Friday is the last day to see the Ambrose McEvoy exhibition at the Philip Mould Gallery on Pall Mall. And when I say it’s the last day to see it, I mean it, as most of the paintings will go back to their regular lives filling space in gallery basements and private collections.

Although described at the time as the prince of fashionable portrait painters, McEvoy managed to fall into obscurity and failed to be remembered in the way Sargent and Zorn and others in the genre have been. Philip Mould believes this is the result of timing, more than anything else. Having been most active in the late 1910s and 20s, his bright and bold high society portraits were most likely out of step with a society suffering the aftershocks of a brutal world war. 

But today his paintings sparkle. His paint is thick, layered, vibrant and often outrageous and his strokes chaotic yet somehow cohesive. It is difficult to believe he was able to lay dramatic strokes of pure viridian or vermillion without upsetting the colour harmony. Up close they are an abstract mess of pigment piled and dragged and smooshed onto the canvas. From afar, the colours meld into beautiful clarity. Photographs simply do not do them justice.

The unfinished works on display give some indications of his processes. He would streak and smear massive globs of colour over the surface, building layers and texture, finding and losing and refinding his drawing. He would paint semi-transparent layers of white over the work and then build accents over the top. He would create a kind of chaos on the canvas that he would eventually, somehow, reconcile. 

Funny, then, that in his early years studying at the Slade he was so scathing of the “lack of any methodical training” at the school, despite later developing a method so seemingly lacking in… well, method. It suggests that with a masterful understanding of the core principles and a keen eye for design, you can paint as maniacally as you want.

McEvoy didn’t paint likenesses. He painted paintings, capturing instead some kind of essence of his sitters. He was unafraid of idealising or exaggerating his sitters’ most defining features – often the eyes – and to stunning effect.

According to those who sat for him, McEvoy painted quickly, ferociously, laying down his strokes, rushing back to see the effect and then coming back in with another brush loaded with colour.

It sounds as though he lived that way too, working tirelessly, trying always to please his clients and attempting to finish paintings despite ill health. This contributed to his early death of pneumonia in his late 40s, and what a shame, because really his painting style was one of kind.

Art, Science and a few other things

Dr Charles Whitehead continues his series of blog posts on the purpose of art from the viewpoint of anthropology.

When I first started to prepare my talk I had an overwhelming urge to use the title page of Galileo’s Il Saggiatore as my first slide. I knew what I wanted to say about this book, but I had no idea why I wanted it in this talk – it has no obvious relevance to art or what art is for. It was some time before I realised a connection. I had recently heard Ann commenting – with a hint of satisfaction – on how much art and science have in common. I guess this followed from “Viewing the Invisible” last September, a creative initiative by LFAS and King’s College, bringing artists and scientists together to compare processes and explore parallels between two disciplines often thought of as polar opposites. In 2018 King’s opened the Science Gallery “where science and art collide”, Central St Martin’s offers an MA in Art and Science, and there are quite a few other initiatives attempting to bridge the two with what often seems to me a naive enthusiasm.

Many scientists regard Galileo’s book as the foundation stone of modern physics. In this work he describes the universe as a Grand Book written in the language of mathematics. This statement has probably done more than any other to drive scientists mad. They love to quote this claim, but seldom cite the rest of the sentence: “…and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures…” That’s the part that makes it sound a bit less grand and a bit more… well, odd.

It’s true that many things in science can be described and predicted by mathematical equations. But equations are things that just sit there passively on a page or blackboard or back of an envelope. They don’t do anything. And there always has to be something else – something dynamic – that the equations describe. What no one can tell us is what puts the fire into the equations – why, for example, E = mc² tells us nothing about the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The ghost of Galileo is still alive today, and never more so than since 1948 when Claude Shannon, pioneer of digital computing, published “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in the Bell System Technical Journal. His aim was quite modest – how to send a message through a noisy channel and have it received with minimal error. Computers never know what anything means, and Shannon was not interested in meaning either. He made “information” synonymous with“entropy” (originally a measure of disorder), and defined “information” as the number of bits required to encode a message. So the sentence “What hath God wrought?” (a Bible quote which just happens to be the wording of the first telegram sent from Washington to Baltimore in 1844)  and its scrambled rearrangement ‘a?thh Gugod aWwt hroht’ both require 176 bits in ASCII. Computing had divorced information from meaning.

