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texts.bunkier.com.pl -
artists
...I was born a painter. Maria Anna Potocka
talks to Tomasz Ciecierski
Maria Anna
Potocka – Is a painter trying to get somewhere?
Tomasz Ciecierski – I’ll tell you an anecdote.
The ideal, the dream of the kapists [Polish
postimpressionists] and various colorists – and it must be
remembered that these were generally representational painters
– was to reach abstraction. I found that pretty damned funny.
Burnett Newman had already calmly arrived at abstraction while
the former were still fascinated by Bonnard and were rooting
around there. But funny or not, there was an idea of arriving
somewhere. There’s nothing like that for me. On the other
hand, my ideal, in the most banal of terms, is even greater
simplification of what I do. Minimizing the diversity. When
you look at painting, it’s not easy to establish anything
unequivocal. On the one hand, the possibilities for painting
seem vast, or even infinitely broad for the great
consciousnesses. But if you look at it the other way around,
it’s full of limitations. All the little squares have already
been done every way possible. It doesn’t make any difference
whether you put something here or there. You just can’t look
at it anymore. Painting ‘Who’s Afraid of Red?’ is not my
ideal. All I want is to keep painting, and to keep painting
about painting and the process of painting, applying paint,
and that’s all. But I don’t see any ultimate goal. I don’t see
any point that, once I get there, I’ll be able to die. For me
it all remains undefined, and maybe that’s why I paint and
keep coming back to it, but always from different directions.
MAP – Doesn’t this involve the impatience of
the search?
TC – If you don’t have a goal, there’s
nothing to look for. This is the patience of results, not the
impatience of searching. If you look at these paintings then
maybe some of the periods are overly long, but that’s changing
in general because, if I paint ten similar paintings, the
eleventh doesn’t come out because I don’t feel the emotion,
because the emotion resulting from the previous ones has dried
up.
MAP – Isn’t painting a little too
difficult, too laborious a way of working out your emotions?
TC – You’ve got a point there. Some things could be
done quicker by other means. That’s why I use photography.
MAP – Do you feel that being a painter is some
sort of divine punishment? That things would have been easier
for you if you’d found a different medium?
TC – I feel
that I was born a painter. I’m fated to the struggle you talk
about. It’s as if it’s my life. I’m often asked why I don’t do
installations, since painters also do installations, mostly
poor ones in my opinion. Sculptors do great installations.
When I look at that I thank my lucky stars I’m a painter. Even
if I can’t say what this means. Painters generally like
colors. I like red, blue, and yellow. That amuses me and
excites me. When I see yellow or red in this spot or another
in a painting, I fell excitement. In a positive sense. It’s
the same with color composition. A painter puts yellow here,
red there, and sometimes it means a lot, and sometimes it
means a lot less.
MAP – How do you start a
painting?
TC – First, you have an intuition. That
strikes me as awfully important. Something guides you.
Something simply guides you. Sometimes it points you totally
subconsciously in a given direction. The whole problem is how
far you can trust it. My experience shows that, often, you
can. All the more so because there has to be a general vision.
You have to know where you’re going. First there must be a
vision; that is, I must have one. Always. When the picture
starts coming out, I feel anxious that there’s still so
extraordinarily much to do. I can see one, two, and sometimes
three paintings ahead, but without the first one there won’t
be a second one. It’s all a matter of one leading to another.
Sometimes I look back and think, “Those non-logical ones were
great in the end. Too bad there weren’t more of them.” But all
periods start to bore me after several, or a dozen, paintings.
When the boredom sets in, you have to take a step, or rather a
leap. The longer the better. Then I know it’s all mine, that
nobody was standing behind my back. Such a leap is usually
something consistent, sometimes it’s not, but it always makes
sense. Anyway, everything really originates inside your head.
When it emerges from your head, the paintings start coming.
MAP – What’s that first painting after the leap
like?
TC – The first one’s great: uncertainty,
emotion, excitement. It’s the last one that’s hardest, the one
before a leap. That can be tiring, even boring. Then comes a
strange moment , I don’t really know what it is, some kind of
emptiness, and then all of a sudden there’s a painting, a
different one, new; that first one. I want it to be completely
different, but it turns out that it really isn’t, but the
change is palpable and again some time passes until there’s a
dropping off, and then once again the last picture comes.
