Sue Rosalind
Vesely
Statement for ‘Painting the Nameless’ 2010
I paint from memory. I do not use models or paint anything from life.
The memory of the way the world appears is in our heads, it is a
language which connects us at a level much deeper than speech. These
things exist only in the vision and they have no names. They are in your
head and in mine and that is why this work may remind you of your
dreams.
I borrow objects from the real world to construct a space. But
these, although they are painted naturalistically, they are not painted
from life, they are made from generic models
of the objects that I have in my memory. Everything comes from the
mind. The objects are recognisable because we all have a visual idea, a
subconscious model of what things look like; which forms
a subconscious language connecting our experience. We do not have words
for these ideas. They are nameless.
Words are always generic: the description of light on an object can
never show the uniqueness of the event. You can say, "sunlight slanted
across the wall" but that will not show exactly how it looked. Our
visual experience is continuously specific and these specific
experiences form models in the memory that are generic.
It is a language without words that connects us subconsciously. So
in seeing my work there is often the experience of being reminded of
something personal. Some people say that I have painted their dreams.
Sue Rosalind Vesely May 2010
Anominalism.
I am
calling my work Anominalism. This is to put a name to the idea that it
is a natural fit to the mind that a single work should contain more than
one language.
We can
think of a new name for a colour but not a new colour for an invented
word.
This is
the difference between a thing that exists exclusively in the vision and
a thing that has a named identity in the mind.
Things/Events exist in the vision that can only be “named” by a
description of the events that cause them.
Such
nominal descriptions can only be general, “…sunlight falling through
leaves and the shadows hitting the wall…”,
whereas
the visual representations of them can be specific, ( in formal terms, a
naturalistic visual equivalent ) or general, (a generic derivative of a
naturalistic equivalent).
These
visual events/things are familiar to all without verbal description.
Representations of the body are read differently to representations of
visual things/events because it is ‘us’, and not an external event.
Images
of the body may be naturalistic, un-naturalistic, or stylised, any
logical representation of physical existence and still be read
differently to the other events because they represent us. The figure
can be represented generically, androgynous and anonymous, or
specifically, and still command in the viewer recognition of identity:
he has to recognise humanity – it is us.
Things
exist on the canvas as of themselves, and purely visually – a patch of
blue paint used in an abstract way, outside our real visual experience.
They
exist on the canvas only as artistic values, without reference to
phenomena in the visual world off the canvas, without reference to the
figure/viewer. They also occupy a space in the narrative reading,
suggesting they might be objects from the real world but existing
outside the structure of real visual experience. A strident colour in an
otherwise naturalistically derived structure, filling the area that
would be occupied logically by another object, will in terms of the
narrative of the picture play the role of that object.
The
canvas can be read as narrative or fragmented.
So it
becomes possible in one work to create an interface between languages
where each is seen more clearly. The narrative may be read as whole or
fragmented and the mind of the viewer is the operative factor. This is
a confluence of languages expressing or pointing out the nature of the
interface between eye and mind.
Sue
Vesely, July 2008.
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My work is the result
of my chasing visions that I can almost see. I want to make a visual
expression of feelings and thoughts I have experienced in the past and in
imagination and dreams. On a conscious level I put a construction on the
images that I make so
that they make formal visual sense to the viewer. I want to find and to
make visible the thing I am
looking for, and I want to show it in a form that will communicate it. I want the viewer
to feel
that he is seeing something that is from his own life.
I have a fund of ideas, a vocabulary which comes from early memories
of colour and space. Some of these images are views of remembered spaces. Some
of these imagined images are an attempt to
make a feeling into the visual, by constructing spaces which would make me
feel like that, or by making a figure whose attitude shows how it feels
to be in that space.
I start with a
space or a figure expressing a feeling from this fund of ideas. Once I
have something to look at two things start to happen. The picture
evolves as I add on ideas as a response to what I see, with a logic
with which the
viewer can read and engage . Also, I respond to what's on the
canvas formally, within the structure I have created I can work with
ideas I have about language, which may or may not consciously interest
the onlooker, but which are the core of the development of the work.*
Sue Vesely, MArca May2009
*See
Anominalism July 2008 (above)
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In my
work the
body is seen as an expression of the mind.
I use the figure from every
angle, to me the surface of the body is an expressive landscape.
The pose the figure takes is a mechanical structure, which is a three
dimensional description of the emotional life within the mind of that
figure. The limitations of the body are a common language. We all know
how it feels to be in the pose when we see splayed fingers or an arched
back.
We are connected below the surface by a common language that is
wordless.
Our minds also work with colour and imagery.
To use this connection, I show the figure in a narrative situation and
the composition is often constructed to give the viewer a role to play
in the picture:
I intend that at a subconscious level, my naturalistic representation of
a familiar world, will give the viewer a sense that the picture is about
him, as he recognises that he has seen this reality before.
A narrative usually forms in the mind of the viewer without any comment
from me, except for the title.
Susan
Vesely MArca March 2006