In 1948, Shannon could hardly have foreseen that his telecommunications work would make him the “father of information theory”, with enormous impact on far-flung realms of thought. He had given to modern science and philosophy an irresistible gift – a perfect instrument of abstraction from reality. Though Shannon is not particularly famous, his impact on western culture has been substantial. Many theoretical physicists now believe that the universe is not made of matter and energy. They think it’s made of bits (binary digits, 1 and 0, like the bits in your computer). Further, the three dimensional world that we think we live in is a delusion. It’s a hologram coded in two-dimensional pixels on the “event horizon” of the universe – though no one knows where that might be. You may think you have a solid body, but you’re more like a paper cut-out living in Flatland.

The same computer-based thinking has hijacked psychology and neuroscience as well. Cognitive scientists assume that the function of the brain is to turn input into output, using an input-processing-output model derived from computing. But brains have to be doing organs before they can become thinking organs. That is obvious in evolution – an animal than doesn’t move is not going to evolve neurones. And until it has neurones to control its movement, it’s not going to evolve sensory organs. So you have output first, then processing, then input last. The same applies when a baby develops in the womb. The foetal brain grows output nerves to muscles before it receives input nerves from sense organs. Again, output first and input last. The computer metaphor for mind and brain leads to a tunnel-vision science that ignores or underestimates the importance of spontaneous output-first behaviours, which means just about everything that makes us human.

Now this is relevant to art, because art is spontaneous in children. It’s one of those things that enable them to grow into healthy, happy and constructive adults – so long as they are loved and no one gets in the way. Babies show a lively interest in bold colourful pictures as soon as they are old enough to sit up on mother’s lap. And at nine or twelve months they start to make marks on any surface – even their own bodies – whether with paint, crayons, jam, or faeces. Art is part of the spontaneous (output-first) and playful things that babies and children do for fun – and in doing so assure their own development and socialization. The narrow thinking of cognitive scientists just cannot accommodate this spontaneous self-development, which is why they get so much wrong when they try to understand art. Colwyn Trevarthen, who spent forty years studying babies and pre-school infants in different cultures, put it like this: “Cognitive science, restricting the role of motives and emotions, puts childhood play and imagination behind bars.”

Now that I’ve told you a few of the things that scientists get wrong, I think I can explain what art and science have in common and how they are profoundly different.

First, both art and science are exploratory behaviours. 

Many animals have curiosity and will investigate things. Laboratory rats will explore a maze and discover where a food reward has been hidden. Curiosity is what motivates science. Einstein emphasized the role of wonder: “Anyone who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” But he also believed that “the process of scientific discovery is, in effect, a continual flight from wonder.” Which is one difference between science and art.

Science has ancient evolutionary roots, because it works in exactly the same way as perception. Light is focussed on our retinas in an unedited way. But the brain interprets this information, creating “object hypotheses” and constructing models of the world, very much like a scientist. When the model makes a wrong prediction, the brain will modify the model and try again. In exactly the same way, scientists must revise their theories whenever a theory makes a wrong prediction. So perception is exploratory. Babies learn to perceive by exploring their environment – picking things up and putting them in their mouths, knocking things down, crawling around and bumping into things, and so on. Even invertebrates like octopus and squid have evolved eyes that work very much like ours, so perception is an ancient and widespread adaptation.

But many vertebrates – especially social carnivores and primates – have evolved a more sophisticated form of exploration that enables their young to develop skills and knowledge – especially social skills and knowledge about themselves and others. They play. Even herbivores may have some form of play. A lamb gambols, so exploring the potentials of its own body. Young carnivores will do a lot of play-fighting, so exploring social relations and dominance relations, as well as their own bodily capacities. This is called embodied play – discovering what your body can do and exploring the physical and social environment.

