When talking about art, I find it difficult not to generalise.

I say things like “Toulouse-Lautrec: he’s the man”. These kind of statements allow the character of the artist to overtake the importance of any specific works. I may have one or two paintings or drawings in mind but, more probably, by making such a vague statement, I refer more broadly to the style or tone of Lautrec’s work. Sometimes, this is intentional. Often, it is not.

I’ve been trying to figure out why we (or at least I) think this way. In the studio it is rare that I’ll actually stop and refer to a specific work by another artist. If I do, it is usually to clarify something very particular, like a printing technique or compositional idiosyncracy. Usually, I just make blanket assimilations in my mind of an artist’s entire catalogue. Let me give a few examples, to clarify:

Rachel Whiteread

I often use Rachel Whiteread as an example when talking about my work, as I think there is an ideological similarity in the starting point for her work and mine (though the physical outcome is very different). I roll it all up into one big ball of vague and say, “her sculptures and installations focus on the method of their own production. The idea of the final work as ‘a relic of its artistic process’ is essential.” This idea is the basis for most of my current work, and I use Whiteread’s oeuvre simply to illustrate that you can reach very different conclusions by exploring the same (quite specific) idea. However, at no point in the allusion do I refer closely to an individual work — the idea, and the sweeping mention of “her sculptures and installations”, are enough to make my point.

Matisse ‘cutouts’

I attended the Matisse show at the Tate Modern a couple of months ago, and it blew my mind. If you haven’t been, go. I mention it now just to say that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it in the days and weeks since. However, looking back at the exhibition today, I see it not as a series of individual images, which I could isolate and flick through in my mind, but instead as a blur. I think of all the smiling people, the colour that moved irrationally from one frame to the next, and the sheer volume of work — the joyous urgency of an old man in the decade before his death.

Leonardo drawings

Renaissance drawings have always had magnetic hold over me. It’s hard to say whether my love for works on paper came before or after my own production of drawings, but I can at least say they remain closely tied. Of the 15/16th century draughtsmen I return to often (and they are, sadly, mostly men), Leonardo is king. Very few people would challenge the quality of his drawings, but what’s more remarkable to me is the diversity of styles, subjects, and mediums used by the artist. However, in my mind, when working on something in the studio, I think only of “Leonardo’s drawings”, and shape the image of his work to fit my needs. I exploit Leonardo’s diversity, focusing on a particular tone used in a number of consolidated drawings, and allow any of his other styles or methods to fade into the subconscious.

Originally, I concluded that the reason for all my generalisations must be the usual ‘short attention-span, internet generation, complacency of technology’ bullshit. I’m sure that’s relevant, but it struck me just how negative — not to mention assumptive — that answer is. The term ‘generalisation’ is so skewed, so loaded, that it seems almost impossible that there are any merits to generalising. This triggered one of those weird clicks in the brain, and reminded me of a sentence in Ernst Gombrich’s Norm and Form (1966):

Art historians like all users of language must admit that classification is a necessary tool but the problem inherent in formulating such systems is that they create the illusion that one is dealing with ‘natural’ rather than man-made classes.

Gombrich’s admission that classification (or generalisation — a bit of a leap, I know, but a necessary one) is imperative, suggests an inherent merit in the action. I’d like to expand on this idea, that ‘generalisation is necessary’, and suggest that generalisation might also be voluntarily used, to aid practical and conceptual efforts in the visual arts.

When I think of John Piper, I think not of a single parish church, but an amalgam of waxy, inky, blotchy crumbling stone walls and spires from all over Europe. I can focus that thought, and concentrate on a single image that I know well, but my first (and most natural) thought is the kaleidoscopic Piper, the unchecked stream of blue-black tracery, etc. This holistic image of Piper as all his work helps me to work quickly; it allows me to imagine crenellations and tombstones in his style, without needing to refer to the slow reality of an individual painting or drawing.

Indeed, not only are these visual generalisations helpful, at times they are essential. The specific history or connotations of an artwork, such as Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library (2000), can actually result in a loss of focus in the studio. Similarly, when thinking about the cutouts in the Tate Modern show, if bogged down by each microscopic example of Matisse’s collage technique, the exhibition would be far from the buoyant reference point it is in my mind today (this holds equally true for the thousands of scribbles by Leonardo).

We are, on the whole, taught not generalise. As is often the case, it seems like art might be an exception. I can’t see many of the ideas outlined above holding much water in a debate about chemistry or economics (or any other ‘serious’ subject based on reason and fact), but art isn’t based on logic or statistics. It’s often based on feelings and urges and sensations that you really can’t put your finger on, both when talking about art and when making art.

So yeah, I think I’ll continue generalising. Toulouse-Lautrec really is the man.