Art and Darkness

Sunday was feeling rather creative and I thought I'd do some, y'know, painting, but I got sidetracked by the discovery of an e-book of John le Carre's classic "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold" which I then proceeded to guzzle up on my smartphone book reader, another discovery that reveals how life is not all that bad, actually.

But here's the thing. Our John is rather fond of the fatally flawed hero and the bittersweet ending, and what with a painting on the back of my mind I began to chew absently on this thing in the Arts where happiness is not typically considered a good thing. As if it's not Art if it's not painful.

Pathos, I believe it's called. A quick google scan reveals pathos as an appeal to an audience's  emotions by identifying with the suffering of a character. It's an ancient thing going back to Greek tragedies, alive and well and living in us still. Look at any graphic novel.

So le Carre's greatest fictional character George Smiley is a sort of quietly tragic superman, or perhaps supermind. The dominant feature of his private life is estrangement from his beautiful and lascivious wife, condemning him to a life of quiet loneliness. Le Carre could just as easily have given him a happy home life with healthy bouncing children, it would have made no material difference to his role of spymaster, but he chose instead to paint him in shadowy shades of damp grey. Perhaps it's the English weather, but more likely it's an instinctive reach for the pathos button.

Another great author with an even meaner streak is John Steinbeck, who doesn't even bother with sweet and goes for straight for the bitter end, neat. Perhaps it's authors named John - just a quick ad-hoc hypothesis you understand - but both are quite happy to dish up a bleak end to a story.

Hollywood, by contrast, loves the happy ending. It's understandable. After spending all those millions producing a movie you can't have people leaving the theatre moaning about an awful end. Too risky.

But their preoccupation with artistic gravitas shows up in movies about the business of making movies like "The Player". The creative bunfight with the money men over the ending to the movie-within-the-movie is resolved in a in a send-up of of the Hollywood process - Bruce Willis arrives just in the nick of time to save Julia Roberts from the electric chair. "What kept you so long?" she asks as he carries her out of the execution chamber. He smirks that smirk of his and says "Traffic was a bitch".

Now I'm not flying at those heights. Back here in the African sticks things are rather more humble. But behind this lies a fact that is constantly fascinating to me - in essence what I do is make marks on a flat surface.  In an age when pictures move, talk, sing and live the richest of fantasy lives to fantastic soundtracks on any of a range of wizz-bang devices - even mimicking real 3d stereoscopic vision - some simple marks on a surface still have the power to move people to the depths of their being.

So the way I arrange my marks has the power to direct those depths this way or that, and for some reason darkness, whether in the colouring or the themes, is a way to do that.

Certainly a bright light is impossible to render on canvas without surrounding it with darkness, but in this  particular piece it's beginning to look as if the darkness itself is the light. This lass is not a sunny spring day, her beauty is that of the deep night when the moon is down and the stars have the night to themselves.

It's not pathos, thank pooch, but sometime last week looking at what was appearing on the canvas in front of me I felt a little scared. It's as if I'm watching something deep, powerful and rather awesome rise up from a deep and ancient slumber. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but it has a power that both both fascinates and evokes love.

Bittersweet love, like dark chocolate. Is that pathos? Could be.