Top Carrot!

September 3, 2024
David Chandler
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“Courage is knowing it might hurt and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same.” – Jeremy Goldberg

To enter an art competition, I’d imagine that you’d need at least one or other of the above traits, ‘though I’ve notion that for most artists, courage and stupidity feel inextricably linked.

Wassily Kandinsky said that you could learn the craft of carpentry and be fairly certain of being able to make a table, but that you could learn how to paint and never

be sure of making a work of art. Sensible people wouldn’t dream of welcoming that much uncertainty into their lives and settle for more predictable vocations, like meteorology, but no matter how courageous or stupid you feel you are and as if Maestro Wassily hadn’t make things hard enough already, that’s not the end of an artist’s difficulties…

There are people like me.

The judges.

^{Wassily Kandinsky 1866-1944}

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Following a 20-year study of experts in numerous fields, their opinions on a wide range of subjects were found to be no more reliable than the toss of a coin. The Beatles’ manager being told by a Decca executive to go back to Liverpool and JK Rowling’s twelve rejection letters spring to mind. And after 40 years in the motion picture industry, movie producer David Picker, who bought James Bond to the silver screen, reckoned that if he’d said ‘yes’ to all the projects he turned down and ‘no’ to all the ones he’d accepted, things would have worked out about the same.

But there are other factors.

When I helped judge the Black Swan Open in 2013, we had to sift through more than 400 hundred entries. That meant, to spend even one paltry minute on each would take us more than six hours without a break. And with space for only 80 works in total at the venue, we had to say ‘no’ at least four times more often than we said ‘yes’ – and be quick about it. Under those conditions, just being good isn’t good enough; the work has to be somehow exceptional. But what does that mean?

“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.” – Paul Cézanne

At the Gillingham and Shaftesbury Show this summer, the guidelines for carrots would have been very clear to all entrants (tap roots intact, all fine root hairs on the sides removed and no splits, cracks or pest-damage) and even a novice in the vegetable field would be able to judge Mr Mannaring’s carrots as inferior to Mr Gooden’s, which are to be admired for their uniformity, girth and colour as well as for the diligence, knowledge and skill that went into their creation.

Ironically, Paul Cézanne eschewed the humble carrot in his quest to change art and settled for the apple instead.

Vincent Van Gogh, however, who would eagerly turn his hand to just about any subject in order to master his craft, painted carrots at least once and wasn’t above the odd basket of potatoes or onions, either.

^{Vincent Van Gogh, Still with a basket of vegetables 1885}

Now, it’s entirely conceivable that as much diligence, knowledge and skill went into Mr Van Gogh’s carrots as Mr Gooden’s, but I don’t think any of Vincent’s vegetables would win a prize at the Gillingham and Shaftesbury Show. Van Gogh’s intentions were entirely different, of course and here’s the thing: diligence, knowledge and skill mark the beginning of his endeavour, not the end.

Back at the art tent at the Show, the multi-coloured portrait of Freddie Mercury was very eye-catching, but not as eye-catching as the painting of a pack of hyenas that won the People’s Choice Award (detail, left). Despite the effort that went into the production of both, however, I didn’t select either work for a prize.

Because, as Paul Klee wrote in his Creative Credo of 1920, “Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible,” and an exceptional work of art does more than arouse in us feelings of admiration for the skill of the artist. As a matter of fact, if all you see when you look at a work of art is the effort involved, then it’s my view that the artist has failed.

^{Paul Klee 1879-1940}

^{© Jamie Randall 2024}

“Does a picture come into being all at once?” Klee asked. “No, it is built up piece by piece, the same as a house. And what about the beholder: does he finish with a work all at once? (Often yes, unfortunately.)”

So with these words firmly in my mind, I plodded around and around the entries and after three hours of deliberation, gave the Best In Show Award to Liz Dewar for her two jolly ladies on the beach (bottom left, above). Why? Because it was joyous. Ms Dewar’s picture not only made me laugh (and art can definitely afford to take itself a little less seriously, these days), but it was painted with the same devil-may-care attitude as her subjects (seagull included!).

A couple of days later, at the 71st Bruton Art Society Annual Exhibition, I was delighted to be in the company of artist and friend, Jules Horn, when she received the Abstract Award.

What were the judges thinking when, amongst all the other worthy works, they gave her the prize for what was probably the tiniest painting in the show?

Let me leave the last word on the subject to Paul Klee, who begins his Creative Credo with that immortal line about making visible and continues, over several paragraphs, to reflect, some times very poetically and at others, highly analytically, upon the creative process…

“The liberation of the elements, their arrangement in subsidiary groups, simultaneous destruction and construction towards the whole, pictorial polyphony, the creation of rest through the equipoise of motion: all these are lofty aspects of the question of form, crucial to formal wisdom; but they are not yet art in the highest sphere. A final secret stands behind all our shifting views, and the light of intellect gutters and goes out.”

Paul Klee, Creative Credo 1920

^{Jules Horn, Wessex Magic 2}