art and life: societal criticism in art

i had a discussion with a dear friend, the other day. not known for my lack of radical views, i stated that i had trouble accepting that so many people in our western society seem to prefer 'positive' untruths to ... well, to the bleak truth that e.g. in a country like ethiopia people have to pick coffee beans at a wage of 40 eurocent a day...7 days a week, for 10 grueling hours a day...just so we can drink cheap coffee. please don't dismiss this statement too easily. think about it for some time.

she said: well, if you are so unhappy about exploitation of poor workers, why don't you do something about it? so i tried to explain to her that this is what i try to do -in my way, which is the only way that i see myself capable of keeping up over the years. which means talking about it, writing about it, painting and drawing about it...although most of my drawings and paintings approach the subject from the other way round: i try to portray how the world would look if we concentrate on a 'spiritual' interaction (compassionate, mild, respectful, you get my drift). and of course i have been buying fair trade as much as i can, for a very long time.

which brings me to another aspect of this thread which has been going on for quite some posts now: societal criticism in art. the theme of societal criticism has been around for centuries in art. a 19^th century example:


jean-françois millet the gleaners (les glaneuses, 1857, musée d'orsay, paris, click for enlargement)

we see three gleaners: poor women, who when the wheat had been harvested scoured the land for the remaining stalks and ears. The so prominent display of the poorest of the population was seen by many as an indictment of poverty and exploitation of the workers. from wikipedia:

Millet first unveiled The Gleaners at the Salon in 1857. It immediately drew negative criticism from the middle and upper classes, who viewed the topic with suspicion: one art critic, speaking for other Parisians, perceived in it an alarming intimation of "the scaffolds of 1793."[1] Having recently come out of the French Revolution of 1848, these prosperous classes saw the painting as glorifying the lower-class worker.[1] To them, it was a reminder that French society was built upon the labor of the working masses, and landowners linked this working class with the growing movement of Socialism and the dangerous voices of Karl Marx and Émile Zola.[2]

One critic commented that "his three gleaners have gigantic pretensions, they pose as the Three Fates of Poverty…their ugliness and their grossness unrelieved."[3] While the act of gleaning was not a new topic—representations of Ruth had already been composed—this new work was a statement on rural poverty and not Biblical piety:[3] there is no touch of the Biblical sense of community and compassion in contrast of the embodiments of grinding poverty in the foreground and the rich harvest in the sunlit distance beyond. The implicit irony was unsettling.

millet was a big source of inspiration for vincent van gogh:


vincent van gogh, the potato eaters (1885, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam, click for enlargement)

$$$$$$

let me add a drawing which i made yesterday, after having had this discussion. i don't think it's my best work...since my subconscious seems to work better on its own, without a directive from my mind. but i do have enough image-creating experience to get things done, visually speaking. however, i'm left with a low expectation that any of my art works will really have an impact on this persistent problem of greed, wealth, uneven distribution of resources,...human nature you could say. you may call me negative for stating this. but i think we need this negativism in order for anything to change. much of the so-valued 'positivism' in my eyes serves to maintain a status quo which is decidedly injust on a global scale.


we trample on them, to maintain our luxury (own work, 2012, 21 x 30 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)

of human relations & dance of life 4

so, like i might or not have said in previous posts, i'm actually working my figurative butt off to develop some way to portray human relations, human emotions, human connections.

Kunst gibt nicht das Sichtbare wieder, sondern macht sichtbar.