Embodied play begins very early in human babies. Only 30 minutes after birth they can imitate the facial expressions of their mother – the beginning of contingent mirror play. If the mother sticks out her tongue, so will the baby; if the baby gurgles, the mother gurgles back. And this is not a case of simple imitation, as assumed by too many cognitive scientists. Babies spontaneously initiate such games themselves, and if the mother refuses to respond (as confirmed in laboratory research), the baby will make strenuous efforts to get her to play. If those efforts fail, the baby will lapse into what looks like severe depression. 

Embodied play continues throughout life. Children will climb trees, swing on swings, play-fight, ride on carousels, and play games like tag and king-of-the-castle. Football is a conventionalized form of embodied play, and a goal scored in a big match can rouse powerful emotions in an audience of billions, even though a goal delivers no obvious economic or biological reward (unless you have a bet on the outcome). Many animals enjoy embodied play. Dogs, for example, enjoy play-fighting, fetch, and bait-and-snatch. It’s the most primitive form of play.

…we might say that art is less primitive and more sophisticated than science.

In human infants, pretend play begins twelve months later than embodied play. The first kind of pretend play is called projective pretence, because an idea is projected onto a toy which represents, but is not mistaken for, a real thing – such as pretending that stones are sweets, or a toy aeroplane is a real aeroplane, or pretending a doll is a baby and feeding it with imaginary food. Other than human children, pretend play has only been observed with certainty in great apes, unless you count play-fighting as pretence.

Human play also develops into what I call “performance”. For example, around three months of age babies begin to synchronise melodic babbling with balletic limb movements – the beginning of song-and-dance display. Their early interest in bold colourful pictures is the beginning of art, followed by their own mark-making at least six months later. These are examples of embodied performance. Performance is similar to play – being pursued “just for fun” – but, unlike play, performance can also be goal-directed and manipulative. This is true in certain animals as well as humans. For example, two or more dolphins can engage in song-and-dance display, with rhythmic whistles and buzzes synchronised with body movements. Performance can be used for social grooming (establishing and maintaining friendships and alliances) and social entrainment (establishing rapport and enabling two or more “selfish” individuals to behave like one great big selfish individual). Dolphin song-and-dance displays are used to threaten potential opponents (“if you attack me you attack my friends”), or to bully females (“we can do this the hard way or the easy way”).

Just as embodied play can lead to embodied performance, so pretend (representational) play can lead to  mimetic (representational) performance, such as iconic art (creating pictures, often of the “mummy, daddy, and me” variety). 

As exploratory behaviours, we can say that both science and art are extensions of play. But science, exploring the physical world, is an extension of embodied play, whereas art is an extension of pretend play (making representational toys). Further, art is a performance. Science too is a form of performance, though largely at an intellectual level, whereas art involves entrainment at all levels – kinaesthetic, body image, sensation, and emotion, as well as the intellectual level of ideas. As performance is a refinement of play, and pretend play is more sophisticated than embodied play, we might say that art is less primitive and more sophisticated than science. The ultimate roots of science are even more primitive than play – in curiosity, pre-social exploration, and perception. In my last blog I also suggested that the aesthetic aspect of art – particularly evident in “decorative” pattern-making – is also ancient. But it cannot pre-date perception.

On the other hand, we can also argue the other way round, making art more primitive than science. From a historic perspective, art is much older than science (in the strict sense of the term). Our ancestors were making vivid representational art at least 35 thousand years ago, whereas the first systematic science – astronomy and medicine in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt – is a tenth of that age. Further, our intellectual abilities are certainly less primitive than our sensual and emotional capacities, though every department of mental life has become more sophisticated as humans evolved. 

Perhaps we should call it quits 

But wait…

I am a scientist (if only part time) and I think science is great. It can do a lot of good for humanity and all living things (when it’s not being abused for political ends). But scientists are a different matter. Most scientists today are guilty of what I regard as a serious sin. They have embraced an ideology called “physicalism”. People who don’t believe in physicalism call it “scientism” – presenting something which is not science as “scientific fact”. Physicalists believe that the universe evolved for 13.8 billion years “in the dark”, until brains of sufficient complexity evolved, and then a miracle occurred – consciousness “arose” from “physical processes” in the brain. They believe that everything in the universe is reducible to physics. 

