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'Painter of Reality' - A Personal Recollection of Cecil Collins (1976)
Bryce McKenzie-Smith
In his representation of another order of reality, it has been said that Cecil Collins is in the best tradition of Blake. All art leads to an expansion of consciousness but in such artists as Blake and Collins, this is often achieved in the form of beings at once familiar and strange. Sometimes he portrays human beings but primarily Collins chooses to paint beings who are demonstrably more than human. They are usually female with human faces but of superhuman power or humility, whose eyes are, for me, the most compelling indication I have seen in pictorial art that there are indeed extraterrestrial levels of life.
His small Head (6 X 4 inches) of 1970 I would rather own than the Mona Lisa. In this composition of brown tones the female figure, her eyes blazing with authority, is an angel - a being neither here nor there, a mediator between us on earth and what may be an infinite number of other levels of consciousness. This angel (with the Fool the main figure in his work) is in a doorway, as such figures often are in his pictures, beckoning us to pass through and willing to come to us if we will give her sufficient time and attention, although, as Richard Morphet points out, at times one is arrested suddenly by some inner quality calling forth when one is not expecting a particular picture to do so.
As much as with any painterof the twentieth century, the works of Cecil Collins must be seen to be fully appreciated with the inner eye. Fools, angels, 'inner' jewels (such as Aldous Huxley reported seeing under LSD), lunar landscapes, grass and plants vibrating, so it seems, with life's essential energy - they are all 'within' us.
The Head that I thought better than the Mona Lisa I liked at first sight. and so much has it grown on me as I continue to look at it that I feel I painted it myself. 'It just shows', said Collins, 'to what an extent you've identified with the picture'. Another small oil, Anima, only slowly became part of me. The extreme tenderness and humility of the angel figure calling to me to find and nourish these qualities in myself before the picture would be mine. But once I had become to do this, to develop those qualities, it started to happen. So it is that Collins' works seldom appear for auction. For once the link is established, between owner and work, it would seem a species of soul murder to dispatch them to the auction house.
And no matter how involved is a picture, it is astonishing, to the patient viewer, to find that there is always an image at the heart of the composition, to know that if he trusts in the vision and skill of Collins an image will emerge and swim up out of the depths. It is a rare moment when it does. My first impression of an extraordinary angel in pen and blue ink was of a mess; a head of sorts I could distinguish and the heart shape of the body, but apart from that it was for me a mass of cross-hatching and lines drawn at random. Suddenly, after twenty or thirty minutes, the form emerged from the 'extraneous matter' while remaining at one with it; revealing itself as a work of wonderful richness. Simlarly, a head in gouache turned, to my great surprise, into that of a concerned, wise young woman.
It seemed to me that the images were plucked 'out of the air' and laid on the canvas in one fell swoop. 'Yes', said Collins, 'it's a real world', he didn't make it up. He could sit down at his table and enter it at almost any time. Almost at any time, for as Sir John Rothenstein reports in his essay on Collins in Modern British Painters, in 1959, he lost touch with his inner world and did no painting for a year.
It is Collins' opinion that the business of the artist is to raise the consciousness of the world. Some worship God with form, some God without form: he tries to infuse his formed paintings with the formlessness of the other world. He does not believe, as do so many, that either world should be emphasised at the expense of the other. He is not concerned with proclaiming a message but in showing forth a vision. He sees his pictures as votive offerings which he hopes will make people happy. It is not a message, rather the experience of things that are there. He wants people to have an experience, after which they might find other similar experiences within themselves.
Despite this wish there is, at his best, nothing in his mind as he paints. The pictures cast from him as objective works. Unlike such people as Francis Bacon, a therapeutic painter whose work is filled with the pus he squeezes from his own boils, Collins tries to keep the egoistic part of himself out of the paintings. Yet, denied the pleasure and sense of relief a Bacon may have in his easement of pain, the attempt is for him agonizing and frustrating. Empty as he is in the act of creation, the fullness any artist feels at this time is something he experiences only at the completion of the work.
