Painting and Imagination: the power of leaving things unsaid

Today, digital tools allow artists to create visually intricate images. And yet, when I stand in front of certain paintings, I experience something very different.  A painting that appears simple - even loosely or roughly painted can move me more deeply than an image filled with complexity and ornamentation.  It may contain only a few shapes, unexpected colours, or an ambiguous space.  There may be far less information to look at and even appear effortless at first.  And still, somehow, I want to keep looking.

Why?  I think part of the reason lies in imagination.

When less gives us more

I feel that the more completely an image explains itself, the less room there is for me to enter it.  When every object is defined and every corner filled with information, much of the seeing has already been done for me.

Painting can operate differently.  A loosely painted shape might suggest a tree, a cloud, a figure, or simply a movement of colour.  A landscape might remind me of somewhere I have been, although I cannot identify exactly where.  A strange passage of colour may awaken a memory without explaining why.  The painting leaves something unresolved.   And that unresolved space is where imagination begins.

Umberto Eco, an Italian writer, explored a related idea in The Open Work. He said, “The work of art succeeds precisely insofar as it appears ambiguous and open-ended.”  For Eco, ambiguity is not a weakness in an artwork.  Rather than delivering one fixed message, an artwork can remain open to interpretation, asking the viewer to participate in making meaning.  Likewise, when a painting is not completely described, it doesn’t  finish the experience for us.  It leaves room for imagination.

The subtle energy of a painting

A colour beside another colour.  A shape slightly out of balance.  A thick brushstroke beside an untouched area of canvas.  A perspective that doesn’t quite make logical sense.  Individually, these things may seem insignificant.  Together, however, they can create something more difficult to describe: an atmosphere, a rhythm, a subtle energy.

Perhaps that is one of the qualities that continues to draw me to painting.

I think of music in a similar way.  Music doesn’t necessarily become more moving because it contains more notes.  Sometimes a few notes or even the silence between them can affect us more profoundly than something technically complex.  Painting can do the same thing visually.  What is absent can become as important as what is present.

Seeing is not a camera

Our eyes move.  Our bodies move.  Time passes while we look.  We focus on one thing and then another.  Hence, the world doesn’t remain frozen in front of us like a photograph.  David Hockey, a British artist, remarked in an interview in 1984, “There cannot be one perspective.  There are thousands there, actually.”

Seeing, after all, may never be a matter of receiving what is directly in front of us.  We see through what we already know.  We see through previous experiences, memories, emotions and expectations.  And perhaps imagination is already activated in the act of seeing.

Between memory and imagination

This I is how I approach my own painting practice.  As my memories and imagination become intertwined, my painting begins to become another place -  a space between memory and imagination.

Too much information can close that space.  Ambiguity can open it again.  Forms are simplified and rearranged.  Colours move away from reality.  Perspectives shift.  Some things disappear.  Other things emerge unexpectedly through the process of painting.  This is why I am drawn to semi-abstract painting.

Leaving room for the viewer

What interests me about painting is its capacity not to explain itself completely.  It can ask us simply to look, wander, feel something before we can name it, or recognize something and then lose it again.

This is perhaps why a seemingly simple painting can sometimes stay with us longer than an image containing far more visual information.  Its power lies in how much space it leaves for us, not how much it gives us.

Painting only needs to open a door to imagination.