Only art can speak to the human heart.

Physics is the study of the movement of bodies in space. Physicalists believe this means the movement of dead bodies propelled by meaningless forces. But it is surely self-evident that consciousness cannot be reduced to the movement of dead bodies in dead space. Which means that physicalism is just plain wrong. And it’s not just scientifically wrong, it’s morally wrong, because (if we accept the rhetoric) it affects the way we see ourselves – as deterministic, mechanistic, depressing robots – with no conceivable role for consciousness, free will, compassion, or other positive qualities that make us human. Since we can’t have any free will, there is nothing we can do to make the world better unless it was predetermined from the moment of the (miraculous?) Big Bang.

Art too can do a lot of good for the world. But artists too have committed a sin called “postmodernism”. It’s not quite as bad as physicalism, but it’s all about deconstructing the very idea of art. I twice saw Damien Hirst (the wealthiest artist in the world) being interviewed on television. Both times he was asked to define art, and both times he said “Art is anything you put in an art gallery.” In other words, there was no art until someone had the brilliant idea of creating a gallery to put it in. In effect, he is saying “There is no such thing as art, but as long as you want to give me vast sums of lovely cash for my non-art, I won’t complain.” It’s cynical, and it’s probably the result of physicalism.

Science has limitations which are not shared by art. You cannot use science to sing a baby to sleep or relax a child with a bedtime story. That takes art. Only art can speak to the human heart. There is a lot of good that artists can do, but I think one important duty of art is to repudiate physicalism.

Theodore Major – a visionary artist from my home town (Wigan) – said:

The purpose of art is to find and express meaning and understanding of man’s spiritual existence on earth.

Post script:

I left out an important point – that physicalism is not the only ideology that has influenced science, as well as education and western culture more generally. Another influential bias is the Protestant work ethic – associated with the rise of capitalism and the industrial revolution – resulting in an ethos which values work over play, object over social skills, logic over imagination, and science and technology over the arts. I think that is one reason why so many people are interested in forging links between art and science – it’s an attempt to reaffirm the value of art.

There are other ideological biases affecting science, notably western individualism (which undervalues human sociality including the social significance of art), cognocentrism (the input-processing-output paradigm which neglects output-first behaviours like child art), genocentrism (the idea that “selfish genes” and “selfish memes” determine what we are and God is a parasitic virus), and logocentrism (the attribution of such major importance to language that other social mirrors – including art – get overlooked). These are discussed more fully in my chapter “Health, development, and the culture-ready brain” in The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience (Oxford University Press). Download DOCX

If you fancy a more pungent critique of western science (and are interested in the paranormal!) send me an email and I will send you two articles from the latest issues of The Paranormal Review – drcwhitehead@aol.com.

Ancient origins and aesthetics

Last term, Dr Charles Whitehead gave a fascinating talk entitled ‘What is art for? – An anthropological view’. However, with enough material to fill a book, there simply was not enough time to cover everything. He has kindly agreed to carry on the discussion over the course of several blog posts, starting here.

Ann asked me to write a “short summary” of my talk. That’s a very hard thing to do because my talk was already too short – the things I covered were glossed over far too briefly and many things I wanted to talk about had to be left out. So I think I should just blog a series of topics, starting with one I did not talk about.

So take a look at the picture of the Makapangsgat pebble. This is a jasperite pebble with a striking red-brown colour, and it is a natural object – no one carved or drilled it to make it look like a human face. But it was found in a cave with Australopithecine bones, in deposits dated to three million years ago. And it must have been carried to the spot, because the nearest source of jasperite is five kilometres away. It seems some Australopithecine found it interesting enough to pick it up and carry it to the cave.

In Uganda, young chimpanzees – our closest relatives – have been filmed playing with sticks and stones as though they are babies, even making a nest at night to put the “baby” in. Captive apes love to play with dolls. So it seems likely that pretend play (make-believe or “imaginative play”) is at least seven million years old (when the last common ancestor of chimps and humans lived). If so, it would be no surprise if some Australopithecine child picked up a face-like stone to play with. I believe that the earliest iconic “art” – that is, something chosen or made to look like something real – would have been a child’s toy. You might say that more modern artworks are toys for grown ups.

