EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

Bread, art and metamorphosis

I just spent the past week learning how to bake bread properly, taught by an artisan baker. The effects were startling. Time passed unnoticed; the scraper became an extension of my body; and only by thinking of what it was like to be the dough did I learn to handle it gently. Anything done with full attention leads to enjoyment, whether ironing a shirt or writing a novel. Painters get similar pleasure in just copying nature. If you do a craft correctly using the appropriate discipline, satisfaction comes easily. EPPH often shows how artists, such as Leonardo, Titian, Velazquez and Rembrandt, portray a similar process for philosophical reasons, identifying with their painted animals. A Picasso specialist noted that Picasso in painting himself as an ape represented:

"what Picasso always sought to embody….an animal nature so close to the world of animals that he never ceased living among them.”¹

Similarly, a Vatican art expert has suggested that medieval artists actually identified with the ox and donkey in Nativity scenes.² In literature likewise Kafka turned himself into a giant insect. Subtler metamorphoses are even more common. A professional writer, Helen Macdonald, has described how she trained herself to fly a hawk:

"To train a hawk you must watch it like a hawk, and so gain the ability to predict what it will do next. Eventually you don't see the hawk's body language at all. You seem to feel what it feels. The hawk's apprehension becomes your own. As the days passed and I put myself in the hawk's wild mind to tame her, my humanity was burning away."³

In science too, a discipline that frowns on poetic techniques, the primatologist Barbara Smuts could not gain the trust of the baboons she was studying. Observing like a neutral observer, as science recommends, got her nowhere. So she started acting like one of the animals. She writes that it was only then when she shifted from being an object for the baboons to being recognised as similar that she, a member of another species, gained an identity.⁴

Like so many other themes in art’s philosophy there is a hidden paradox here. Becoming an animal, or a lump of dough, may sound like a step down the ladder of evolution but, in becoming other, it reveals an aspect of our hidden essence: our links with everything.

 

1. Jean Clair, "Parade and Paligenesis: Of the Circus in the Work of Picasso and Others" in The Great Parade: Portrait of the Artist as Clown (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada) 2004, p.25

2. Msgr. Timothy Verdon, Mary in Florentine Art (Florence: Mandragora/Memoriae Ecclesiae) 2003, p.68

3. Macdonald, H is for Hawk (New York: Random House) 2014

4. Erica Fudge, “The Animal Face of Early Modern England”, Theory, Culture & Society, 2013, p.5