Lee Woods

There is more than one valid reason to make art. Not everyone wants art that 'challenges' (usually by employing shock tactics); some people find life shocking and challenging enough. Entirely valid art can be made to delight, to amuse, to enchant, to inspire, to astound, to impress, to strike dumb with awe or simply to please. If each of these verbs is treated individually as a valid artistic goal, one can see that each has its own avant-garde, its own innovators working hard to move their respective genre forward. Not all of these innovators find it necessary to reject every skill that ever made art recognizable as art. Not all of these artists find it necessary to ignore history and restart the clock with every new second. Art made “to challenge” is but one of many genres.

Although the beliefs stated above are enough to explain most of the work I have produced since about the age of twenty, they perhaps don’t adequately explain my most recent work. Several years ago, in total admiration of the skills of pre-modernists and with the help of numerous old treatises, I set about learning the relevant techniques. One of the first I read was Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise “On Painting”. Leonardo’s advice to ambitious and aspiring artists was that in order to develop their own desired style, it was necessary to choose a master whose work most closely resembled their desires, temperament and character and then copy them and learn from them until their own style emerged.

After extensive research in numerous museums, I had only been able to narrow down my search for a master (who might be able to help me move my work forward) to two artists; Sandro Botticelli and Thomas Rowlandson. Hardly compatible, you might think. The work of Rowlandson seemed to fit my temperament and character like the proverbial glove and the work of Botticelli matched my desires. For a long time, as I copied every sketch and every painting I could get hold of or go and see, I wavered between wanting to follow in the footsteps of one or the other. Then very suddenly, just a few years ago, what I felt to be truly my own sketches began to emerge. Leonardo was right (of course) – and so was Archimedes! Perhaps the caricatured figures which have emerged owe a lot more to Rowlandson than to Botticelli but I’m still working on bringing more of Botticelli’s grace and beauty into the work :)

Caricature has a long history stretching back – as always in Western art – to the world dominated by the influence of ancient Greece. Pliny the elder singles out Antiphilus of Naucratis as the inventor of humorous ‘caricature’ in about 300 BC. Pliny mentions a painting of “Mr. Gryllus” which appears to have been a portrait of a known person, made humorous by giving him the characteristics of a cricket. Today the word “Gryllus” is both a part of the Latin name of a species of cricket and the derivative “Grylli” the archeological name for small half-human, half-animal objects from the ancient world.

There is some dispute about the actual time in which Antiphilus lived as Lucien of Samosata claims that he was a contemporary of Alexander the Greats favourite painter Apelles. If true, this is an interesting coincidence, because Lucien also claims that Antiphilus was the rival who spread calumnies about Apelles – which, during the Renaissance, became the subject of a Botticelli painting! One thing both writers appear to agree on is that Antiphilus and his caricature genre were highly respected in the ancient world. A painting by Antiphilus is said to have been smiling down from the walls of the Curia Pompeii two centuries later as Julius Caesar was cheerfully being stabbed to death by Brutus and friends.

I have kept my figures locked in the clothing fashions of the late 18th century partly for aesthetic reasons (i.e. I like them), partly as a homage to Rowlandson and partly to make the point that such is the spell cast by art over human history that many of the stories I have read from the ancient world are as modern and relevant today as I am sure they will be well into the future. Time and fashion are therefore irrelevant and we are free to choose.

So I hope that in the future, I shall be able to use the new things I have learned to highlight not only changes but also the things about us which stay the same; to say something new with something old and to offer something challenging and thought provoking without sacrificing everything artists of the past have tried to teach us.