On Feeling

Every year a flower painting finds its way into my art. The Sunflowers started with a creature I drew in charcoal straight onto the unprimed linen surface of a large painting. The rabbit-skin glue then fixed it into the fabric of the canvas and the sunflowers evolved around this creature, but before I finished the flowers in the vase were completely wilted. I took some of the petals and pushed them into the paint and moved the painting from the wall to the floor and then painted around the painting in a circular fashion. During the process I took trips to the National Gallery to examine Van Gogh’s sunflowers and carefully observed his brushstrokes, which later found their way into my own movement of the paint. I left areas of the canvas unpainted. I noticed that every time I do that the painting retains something of its original feeling. Its incompletion makes it breathe. A few years later, during the Australian bushfires, the enigmatic charcoal creature in the centre of the painting startled me. All of a sudden I saw a shrivelled, burned animal hanging onto a branch, not unlike the images from the media of little koala bears clasped onto trees in a landscape of devastation.

Fig 1. The Sunflowers (Gabriella Kardos 2017, oil and sunflower petals on linen, 170 x 170cm).

In March this year I picked up a bouquet of spring flowers, blue, yellow, violet, and white. I wanted to paint an explosion of joy, something akin to another painting I created the year before and which I titled ‘Watteau’. But that didn’t happen. As soon as I started painting the flowers a face found its way underneath them. When I showed it to an old friend over a FaceTime call he said, ‘It’s you.’ I did not look in the mirror. The face was something I knew from long time ago, or rather it knew me. Now, every time I happen to catch a glimpse of the painting, its gaze pulls me in. There is something bare and honest about it, as if I’m starring into my own soul. This is one thing I thank the lockdown for: paving the way for a slower pace, less noise, more time to think and be alone. And as I’m thinking this a song by Leonard Cohen goes through my head: ‘I’m slowing down the tune / I’ve never liked it fast / You wanna get there soon / I wanna get there last. / It’s not because I’m old / It’s not the life I led / I always liked it slow / That’s what my Mamma said.’ Time stretched during lockdown. It unleashed an internal valve to long-forgotten ways of being human. I remember something Marcel Duchamp said in a late interview with Calvin Tomkins when asked about artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns who went on to work with ideas he developed. His response was that he was pleased, but could not understand the fast pace at which they were producing and showing their work. His time was much slower, he said, 50 years before theirs, and it was important to take time to think. It is that period of ‘not doing’ which regenerates the work of an artist. I can say this forms part of my process too, even though I agonise about it. Cy Twombly would sometimes spend three months not painting at all, only to go into his studio at the end of a summer and fill it up with paintings. I know that verve of accumulated energy, it feels so liberating and you can see it straight away in the work when it happens.

Fig 2. Red Studio with Money Plant (Gabriella Kardos 2014, oil on linen, 170 x 170cm).

I can’t just look at the flowers and paint them. I lose interest looking at where the shadow or the light falls. Rather, I need to embody the flowers, dance them onto the surface of the canvas where they start creating something else. This is how I painted Watteau, the large burst of flowers I mentioned earlier. And taking the conversation back from the inference that I am unable to recapture something from a painting I’ve done before into a new one by mimicking a similar ethos, I totally mean that. I don’t know how others do it—repeating something over and over from one painting to another, what some call ‘branding’. My only branding is the truth. I don’t hold a monopoly on truth, but my creative process is steeped in the experience of openness in the moment. It relies on a state of receptivity within a condition of uncertainty, not knowing where the painting is going to take me. I try to abandon my assumptions and rely solely on my intuition, yet of course as I say this I’m also aware that, in a Bergsonian fashion, this intuition is nothing but ‘instinct educated by the intellect’.

Fig 3. The Bouquet (Gabriella Kardos 2021, oil on linen, 60 x 60cm).

