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INSPIRATION, NO.

By Ben Prudden:

Introduction

There are many people that look at discord and see harmony; a harmony within the
randomness, chaos, and strife between the elements that in their conflict unite to beset
your senses with claustrophobic explosions. Specifically discord within art concedes that it
can deliberately shatter the linear progression by combining various elements out of turn;
concluding that discord, as much as harmony, pushes the medium of art forward. But what
are we pushing forward into? Much like the fundamental questions of this world revolve
around the future where; where is this relationship going? Where is the universe expanding
in to? As much as we want to live in the moment, human beings fundamentally feel insecure
without understanding their progression from the past to the future. It can become life
consuming.

The medium of art has never collectively wonders where it is going next; it relies on
instances in time to spark a change, indicative of the fundamental basis for the medium,
expressing the realities that surround us. But it therefore becomes near impossible for an
artist to remain relevant for a significant period of time with the progression of art reliant on
incompatibilities with the past. Admittedly the likes of Michelangelo have stuck, but haven’t
sparked change; created that burning ember that burns bright for the most present second,
changing everything. Changing the air we breathe. He was Inspirational, yes, consistently
remarkable, no.

“Inspirational, no.” Is about making realities consistently remarkable. It is no longer

acceptable to reinvent the medium through a chaotic process that renders previous artists
and experiences irrelevant in the pursuit of a deliberately uncertain future. If discord is
defined as a lack of agreement, art itself is fundamentally a lack of agreement between
representations of reality; for discord to be represented, a lack of agreement with this
fundamental basis comes in the form of agreement.

This project is not inspirational, the art and artists included are not modern cutting edge or
refined in the renaissance. Instead you will find artists that create art around an experience,
a form of reality; they create in the moment with a passion and a confidence in their
representations of that reality, their work only becomes only more significant as time
progresses. It is complex to define this in your own work for it can come across arrogant
and excessive. However through a combination of looking at artists that critics believe are
slowly progressing toward a similar end, and artists that I think through texture, forms, and
manipulation of time, represent the formation of realities now that will culminate into
agreement between past, present, and future.

Inspiration, no. – Chapter 1

Texture:

Contained within this essay are 3 chapters, chapters that express a progression of thought
through art coinciding with the 3 instances of time; past, present, and future.
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Texture underpins all art. Artists are only as good as the materials they use; especially
considering that an increasing majority of modern artists use industrial processes
exclusively to create their work. It brings into question the nature of an artist that wants
their work to look like it has never interacted with, touched by the artist’s hands; it directly
violates human instinct from a young age to explore, to touch everything. Inspiration, no.
defies this convention and allows anyone to touch the art in front of them. Although not tied
to any particular artist, it has been a long standing personal aim of mine to create art that
can be touched, grasped, licked if it so please the person in front of the work.

Because of this increased interaction, the work must have a solid basis in reality, but remain
elusive enough for the audience to be driven ever closer into the experience. For an
example of this, one only needs to look in the direction of Richard Nott; the physicality of
his work purveying the language of war as he battles, scars, and burns the surface with
industrial materials that juxtapose experiences of the natural, placing himself and his works
in a material reality. It could be likened to “extraction,” if it were not for the organic
sensation created through the materials themselves. It is because of the interaction
between the mind’s eye and the means to create it that fickleness occurs and becomes
uncontrollable; fire, brimstone, and everything in between not only change the piece, but
they give it a timeless dynamism where the familiar becomes remarkable every time the
work is presented.

It could be argued that the materials that create art ground it in reality; the logic being that
if the world is made of these materials, then the same must be said of art. But, when the
media is populated with images of Jeff Koons and his man made inflatable dolphin, this
relationship becomes distorted. The superiority complex instilled in us all says, “We are
better,” we are better than anything; everything. The truth people forget when trying to
discern a deeper meaning behind a semi-naked woman, a set of inflatable’s, and a set
suspiciously akin to that found in cheap pornography, is that it was all of this earth at one
point. Any texture you touch is a variation on a formation of reality. Juliette Paull realised
that there aren’t words to truly describe such a crucial nature, her art instead tries to alert
people to its presence; furthering the work of Richard Nott, she creates a focal point
representative of life, only to draw you into the “discovery of moments” left behind in the
texture from the remnants of previous work.