Now look at the second picture. This shows one of two abalone shells used for making paint, accompanied by grindstones, all with traces of haematite or red ochre – found in Blombos cave, South Africa. The cave was evidently used as a workshop around 100 thousand years ago, and it seems red paint was being manufactured on a near-industrial scale – over 8,000 pieces of ochre were found, often polished smooth by rubbing or grinding, and some of them engraved with cross-hatched lines. Similar zigzag markings were made on a shell found in Indonesia dated to 430,000 years ago, presumably made by Homo erectus. Archaeologists argue about such things, but a reasonable consensus holds that the likeliest use for ochre would have been body-painting. 

Body-painting is not usually iconic, and may represent what developmental psychologists call “mark-making” behaviour, as in the “scribble stage” in the development of child art. Or it could involve non-figurative patterns. Zigzag lines also represent pattern-making, which began in our ancestors almost half a million years ago, and perhaps earlier. Many animals seem to enjoy mark-making when given suitable materials. Animal paintings often have an apparent sense of pattern, though never quite so organised or geometric as those created by Homo erectus (and Neanderthals). Not just chimpanzees, but also monkeys, elephants, a beluga whale, naked mole rat, and even Bini the Bunny have produced paintings which are a kind of kinaesthetic play. Many zoos have now inaugurated “enrichment programmes”, including painting activity, to relieve boredom in captive animals.

Creating iconic images (representational art) and making patterns (“decorative” art) are two very different activities and may have evolved independently. Of the two, only pattern-making is necessarily aesthetic – that is, having colours, shapes, and composition that are intended to be visually pleasing in their own right. Mark-making probably also has aesthetic motivation, but this is hard to prove. Certainly, art critics have been fooled into writing rave reviews about animal paintings, believing them to be the work of talented human artists. 

Philosophers and scientists who study aesthetics often define the aesthetic as any sensory or emotional response to art – even horror and revulsion. This risks obscuring the fact that there is a double dissociation between art and aesthetics – all that is aesthetic is not art (think of a beautiful sunset), and all that is art is not aesthetic (the art of Gobekli Tepe is intentionally nasty and repugnant – more on this later). A relatively new sub-discipline in brain science – neuroaesthetics – also tends to conflate “art” and “aesthetics”. This kind of thinking further collides with a popular biological opinion that aesthetic responses evolved to support adaptive choices – indentifying things that favour genetic fitness, such as the selection of ideal potential mates and locations that provide food, water, safety, shelter, and comfort. This biological view defines aesthetics in terms of attractiveness and beauty, and I prefer to stick with that more traditional view.

We can certainly argue for a very ancient origin for aesthetic sensibilities. When a peacock woos a peahen by displaying his gorgeous tail, it is hard to believe that the peahen is not emotionally moved by its beauty. The fact that we humans can also appreciate the beauty of those iridescent colours and multiple eye patterns – not to mention the stunning song-and-dance displays of birds of paradise – might even suggest that there is something universal about beauty. We can also appreciate the beauty of the bold wing patterns of certain butterflies. These patterns can serve such functions as camouflage and predator defence, but they also serve to attract choosey females. So even insects may have aesthetic responses.

Though chimps can read photographs and enjoy television shows, only humans are known to create iconic representations.

Neuroaesthetic research implicates very primitive brain regions in humans. For example, a study of people listening to their favourite music – the kind that gave them “chills” – found that these chills were linked to increased activity in the reward centres of the brain, just as the brain responds to food, sex, and drugs. These are part of the limbic system, the oldest part of the brain, which is similarly present in reptiles as well as mammals. There must be more to it than that of course, because we do not usually regard the pleasures of sex and eating as “aesthetic”. The reward centres do send signals to the prefrontal neocortex, where such distinctions might be made. The neocortex is the most recently evolved part of the brain, and the prefrontal lobe, which serves important social functions such as empathy and compassion, is the last region to become highly expanded during human evolution, and the last region to mature in young adults. Some of us would regard our aesthetic experiences as transcendent or spiritual, but most scientists regard such things as embarrassing and wrong. Neurotheologians study the neural correlates of spiritual experience, and not all of them are atheists. So far I am not aware of any collaboration between them and neuroaestheticians.

