ARTISTIC LICENSE: A meditation on texture

Some artists and readers out there might think I’m losing my mind a little from the subtitle of this article! What is texture, and what’s it for? The great artist Ted Michalowski in an interview once suggested or, possibly playfully, accused me of being more interested in the philosophy of art than art itself. He might be right for all I know, but when I actually do create art, and I create a lot of it, I don’t do philosophy.

But when I’m not actually creating art, I do often philosophize about it, and enjoy doing it. And so I hope that you, my sometimes long-suffering readers, enjoy my maybe somewhat odd thoughts on art. I have happily heard that some readers really do enjoy this aspect of my writings. So here goes nothing on texture.

What is texture in art? For one, academically, texture is one of the elements of art, along with line, shape, space, value and color. These are just the basic elements. There are, as it were, other sub-elements, such as proportion and scale. Yet art is pretty complex when you break it down into its parts — its intelligible parts, that is, and that is, therefore, its philosophical parts.

Texture is unique in art in that it is the only element of art that influences two senses: sight and touch. So in one sense, texture is what we feel, and that is maybe the more important of the two; maybe sight itself is a form of feeling texture. So what are actual textures in art? Everything from stone, especially rough stone, to fabrics to impasto paint to collage to hair, as in Oppenheim’s “Fur Breakfast 1936” — anything that is tactile, and the more tactile the more textural it is artistically.

There are various abstract aspects or types of texture in art, again, academically, and therefore abstractly, and therefore again philosophically. I find that artists do a lot of philosophy without knowing it, and oftentimes they do know it. Klee and Kandinsky and others come to mind.

These abstract aspects are:

1. Actual texture: The objects listed above, like stone or rough wood.

2. Simulated texture: Painting or forming “fake” wood or simulated stone, for example.

3. Abstract texture: Abstract shapes that might resemble stone but are not copying it.

4. Invented texture: Artists’ abstract shapes that remind one of texture but do not copy it even abstractly. Series of tightly crossing lines might be an example. See my texture art that I did especially for this article. Purely abstract, but I think, and hope, that it implies texture. Just its uneven colors I suggest do just that!

Things with texture are therefore three-dimensional or imply three dimensions as in perspective, and shade and shadow. These latter are tricks of the eye, as it were.

Now, largely two-dimensional things can still have some texture, for example canvas or watercolor paper have more texture than most card stocks or photo paper. And impasto in painting can make a painting quite sculptural. I recently did a large acrylic painting on board titled “Three Heads.” It’s pretty good, but I didn’t think it was that great, but everyone seems to like it, even a great European trained painter.

I think it is because of the fantastic textures I almost accidentally created using layers of thick impasto paint with palette knives and thick brushes and plaster trowels — I love trowels! — and my hands, even. It’s like a flat sculpture, sort of, like a coin is, only rougher. I also have strong contrasts in color that I think emphasize this textural aspect, for I would argue that even contrasting colors are a texture of sorts.

When we talk about some art — not always painting, as being painterly — this textural aspect is what we mean. Examples would be some of van Gogh, who Gauguin accused of throwing paint on like slabs of butter, if memory serves me — or Munch’s “The Scream” would be another example, from what I can see in photos of it.

On a more abstract and philosophical level yet, I would argue that texture is difference or otherness itself and symbolizes as well as it often is matter and even emotion, I would suggest, at times — at least changing and powerful emotions. Something smoother is more restful to look at than something with a rougher texture, everything being equal — maybe even warmer somehow, too

Everything being equal again, texture is often less realistic or more abstract than something smooth. At least for figural work, as there was an abstract school of painting after Pollock’s time that emphasized smoothness and flatness as abstract, but I think that was an emphasis on pure form and color, not on texture and figural shape.

For example, if you paint a figural work or sculpt a human being, then a rougher texture will be more abstract. One of my favorite examples is Michelangelo’s last work, “The Pieta Rondanini,” that in form reverted back more to medieval poses, but in shape and texture was unlike anything in the renaissance. It was very modern in its own way. Janson supposes that he was groping for new forms and was dissatisfied with his earlier work and was probably designing it for his own tomb and suggests Michelangelo’s own deep repentance. Profoundly beautiful!

Now, which was better, his more famous “The Pieta” or his last Pieta? Only God could probably decide that. But if you compare the smoothness of the earlier work to the extreme roughness of the later work, you can see, I believe, that the earlier work is in fact more restful and cooler even in a way, temperature being transposed here to aesthetics somehow in that, the later work. The earlier work you don’t have to think about in a way; your eye just gracefully moves over the almost perfectly undulating shapes. Now, I said earlier that a rougher shape is often more emotional. Does that prove to be the case here, for what is more devotedly emotional than the great Pieta? I would argue that the later work is more emotional in its rough form. You can feel the emotion of Michelangelo in his actual sculpting. In the earlier work, it is not the smoothness that makes the work so emotional, it is the realistic portrayal of the mother of God holding her divine but dead son.

Whether you agree with me or not, it is helpful to think about these types of philosophical questions for later creating your own work, consciously knowing both what texture is and what it is for. Or in better understanding the diverse aspects in viewing great art.

To conclude: I suggest that rougher textures in a works of art are more abstract, and that any more textural work — assuming it is figural and based on imitation in any way — will make the mind work more to understand it. Some works of art are so one-dimensional that they are just what they appear to be and nothing else. I have argued in previous articles that great art should not stop a the canvas or surface of stone, but should be transparent to experience. This is what I think the great Kant implied about great art stimulating the mind to try to understand art. He did not think that it could be understood in the same was as Newton’s physics for example could, but the continuing act of trying to understand it made it great. That’s what makes a book great or classical, as Mortimer Alders pointed out, in that we can re-read it endlessly. The mind in textural art, as in Michelangelo’s last work, needs to work to understand it, even to see through the stone to the clearer human forms within. In the great earlier work, the eye can just rest on the surface to see the form. It also of course is inexhaustible in its endless meaning.

The great third century mystic philosopher Plotinus in his profound work “The Enneads” spoke of moral purification as analogous to a sculptor chipping away the excess stone to find the pure and perfect form within. The extra stones to Plotinus were our moral ignorance and impurities. I mention this because in textural and abstract works of art, I believe that, like Plotinus suggests about the sculptor, that we ourselves as viewers of art have to cut away or see through the matter to the light, as it were, of the pure or figural form within.

Now, if all of this doesn’t make sense, that’s OK, it might not. And I might be wrong also, but I think I am right enough to have you begin your own contemplation of texture and art in general.

But no matter what you think of my philosophical musings or ramblings, please check out this article online, and there you will see what the great artists have shown to us lesser beings about texture in art.

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