Permeable membranes after BODY

In his book Courbet�s Realism Michael Fried describes a kind of quasi-corporeal merger that is facilitated by the structure of the image.   I would like to look at more material qualities of the artwork that assist the viewer to enter the image imaginatively or to enter a state of reverie through their experience of the painting.

The permeable membrane of the surface may be thought of as a veil that both reveals and conceals in the manner of the Temple Veil.  The painted surface exists in a pivotal place like the theoretical membrane that separates the concrete world from our knowledge of it.  Our perception and understanding is always contingent and partial, knowledge lies alongside the world more or less closely but it can never be the thing itself.  

 Frank Auerbach claimed that it was first necessary for him to become the thing in order to be able to make it in paint. (What one hopes to do is somehow become the subject, and out of that identification to make a vivid memorial)  This transference to the inanimate must entail a moment of occlusion or loss of consciousness.  In this paper I will try and give this idea some flesh.
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Intimacy through the hand of the artist

Modernism�s emphasis on the surface and on the hand of the artist seems to deny transparency in terms of mimetic illusionism but in some cases tactility expressed by the hand of the artist and the materiality of the paint surface invites a different material experience that is transparent to the senses. Such works also anticipate that the image will finally be resolved in the mind of the beholder.  Hence the image is at once more present and yet forever illusive.

The intimacy engendered by Courbet, Monet, Bonnard and more dramatically still Lucien Freud is supported by the brushwork that metaphorically and literally opens the figure for our engagement.  Comparing the brushwork of these artists with salon paintings contemporaneous with Courbet we can see that there is a surprisingly consistent distinction. 

1.L.  Alexandre Cabanal Birth of Venus 1863
1.R. William Bouguereau Birth of Venus 1879
Artists like Bougereau and Cabanel not only project their subjects into an exotic scenario, they also brush away any trace of their hand.  It is as if they distance themselves from the voyeurism facilitated by their art.

2.L.  Gustave Courbet The Trout
2.R Gustave Courbet  Seascape
By contrast Courbet�s paint seeks a material equivalence with flesh, water and stone

3.L. Claude Monet Waterlillies, the clouds 1903
3.R. Claude Monet Branch of the Seine nr Givernay 1897
Monet�s loose brushwork allows visual penetration, often setting us adrift in space, his marks might simultaneously represent ripples in the water, reflected light and objects floating on the surface.  At the same time they present us with a kind of veil through which we can imaginatively project.  

Peter Fuller in his discussion of paintings by Robert Natkin invoked D W Winnicott�s theories in which the painted surface is identified with a security blanket that allows the weaned child to maintain some tactile contact with the undifferentiated world from which it has been ejected.  There may be some truth in this that helps us to enter a state of reverie in front of certain kinds of painting, but there are many other associations with veils, curtains, arras etc that make it a very powerful metaphor at least.  

4.L. Pierre Bonnard  Marthe at her toilette ??
4.R. Pierre Bonnard The bath  1925
I will return to Bonnard whose figures are extraordinarily transparent and unbounded.

5. L. Lucien Freud Young  man Lying 1977
5. R. Lucien Freud Naked man on a bed  1977
Experiencing the tactility of the Realist works, in contrast to the salon images, entails a full sensory engagement because in tracing the form, the viewer�s eye follows the gesture of the artist.  This is a process that brings the viewer very close to the artist and to the subject matter.  In a way it is as if the viewer recreates the moment of production with each glance. 

By replacing the objectifying and distancing conventions of academic painting with an emphasis on sensory and emotional engagement, certain works weaken the boundary between art and life.  Art that makes this boundary visible presents visual language as a kind of screen or veil that reveals yet separates and obscures the represented.  Some include literal manifestations of this boundary in their work. 

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Voyeurism or intimacy
There is a striking contrast between the nature of the painting of Bonnard and Balthus that reveals an extraordinary correlation between the degree of empathy experienced by the viewer and the openness of the artist�s brushwork. 
Bonnard creates an intimate domestic environment where the naturalness of the figures allows the viewer to feel at home.  Balthus on the other hand creates theatrical scenarios that emphasise the separation of viewer and the model replacing an intimate relationship with that of a client or patron.  