People have been kind enough to tell him that his paintings reveal to them 'the other side', which he speaks of as naturally as do most people of a nearby neighbourhood. Yet to him the wafting of the image onto his favoured hard board is something that he knows nothing about, an event that happens in spite of himself. Things happen. Paint is applied, images are conveyed to the surface and when he has finished, Collins wonders how they got there. So detached can he feel from his creations that at his big retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1959, he came to the door, as one who is a newcomer to the work of Cecil Collins, bought a catalogue and stood before No. 1., a nine-foot high monster. 'I wonder who painted that?', he mused, before proceeding to No. 2. He quite enjoyed the show.
His works are his children but where they are from and how created is a mystery. Words that he uses often to describe his pictures are 'absolutely un-analysable' and 'hypnotic', which they seem to many people to be. A 1958 watercolour study Studies of Seated Women, for instance, meaningless for a time until the meaning suddenly came to me, (or I had grown into the meaning), it has become an even more fruitful experience, a picture which fascinates me in the word's sense of irresistable enchantment. Three women are seated side by side, though clearly not together, representing as they do, different aspects of consciousness. The figure on the right is an old woman composed of a mass of apparently chaotic black lines and splashes of paint, some form of original energy before it was worked on and given clearer definition. In the centre is a young woman with no facial features, a contemplative figure of the utmost serenity, one of those beings of Collins' almost overwhelming in their gentleness. Finally, looking towards us from a doorway on the left, is a woman akin to the angel of 'Head', an hieratic figure in which we see a fusion of the energy and poise of the other two women, a woman, the light in whose eyes flashes out towards us with tremendous, irresistable power.
Apart from the pleasure I have in looking at the picture (and in being looked at?) I feel that I receive from it a communication, though what that might be is, as Collins says, beyond definition. In 'Woman' a small oil of 1962 ( a time of introspection and 'intimate thoughts' in paint), a white-robed young woman with downcast head and eyes stands in a doorway, in an attitude of the most tender solicitude, and with profound humility. A messenger from another world? A mediator standing at the meeting point between other realms of life and our earth? Someone setting us an example of true self-abnegation? These and other thoughts arise from contemplation of the picture. Finally one sees that the meaning of the picture is not to be expressed in verbal terms, but in what can only be described as meditation. Culled from afar, the woman seems truly to have a life of her own and to be, ultimately, like all human beings, trees, fish, and the rest of creation, beyond understanding.
That a Collins picture changes the atmosphere of a room is undeniable, though how it does so I do not know. Let he who claims to explain it beware! Collins thinks that such people as Jungians err in interpreting his works, no matter in how sophisticated a way they do it.
For how could they 'explain' his angels (those meek or terrible figures that, as well as anything in art today, convince me of levels of life beyond the intellect) in terms of anima, Great Earth Mothers or that marvellous and convenient rag - bag, the collective unconscious? It is clear, remember, that to most Jungians, as well as to those of a less extravagant cast of mind, angels are not real but are a metaphor, to express another order which may not really exist either.
Cecil Collins has seen Angels. In his work, they do not just stand for something. In the midst of the daily round and at almost any time he chooses, he can change the level of intensity of his experience and enter the region where angels and other forms and creatures dwell. In their mediation between an unknown world and earth, angels perform a vital role. Ignorant and imperfect as we are, we could not bear the direct reality of that unknown world.
Angels have human faces. They would be of no use in relating to human beings if they did not have. In Collins' work they are female rather than male. He is, in this emphasis, in harmony with an increasing number of thinkers and creative artists who, over the past twenty years, perceive that the feminine in life has been and is undervalued and are attempting to redress the balance.
Much involved with 'vibration' and 'intensity', Collins takes great pains to ensure that his paintings can be appreciated from any distance. This is unlike, for instance, England's greatest impressionist, Hercules Brabazon Brabazon, whose watercolours are revealed in their full beauty only at a certain distance, usually six to eight feet. In a small oil, Collins has painted a white-robed angel kneeling beside a pool in a barren plain, overshadowed by purple mountains and a looming orange sky. The angel scarcely visible from 10 feet one is impressed by the strange austerity of the terrain, while at two feet the seemingly fragile figure is felt in all its power and dominates the picture. So it continues, even if one proceeds to a degree not normally taken; a slide was made of the picture, the angel enlarged, and this new image projected to cover a wall. Such was the clarity and detail, it was almost impossible to believe that it had all been contained in the original.
