Pretension in Art

    I always get a pissed-off when people in the art community try to make paintings mean more than what they are.  Stereotypically, they are always standing around in front of a painting of a swirling conglomerate of colors, nodding their heads and stoking their chin contemplating, “What did the artist mean?”   Usually when this question is thrown at the artist, they just throw it back to the questioner, “Well, what does it mean to you?”  I have always suspected that there is a whole lot less meaning in a painting than is generally assumed.

    I first ran into this pretension when I first entered a juried show for paintings.  In 2005, I had just finished my first painting “Cabbage” and when I applied to enter it in the show I was sent a questionnaire  to fill out.  

    What is the title of your work?

    What are the dimensions of your work.

    What medium was used?

    Those were all valid and important questions, and I wrote down the answers on the form.  Then I went on to the next question.

    What does it mean?

    “What does it mean???”   I couldn’t believe the question, “It’s a painting of a cabbage, it doesn’t mean anything.”  I can’t express how ridiculous the question seemed to me.  I don’t remember what I wrote, probably that it was just an image of a cabbage.  

    I probably should have made up something like, “It symbolizes the development of the personality, with the solid core of beliefs tightly wrapped in the center and as the personality develops with age, experience causes older non-usable parts of the personality to break away from the core.”

    I don’t really understand why a painting just can’t represent itself without making up some highfalutin BS about it.

    When I did my show in Prince George last year, I entitled it “Color and Light in the Robson Valley” because I had to make it sound more academic than “Images from the Robson Valley”  In the little printout done by the gallery, they wrote a whole lot of stuff about my work being transformed from digital images and all the squares I use in my painting were somehow related to digital computer stuff, which really wasn’t accurate, but they had to make the paintings somehow more than what they were.

    Anyway, I hate all that pompous stuff, just take my paintings at face value--It’s just a cabbage.

You can see my paintings at:  davidmarchant.ca