7.L.  Bonnard The Bath (1925)
7.R.  Bonnard Nu de dos � la toilette (1934
These paintings by Bonnard depict his wife Marthe de M�ligny in the privacy of their home.  The brushwork is open his loose dry strokes always transparent to our eye.  For example Nu de Dos � la Toilette, 1934 where the openness of the painted surface makes the flesh glow with an inner light.  Not only is the surface open but also the boundary of the figure is very softly defined.   The back of the figure virtually merges with the brightly lit wall behind her.  Our visual comprehension of the figure is only possible when it is seen as a whole with the rest of the composition.  If you were to isolate any portion of the figure it would become unreadable.  By opening the figure to the passage of light and dissolving figure - ground distinctions Bonnard parallels aspects of Analytic Cubism.  Like Picasso, Bonnard makes the figure merge with the painted field.  The figure is quite literally opened up for our gaze.

8. L. Balthus  The Room 1947-48 
8. R. Balthus  Nude with cat  1949
Contrast the transparency and unboundedness of Bonnard with Balthus.  The paint which describes the skin of the nude figure has been worked dry over dry and rubbed back repeatedly producing an orange peel effect somewhat like a close up of the pores of the skin. 
The edges of the form are sharply defined at every point on its silhouette.   Balthus� model is made to adopt a pose from imperial Roman sculpture.  It would be hard to imagine a more dramatic contrast with the private ambience and loose technique of Bonnard.  The simulation of skin represents sensuality but it refuses any possibility of visual merger. 

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Merger or passage from consciousness into unconsciousness

11.L. Edward Hopper Nude crawling into a bed 1903
11.R. Francois Sall� The Anatomy Class at the �cole des Beaux Arts  (1888)
This tiny and atypical painting by Edward Hopper returns us to the main theme of passage or absorption. The intimate subject matter, the dark tonality and the broad-brush work are more typical of a study by Rembrandt.  Hopper has brought the figure very close to the picture plane.  The figure faces the same way as the viewer and moves into the space of the painting.  This proximity to the viewer, and the insistent quality of the painted surface makes for a strong kinaesthetic bond between the figure and the viewer. 

The room is divided by the play of light and shade, creating a screen of illumination parallel to the picture plane (and metaphorically reproducing it). 
The figure of a woman moves through this screen.  Her buttocks and legs are brightly illuminated as is the near edge of the bed but all beyond is dark and mysterious.  The woman passes into the dark recesses of the bed and the space beyond.  This implied movement from the illuminated surface into the veiled interior evokes a movement from consciousness into reverie or sleep.  Because of the strong visual association between the viewer and the figure there is also an implied sense of embodiment or merger on the part of the viewer. 

Fran�ois Sall�s, The Anatomy Class at the �cole des Beaux Arts  (1888) depicts a half naked male model being examined as if he were a piece of flesh.  His sturdy muscled torso and rough trousers attest to his lower class status thus rendering him available for objectification by the gentlemen at the academy.  The student in the foreground stares at the model with no hint of embarrassment.  It was as if the man did not exist as a subject in his own right.

The man himself has his eyes closed.  He is removing himself from the possibility of meeting the intrusive gaze of the students.  He has withdrawn into himself, into a state of reverie perhaps.  The blackboard that is behind them frames the figures of the doctor and the model.  It is of course a literal depiction of the Academy as it still is today but the coincidence of the man�s reverie and the black space behind him is striking.  While Duval the anatomy lecturer leans out towards the students and the theatre lighting illuminates his baldpate, the model leans back, his dark hair merging with the black field.  As an artist�s model in the early 1960s I met many colleagues who practiced meditation and trance induction in order to get through the day. 

Another oblique connection to this discourse of consciousness lies in the fact that Duval was an admirer of Charcot and attended his demonstrations of hysterical behaviour at the clinic in Saltpetri�re.  States of consciousness were the subject of much fascinated speculation in the 19thC.

It was with great interest that I recently read an essay by Paul Barlow on the English painters Watts and Millais who attempted to register authenticity by elaborately reworking the painted surface to emphasise its materiality so that it might act as a metaphor for the primordial sludge out of which animate life arose.  In Millais� portrait of Lord Salisbury for example the dark brown field and the subject�s coat recede while the shining pate of the sitter even brighter than Duval�s surges upward symbolising consciousness arising from inanimate matter and unconsciousness. 
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Michael Fried and Courbet

12.L.  Gustave Courbet The Grain Sifters 1854
12.R.  Gustave Courbet Burial at Ornans  1850
The black hole in Sall�'s painting acts as a reminder of occlusion suggested by Courbet�s Tarare in The Grain Sifters or the open grave in the Burial at Ornans that Fried identifies as a possible point of merger.  Fried argues for the sifters as an allegory of the act of painting, the sticky red dots of paint representing the grain as both menstrual blood and paint splashed on the canvas stretched on the floor.  The child peers into the Tarare into the dark as a metaphor for the occlusion that would necessarily accompany merger. 
The grave in Burial at Ornans is right at the edge of the canvas as if the hole were a gap between the painted space and the viewer�s world into which we might again be drawn and thus pass through unconsciousness into what state beyond?