MAP – What’s going on in your head?
TC
– Sometimes when I’m thinking about pictures they shift around
inside me, as if they were presenting themselves to me. Maybe
that’s what a composer feels when he hears unwritten music and
a symphony takes shape inside his head. It must be that way
with every work. They must construct themselves in outline
form before they begin to emerge. Then it just happens, it’s
just a question of craftsmanship or of the means you want to
employ. Constructing that internal sketch is exciting.
Sometimes, you can get lost in there. People ask: “Where are
you?” I’m already inside the picture. What a trip. Of course,
this doesn’t apply only to me. I often see it in other
artists. Sometimes at an opening or a reception they’re
walking around, talking, drinking, the plates are being
passed, and suddenly I see one person sitting by themselves,
not drunk, just looking deep within themselves, listening to
themselves. I can tell from across the room that they’ve tuned
out for a moment and are off somewhere looking at their
sculptures or paintings. Then it passes and they come back,
but you can plainly see that they were somewhere completely
different for a while.
MAP – Does that kind of
internal art yield any satisfaction?
TC – Not at all.
This is the problem for painters, and not only painters. The
painting has to be painted, the work has to arise. Sometimes
something appears internally that makes sense, other times
it’s a void and there’s nothing, sometimes you see the
finished picture and you suddenly know how to start painting
it. You always have a vision when you start a painting, not to
call it an intuition. You more or less know what you want to
paint. If you really know, then everything will come in
rhythm, in order. The worst moments are when you’ve laid down
the undercoat, you seem to know something, you’ve got a
certain intuition, you make the first stroke, and you feel
that it’s wrong. Earlier, in the ‘first draft’ period, that
was no problem. When I felt something was wrong, I crossed it
out of the painting and carried on. Some sentences or signs
dropped out of the painting, even though they were still
visible in it. They were crossed out as misspellings or
extraneous sentences. To a degree, that was the point of those
first drafts. But I grew out of the first drafts and now I
don’t want the slightest thing to be wrong with the painting,
from beginning to end.
MAP – So what do you do
now when you feel that something’s wrong?
TC – I put
the painting aside and go back to one I started earlier. Now,
I paint several pictures simultaneously. If I have any doubts
as to one of them, I just set it aside. The earlier paintings,
from the seventies, I painted from beginning to end. The
kapists and the colorists – I’m thinking of my teachers – used
to say that ‘the picture is never finished’. That was total
claptrap. Mine were finished. I put them aside and went on to
the next one. Now I’ve got several going at once. I just look,
take a good look, hang this one, hang that one, put it aside,
take another one, take a photograph. In the meantime,
something arises. Sometimes I approach it a second time, and
the painting comes to me. I recently painted a picture really
fast, literally in a couple of minutes. And I’m happy with it.
It’s really a continuation of what came before, but painted
completely differently, very simply.
MAP – Does
having to start on a white, blank canvas make you afraid?
TC – I’m not afraid of that blank canvas. Sometimes
I’m afraid because I’m blank inside. That’s the kind of blank
that scares me most. You suddenly feel simply empty,
something’s missing, you know you want to do something but you
know at the same time that emptiness leads to anxiety and
drunkenness. I never allow myself to go that way. When I’m
empty, I try to draw.
MAP – And when the
picture starts coming?
TC – You have to be excited for
a good picture to come. If you’re not really excited then you
should go back to thinking. You do something that strikes you
as different, new, it can’t be painting from memory, you’re
taking a new step in your quest. And that’s pretty damned
exciting. Liberating, in a sense.
MAP – So
where are the limits?
TC – The limits are rather
intellectual. Sometimes there’s also the problem of
concentration. When I don’t have perfect concentration, work
on a painting takes longer than it should, there’s more and
more paint, it gets thicker and thicker, and that’s a
limitation. Sometimes I’d like to stand there, pick up the
brush, and just give it two good shakes. So that it wasn’t a
little bit more, and some more, and some more, until there’s
this heavy texture. That texture comes from painting, from
applying paint, because I keep painting until I’m satisfied.
But in fact I really can’t stand textures. They result from
limitations. My own. On the other hand, I have an increasing
affection for lightness and the lack of physical exertion.
