Portrait of the artist

Architectonic, but with wobbly edges

Margaret McGhie

Ian Barr has the good fortune to live in communion with the fields, forests and beaches of Scotland's Black Isle. Many of the found objects he brings back to his studio from his daily rambles with his dog find their way into his artwork: as inspiration for his paintings; as material for his sculptures; and in particular, as materials for his 'constructions', neither painting nor sculpture, but an ambiguous combination of the two, elements of both collaborating holistically to make more than the sum of the parts.

Invited in a recent conversation to categorise his work, he chose to describe himself as a ‘constructivist expressionist’, his own term, another ambiguous combination, and interestingly, one he feels describes not only his work, but also his personality. He felt it essential, nevertheless, to point out that, in general, such tidy categorisations aren't really his scene, either in art - he echoes Howard Hodgkin, who says quite simply, 'I'm not an abstract painter, a representational painter, I'm a painter.' - or in human terms, regarding life not as a journey, but as a series of accommodations.

Constructivism and Expressionism are two very different approaches to art-making. Central to the Constructivist approach is the idea of structure, a three dimensional concept. Constructivist work is often geometric, usually experimental in a rationalistic mode, often rather clinical, severe, cerebral, and without much emotional content. It may often be a work put together from separate bits – constructed, as is Ian's latest work, from fragments or found objects. Line, form, space, colour, surface, and texture are important, as is a technical competence and organisation of the materials - what Ian would call 'craft'.

Expressionism, by contrast, employs a much more individual and subjective approach, often using arbitrary colours and bold compositions in an effort to convey emotional states, subjective interpretations and responses that experiences and events can arouse within a person. As Ian says:

'Expressionism is all about the emotional gesture, flourish and ‘hairs on the back of the neck stuff.’

It's an interesting irony, evidence perhaps of the nugatory idea of categories of art, that the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin, conceptual founder of Constructivism, on returning to Russia after visiting Picasso in his Paris studio, began producing his Relief Constructions, a series of sculptures made from an assortment of junk and other found materials, in imitation of the works of his Spanish host, surely one of the least constructivist of artists.

While these are, of course, not the only influences on Ian's work, it's fair to say that there are significant resonances and reflections of both approaches, particularly in his recent constructions, works composed of found fragments. He describes these as ‘two and a half dimensional' images, resonating with the Constructivist structural approach. On the other hand, as with the Expressionists, his artwork is an intensely personal and emotional response to specific places or experiences, representing a personal journey of understanding and meaning making. He too uses animated brushstrokes and a sensuous colour inventory, aware, for example, of how two theoretically clashing colours put next to each other can sing. He uses layers of colour, sometimes scraped off, then painted over, often pointing up the thickness and materiality of the paint.

As he himself says:

' What I am trying to do is to instil into my constructions an emotional element that is more alive than the austerity of much constructivist work, but not quite about the excesses of what might be described as full-on expressionism. I guess you might describe it as essentially architectonic, but with wobbly edges, with rich paint qualities and textures.'

Perhaps if this were food, or fashion, or jazz we'd call it fusion, or in literature or cinema cross-genre, though 'genre' is itself an ambivalent idea in a post-modern world. It's an approach that tries to hold two contradictory approaches in tension to make something new, interesting, and inviting, going beyond traditional boundaries or pigeonholing to produce something different. The result is an aesthetic that isn't too readily elegant, balanced or tasteful. It may be harmonious and ‘tuneful’; equally it may be discordant, dark, and dissonant.

In Ian's constructions, and to an extent his sculptures, this involves using items from his assortment of found objects, odds and ends, fragments collected ‘at random’ as raw material for his work. This is a description that Ian feels comfortable with. And yet, in a recent interview he is quite clear that though the fragments are collected seemingly ‘at random’, they are not selected at random for inclusion. They must conform to certain quite specific criteria. Fragments are often weathered or damaged, and have some indications of use or usage. And while it may be possible to guess at their previous use - part of an old fence, a barn, a boat, a ruined cottage, a piece of furniture - what is important is that they have a unique and unknowable provenance, and that in his constructions they become objects in their own right. In a Zen sort of way, through his artworks they live now, in the moment, yet at the same time remind us of the perishable and ephemeral nature of all existence.

The Buddhist concept of annica, impermanence, the idea that things and beings that once seemed fixed and solid are inescapably in a constant state of change, and that without impermanence nothing would be possible, has long resonated with Ian. So too has the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, derived from Buddhist teaching. It is based on an acceptance of the natural cycle of growth and decay that acknowledges simple realities: nothing lasts; nothing is finished; nothing is perfect. It encourages us to find a flawed beauty in imperfection, to delight in wear, in visible repairs and in patina.

Ian's work is infused with both of these big ideas. The wabi-sabi aesthetic in particular, characterised by asymmetry, simplicity, roughness and irregularity is an obvious influence on his work.

