of the creator”, then we are free to step beyond the bounds of the Valley, free to explore the grasslands of possibility.

In the beginning, before I went back to school and began to read up on Expressionism, and thence  to find much which struck a concordant note, I justified it on the basis that the picture was an accurate representation of how I saw, reflected accurately my own visualisation of what lay before me. I had not yet begun to move deeper into this expressionistic approach, and I certainly had no wish to approach the angst-ridden zone of someone like Munch ( Die Schrei), who, while he was working long before Expressionism came to be recognised as an art movement, was later included in this group. What I was well aware of however was the gap between what I thought I saw (my mind) and what I actually took in as information (my eyes). And it was the knowledge of that gap and the exploration of which inform the way in which I made the photographs, and unbeknown to me at the time, allowed me to step out into the Grasslands. What really added momentum was when I found that, while my audience would occasionally be uncomfortable at my explanation (that is in fact the way that I actually see things-i.e in my mind), I in fact experienced no discomfort whatsoever. It really was about my emotional response to the scene in question. Later, as I moved further and further into allowing myself to evolve techniques which would enable me to better question and explore, I began to realise that in many ways I was more interested in the inner ocean itself, in the psychological waters within each human, then the object itself. And working with people, helping them with their own photographic journey, looking at their results and what they tell me about the inner ocean of the artist seems to me to line up perfectly with much of what the Expressionists had to say. In that sense I’m happy to define myself as an Expressionist photographer (I can hear a number of you saying: aha! At last)

Of course I am not the slightest bit interested in mimicking Beckmann or photographing blue horses a la Franz Marc), but many of the idea and philosophies developed by the Expressionists are ones I can carry with me out into the grasslands. You see, it is easy to get lost out there, to wander out into an region of uncertainty and untethered possibility. It is easy to step beyond the Valley with no guidelines, where there are no signposts or maps. That is fine. Bad HDR is only bad when we show it to somebody else, when we bring it back to the Valley which has had a long history of aesthetics and group consensus. Remember that aesthetics evolve, that they are neither fixed nor absolute.

Like the Expressionists, I am fascinated by exploring the location of the pivot point between aesthetics on the one hand, which requires a degree of agreement between artist and audience, and the expression on the other which requires none at all. And therein lies one of my journeys in the grasslands. However (call me cowardly if you will), I prefer to have some guidelines along with me, to be informed while I journey. As an Expressionist, I am happy to view my pictures as the outward expression of an inward impression or emotion, as a postcard I am sending to myself from wherever I was on the day I made the photograph.

This image (which has lain there in the archive for nearly 18 months) was made one day while working on the Out There South book. We were returning from Percy Saddle in Fordland, and we stopped for lunch on the Borland Saddle. The storm coming in off the Tasman was well and truly on the retreat by now, and the storm gods were reeling the front edge back out to sea. The clouds were still coming and going, punctuated by holes through which great shafts of light played across the landscape, spotlights eerily edge lighting the ridges and mountaintops. Somehow the scene resonated, somehow there was a moment of recognition. I sensed in the scene that I was looking into myself, seeing the ocean within myself.

Like some of my best work, the file has sat in the darkness for some time, clicking on one of the hard drives on my computer, until circumstance or my subconscious realise it is time to work with it. The second sense came when we were putting the final pictures together for the exhibition around the book launch of Out There South (we didn’t use this one in the book, but I selected it for the show). It was only on Saturday, as I began working on it, that I began to really understand it. This is yet another case of my subconscious acting long before my rational mind was ready. As I looked at the image, I was conscious of the darkness within it, a darkness with which I have become familiar in which no longer frightens me. We all have that darkness, but most of us studiously avoided. As I looked at it, I began to notice how the shafts of light came down through the holes in the clouds, certain indication that beyond them all was light, that these beams of light, as they drifted across the landscape, exposed the bare beauty of the mountains, separated the shoulders of these ancient trolls, picked out and highlighted the folds and crests, and shone deep into the valleys. As I worked on it, the metaphor became obvious. And, to put it mildly, I wasn’t that interested in the mountains themselves. Rather I was interested in the emotion I was feeling, both at the time I made the image and as I was working on it. Reflecting back, reflecting forward.

Retreating storm, Fiordland-ex camera

What helped was being able to take from my backpack what I needed, namely the memory of the fact that the Expressionists were interested more in the emotion than the objective reality. I could hear Beckmann  and Georges Roualt whispering in my ear.

I was free to venture further into the grasslands, knowing there was still a signpost back to the Valley, that I could still get news and information from home while I journeyed further outwards.

A keystone in the arch of human understanding is the recognition that mandates certain critical points synthesises experience. Another way of stating this is that man learns what he sees and what he learns influences what he sees.

-Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension

Footnote: the image at this end of the post represents the original, with only the Lightroom None preset applied to it. Some of you will, I suspect, feel drawn more to this than to interpretation at the head of this post.

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Tags: Canon, Expressionism, impressionism, landscape

Published on Monday, August 23rd, 2010, under Thinking about Photography and Art, art