Andrew Marr’s ‘A short book about painting’

A thoughtful, opinionated analysis of the challenge facing the abstract artist

I’ve been a fan of Andrew Marr ever since he was the BBC Political Editor in the early noughties: he brought a potentially dry subject to life, with evident relish and wit. His book ‘My Trade’ about the inside of journalism and the BBC should be on everyone’s must-read list.

In more recent years, he has revealed his hobby of drawing and painting. His ‘short book about drawing’ was an enjoyable, breezy read, and disarmingly candid about his own struggles to get things right. His more recent ‘A short book about painting’ is an altogether more substantial work. It’s short, but it’s dense. It seems to be the product of some lengthy thought on the problems to be solved when creating (and, argues Marr, when viewing) ‘abstract’ art.

He tackles this one problem at a time: chapters covering ‘taste’, ‘colour’ and ‘motif’ will give you a feel for where he’s coming from. He’s not shy about stating his view: as a result there are parts of the book where I found myself questioning every sentence. I think that this is exactly what he’s after. After all, more or less every word written about art is, almost by definition, subjective.

A general point of view I find persuasive is that it’s not possible for an abstract artist to ignore the real world completely. As he says

Vision evolved not for artistic pleasure but to keep us alive… We are unable to see without reading messages and decoding them… Artists who attempt to keep us… thinking about the act of painting… will have to accept that image decoding cannot be divorced from the present act of looking.

He has many examples: it’s hard to deny that our emotional reaction to colour is impacted by the colours of what we see in the natural world.

All in all this is an indeed short but not entirely easy read, but well worth he effort.