I think we can conclude that there are two distinct kinds of behaviour and response that can (but do not always) converge to form the foundations of what we regard as “art” today. Aesthetic responses, that can motivate mark-making behaviour and are certainly required for “decorative” pattern-making, seem to be extremely ancient and common to many animals. 

Making iconic images, on the other hand, depends on pretend play, which has been observed only in our nearest ape relatives, and is uniquely elaborated in humans. Indeed, though chimps can read photographs and enjoy television shows (such as boxing matches and the movie King Kong) only humans are known to create iconic representations, and the earliest evidence for that ability may not be much older than 300 thousand years. The Berekhat Ram “Venus” is a scoria pebble which has been apparently engraved to enhance its resemblance to a female figure. Kill-joy archaeologists argue that the pebble is entirely natural, but there is no naturally occurring scoria anywhere near the place where it was found – a Homo erectus site on the Golan Heights in Israel. Microscopic examination has convinced others that the grooves around the neck and along the arms have been deliberately engraved. Similar arguments apply to the “Venus figurine” found near Tan Tan in Morocco.

One thing these objects are certainly not is Venus figurines, which are beautifully carved sculptures of the Upper Palaeolithic, widely distributed across Europe and Eurasia, starting around 200 thousand years later. I think it much more likely that they were dolls, made by or for children to play with.

So what does all this tell us about what art if for?

The earliest archaeological evidence points to two distinct kinds of behaviour. The first suggests kinaesthetic play – exploring the possibilities of bodily movement when artificially extended with engraving tools or paint, and the feelings that can be evoked by such action. This is one kind of embodied play and many animals are capable of enjoying it. The second suggests pretend play, or imaginative play using iconic toys that represent real things. During child development in modern humans, embodied play begins within an hour of birth, preceding pretend play which follows around a year later. And both these forms of play are part of the spontaneous repertoire of human infants, which enable them to grow themselves into healthy and socially constructive adults. Nor does play end with childhood, being essential to health and happiness throughout life.

As George Berhard Shaw put it: “We do not stop playing because we are old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

Like many people, I stumbled into London Fine Art Studios (LFAS) by chance one rainy day in search of art materials. At this point in my life two years ago I was in the process of rediscovering a neglected love of art, though I was unaware there were still schools teaching the methods of the artists who inspired me – many of whom, like Philip De Laszlo, are long dead. After a tour of the studios, I knew I had to enrol. But it wasn’t for another year that I was able to arrange my life and save enough money to commit to a year of studies. 

The first year flew by. I became embedded in a community of likeminded individuals and learned more than I could have imagined in such a short space of time. I could feel myself progressing with each term. Yet after every Ah ha! moment – and there have been many – there spanned before me a wilderness of new, unforeseen challenges to overcome. Us artists, it seems, are endlessly chasing this horizon but the journey is neither fast nor free. 

Having looked up to, been taught by and made friends with many of the award’s previous recipients, I was keen to put myself forward for it.  

On my first visit to LFAS I was impressed by the relationship it had established with the De Laszlo Foundation and after my first year of full-time studies, I was finally eligible to apply for the De Laszlo Scholarship. Having looked up to, been taught by and made friends with many of the award’s previous recipients, I was keen to put myself forward for it.  

It has been an honour to have been granted the scholarship. Not only has it provided me with funding to continue my studies and rent my studio, it has also given me the confidence and support I need to pursue my dream of working as a professional figurative artist.

The award is not just a bursary to help students get by financially for another term. It helps to establish them firmly within the school and provides an extra rung in the ladder on their way into the dizzying world of professional fine art. Each De Laszlo scholar is following in the footsteps of a succession of great artists and it is a privilege to be a part of this tradition.