Whether they are 'intimate thoughts', as in the Angel by the Pool or works of full assertion like Studies of Seated Women, one senses in all Collins' pictures great energy. There are no histrionics, no tricks, nothing but the real thing: a conviction of image which flows from his almost unbroken contact with the Source of all form. In a day when the word has been used too often, 'life-enhancing' is a true word for the work of Collins. As well as the indefinable change of atmosphere his paintings can effect, they also, paradoxically for works not conceived in a moralistic or didactic vein, make you feel better.
It might seem, from the way in which one speaks of the connection between the 'other side' and the power of Collins' paintings, that any mystic could do as much after a few lessons with the brush. This is of course not so. Time and again Collins stresses that. as an artist, the finding of the image is of no import without a highly-developed technique with which to set it down. No mean painter by his fortieth year, he nevertheless devoted the whole of 1948 to the study of technique, starting with the Romans and gesso and working his way through art history. We see, for instance, that the calligraphic style of the grey, monochromatic Studies of Seated Women owes much to the East. In The Mage he achieves an extraordinarily rich effect by applying a solution of inexpensive gold paint which he then 'traps' under several layers of other paint and glaze.
As well as the glazing process, in which layer upon layer is applied slowly and with great care to the finished picture and where we see Collins in what might be called his symphonic aspect, there is the chamber music of his drawings in pencil. In June, 1976, at the d'Offay gallery, he had an exhibition composed solely of pencil drawings, a rare event these days. Angels there were, of course. Fools (simple, innocent men looking out without guile at the world - not foolish men), a mysterious young girl before a table shape that with the impress of Collins can be nothing but an altar, re-workings of a huge oil of his wife and himself painted in the 1930s and two female heads transferred to the paper with such delicacy that it seems that they have been created in smoke and could at any moment drift away.
He prefers different mediums at different times - oils, watercolour, pencil or pen and ink. In the last of these, in his employment of beautiful blue ink or that evocative umber of Rembrandt, he is, unchallengeably, a master.
So, too, does he work on varied surfaces: from the thick paper of those recent pencil drawings, to canvas and his favourite surface, hardboard. Its nature yielding and feminine, canvas is not as suitable for him as the 'masculine' wood which fights his brush and provides the ideal complement to his predominantly feminine sensibility.
But whether board, canvas, paper, the etching plate or the stone for the lithograph, Collins approaches the surface on which he is to work in the same spirit as the icon painter blessing his wood. As in all aspects of the work of Collins, one is reminded that for him, art is a sacramental activity.
A mystic, a 'visionary' as a critic described him recently, Collins seems at 68 a man who would be equally at home in a cloister or a nineties cafe, a man who, while aware of the crudest details of everyday life, yet has his real home elsewhere.
For years it has been the connoisseur who has appreciated him. His work is in the collections of, amongst others, Lord Clark, Lord Britten, Peter Pears and Stephen Spender. Today, with the time catching up with him, his work is being recognized by more and more people. The surging interest in mysticism and the occult, the desire of the young for direct experience instead of dogma, the search for inner authority - it is the knowledge that Cecil Collins has been on this 'wave length' for fifty years that endears him today to the young.
For the thirty years in which Roger Fry and Clive Bell ruled the critical roost he was ignored. Later, because of his inner experience and for faithfully attending to his work for so long, the young were enthusiastic and numerous at his London College of Art classes and at his lectures at the Tate Gallery and City Literary Institute. Stalwart, too, were they in his defence in his significant 1975 battle with benighted bureaucrats, his victory which enabled him to continue teaching after the stipulated age of retirement.
Collins feels that few critics appreciated his paintings. Having slowly grown into his world over two years, I can see that it might have been so.When an artist's pictures require so much time for their just appraisal, it would be an exceptional critic who, amidst the hundreds of images of a dozen exhibitions a week, could make connection with one of Collins' truly inspired works. So it is that he lays much emphasis on learning to read an artist's work (and by no means only his own) and that he holds regular classes in this art of reading. There is too much ideology in art, he thinks, too much exaltation of message over technique. Time and again one is reminded of Collins' mastery of technique, of his having painstakingly equipped himself to show forth his visions.
