Painting and planning    

I really love three things: looking at paintings, reading about paintings and painters, and painting paintings.

1. Painting paintings  

I'm not sure that I can talk sensibly about painting paintings. Or, at least not in a way that will be useful to anyone.

But the simplest and quickest way to explain why I love doing painting is to quote from two very different, very famous, though equally great British painters.

"Drawing and painting are only a much more complicated kind of writing," said William Hogarth (1697-1764). Painters, he points out are not working with a fixed language or within the boundaries of an alphabet. Hogarth is famous for acutely observed and comic works such as the series called 'A Rake's Progress'.  One of the paintings from the series is shown in Figure 1:

I identify with what Hogarth said because it gets across both the real difficulty of painting and why, when it comes off, it can be so satisfying.

Then there's Francis Bacon (1909-1992). He is known for works which are anything but comic. He is famous for paintings such as the one I have included in Figure 2.

He He said when asked to explain what he was up to by the great critic David Sylvester that he wanted to "unlock the valves of feeling and therefore to return the onlooker to life more violently".

This certainly has relevance to someone like me who paints. But it also defines what makes great paintings great. Is it too big a leap, or just too pretentious, to suggest that "unlocking the valves of feeling and therefore return [ing] the onlooker to life more violently" is what great creative thinking, great creative ideas and even great planning can do?

2. Reading about paintings and painters  

There are loads of ways in which reading about paintings and painters helps me on a day-to-day basis. The main way it helps is by giving me different 'ways in' to a problem.

The literature about painting is vast and would probably seem surprisingly varied to the uninitiated. Call up in your memory any (famous) painting you can think of. It will have been written about in a bewildering variety of ways. The various positions art historians will have taken up with regards to the famous painting you're thinking of can be described as different degrees of focus sometimes close in, sometimes pulling way back to take in the surroundings. I've represented these positions graphically in Figure 3:

Consider a painting like Edvard Munch's 'The Scream'. This is the one which was stolen recently from a Norwegian art gallery. (figure 4)

 Just using the sample of my own bookshelves I have books dedicated to the painting itself, and books which tell Munch's life story and relate it to the work. Another book puts the painting into the context of the 'Kristiana Boheme' (Kristiana is the old name for Oslo) a revolutionary anarchist group of artists and writers:  Munch's contemporaries and 'school' as it were. Another book relates the painting to others from different geographies and across history, and yet another looks at the painting through the lens of the context of European culture in the 1890s.

Fanciful though it may sound, when I'm suffering from planner's block I find it useful to think of the brand that I'm struggling with as a painting to be critiqued. Can I get to an answer by scrutinising the brand up close? What about relating it to other brands with similar issues (the styles or themes of painting criticism). What about the broader context?

3. Looking at paintings

For me the real pleasure in looking at paintings is understanding what the painter is up to and why what he or she has done is (or isn't) affecting me. 

Again and again I find that painters who take one of two broad approaches usually create paintings which move me most.  These two approaches are:

i)   DE-FAMILIARISATION - That is to make the familiar appear strange and so conjure up the sensation that one has of seeing something commonplace for the first time.

ii)   DE-CONTEXTUALISATION - Where the painter has collided together incongruous elements (such as in   the best of Surrealism) or has taken something from its expected setting and put it into some new and different context. My two favourite examples of these approaches aren't paintings. The first is strictly speaking what is called a 'found object' or 'ready made'. (By the way, for me distinguishing between painting and other forms of art is as meaningless as drawing a line between advertising and communications.) The work I am referring to is Marcel Duchamp's infamous piece called 'Fountain' of 1917, which is of course a commonplace urinal (Figure 5.)

Fountain is the work which gave birth to the conceptual art movement which is so much a feature of the art landscape today.

It shares with some types of great creative thinking the power to turn presumptions and preconceptions on their head and to push us to un-learn what it feels like we have been trained in. An example from the APG awards which comes to mind which does this is Jane Cunninghams' and Philippa Roberts' thinking for Transport for London which led to our much maligned transport infrastructure being described as "the simplest way through the world's most complicated city"(APG awards, 1997).

The contemporary artist Robert Gober (b. 1958) has created a disquieting image (a 'hairy shoe') out of the surprising combination of human hair and plastic shoe (Figure 6).

This is an example of de-contextualisation at work. 

De-contextualisation is a manoeuvre which you see in lots of great poster and press work. Is it also part of the reason why Honda's Cog seems so fresh and different?  A Haynes manual in 3-D collides with a piece of art-happening choreography?  Maybe.  

I've enjoyed talking to you about what I love.  Maybe there's an outside chance that you could do something with it.  But even if not, writing this article has reminded me that there are connections between my passion and my profession. 

In the dark world of the daily grind, that is useful.

Malcolm White Executive Planning Director, Euro RSCG London