Kasimir Malevich Black square 1929
Kasimir Malevich White on white  1918
The Russian Suprematist Kasimir Malevich first painted a black square in 1912 and exhibited it in 1915 While it could be seen as a revolutionary gesture or a negation of representation it was also a kind of event horizon a portal onto the infinite and as such a space for contemplation of the void.   The parallel between the �clean slate� of a revolutionary manifesto and the idea of the plenitude of the void is a striking one.  White on white painted in 1918 initiated a whole genre of utopian painting in Europe and later in America from the Polish Unists in the 1940s to Robert Ryman and Agnes Martin in the post war period.  In all these paintings the light beyond the void is seen not as a blank but as potentiality.

13. L. Courbet  La Source 1862 ( Metropolitain Museum) 
13. R. Courbet  La Source 1868  (Musee d'Orsay)
To back up a bit lets look at images that suggest passage through the pictorial surface.  Courbet�s La Source from the Metropolitan museum is particularly relevant to this narrative more so than the admittedly more important version in Musee d�Orsay.   Here she is pressed up against the waterfall her arm moving through the surface as if she is about to slide through the mirror.   Her dark hair already blending with the shadowy trees beyond

The luxurious paint that Courbet always applied for water lubricates the implied merger of figure with landscape.  Courbet mixed varnish and other thinners into his oils to make the paint more transparent and also more liquid.  Applied with a palette knife this produced a fluid, buttery texture.  The drier brush marks that make up the figure enhance this lubricity by contrast.  Courbet is not just absorbing the woman into the water and the land itself, he is equally drawing the viewer into an imaginative penetration, not of the woman as Nochlin suggests but of the veil of representation that separates art from life.  (Nochlin�s critique of Freid�s analysis in her catalogue essay for the exhibition Courbet Reconsidered at the Brooklyn Museum 1988)

Courbet's painterly treatment of rocks and water is as obsessively rendered as his handling of skin, fabric and hair.  He evolved techniques for handling paint that approached the concept of equivalence that was later articulated by English painters such as Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon and Frank Auerbach. 
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The trace of the artist at the surface of representation

14.L. Lucien Freud Young man with a rat 1977
14.R. Egon Schiele  Self portrait masturbating 1911 

In these paintings by Freud and Schiele the artists have amplified the sensation of their tactile marks by emphasising a sense of touch in the subject, the rats tail and the artist�s index finger on his penis.

Experiencing this tactility in Realist works entails a full sensory engagement because in tracing the form, the viewer�s eye follows the gesture of the artist.  This is a process that brings the viewer very close to the artist and to the subject matter.  Duchamp once used the expression to touch with the eye.  This �touching� weakens the boundary between art and life or at least between the purely visual and lived experience. 

15.L.  Francis Bacon  Lying figure with hypodermic syringe 1963
15.L.  Francis Bacon  figure with meat 1954

Bacon articulated the principle that paint should be made to function as an equivalent to the sensations of the body rather than merely reproducing the body�s appearance. 
In his last filmed interview, with Melvin Bragg, Bacon said, �I wanted to bring about the sensation of the thing without the boredom of its conveyance.�  This is, in part achieved by the direct response, which I am proposing between hand and eye that binds artist and viewer through the action of the body, and our bodily response to that action.

16.L. Dubuffet, Gymnosophie 1950
16.L. Arnulf Rainer.  Overpainting-Totem 1983/84
Bacon greatly admired the graffiti like scratching of Dubuffet that he likened to urgent scrawling on lavatory doors or in wet cement.
Overpainting-Totem (1983/84) by Arnulf Rainer is a photographic self-portrait that has been almost completely covered over with daubs of paint.  The trace of the artist�s fingers has virtually overtaken his visual representation.  In this image the artist scrabbles against the surface as if it might actually part and allow passage, like Alices mirror.

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Into The Void?