With no 'periods' or good and bad times, Collins paints on, slowly, now putting down the fruits of contemplation, now surging forth in pictures of great energy. His pictures are to be enjoyed. We may, if we choose, read into his female figures our own disregarded feminine aspect, we may put on a Jungian hat and connect this image to that myth. But, finally, such analysis counts for very little, if for anything, in an approach to Collins' work. Let us be content that each of his pictures touches us in a different way, until we feel that if he went on painting forever, we would have eventually a map of the entire human psyche, of which each picture is a part.
It is Collins' view point that is so unusual; when we look at most pictures we believe we can imagine ourselves into the artist's mind and wonder why we had not seen the subject in that particular way, without his assistance. With Collins, however, it is not like looking at a picture screen from a seat in the stalls, but as though we have turned around in our seats to look towards the projector (our real self) on the dual sides of which are angels, demons and all those other beings and forms that have been in existence since the dawn of creation.
Images, let us not forget, are not passed down to us only from the third and fourth generations but from the four hundredth and four millionth and from that time too before there were human beings or other life on earth. Each evolutionary stage contains the images of all that had been before, just as we see the baby in the womb recapitulating the evolution of creatures on earth. We can appreciate, and perhaps experience, that, deep within us, we are birds, reptiles, fish, prehistoric animals, rocks, flowers and that original one-celled amoeba whose appearance is such a mystery. So much has been experienced by some. And if this is so, is it beyond credence that before the amoeba, when the earth and other bodies were very old, there were angels and other beings whose consciousness helped in the creation of the amoeba and which is, therefore, part of us today?
When I see a pencil drawing of leaves in which there are tiny human heads ('the leaves were full of children'), when I fancy that I discern in a trunk and branches of a tree the figure of a man, or when, meditating on a tree's foliage I see the image of a head and angel's wings emerge, I am deeply moved. On one occasion I was actually brought to tears. In one of his finest lithographs the human (or angelic) image is clear, that of an age-old young woman before whose face leaves can be taken to be drifting or to be embedded in the face; in this, as in all his pictures, we see that we are more, infinitely more, than flesh and blood and conditioned responses.
All is one, the mystics say and in each one of us is all. The contemplation of Collins' images is like a reunion with a loved one who has gone away and become lost to us, but who, unexpectably, knocks at our door and embraces us with all the fervour of the father rushing to embrace his Prodigal Son.
The essential quality of this loved one is the way in which it directs its attention. There is, in many of Collins' paintings, someone looking out at us or at something in the picture, like the young male being who lies, leaning on his right elbow, as he gazes accross a bare plain to the sun rising behind a hill. With complete non-attachment he watches, a child who in a careless moment has created what he sees about him and who is wondering now what it is. It is the attitude of pure experience, of meeting the world without any guile or preconception whatsoever; of the original principle of consciousness we see embodied in the Fool.
With eyes at once expressionless yet with the sum of all possible expressions, the watching being is at the same time empty and full of knowledge. What the knowledge is of I do not know. It is something I knew once but have forgotten. We all knew it once and Collins' pictures create in us a longing for and a dim recognition of something we cannot fix, something very close to us. In this nostalgia for eternity and ourselves, it is not surprising that tears may come.
Before the angels and all else there was God, in whose service the foolish shall be made wise. Though it has been said that meditation and contemplation are essential for appreciating his paintings, one senses that it is not the practice and technique of meditation but prayer that lies at the heart of Collins and his work. Below all one's groping and fumbling towards meaning and explanation, one is simply more convinced because of Collins' paintings that there is a God and that He is a God of mercy and love. If such a God did not exist, it is impossible to believe that these pictures could have come into being.
'Vincent van Gogh: A Symbolist Life'
Alan Taylor
(In this extract Alan Taylor first quotes Albert Aurier, from an article in which Aurier
described the Symbolist characteristics of Vincent's work. Taylor then goes on to give his own interesting and concise thoughts on the meaning of the word - "Symbol".
Alan Taylor is a lecturer on fine art, an artist, and a psychotherapist, living and working in North London).
