scream more than the horror. I think, if I had really thought about what causes
somebody to scream, it would have made the scream that I tried to paint more
successful. Because I should in a sense have been more conscious of the horror that
produced the scream. In fact they were too abstract.... I think that they come out of a
desire for ordering and for returning fact onto the nervous system in a more violent
way. Why, after the great artists, do people ever try to do anything again? Only
because, from generation to generation, through what the great artists have done, the
instincts change. And, as the instincts change, so there comes a renewal of the feeling
of how can I remake this thing once again more clearly, more exactly, more violently.
You see, I believe that art is recording. I think it's reporting. And I think that in abstract
art, as there's no report, there's nothing other than the aesthetic of the painter and his
few sensations. There's never any tension in it.
DS: You don't think it can convey feelings?
FB: I think it can convey very watered-down lyrical feelings, because I think any
shapes can. But I don't think it can really convey feeling in the grand sense...
I think it's possible that the onlooker can enter... into an abstract painting. But then
anybody can enter more into what is called an undisciplined emotion, because, after all,
who loves a disastrous love affair or illness more than the spectator? He can enter into
these things and feel he is participating and doing something about it. But that of
course has nothing to do with what art is about. What you're talking about now is the
entry of the spectator into the performance, and I think in abstract art perhaps they can
enter more, because what they are offered is something weaker which they haven't got
to combat.
DS: If abstract paintings are no more than pattern-making, how do you explain the
fact that there are people like myself who have the same sort of visceral response to
them at times as they have to figurative works?
FB: Fashion.Statistics: Posted by bels — Fri Feb 12, 2016 9:42 am
]]>