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