In the studio I leave the world behind—no radio station chatter, no news. Here I can descend, or ‘ascend’, into vulnerability and let myself feel my own mortality. The key word here is ‘feel’. I can’t proclaim that I can do away with thought, but what I do has to be felt. EE Cummings understood a poet’s absolute need to feel, which I extend to being an artist:

A lot of people think or believe or know

they feel - but that’s thinking or

believing or knowing; not feeling. And

poetry is feeling - not knowing or

believing or thinking.

Almost anybody can learn to think or

believe or know, but not a single

human being can be taught to feel.

Why? Because whenever you think or

you believe or you know, you’re a lot of

other people: but the moment you feel,

you’re nobody-but-yourself.[1]

This process is valid not only in making art but also in looking at it. So often we go to exhibitions and read the labels near the paintings before we give them a chance to be experienced. It is as if we are incapable of looking and experiencing something for ourselves, we need to be informed, like everything else around us in this networked age of distraction where our experiences consist of little snippets. Do we need to know the recipe before enjoying a meal? I think it is important to situate a work of art in its context, yet often what the viewer leaves with is only that information, having looked at the work only in passing.

And what is the purpose of an artist’s statement? We have to say something which encapsulates us, in half a page. I find this quite restrictive and dumbing-down, for both artist and audience. Yet we all go along with it because it is expected of us. It is a form of advertising. In a nutshell: if you identify yourself with your work, who are you? What are you after? We don’t ask this of any other profession. We somehow seem to know. But I don’t want to be disgruntled. I want to concentrate not on what is lacking in life but on the richness of life. I used to be down each time I got up in the morning and spent the day trying to lift myself up. Over the past couple of years I have started a gratefulness journal where I look for things in my life I’m grateful for, simple things—the coffee on the table, memories, books, the work I’m still planning on doing, the people in my life. I place one foot in front of the other, and in the space of an hour I traverse a bridge from pessimism to looking forward to the things I’m going to accomplish in the day. A long time ago I used to dump my feelings of hopelessness into my paintings. But I also decided, a long time ago, that I didn’t wish to stare those experiences in the face. A painting has to be the truth. If it is a lie it remains on the surface like an ornament. So I work with myself to get to a state of receptivity. This basically involves making space within my head, creating an opening for things to emerge. Because of this, I don’t produce a huge number of works. But when a painting succeeds in showing me something about myself I didn’t know, when it shines with an inner life of its own, I know I’ve got somewhere. I’m asking that the painting transcend me, that it connect me to the past and to a deep humanity.

Fig 4. Free (Gabriella Kardos 2018, oil on linen, 30 x 30 cm).

I took up etching only recently, after my father’s death. My etchings are more planned, yet each plate has become a treasured moment from my past. Drawing on a small scale, with delicate markings while I sit at a table and try to recall my father, is not so different from writing in a journal—something the flâneur in me has been doing all my life, wandering into cafes in various cities I’ve lived in. As I fish thorough disjointed memories—the emigration with my parents and sister in 1976 (the séjour in Vienna, the arrival in Montreal)—I rediscover a lost world I completely ignored for so many years. Like small pieces of a puzzle these memories become embodied in the images of my etchings, they become alive, they give substance to so much of my life I’ve forgotten or unwillingly shut away by moving from country to country.

I would like to end with a quote from TS Eliot which made an impression in my student days and which still resonates with me:

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way in which you are not.

And what you do not know is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.[2]

Gabriella Kardos

Gabriella Kardos is an artist and art historian. Her 35-year career spans painting, photography, and printmaking. Her works feature in national collections across Europe and North America. ‘Her concerns are not at all matters of the tired conceptualizing and ironic simulacra that characterize much of current culture and polity, but rather a fervent attempt to find a space again—even an imaginary one—for beautiful things and genuine human responses’ (Michael Joyce).

[1] EE Cummings, A Miscellany Revised (as cited in Maria Popova, ‘The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel’ (brainpickings) <https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/09/25/e-e-cummings-advice/> accessed 1 March 2021).

[2] TS Eliot, ‘East Coker’ in Four Quartets (first published 1943, Faber and Faber 1995) 18.