The qualities which Van Gogh brought to his painting were analysed perceptively by the
French art critic, Albert Aurier (1865 - 1892). Aurier was also a poet and member of the
Symbolists group. In the first article ever written on Vincent van Gogh, which appeared
in the inaugural issue of 'Mercure de France' in January 1890, he wrote,
"In the case of Vincent van Gogh - his choice of subjects, the constant harmony of the
most excessive colours, the honesty in the study of his characters, the continuous
search for the essential meaning of each object, a thousand significant details
unquestionably proclaim his profound and almost childlike sincerity, his great love of
nature and of truth - of his own truth. - This can be seen in the almost orgiastic excesses
of everything that he painted; he is a fanatic, an enemy of bourgeois sobriety, and of
trifling details. - He is no doubt very conscious of pigment, of its importance and beauty,
but also, and most frequently, he considers this enchanting pigment only as a marvellous
language destined to express an idea. Almost always he is a symbolist - feeling the
constant urge to clothe his ideas in precise, ponderable, tangible forms, in corporeal and
material envelopes. There lies in practically all his canvases, for those who know how to
find it, a thought, an idea. And this idea, the essential synthesis of his work, is also at
the same time its efficient and final cause. He had for a long time cherished the idea of
inventing an art of painting that was very simple and popular, almost childlike, capable of
touching humble people who do not care for subtlety." (End of quote).
Aurier concluded that great works of art should simultaneously be:
1. ideist, that is have an idea.
2. symbolic.
3. synthetist, that is have congruent forms.
4. subjective.
5. superbly decorative.
What do I mean by the word/term, symbol?
Philosophers, of course, have also envisioned nature as a reconciliation of the harmony
of opposites, and conceived of art as a demonstration of these ideas. The aesthetic
theories with which the symbolists became familiar are ancient Greek ideas about the
effect on the psyche of forms and colours. The correspondences that bind the universe
together make symbolism possible. The word symbol derives from the Greek roots esyni,
meaning together, and eballieni, to throw. eSymboloni was the name given to a bone
broken by friends into two parts that were kept as tokens of their emotional union, and
esymboli has therefore always signified both the physical and spiritual aspects in joining
together separate parts to a unified whole. The symbol restores something incomplete to
its original state of integration by reconnecting the individual to the world by
synthesising matter and spirit, form and idea. Most cultures have perceived symbols as
having religious implications. A symbol conceals something yet is a revelation. A symbol is
an unconscious invention in answer to a conscious problem, and a very powerful
communication, such as for example, the Christian sacrament.
'The Symbolist Landscape - Some Reflections'
Lindsay Wells
Landscape is, in general, probably the most readily accepted imagery in fine art, particularly for those who do not seek art out, but can enjoy a picture when they come upon it.
The scenes can make little demand upon the viewer and can soothe and satisfy through the aesthetic qualities and the pleasant associations conjured up by the image. The ease with which a beautiful landscape picture can be enjoyed, can bely the excellence and depth of skill involved in its production
Symbolist landscapes are in the main no different from the mainstream in their pleasing representations of the beauty of nature. However we should also expect an edge, more dusks and stormy skies for instance, those elements in nature that can outwardly express the emotional inner landscapes of mankind. Historically the precursor to the Symbolist landscape was the Romantic landscape, which as part of the wider artistic movement of Romanticism, can be mainly located in the latter part of the eighteenth and earlier stages of the nineteenth centuries. In the Romantic landscape there is the natural beauty of nature, which is now overdetermined by the emotion of the artist, in turn, provoking the emotions of the viewer.
In this is the difference between, for instance, a seventeenth century landscape by the French painter Claude Lorrain (1600-1682),which is likely to be a painting of perfection, an ideal that has been beautifully composed, and the freely expressed and highly emotional sea storms and sunsets of the English Romantic J.M.W.Turner .
The Romantic landscape incorporated the emotionand took it as the dynamic force to push landscape art into new and more ecxiting areas.
The Symbolists, following on from the Romantics historically and reaching their most concentrated period at the end of the nineteenth century, were truly in the tradition of the Romantics. They added in their art though, that indespensible Symbolist ingredient - the idea.
It is not possible to always be specific about this idea or to specifically always locate it in the Symbolist oeuvre. Artists have always had ideas, and the landscape artists of Romanticism could themselves certainly convey an idea as well as an emotion. However it is with the Symbolist landscape that there is the provocation of the questioning thought - 'What does this mean?', thus - 'What is the underlying idea of the artist?' It is also in the nature of the visual arts and the literature of the Symbolist movement to pose the question and to evoke a response, without providing the means of a clear and comfortable answer. So the viewer can be left touched by the subjectivity, the inner world of the artist, and intrigued by the subjectivity of their own response.