17. L. Lucio Fontana Concetto Spaziale attese 1962 
17. R. Caravaggio Doubting Thomas
Lucio Fontana�s slashed canvases emphasised a crisis in representation brought on by fragmentation of the surface in modern painting and as its evolution as a site for real time action. Rainer for example makes us very aware of the sensitivity of the canvas as a boundary between real and imaginary.  The crisis in representation that is often thought of, as a modern dilemma is however an ancient one that is a consequence of our condition � suspended between matter and consciousness. 

Fontana was born in Latin America and subsequently lived in Italy.  The Catholic iconography of the wound can hardly have escaped his attention.  It is an easy step to consider the slash in the pure skin of the monochrome canvas as a wound and then to associate it with the crisis Doubting Thomas resolved by plunging his hand into Christ�s side. 

The visual associations between these cuts and wounds rupture the veil or screen of representation at the brink of the void.  Because this veil is metaphorically related to the skin that separates the body from its surroundings, the orifices created by Fontana naturally evoke the openings of the body itself.  Thomas� doubt perfectly expresses our anxiety at living in a world that is only available to us through the mediation of visual appearances and the word. 

In medieval times the image was often bolstered by the inclusion of an indexical element, the frame being made from the shinbone of the saint or the true cross thereby overcoming the limitations of the image to signify fully.

18. L. Mike Parr Unword performances 1996
18.R. Gina Pane Aktione sentimentale 1973
The literal action of Fontana comes very close to performance art.   Indeed since Pollock painting contaioned this possibilityThese images of Mike Parr and Gina Pane suggest exploring and rupturing the skin as border between the bounded self and the world.

19. L.  Yves Klein�s Leap into the Void  1961
19.R.  Courbet�s Man Mad with Fear 1843. 
Man Mad With Fear (1843) is a graphic image of the potential terror of representation that is entrapment through merger, on the wrong side of the glass. 
In Courbet's self-portraits the artist is usually shown pressing up against the pictorial surface or the frame of the composition as if he was about to burst through the viewer�s side of the canvas. 

In this painting the figure of the artist leaps into the pictorial void�signified by the cliff at the lower right hand side � and into the viewer�s space. Michael Fried has argued that such voids at the margin of a composition are linking spaces that provide entry for the artist and the viewer.  In Man Mad With Fear the void is �fortuitously� left unfinished: precisely at the point where the artist is about to leap through the pictorial surface the paint breaks down into an abstract scumble.  Representation is seen dissolving in front of our eyes. 

Yves Klein was a keen Rosicrucian and followed rigorous spiritual exercises combining this with his considerable expertise in judo to work towards a literal physical transcendence.  In 1961 the year before his untimely death he made a gesture that acted out this metaphysical aspiration by leaping into the void from a second floor window.  He believed that the material world was approaching an end and that by diligent spiritual exercise mankind could break down the distinction between matter and spirit.  This leap then is another form of slash in the metaphorical veil. 

This is an image of extreme optimism, utopian, crazy, but an act of faith to demonstrate the truth of human longing that breaks through conscious suppression into our dreams.

20. L. Anish Kapoor  Untitled  1992 
20. R. Anish Kapoor Void field 1989
In his homages to Yves Klein Anish Kapoor�s greatest achievement has been to manifest the experience of the void in an extraordinarily concrete way.  Kapoor is an Indian artist living in London.  He grew up in the state of Kerala but went to school in Bombay.  His background incorporates Hindu, Jewish and European traditions. 

In 1989 Kapoor discovered a new way to imagine the infinity of the void.  He created a portal onto the void within blocks of incredibly dense and ancient Cambrian sandstone, possibly the oldest sedimentary rock on earth.  At first glance the spots on top of these great stones seem like applied black velvet but on closer inspection they are revealed as holes in the rock.  There are no apparent sides to the holes and there is no visible end to the space.  He has created the experience of a black hole within matter by hollowing out the stone leaving only a thin shell at the top at the brink of the void.  The hollow has been lined with a dark blue pigment to give spatial depth to the darkness.

The American critic Thomas McEvilley wrote for Kapoor's catalogue at the Venice Biennale in 1990.  He played upon Kapoor's Indian background to characterise these black holes as the womb of Kali.  More recent variations on the theme make it apparent however that this void is like Black Square 1915 by Kasimir Malevich, This painting of a black square has become a powerful symbol in modern art for a portal onto the infinite.  It is a deep space for contemplation in which we project our imagination of the unknown.

