What is reality? One of the delights of the creative world is that you come across so many different portrayals of reality, but the ones I am drawn to still contain truth and honesty. Outside of this constructive art world we have to contend with ‘Fake news’. Videos and images are created which have been found to be untrue and misleading. Instead of being creative and life-enhancing, communication becomes manipulative and dangerous.
To my generation AI feels like part of this unreality. How much can I trust an article which is computer generated? From the early days of television, when sources of news were limited, there was a feeling of authoritative truth from the BBC. Yes, we knew that when we were at war (say the Falklands?), the element of propaganda was present but by and large we felt ‘auntie’ would dispatch the truth. Now we are aware that there are many different agendas behind the delivery of the news whether delivered by newspaper, social media, or a plethora of TV and radio channels.
There can be other agendas at play in the art world too. I have a love and a passion for the Dutch flower painters who thrived in the 17th and 18th centuries. They painted small, exquisite images of flowers which were being grown at that time in the Netherlands. When I see them I want to reach out and give them to my wife. I want to bring them home and photograph them. They are painted in such detail that I can enjoy the flowers without needing to cope with their perfume (which makes me sneeze!) Even these paintings, though, were painted sometimes to promote the latest bulbs in the lucrative trade of past centuries.
I could photograph flowers literally, but I deliberately choose not to have them in focus and pin sharp, but often more in a state of softness, a kind of dream-like imagery. It’s my interpretation and can be ethereal and romantic but it’s not exactly what I see. I know what the reality of the flowers is, and some would say my photographs are not real. Does it matter?
I have visited exhibitions at the Mall Galleries on several occasions. They centred on fruit and vegetables, flowers and butterflies which fascinated me. The apples were painted so vividly it felt like you could reach out and eat them. I can enjoy this very realistic technique. The impressionists, though, were looking for a different reality. They clashed with the art salons of their day because they didn’t conform to the guidelines laid down by them. They had a new and fresh approach, and initially their pictures were rejected. (In my opinion, some modern art should be rejected today! Our granddaughters often produce better pictures than some paintings which sell for thousands of pounds! Are we biased?) Seurat, for instance, constructed paintings made entirely of dots. Clearly landscapes are not made of dots, but the pictures he made were still recognisable. Was he the forerunner to Bridget Riley today who uses geometry in a far more abstract way?
Dali is known for his melting watches (see “soft watch at the moment of explosion”) but the viewer can still imagine the watch straightened out; it’s a version of reality that feels both familiar and distorted.
I have seen tutors refer to cubism, a revolutionary new approach to reality, when teaching pupils to draw figures. It was a good way into the difficulty of life drawing using shapes for the torso, arms and legs and then softening the edges. Guernica is a painting by Picasso that shows the truth of suffering, but not in a literal way. Maybe reproducing the suffering photographically would have been too hard to take. Some paintings express more positive images, and are an expression of joy, love and hope. I wonder if the Mona Lisa was a dream for Leonardo da Vinci. It’s a compelling image.
History tends to be put into images by the victorious party; it’s the reality they want to sing about. We hear more from the U.S.A. and the U.K. about the second world war, for example, than from Germany. To go further back, the French created the Bayeux Tapestry after their victory over King Harold. With the simplicity of stitches they created something which I find stunning, but it is a one-sided truth, history from the French viewpoint. Some of the pieces of artwork that have most shaken me have been those about poverty and war.
It is not just in painting that questions of reality arise. I have a love of poetry but, with my dyslexia, need to have it read to me, which is a huge frustration. My friend the Bibster pointed me to W.B.Yeats’ poem ‘He wishes for the cloths of heaven’ which is full of imagery.
It begins:
‘Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet”
But, realising this is not realistic because he is constrained by a budget, the poet offers instead his dreams concluding:
“Tread softly then because you tread on my dreams”.
The cloths are only in his imagination, not ‘real’, but still demonstrate the truth of his love which longs to be a tender giver.
A photographer called Paul Sanders who I admire for his pared back images often uses poems with his photographs, but they can be impenetrable to me. Songwriters use their ability to compose lyrics to express their views on what is happening in their life. A song called “Taxman” by George Harrison is a case in point, and a definite expression of anger, frustration and pain directed to the political leaders and tax situation of his time. Referring to Mr Wilson and Mr Heath, he uses his creativity to tell us about a reality he finds unfair. Bob Marley wrote a song called “Is this love that I’m feeling?” questioning what is real, and 10cc played with this idea with their song “I’m not in love”, and Fleetwood Mac wrote of the true experience of betrayal and rejection in “Go your own way”.
At my mother’s funeral in 2023 we chose a hymn she loved, “How great thou art”. A friend commented that this song speaks of the beauty of creation we can see (reality) and the beauty of a God we cannot see (faith). There are more than a thousand recordings of this hymn, and it often appears in a list of people’s favourite songs about faith, so the lyricist clearly touched many with his words. One line begins ‘Then sings my soul’ as the music soars. I delivered the eulogy to my mother straight after singing this hymn, so it will always be important to me.
So, we have thought about truth in its many forms, through music, different forms of art, poetry and the media. In conclusion, for me, I feel truth (but not literal truth) needs to be present in a work of art to make it great. I can only agree with Shakespeare who said “To thine own self be true”, and aim for this in my personal creativity.
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