('art doesn't show what is visible, rather it makes visible' - paul klee, 1920)

at times i have found it frustrating to have to explain the above to the lay person...but in later years i find myself explaining less and less. it is hard enough to come up with the images, the techniques, the perseverance in details... this reluctance to explain is not arrogance, it is a form of acceptance that some things cannot be explained.


of human relations (own work, 2009, 21 x 30 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)

some more drawings on dance...where in the first you could notice that i'm working on some new painting techniques to paint people...


dance 3 figures (own work, 2011, 30 x 45 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)


dance 4 figures (own work, 2009, 10 x 15 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)


dance 2 figures (own work, 2011, 15 x 16 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)


dance 1 figure (own work, 2011, 20 x 30 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)

dance of life 3

i came across a reproduction of one of my drawings at a friend's house last week...she made a photocopy of it during one of my previous visits because she liked it so much. i had already almost forgotten about this drawing, but it deserves a place in this thread on art, dance, life.


dance of life iii (own work, 2011, 21 x 30 cm, click on the image for an enlargement)

what is art for? homo aestheticus by ellen dissanayake

as an illustration to the previous post, let me quote from the wikipedia lemma on ellen dissanayake:

In Homo Aestheticus (University of Washington Press, 1995), Ellen Dissanayake argues that art was central to the emergence, adaptation and survival of the human species, that aesthetic ability is innate in every human being, and that art is a need as fundamental to our species as food, warmth or shelter.

What art “makes special”
This aesthetic ability, she says, enabled us to ‘bracket off’ the things and activities that were important to our survival, separate them from the mundane, and make them special. We took the objects and practices involved in marriage, birth, death, food production, war and peacemaking and enhanced them to make them more attractive and pleasurable, more intriguing and more memorable. We invented dance, poetry, charms, spells, masks, dress and a multitude of other artifacts to make these associated activities, whether hauling nets or pounding grain, more sensual and enjoyable, to promote cooperation, harmony and unity among group members, and to also enable us to cope with life’s less expected or explicable events.

Methods of “making special” derived from our evolutionary inheritance
Using her own lived, anthropological experience and a wide knowledge of contemporary literature on the subject, she provides many examples of how this “making special” is done. She argues that in making things special we drew on those aspects of the world that evolution had led us to find attractive and to prize: visual signs of health, youth and vitality such as smoothness, glossiness, warm colors, cleanness and lack of blemishes; vigor, precision, agility, endurance and grace of movement; in sounds - sonority, vividness, rhythmicity, resonance, power; in the spoken word repetition of syllables, verses and key words, the use of antiphony, alliteration, assonance and rhyme. She adds to these pattern, contrast, balance, roundness, length, geometric shapes such as circles, squares, triangles, diagonals, horizontals and verticals) - and more complex forms arising from variation on a theme, or to put it the other way round, the absorbing of asymmetry and difference within a wider, encompassing pattern - the taming of the unruly wild. As such, she argues that art springs from the same sources and interacts with the same physiology as everyday life, but because it is so crafted, more intensely.

Art as a normal and necessary part of human life
In Homo Aestheticus, Dissanayake argues that Art is not an ornamental and dispensable luxury, but intrinsic to our species. And once we recognize this truth, she says “each one of us should feel permission and justification for taking the trouble to live our life with care and thought for its quality rather than being helplessly caught up in the reductive and alienating pragmatic imperatives of consumer and efficiency-oriented and “entertain-me” society.”
“Art is a normal and necessary behavior of human beings and like other common and universal occupations such as talking, working, exercising, playing, socializing, learning, loving, and caring, should be recognized, encouraged and developed in everyone. Via art, experience is heightened, elevated, made more memorable and significant”

Included in the book are more than 16 pages of references covering the emergent fields of Bioaesthetics, Neuroaesthetics and Psychobiology.

what is art for? is the title of another book by ellen dissanayake (this links to her website):



and you will note the nice 'coincidence' that the author uses the same painting by gauguin as the one that started me on this whole thread...;-)

landscape art 3: what is art for (again)?

as i understand visual art, it is as important to us as music, and dance.

i wrote some posts earlier about dance, dance of life, tree of life...partly because of gauguin's monumental painting, partly because i was inspired by pina bausch. but mostly because i am arriving at the conclusion that many, if not most noteworthy artists in any arts discipline have been tasked with doing what we should all be doing.

so i think we should all be living more music, living more dance, living more poetry and stories and plays and movies, and living more visual art as well...if you get my drift.

