Where is Art?

Does art lay in wait in an artist’s materials? Is there a drawing inside every pencil, a painting in every tube?

Do the artist’s hands contain the art or does it travel from the head, electric and formless, commanding the hand to make tangible from mental?

In my conscious mind, there is never any fully formed art. There can be concepts, modes, structures, tools, and patterns that I choose from towards the idea of making art. But there is no plan or precognition of a final state or even its process in my head.

I make choices in the moment that might lead to art coming into being in all of it’s myriad banal yet possibly evocative forms.

Before the first mark occurs, I choose a surface to work from and that can suggest something of what might be the final form of the art. That surface is sometimes a blank page from a book of paper specifically for art-making but it could be paper that has already had another purpose — a ledger, graph paper, a printed book page, cardboard packaging. Other times the surface is more precious like a store bought framed birch panel with its smooth light but uniquely grained front. Or it could be garbage like a series of rough wood offcuts gathered on the street.

Each of these surface choices direct the type of marks that might be made in some way but only subtly. A rectangle, square, or even a circle will cause the eye and the mind to react but they don’t determine the content or context of the art.

The art is still somewhere in between the surface and the hand like a static charge crackling finding a path.

Or the art is formed from the light bouncing back from the surface to the eyes, another dance of energy that our minds contextualize as colours, and shapes, volumes, and objects.

The tools with their metals, woods, plastics, and silicone structures either made to accommodate art making or commandeered into a new purpose from a previous utility. They shape the marks under the control of the hand, their form altering what the hand can produce when empty. The tools can only be elements in that electric circuit between the mind and the hand.

The same for the various visual media with their colours and textures, the structure and the viscosity of their creation. The pencil with its densely packed minerals, waxes, oils, and pigments reactive against the friction of the surface. The paints thick and thin, opaque and transparent, their intense pigments so finely bound into something so specifically manufactured for art making. A whole set of industries to create the means to apply colour.

And then in a rush, or so it seems, these come together and there is art.

But then is this piece of paper with its applied pigments, shapes, lines, smudges the art? Or does the art happen between the page with its colours and marks and subsequent sets of eyes and minds that give it their own contexts? The aphorism says that art (if we count it as a form of beauty) is in the eye of the beholder.

Richard Long’s A Line Made by Walking has a surface, mark making tools, a process, an artist but is the art the line made or the process of making it? Is the art the photograph of the marked line or the ephemeral experience of seeing the line in person. Did the art reside inside Richard Long while walking that line across the field in England? Is it still there in him now?

Maybe we only find art when we aren’t looking for it? Maybe it waits in us dormant and becomes radiant briefly when the circumstances align.