But these are ideas personal to the artist. This is not art with a 'message'. As Waldemar Januszczak, art critic of the Sunday Times, writes about the wonderful combination of John Hoyland's paintings with Damien Hirst's new gallery:

'It's a reminder that this is what art is supposed to do. Art is supposed to knock you out visually. The thinking and the conceptualising ...should be extras, not essences.'

In other words, there need be no interest in spelling things out. Leave the understanding to the viewer. Simply put, a great reaction to any artist's work is just 'Wow!'

'Artist' is a label that Ian, and a significant number of other artists, find difficult, feeling that it conveys a certain pretention and effeteness. They prefer the term 'maker', regarding it as more grounded, a better description of what they actually do - make things. Perhaps this isn't surprising, since in the UK, unlike in many other European countries, we are liable to give art and artists pretty short shrift, resorting often to our default setting: 'Call this art!'

As a nation, we do like to pontificate, and art is fertile ground. It was recently announced that Lucien Freud's treasured collection of paintings and drawings by his friend Frank Auerbach is to be distributed to galleries across the UK - a glorious bonus, you might have thought, at a time when the arts are increasingly cash-strapped. The Tate London is now holding a major exhibition of Auerbach's work, following a retrospective in the Kunstmuseum in Bonn. Cue the almost immediate and seemingly endless art blether, all the familiar splenetic outrage of the self-appointed art 'cognoscenti' running the gamut of outrage from A to B, to borrow from Dorothy Parker. Sadly, many of us tend to have only the narrowest and most stereotypical of understandings of the fine arts, and we've put it all in a box marked Art/Artists, generally understood as 'folk who do art stuff.'

But the fine arts have no monopoly on the artistic. Granted, the arts are a special form of experience, using their own particular 'language' to describe the world and individual experiences of it. But there are multiple ways in which the world can be known and multiple 'languages' for describing and making sense of that world. The kind of experience accessible through the arts is available in many other arenas. ‘Artist’ is an all encompassing term describing individuals who have the dispositions and skills to create excellent, skilful, and imaginative work in whatever domain they choose to work in. As the late Professor Elliot Eisner - interestingly an educationist as well as a painter, a combination that also applies to Ian Barr – argued:

‘The distinctive forms of thinking needed to create artistically crafted work are relevant to virtually all aspects of what we do.’

A crucial strand in this distinctive thinking is imagination. Imagination, the place where everything is possible, fuels all art. But it is equally essential in many other domains. Modern day scientists, in particular, have long argued that to assume that what they do is entirely rational, emotion-free, measurable, linear, and largely quantitative, is to misunderstand the nature of scientific enquiry. Much scientific enquiry begins with the ‘What if…’ question. Imagination plays as great a part in science as in the arts. Designing experiments based on the best answer to date - what one scientist calls 'good guesses that have gone through the sieve so far' - in an effort to find the next best answer to date, and imagining what that might look like, is as imaginative a task as making an image, or composing a symphony, or designing a car, and follows roughly the same process.

Another of Eisner's distinctive forms of thinking involves discerning judgement, of seeing, not just looking. It's what he calls 'the enlightened eye', what Hemingway called his 'shit detector' and what neurologist Oliver Sachs called an 'intuitive, personal, comprehensive and concrete way of seeing how things stand in relation to one another and to oneself.’ They are all, in their own terms, describing the relationship between the 'maker' and the' thing made' as a form of dialogic relationship, where each 'speaks' to the other as the work progresses.

This often involves an inordinate amount of time looking in order to really see:

'How is this work progressing? What's not quite right about it? ‘What’s this work saying to me?' What next? '

Howard Hodgkin reacted spikily to an interviewer’s question, 'When you're sitting looking, are you working?' 'Of course!' Derek Boshier even has a special 'looking chair' in which he deliberately sits in order to contemplate and reflect on a work in progress. Frank Auerbach often scrapes all the paint he has applied during the day into the bin and starts again. This is the enlightened, discerning eye at work.

Ian Barr describes it as:

'The process of searching for things you don't know the nature and form of. It involves a lot of time spent seeming to do nothing but stare at unfinished work. It involves a disproportionate amount of time engaged in a kind of self-indulgent meditation.'

While artists of all kinds may often have a clear sense of what it is they are setting out to create, what they end up with is often very different from that internal vision. Everything is a work in progress, again and again beginning afresh. As Howard Jacobsen said in his lecture on his new work ‘J’ at the 2015 Edinburgh Book Festival:

'There is no job spec. There are no rules about what you can or can't do. You don't know what you think till you write it. Only when you start writing do you know what it is that you mean, what you think. One thing leads to another. Do what's in your heart.'

Artists of all stripes and in all domains are driven by a love of what they do. What they make is a kind of extension of themselves, an 'I made this!' Poet, writer and playwright Lemn Sissay, declared in a recent interview:

'To write something that no-one has ever seen before is proof that I am alive.'

Or as Ian Barr says:

'How can I put a price on something that is part of myself? '

Copyright © 2015 by Margaret McGhie

The moral right of the author has been asserted.