21. L. James Turrell Light House at Echigo Tsumari 2000
21. R. James Turrell  Arcus 1989
James Turell is an American artist whose installations use light to create a sensation of infinity.  He has built houses to frame the sky producing a rectangle of literally endless and ever-changing blue, he has even modified a volcano to allow the viewer to lie and look up at a vast framed circle of infinity.   Some are built into gallery walls and give the initial appearance of luminous blue paintings - however on closer inspection they begin to appear as space beyond the wall.  The viewer experiences a degree of disorientation or of floating in space.  In time it becomes a manifestly meditative experience realising the imaginative space of Klein in concrete form.

It is both an extreme abstraction and a concrete manifestation of pure sensation.  Unlike the sublime it does not depict grandeur or moralise on the power of the creator it simply is. 

22. L. Brian Blanchflower Canopy XXII   The Generative Eye  (triumph over time) 1990
22 R.  Brian Blanchflower Canopy XII   Traces/Glimmers

Brian  Blanchflower treats with nothing less I would suggest than the void made implicit (I am almost ready to say manifest) in matter.  I am thinking about the void in a Gnostic sense something like the darkness before the word and the light.   It may be easier just to think of the sky and infinity or what lies over the horizon but the void is never an absence it is the potential for everything and as such a space for meditation as well as terror.  Human consciousness is utterly dependent on and bound up with material existence and yet it too refuses definition or spatial coordinates, it is as if we have a void within that is the double of the void out there. How can mortals contemplate the infinite?  Our sensory equipment is not intended for this quest and yet we desire to experience it and will try anything to get some inkling of its totality.  The artist may just be the conduit through which matter is transformed even if only momentarily into a medium for joining these voids through sensation in consciousness.

There is an extraordinary history of allegorical and metaphorical imagery that �speaks� about such things but for some visual artists the greatest challenge is to make something that can convey a degree of equivalence between the thing they make and feeling the idea, not an image but the sensation of transcendence.  This quest may take many paths and depends upon the artist�s negotiation of the relationship between the mind and matter.  For the viewer it is also necessary to be able to allow their imagination to enter the space created by the artist and to visualise or experience the immaterial.  The progression of day-to-day instrumentalities tends to prevent us from taking time out to feel the slower rhythms of being.  Like meditation art takes time and effort but it is sometimes worth it.

Agnes Martin Untitled #8 1980
Ad Reinhardt Abstract painting black 1954-56
Agnes Martin and Ad Reinhardt both create meditative spaces.  Martin proposes her minimal grids on white as quiet interludes that slow down the rush of consciousness by providing a space for contemplation.  The content of the experience here must rely heavily on the mind and spirit of the viewer. 

Mark Rothko Earth and Green 1955
Yves Klein Monochrome IKB 1958
Yves Klein�s blue monochromes provide pure sensation of the colour that he believed constituted a material manifestation of the void.  Something similar happens with Rothko except that his spaces are imbued with emotion.  Rothko like Klein railed against expressionism (self expression) but was unable to keep his spirit out of the work, nonetheless his paintings seem to ignite a fire in the viewer�s heart through the artist�s pain and joy.

Blanchflower�s paintings often include references to specific worldly sites and to the experience of the sky�s canopy in other words they are grounded in the material world but many of his most recent works open a portal onto the infinite while leaving the nature of the journey to the individual viewer.   This is not to say the void is a blank.   Contemplation of the void can take mundane forms such as our widely shared wonder at the horizon where the known gives way to the imagined or at the magnitude of space in landscapes and in the sky at night.  There is communality here even if what beckons for some might be a cause for terror in others, it is nevertheless something substantial in human consciousness.  The artwork invites us on a journey without promising a definitive destination, it is setting out that matters.

Blanchflower began his long dialogue with the infinite as a student when he walked the English countryside following ancient spiritual paths that link the standing stones set in place by Neolithic astronomers.  The pilgrimage kept him out at night camping at Stonehenge or in the Orkney Isles so already the nocturnal sky was making a deep impression on him.  The stones however are themselves extraordinary testimony of man�s early philosophical commitment to binding the infinite in some concrete form.   The stones are arranged to act as calendars almost certainly to help with cyclical agricultural practices and certainly these sites would have been profoundly sacred.  The community�s survival literally depended on them but by revealing the movements of the universe they also implied a certain control over nature by conscious mind.   The designers had tapped into extraordinary power.  For me the most marvellous thing is that spiritual mysteries and profound phenomenological issues are founded on the most fundamental process of mucking about with soil.  This is an important metaphor for me when trying to understand the transformations brought about by art.

