New Modern Art, A Mission Statement

a painting manifesto

Issued by Stone Riley,
painter, poet, storyteller,
so-called senior elder Pagan,
so-called Druid Of New England
© September 2003 with all
copyrights donated to the public.

Now in this perilous disjointed modern age, we need to do the main thing artists always strive to do if they are worthy of the name: Re-tell the great stories. We must offer reassurance, or even proof, that ancestral wisdom is available and useful. We must show that the creative source of life is always new. But we must have a language that is equal to this challenge in this difficult time.

Visual artists and their audience often share a powerful symbolic language.

Among Victorians, with their beloved ornamental gardens, there was a fine vocabulary of the flowers. So, by placing some specific flowering shrubbery in a wood, or some specific blossom in a figure's hair, Victorian canvas painters could convey their thoughts about their characters and plots. For most of us today the crimson rose's bold erotic cry alone remains.

Among the Classic Greeks Athena always had her shield and helm. Ariadne had her bow. A husky male with club and lion skin was Heracles. Two solemn women with a happy boy were Demeter, Persephone and Dionysos. Statuary, murals, painted pottery, jewelry, costumes for the stage, all took part in this visual mythology. It seems like priceless holy copy books of sketches must have passed from hand to hand although no scraps of even one of them remain.

Among the folk of Western Europe in the last Ice Age, where many different creatures crossed the land, the painters of the caves took up the animals' gestural communication. The stories humans tell were painted on those cavern walls in the particular angle of a horse’s ears or bison’s tail, the blur of hooves and antlers, and all of that, for all of that was common coin to those folks then. And now to us their fluent handiwork is all mysterious marvel.

And countless other fine examples can be found across the world; times and places where visual artists and their viewers powerfully shared our human stories by means of some deep rich common tongue.

For our tumultuous age we have invented Modern Art.

Now while so much around us constantly falls apart, here is a language with which visual artists strive to intimately address experience and knowledge humans have inside themselves. As the old bohemian Picasso said, "My pictures reach in through your eyes and grab your asshole!" Most viewers recognize this power as the yoga that it is and they respond appropriately, sometimes enthusiastically.

And yet a certain difficulty does exist: Those who have developed Modern Art, a hundred years ago and ever since, have followed their researches boldly into a multitude of different schemes. Cubism unfolds things; Expressionism ramifies them; Minimalism diagrams their force; etc. and so on. The power of the language, if we let it, might well dwindle out along these narrowing streams, these dialects each with its special purpose and its mode of operation in the humans.

And yet a student of this language is so rich today. Museums today are stuffed with fine original pieces and they swap them all about on tours. Bookstore shelves are absolutely groaning full of volumes chockablock on every page with magnificently printed photos of the whole world's masterpieces often with quite excellent analyses, biographies and histories. The internet is there to fill in any cranny where a student feels some hunger pang; just type in "guernica" and click on "search".

Surely now our difficulty has become the very chance we need. I'll pose a case. Let's say: In light of certain insights that you found in Shakespeare's "Murder of Gonzago" now you feel compelled to talk about the murderer George Bush. You guess you'll do this with a painted canvas. So now on pondering at length, let's say you wish the painting could, inside the viewer's eyes, somehow unfold and ramify those insights and diagram their force. Great Gods! You need some specialized techniques. You need examples from the masters who preceded you. No problem. Visit a museum, thumb through some bookstore shelves and surf the web. And then of course you slave before the easel.

But still there is another quite essential step. Our purpose is communication. So now you take your painting to the public. Take it to some park, perhaps, and perch there with it on a bench, or something such, and chat with passersby. Yes, tell people what you tried to do, in detail if you may, and ask, in detail if you may, what aspects of the work succeeded.

True, to tell a story with a still and silent isolated artifact of painted canvas is not easy. But if approached with wit and boldness, then I think the task may cultivate in you some very fine poetic skills, for it is unavoidable that you must find the deepest strongest images imaginable and trick them out with all available technique.

So there's the deal with New Modern Art. Let’s reconcile the disparate dialects of Modern Art into a fluent language. It will possess astonishing communicative power. And then let us re-tell the great abiding tales here in this present age.