The German speaking nations had a particularly rich tradition of Romantic landscape art in which Casper David Friedrich (1774-1840), also surely a proto-symbolist, has the greatest significance and and influence. The most significant name in Symbolist landscape, the Swiss Arnold Bocklin (1827-1901), showed powerfully the influence of Romanticism and added to it that extra layer to a given scene that is provided by the Symbolists' beloved imaginative idea. Paintings by Bocklin such as 'The Isle of the Dead' have iconic positions in the history of Symbolist art. Such work was shown to great effect in the magnificent 2000 exhibition held at Birmingham City Art Gallery, 'Kingdom of the Soul - German Symbolist Art (1870-1920) '. (Get the catalogue if you can).
On this website can be found some original prints by Germanic artists that are influenced by the Symbolist way. Reverie in a Landscape, an aquatint by Cacilie Graf-Pfaff (active early 1900s) is a magnificent example of the melancholic, contemplative dreamlike nature to be found in the more romantic kind of Symbolism. Forest Scene, a lithograph by Georg Broel (1884-1940), expresses the mystery and allure, but also the uncertainty that is generated by the opening to the forest, (the unconscious); and the etching of the Windy Landscape by Fritz Voellmy (1863-1939) contains that object, the tall slim tree, its tip curved and swaying in the wind, that has been used so well by Symbolists to convey the metaphysical element in nature.
From - 'A Celebration of Cecil Collins' (July 2009)
This extract by Jane Wisner
Compiled and Edited by Nomi Rowe
With kind permission of the publishers - Paul Holberton Publishing
This extract is from one of the contributors to the book - Jane Wisner (1944-2006). Jane attended Cecil's classes in the early 1980s and was profoundly influenced by him. (There will be a substantial on-line exhibition of Jane Wisner's work on this website starting in late January 2012).
'Most of Cecil's students have dreamt about him. The first dream I ever had was simply of him and me standing in the grass which was spangled with the small flowers that appear in his painting The Sleeping Fool. We were in the realm of his pictures, the Lost Paradise, and the importance was that we were the ones who were to manifest it in this world. He was showing me how, by stepping in to it and holding a focus, a purity of consciousness, and clearing away all interference of the ego, we could make room for it. Learning how to become and then to create.
For years and years, I had been striving for peace, strength and inner harmony in my pictures, but I'd not been able to put my belief into words. I had felt so lonely, as if I was the only being on the planet trying to do things in a different way. When I met Cecil, it was as if the loneliness was over. Here was a kind, gentle, perceptive man, full of humour and mischief, erudite, expressing with ease and integrity those truths I'd believed couldn't be expressed.. The recognition was so strong that I would be in tears every time we spoke together.
Cecil could never remember my name. To others he'd refer to me as, 'The one who can draw'. I was extremely shy in those days and he would quietly support my self esteem. At the end of one class, he asked me to take my drawings and spread them out on the podium so everyone could see them. I had been working in a particularly intense way that day and every line was imbued with distilled energy. There was a shift in the way that he and I worked after that.
Each class was a precious gift. All boundaries were dispelled in the joy of drawing. I loved the rituals Cecil used and the times he used to talk about mythology and symbols. He would sit in a corner, his eyes lowered and as he talked the energy would build and change, shift and shimmer. It would pour into us and into the drawings. It often carried an element of great joy and was sometimes very moving. Sometimes a great peace would descend.
I sit writing this in Chichester Cathedral before the 'Icon of Divine Light', which Cecil painted for the altar of St Clement's Chapel. Whenever I am in Chichester, I spend time with this wonderful image. I jump the rope and kneel as close as I can get in order to look into the eyes which gaze back into my soul. I feel the energy change. 'Behold I make all things new.' It is only when one goes beyond the surface of this image that it becomes active. It is only when we allow the divine to enter us that we can create on its behalf; then, if one allows oneself to become receptive and focused, one's whole being is blessed. This is what Cecil's teaching meant to me.'
(To return to the index of Articles and Commentaries on this site click here: Index of Articles).
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