The painter’s discipline: aesthetics and form in Scottish painting

Abstract

This paper concerns the practice of Glasgow-based painter Louise Hopkins. Most known for her detailed, laboured repainting of furnishing fabrics, Hopkins appropriates found images and everyday mass-produced fabrics into her work. Founded on the interstices between semiotics and formalism, her aim is the turning of found images into painting. Unravelling this particular aspect of her practice will form the central concern of this paper. Based on ethnographic research with the artist, this paper will explore the artist’s commitment to the discipline of painting through the lens of an anthropological analysis and specifically, how her work evokes modernist concerns with aesthetics and formalism long since thought dead. In what follows I will address how artists are currently engaged with aesthetic concerns, ensuring its continual transformation and revival and how, like the medium of painting itself, its prophesied death has never really materialised.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

[1] Ingold (1996); Sansi (2015); Gell (1998); Pinney and Thomas (2001).

[2] For more recent criticisms of formalism see Walton (1970) and Danto (2005).

[3] For instance, Richard Wright, Hayley Tompkins, Victoria Morton, Merlin James.

[4] In the 1980s, the term appropriation is most notably connected to neo-minimalism. But as a term that designates the integration of pre-existing imagery into a work of art, appropriation is commonplace across multiple disciplines.

[5] For discussions on the image see Ingold (2011) Rancière (2009).

[6] Touring exhibition sponsored by Kingston University, 1996, entitled ‘Merlin James: Paintings, Drawings, Prints 1981–1996ʹ.

[7] However, this definition of drawing calls to mind any number of contradictions. Bryson’s categories of drawing and painting are, then, really concerned with how a work is made and the transformation of a drawn surface. If we follow through with Bryson’s definition, a work that is infused with lines and covers the entire sheet of paper is a painting. Any mark on a paper that keeps the surface exposed can be defined as a drawing, even if it does not use the traditional materials of drawing (for instance Richard Long, Tim Knowles, and Kristján Guðmudsson). But any drawing that starts off as such but that eventually covers the surface in its entirety is no longer so, becoming instead a painting (see Benjamin 1999).

[8] Again, there are a certain assumptions being made here. But the point is to stress that the deviation from the assumption of an overall-ness in painting, how it is achieved by each artist, is what distinguishes them.

[9] Art historian James Elkins in ‘On Some Limits of Materiality in Art History’ (2008) notes that with the downfall of Modernism, and its endorsement of an ocular vision, seeing is now quintessentially embodied. Consequently, as Elkins notes, ‘art history is no longer an archivist’s or iconographer’s paradise, driven by textual sources: it has become attentive to the physical stuff, the presence, the material of the artwork, its bulk, its human scale, and even its “base materiality”’ (2008, italics in original).

[10] The bodily determinism presented in the thesis, as Jean Molino acknowledges in the book’s introduction, for as Focillon notes ‘the meaning of form is above all the rhythm of the body, the movement of the hand, and curve of the gesture’ (1989, 21), is also its limitation.

[11] As Merjian notes (2013, 72) ‘there is a long list of artists he’s either on record as admiring or references directly in the titles and imagery of his own paintings. It includes Delacroix, Poussin and Morandi, as well as less well-known figures such as William Nicholson, Jean Helion, Serge Charchoune and perhaps surprisingly, the supremely cool stylist Alex Katz. James will quite happily take a detail from someone else’s work as a subject. He doesn’t copy it, although resemblance can be overt, and he doesn’t translate it. It just becomes the subject for the painting like any other subject’.

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Notes on contributors

E. A. Hodson

Elizabeth A. Hodson works at The Glasgow School of Art in the department of Fine Art Critical Studies. She was awarded her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Aberdeen. Her research interests include drawing, interdisciplinarity, alterity, the imagination and materiality. Her most recent project, entitled ‘Imagining Landscape and Myth in Scottish Art, is concerned with art in rural communities in Scotland.