People used to say, “Is there anything in it?” to question if you could benefit from something or whether it was a waste of time. As in, “What do you do?” Oh, I work in the field of high-end pet insurance. “Really? Is there anything in it?”
I once interviewed an older abstract painter known to be a cagey subject, notorious for resisting publicity. Mid-interview, he turned the tables on me, and he started asking the questions. “You paint, do you?” he said. “Who do you like?” I dropped the name of an abstract expressionist I admired and still do – Franz Kline. “Kline, eh?” he replied. And after a moment’s pause he said, “Is there anything in it?”
It stopped me in my tracks.
Because I knew exactly what he meant. That simple idiomatic sentence contained a profound theory of painting. He used it to question not only the fundamental “worthwhile-ness” of any painting by Kline but also to ask about a painting’s relative fullness or emptiness of felt meaning: Not how skilled or how enjoyable, not how well drawn or how harmoniously colored, not how innovative, or how stunningly photorealistic or how abstract it is. In short, not, is it a “good” painting – but What did the artist put into it of his or herself and make accessible to the viewer?
Michelangelo, “Pieta,” life-size marble, Vatican Museum.
You can waste a lot of mental energy worrying over whether your work is too abstract or too representational, too tight or too loose, too detailed or not realistic enough. I want to tell you to stop wasting your time by doing that – there’s nothing in it.
However elusive to define, the “Is there anything in it?” criterion is a very high standard indeed. It’s also the only one applicable to all the great and not so great works of art ever created, regardless of style, time period, this or that ism, or anything else. Just Is there anything in it? What’s in it for us, the viewers (even if we can’t put words or a name to it – especially then, actually)? What of their truest, deepest self did the artist invest into the work or, consciously or not, leave behind for us to find there?
I also knew he did not mean, Did the artist start with a sound concept and then make the painting to embody it? Rather, he meant it sort of the other way around: Did the artist surrender to and trust their deepest feelings regarding what life is all about, and did they allow those feelings to “get into” the work? Did the artist allow something of the joy, horror, or astonishment at the whole mysterious mass of existence that we all sometimes feel – some moment of heightened consciousness or connection, some unusual emotional state, some sense of wonder and awakening to the mystery of things – did they allow something real to seep into and direct the work’s making?
What’s real in this sense? Any work of art, no matter how abstract or how realist, that affects like the most profound moments of our lives – those “a-ha” moments, when on multiple levels – in a flash – we know and feel (emotionally and physically) something at once because of how well (i.e. authentically, not using clichés) the work expresses and embodies it.
Aesthetic theory breaks this knowing-feeling response into three things: idea (cognitive response), feeling (emotional response), and embodiment (somatic response). It’s not too much to ask a work of art to “hit” on these “deeper levels.” Abstraction vs. representation, color vs. monochrome, linearly detailed vs. wildly gestural, Human or AI – none of these matters in isolation.
Douglas Fryer, “After the Storm,” oil on canvas, 30 x 30 in.
In short, during my encounter with the great artist, I realized on the spot what to stop worrying about and what to start trying to do instead: It’s not about the tools or the medium or how abstract or how representational it is. An abstract painting can be powerful or it can be weak, exactly as a realistic painting can be powerful or can be weak. A photograph can be a better work of art than a very good painting and vice versa. What matters is what the artist puts into it of themselves through the thousands of tiny decisions and counter-decisions every work of art entails.
“Any art which has imagination,” artist and author Philip Evergood (1901–1973) once said, “has the “magic touch” and expresses universal truths which man can feel and understand, is valid – is Art. Only people and time will decide what is great.”
I love abstract paintings that seem to channel the forces of nature and life. I love realist paintings that do the same. I love any work that communicates authentic insight about people, places, and things and what it’s like to live even for a moment with a vital, truly open heart and mind.
If landscape painting feels to you like a genre suitable for expressing your feeling for life, have a look at Douglas Fryer’s “Painting with Intuition.”