Blanchflower�s wanderings often took him past Oxford where he took time out to look at the collection of works by Samuel Palmer at the Ashmolean Museum.   Palmer�s nocturnes in particular inspired him and stayed part of his visual memory throughout his life.  Palmer was another of the artists who have sought to manifest something atmospheric and spiritual into the nature of the image rather than to simply represent it pictorially.  Like Blake he found mysterious power within the forms of everyday objects in the landscape and his paintings invest the forms with this power.

The first paintings of Blanchflower�s that I am aware of were flat monochrome panels that are similar in appearance and date to the radical experiments that the Australian pioneer of Conceptual art Ian Burn was making in London in the late 1960s.  The two never met then but this was a time when phenomenology gave birth to conceptual art.  It was a time when such issues were impossible for an artist in Europe to avoid.  Questions about the nature of being and the limits of representation were the staples of conversation in pubs and universities alike.  Blanchflower made his monochromes as a part of a performance work on the beach at Brighton.  He placed them along the pebbly foreshore and photographed them there.  The scale and colour intensity of the images constituted an optical experiment with space.   He was in effect manifesting a conjunction of ideas and the sensible world.  This is where Blanchflower parted company with conceptual art.

In the years to come he often made reference to his walks and to the sacred sites that so influenced his early development.  This took the form of paintings of rocks and lunar surfaces and at one time he conducted rituals celebrating the solstice by pouring sacrificial honey over an industrial monolith accidentally exposed by a road construction in Perth but his experiments never led him towards the dematerialisation of the object, on the contrary he always celebrates the material even as he seeks to prize from it the latent meaning of the cosmos.

Looking at his recent works I have found no difficulty in proposing a direct lineage for Blanchflower that comes down from Palmer through Monet�s late water lily paintings to Rothko�s dark meditations on the infinite, here in Blanchflower a similar space is being conjured.  Consider Monet�s water lily paintings.  All our spatial coordinates are disoriented, there is no ground beneath our feet and the horizon is excluded from view so that everything is reflected in the water or is an effect of light upon the it.  Yet Monet does not deal in optical illusions, his paint is totally insistent as material we are somehow invited to experience space while always having the primordial stuff of paint asserting its presence.  This is the quality I also find most extraordinary in Blanchflower.  It is not entirely a modernist concern either. In the 19th century and even in some form since the early Renaissance the exciting proposition that the artist is somehow able to manifest the appearance of consciousness out of the material stuff of paint has been close to the heart of visual art.  Originating as a humanist defence against the iconoclasts by defining the image as a product of human virtuosity rather than an index of the scared, the idea grew into a richer contemplation of the processes of making and perceiving.

Blanchflower�s near monochromes since the late 1990s generate an extraordinary sense of space and intense yet subdued light that invite visual absorption.  It is as if we could almost walk into their mist and emerge in Monet�s garden or in some unimaginable void.  And yet they are intensely material objects. They are painted on coarse hessian sheets that have been stiffened with binder till they are like boards.  The paint layers are then built up almost as if they were accidental accretions revealing the coarse support and successive layers of colour.  The paint includes metallic and pearlescent media that glint like minerals in the soil but also contribute to the transparency and inner light that the surface radiates at certain viewing distances.  As one approaches the paintings the surface comes to dominate the attention they are like the rocky surface of the earth itself and yet as you retreat the colour transforms back into infinite space.   For me this is the most marvellous manifestation of infinity in the mud.  In the late 1970s his paintings made reference to the surfaces of prehistoric monoliths and to the inscription on their surfaces representing configurations of the stars.  In many ways these recent works take the illustrative quality out of the earlier paintings and manifest the idea more completely as seeing rather than reading.

Artists who aim impossibly high may sometimes fall short of their target.  Anselm Kiefer is an extraordinary example.   His experiments regularly fail spectacularly because he obeys no workable conventions as a result
He always has hundreds of unsatisfactory works awaiting recycling in the studio.   Blanchflower is not as radical technically as Kiefer but the subtlety of the works may not always be immediately accessible to a casual observer.   While Kiefer strives to make the same journey between the material and the spiritual he often falls back on esoteric signs and literary devices for all the massive materiality of the work.  Blanchflower has increasingly eliminated the signs leaving us with an invitation to imagine.  I only mention this because if you have only seen one or two works and find none of the qualities I am describing here have patience give them time and keep looking, the rewards are great because when he does pull it off he can liberate the human soul even if only for a moment!  Only the safely mediocre always succeed and Blanchflower is certainly not mediocre.