sadly however, many of us live in a society where these things are only limitedly tolerated, for whatever reasons. as human beings, we are not even close to realizing our human potential on a global scale, and we are often already bogged down by our immediate social peers.

whereas, to me it seems that life is an inscrutable mystery, in which we play a minor and incomprehensible part with lots of suffering and misery thrown in. in such a setting, any form of art ideally helps us to live our lives more joyfully, more peacefully, more in tune with life and less to the tune of greed, social oppression, military oppression, religious oppression, any oppression.

for many of us, music is an outlet for our emotions vis-a-vis what we encounter in daily life. in my own dutch society, music seems much more accepted in that way than visual art (although, one should count movies in here). yet visual art has so much to offer in the same sense as well. but to appreciate these possibilities would seem to require more exposure to and emphasis on the importance of visual imagery/art in our education system than is the current practice.

$$$$$$$ (money, that's what everybody seems concerned about)

anyway, landscape art is in many ways a counterweight to 'quick bucks'. it takes a long time for a natural landscape to form. when walking in such a landscape, i believe we connect to slow forces of nature, and even the benign-to-humans atmosphere of many trees and plants. (i know there are also less benign landscapes...but these also have a certain time-slowing impact on us).

how to represent in a painting or drawing or drainting or ..., the influence on our feeling and thinking that landscapes have? even more radical, landscapes often set me thinking about the nature of Nature, the nature of of spatiality, the forces of life & death, the nature of beauty,...

i feel quite some understanding for the aboriginal way of looking at the land: also through dreams and ancestral stories from time immemorial. no wonder that i am intrigued by some forms of aboriginal landscape art. why is it that so-called primitive societies seem to have such a much more evolved concept of what life is really about? also see dreamtime on wikipedia.


unknown land (own work, 54 x 60 cm, 2010, click on the image for an enlargement)

landscape art 2: recent paintings of canary islands

the exotic landscape of the canary islands has been quite inspiring to me, even though i do not paint a proliferous number of canvases.

i earlier posted a painting based on la gomera, and i now simply show two recently finished paintings. the first of these is based on a 2003 visit to gran canaria and has been waiting for some finishing touch for years...glad to see i finally found it. however, the colours are difficult to capture with my canon eos 300d...i will upgrade to a better camera this year.


gran canaria i (own work, 70 x 110 cm, 2003-2012, click on the image for an enlargement)



la gomera iii (own work, 80 x 120 cm, 2011, click on the image for an enlargement)

landscape art, van gogh, gorges du tarn

let me say just a few words on landscape art. it has always fascinated me, perhaps firstly because both landscape and art have always fascinated me. but secondly, my views on landscape art were almost demolished when i first saw a van gogh painting (i believe i was around 11 yrs old).

before that, i was already surrounded in our home by paintings of kenyan landscape as a backdrop for kenyan wildlife, by peter pakara (pseudonym of an artist who i barely managed to find on internet as peter siegfried hahn). i admired these paintings greatly.


peter pakara (peter siegfried hahn) (unknown title and date, i believe this to be fair use of the image; the paintings in my parents' possession are all from the seventies)

as a child i already had visited the rijksmuseum a number of times through my primary school in amsterdam. but i don' recall seeing a van gogh there. in short, my idea of what painting was changed completely (i now believe) when i first saw works by van gogh.

unfortunately i don't remember which of his works i actually saw first, but i do recall the sensation of being in complete awe of something another human has made. not like the awe i had before for realistic works of art, but on a wholly new level, the awe that somebody had actually managed to paint something of what i always felt when being in nature.


vincent van gogh wheat field with cypresses (1889, click on the image for an enlargement)

ok, now for my own puny contribution to this post's imagery. three years ago i visited the gorgeous gorges du tarn:


st georges de levejac, gorges du tarn

and some time later i made this drainting:


gorges du tarn (own work, 21 x 30 cm, 2009, click on the image for an enlargement)

(to be continued)