MAP – Yet you’ve painted many heavy, difficult
pictures…
TC – That’s true. For example, those
multi-layered paintings are so heavy. Now I fell that I put on
too much paint, that I need to change things and go back to
simple paintings. A picture like that is also physical work,
which is enervating. The point isn’t that I’m not up to it,
because I am, but I want to go back to the simplest paintings,
the ordinary ones. That multi-layering strikes me as overly
complicated.
MAP – What’s the most important
thing?
TC – The thing I pick out and value most highly
in art is authenticity. But that immediately causes problems,
because a dauber can be just as authentic and identify with
what he does as a great artist. The criterion of the new has
some significance for me. If somebody tells me about something
already familiar to me, but totally different, that excites
me. Because art has been talking for centuries about very
similar things, but it changes the way of talking about them.
The truest art keeps going back to the things that affect us.
Sometimes they’re abstractions and then what convinces us is
whether they deal with new shapes. The authenticity also gets
through to us then. But when you learn to sense the authentic,
you can also be assailed by what’s false. For instance, I
often have a sense of the false when somebody who’s 25 goes on
about death in their art. In the seventies, many of my friends
were going on about death and it was utterly unconvincing.
When you’re 25, what do you care if your great-grandmother
dies? You feel sorry, but aside from that everything keeps
going. I feel the false especially often in regards to things
that are dreamed up, pretentious, not to mention borrowed.
When authenticity appears, when there’s not a tinge of
falsehood, then there’s no emptiness. Even though it’s not
completely known what it’s about, almost all of us know what’s
underneath it.
MAP – Why did you wave your hand
with such resignation?
TC – Because what we’re talking
about sounds different in words than in thoughts. I hear it,
it’s as if it’s all true, but I can’t accept it. It’s not a
matter of lies, but of lightness, clarity, simplicity.
MAP – That’s unavoidable when you verbalize
intuitive impressions. What about the false in your paintings?
TC – I have a precise feeling for it. Sometimes I can
even foresee it. I talked about this earlier. I start doing
something, but I’m not concentrating well enough, but I make a
move anyway, and I can immediately tell that it’s wrong.
Sometimes I stop and it comes by itself. It’s the same in
paintings as in drawings. It happens. But the big problem
isn’t only that something’s wrong. Sometimes it’s
helplessness, getting lost in a painting, even awkwardness.
Here’s a great example. Long ago, I painted a picture inspired
by Uccello. Remember? Everybody liked it. They sometimes
called it ‘May Day’, because figures are marching across it in
rows. I was 90% sure of what the finished painting would look
like. I started with two landscapes, and then I put in those
figures that march and march and march and march – and all of
a sudden I was stumped. I came in the next day and saw that
they were really marching, but they weren’t going anywhere. I
thought: ‘forget it’. Then I painted in those spots and they
immediately constructed the painting and evoked a rhythm. And
that rhythm was precisely the point, justifying the motion
from right to left. On the one hand, it’s a very stable
landscape, and on the other hand there are those marching
figures as the opposite, and next to that are the spots, which
reconcile it. Uccello, for his part, could not handle the
horses, he could not handle the perspectives, and so he
started putting in lances and arranging the broken lances so
that they constructed space in depth for him. A simple thing,
sticks set at different angles and, thanks to that, a really
good painting [Editor. Three Incidents from the Battle of San
Romano, National Gallery, London].
MAP – Do you
expect some kind of reward from a painting?
TC –
Sometimes. I mean I sometimes get a reward. I look at it and
say: ‘Jesus, it turned out alright!’. That’s my reward.
MAP – That only sounds like part of the reward.
There should also be some kind of promise of the next
painting, because there’s no such thing as the last painting.
TC – Of course, but I’m talking about something
smaller. You say, ‘It turned out alright’, and you’re happy
for a day. You put the painting aside and walk away.
MAP – What does ‘I turned out alright’ mean?
TC – I don’t exactly know. Some kind of special
satisfaction, an impression that something emanates from the
painting, that there’s more to it than a couple of lines and
two landscapes.
MAP – What emanates from it, is
that more of a question or an answer?