Inspiration, no. – Chapter 2

Form:

Form is an interesting concept in art. Considering the dramatic rise in abstract art, you
would be inclined to think that form has been in decline; the precision of the past masters in
their study and implementation of anatomy has not been forgotten, but replaced by weird
and wonderful shapes. These shapes are as much forms as anything that came before
them. If anything, the creation of these forms has accelerated the learning and observation
of forms in reality. As much as the past masters, including the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci,
could draw and paint with precision what they saw around them, as artists they began
correcting reality. They saw imperfections. Expressionists furthered this by using technique
to blur reality somewhat. However, abstract artists create what they see. It is an honest
representation of both the “light and dark of human emotion.”

Not only do we get increased diversity within art and artists displaying their work because of
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this, but we also get work that is possibly not the most inspiring, it could for all intents and
purposes be revolting to look at, but it is always remarkable; always relevant, new. The
most famous artist to do this was of course Pablo Picasso, the Spanish painter that founded
cubism. However, the artists this project focuses on need to be united, therefore two artists
that perfectly personify this are Trevor Bell and Matthew Lanyon.

A particular interest can be found in Trevor Bell’s use of forms that extenuate his shapes
within the work outwards. The shapes of his canvases are as pivotal to the work as what is
expressed on them; the large controlled sweeping colours create shapes and forms that
jump off the piece and out into the world. The use of 3 dimensions over a large surface fills
the audiences’ view, fills their reality, with forms that can both envelop and repel them from
instant to instant. This concept of making the canvas part of the art itself is remarkable;
regardless of Da Vinci being able to draw a perfect circle; the imperfection in Bell’s shapes
makes them infinitely more entertaining.

Matthew Lanyon does something similar; instead of making one giant shape, his work uses
the forms of multiple perspectives of the same view to create a sense of timelessness. The
intersection of these various realities within one piece of work combined with his use of very
specific forms to symbolise the most fundamental nouns of man, woman, and sun create an
abstraction that burns itself into the consciousness. With Matthew often being known as a
“colour genius,” his use of colour serves to perpetuate a state of higher being, as if we are
looking down on his work somehow. The artist Yonatan Levy describes this as, “any
expectations or personal preferences are left out of the process” everything is generated
without compromise, enabling the remarkable.

Inspiration, no. – Chapter 3

Time:

Time is the strangest of things; not just in art, but in the fact that its formation was both
natural and manmade, driven by the human need to quantify its own overall context. Time
itself is constant, but it changes from moment to moment as the second hand ticks past
another quantity of time. For art, time is not so much a quantity as it is a reference point;
photography captures the quantity (hence it’s popularity), art does its best to express it
with relation to everything around it. Time is essential for this project because of its desire
to unite past, present, and future so that those expressions of time are relevant across
time, rather than isolated in the context of the past or proposing the future.

The Japanese have a competent grasp on this concept through the need to keep old
traditions of the samurai alive while making progress as a technological innovator ever
faster in the “digital decade;” so it should surprise nobody when I use a Japanese artist to
illustrate Inspiration, no’s concept. Shinichi Maruyama is a young artist that has only
recently made large strides in the contemporary art world when exhibiting in the west
rather than in his home country. He, ironically, works primarily in the medium of
photography; however, he first creates what he wants to photograph. The decisive moment
is not in capturing the quantity of time with the photograph, but in the millisecond
difference between discord and harmony; emphasising the unquantifiable reality that
happens between seconds. It is this reality that artists observe, but it is also this reality that
makes or breaks them. Artists often try to express it the instant the observation happens,
or worse, try to anticipate it by looking to the past for indications of them. Art becomes
stranded.
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Like Richard Nott, it is only in the extraction of these instances can we make them relevant.
They are inspiring in themselves, and artists are more than capable of expressing that; but
to make them relevant they must be based in reality, their effect must be, for the lack of a
better analogy, extended like a drop ink making a splash in water.

An example of this reverberation effect is from another up and coming Japanese artist,
Motoda Hisaharu; who, by expressing a very physical calamity in his prints of post-
apocalyptic Tokyo, shows us the result of when the point of discord and harmony is
reversed. It becomes like looking back upon something that never happened. Yet it’s still
hard to shake this feeling that it could have happened. Time may be constant, but there is
the equivalent of leap seconds happening all around us as time begins to be expressed in 3
dimensions. They should be attested to; past, present, and future.