The art of Ryno Swart

Spirit of the Quince Tree

     Some years ago, Spain's premier film director was offered the opportunity to make the movie of his choice. He chose to do a documentary on his favorite artist, one of the country's most admired painters. The artist agreed to have his house invaded for the documentary, a record of the development of a single painting from conception to completion. He was planning to start a new painting anyway; a picture of a young quince tree growing next to his house.

    The crews set up camp near the house, and the next morning the artist started on his painting, chatting as he set out his colours. While talking, he laid down the initial washes for his picture, and slowly, with great care, reverence even, plotted the shapes of the main brances. After about an hour, the light had changed, and he cleaned his brushes and his palette, moving indoors for a nice cup of tea.

    The next morning they started where they had left off. Delicate strokes of carefully weighted colour mapped the intricate patterns of branch and twig. Everything was going beautifully. But on the third morning it was overcast. The artist stepped outside, set up his equiment and patiently waited for the sky to clear. (I am making all this up, note, I haven't seen the movie, and I wasn't there...) As it happened, the sky remained overcast, and after an hour, he packed everything away and moved into the house, all the time happily talking about the glories of art and of nature.

    Three days later, the weather was perfect, although he had to cut short his work session, because now the sun was rising a touch earlier... Now he was intrigued and delighted by the little leaf buds that had started to form on the branches, delicately indicating their shape, their colour and their fragility. A week passed, and every day new buds were forming. Not only this, but leaves were now uncurling from out of the buds. Soon the artist noted that the brances were growing and changing, every moment perfect in itself, and with every subtle change he adjusted his picture. Blossoms developed, transforming the whole tree, and true to his vision, the artist moved with the dance of time and beauty. Even when the blossoms fell, he changed his picture in line with the truth.

   Seasons changed, and eventually the director had to withdraw to edit his movie and to release it as a work in progress. The painter remained with the tree. Both artists were at peace with their unfinished work. When is a tree finished; when is a painting? 

   The movie "The Spirit of the Quince Tree" went on to win several awards, including, I believe, an Oscar. But although both of these artists personify my ideal of slow loving work with no purpose but to see and to feel, I have no information on either of them, not even their names. And that too, is as it should be. It is one of my favourite movies, the only problem is that I have never seen it.

Lost in time

   Once in Venice I experienced eternity in a moment. It was pre-dawn, and we were painting a quiet canal. A flock of birds flew in to to chatter and sing, right next to us. Then a churchbell, ringing complex melodies, soon joined by another and then a third, until we were enveloped in music, a concerto of winged creatures, angels and starlings.

   These moments live with us forever.

Figure drawing workshop

Tuesday, 16 September to Friday, 19th.                                    Simon's Town Library. 9:30 until 3:00 daily. R1000.

Aspects to be covered include:

   Gesture, movement, proportion and anatomy.
   Portraiture and the proportions of the face.
   Light and dark, shading, tone, chiaroscuro.

My kind of art.

    Art is at a crossroads. It has been at this crossroads for nearly a century, since 1910, when the "Modern" movement took power and it has been stuck in this crossroads ever since. Modernism has never found any acceptance from the public, who were cowed into feeling inadequate and stupid when it comes to art. Today modernism is dead; or rather, modernism has finally been recognised as never having had any vitality. And post-modernism is a cruel and nasty joke, based on the aestheticisation of ugliness , cruelty and filth, with the backing of public funded museums and galleries and neo-Medici art moguls such as Saatchi. Photo-realism started with shock and quickly degenerated into commonplace as "artist" after "artist" embraced the aesthetic of the projector.

A genuine art

   There are many kinds of art. With many names. I call mine "genuine art." This means quite simply, art done with honesty, sincerity and skill. And with love. It does not preclude any approach to art, but it does insist on the highest levels of personal and artistic integrity. 

    I cannot tell anybody how to conduct their lives and their art. But I can decide on my own life and my own art. This is what I teach; it is all I can teach. When anybody is looking for a teacher, it is vital that they go to somebody who holds the same ideals that they do. Many artists refer to themselves as, and even teach under the banner of being, my students, but if they do so while working from photographs, it hurts me, and worse, it compromises my ideals.

The crossroads

   The path from prehistoric art, through Greek and Roman culture, and from the Renaissance to 1910 is an unbroken development of vision and expression, as Ruskin put it, learning ever more deeply "to see, to feel." At this point, for materialistic and even political reasons, art split into several streams, each calculated to alienate the public and to create a superclass of "art cognoscenti" with the power of dictating which artists are of importance, or "valid". Expressionism, Surrealism, Dada, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism, Primitivism and Photo-Realism dominated the 20th century, conducted by public collections, critics, and academics, often working in concert.

Hidden Photo-realism

   After Chuck Close had managed to shock the public and delight the academics with his lifeless "photo-realism", a new sub-art developed, a hidden photorealism where artists of a certain skill in rendering effects started to use the camera to produce paintings which looked as if they were the result  of drawing, composition and the mastery of perspective and proportion, whereas, in fact, they are tracings from photographs, often rendered in lively brushwork. Most, if not all of these artists, are keeping their questionable methods secret, and their adoring public is unaware of being fooled.

The road ahead

    During this century, there has been a small group of artist who ignored all the "movements" and continued on the road of genuine art. They determined, often at great cost, to draw, to compose, to see, to learn the laws of proportion and perspective, and the mysteries of chiaroscuro and of colour, harmony and paint matter. They explored the secrets of vision; physical seeing; memory, imagination and creative visualisation. Many of them turned away from a hostile art world, and made their careers in cinema and in comic strip art, but a few remained true to their dream and the dream of the millennia, to draw and to paint as an act of pure love. This is my kind of art.

   Slowly we are asserting our own taste in art. Now it is a matter of time and of open communication till everybody will be able to say, without fear of looking stupid, "That is my kind of art".

In this issue

• Spirit of the Quince Tree
• Lost in time
• Figure drawing workshop
• My kind of art.

Website

http://artistvision.org/

Workshops

For details on workshops and classes in Cape Town and Europe, click here

Archive

Previous newsletters from Ryno can be found here.

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