TC – First,
there’s joy that it came out. The questions come later. First,
there’s satisfaction, and only afterwards comes the question
of why it happened. Then there are more questions: ‘What comes
of it? What’s going to come of it?’. Thins that turn out
alright can be continued and developed in the next few
paintings. In the most general terms it can be called ‘putting
the paint where it really belongs’. That always gives
satisfaction. Those are the moments you wait for. But they
cannot be repeated, because they are fleeting. Remember those
quadruple paintings? Two landscapes at the top and two colors?
I tried doing more, but they really wouldn’t come out.
Whatever had been new and different to me was gone. There was
no excitement left. When those emotions drop away, all you can
say is, ‘too bad, sure, it’s merchandise that sells, but
you’re not a commercial artist’. I simply couldn’t go on. My
emotion wasn’t there, and nobody else could find emotions
there, either. Nothing would emanate from it; it would be
merely an aesthetic toy.
MAP – Do you think
that can be felt clearly?
TC – I’m convinced. In any
case, I can feel it. In other people’s paintings, too. I know
when they’re done without emotion, from memory, like kossaks
[late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Polish genre
painters, father and sons]. You paint them because they sell.
It’s no help that you can easily come up with various
theories. That’s always been the easy part. Theories like that
are only external rationalizations. They don’t lead anywhere.
You can tell at a glance that it’s one more painting made to
sell. Of course, you have to make a living.
MAP
– Isn’t painting a profession?
TC – For some, it is.
That’s usually where the art ends. Art ends at the moment
where craftsmanship begins. You start competently doing
certain themes. You learn to paint one or two things really
well and spend your whole life painting them.
MAP – What determines whether it’s art?
TC – There’s no adequate word for it. The best is
‘soul’. A work must have a soul. I know it sounds terribly
pretentious, terribly, but in this place you either have to
hold your tongue, or not be ashamed. Words become stupid at
the foundations of art.
MAP – Where does that
soul come from?
TC – It’s a measure of talent. That
still doesn’t explain much. But it’s known that not everything
can be fully verbalized, and much remains in the realm of
spirit. It’s not enough to have a great idea. Something
tangible must rise beyond a great idea. When I first saw The
Dead Class, I was half knocked-out. It was as if somebody was
telling the story of my family, of me, of everybody: the
migration, the war, coming and going, school. Above it all
rose the soul of Kantor, which was also my soul. That soul
either rises up, or it’s simply not there. And it doesn’t
depend on whether something turned out alright for someone.
There are things lacking a soul, and for me, that’s the
deciding factor, even if that soul cannot really be defined.
Sometimes it seems to me, without any modesty, that something
like that rises up out of some of my paintings.
MAP – How do you get that soul?
TC –
You have to be alone, absolutely alone with the art. Stand in
front of the painting and not feel other artists standing
behind you. If I suddenly feel as I’m working that another
painter, whom I like, in addition, is looking over my
shoulder, then I discard that painting. The most important
thing is to be alone. I have seen thousands of paintings,
installations, thousands of films, and those are forces that
are subconsciously creeping in all the time. I think I’ve
managed to eliminate the artists who are closest to me. But in
moments of hesitation, when something isn’t coming out, they
are activated and you can feel them breathing down your neck.
It happens to me sometimes. Some artist is standing behind me
and whispering something. Lately I’ve managed to avoid it
somehow and no one has been bothering me.
MAP –
According to you, who is most often breathing down artists’
necks?
TC – Gerhard Richter has a crazy influence on
artists, and especially on painters. They still haven’t grown
tired of cutting up Richter into little snippets. A reference
to an admired artist is most frequently a gesture of despair.
Uninteresting pictures get painted. They are redolent of
Richter, of Boltanski, Damian Hirst, or someone else. At
times, the idea is intelligent, I stress that word
intelligent, an illustration of something, and at times, as on
the Polish scene, it can be amusing. I have the impression
that I’m free of this. In any case, the internal artist is
stronger than the external one. All the more so because I am
temporarily absorbed in and excited by photography. This
permits me to continue with painting in an extraordinarily
thrilling way. Because it is painting. And also, my new
paintings are generally cheerful. Maybe even joyous. In any
case, there’s nothing dramatic about them. And there won’t be,
either.
Translated by: William Brand
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