Brian Fielding was a painter who used the language of paint with great sensitivity and articulation.
In the early 1980s he was a tutor at Ravensbourne College of Art; quiet, serious and unassuming. I was a seventeen-year-old student there at that time. He was known as a very capable artist. Although I wasn't taught by him, I met him and sensed an aura about him. Later when I saw his work I associated it with Roger Hilton, who also succeeded in articulating emotion in the language of paint. Fielding’s work seems to take this articulation a step further, in that his work appear to emphasise the ability of paint to, as Patrick Heron called it, "render perceptions actual". Sensitivity in paint, nuanced voices that speak slowly and gently through the medium.
Reaching up and out, like a brush mark to some oblique idea of purpose. The point at which a work is left, Guston said, is "when it stops following you around like a cat". Leaving off and then touched again, the associations with music are well-known with abstraction in painting, but this can miss the depth of the actuality or materiality of the paint, the voice of the paint itself. Sounds in the distance, the need for monastic-like peace for the work to appear from the brain’s blur to some form of clarity that is specific but not literal.
So much observation of painting wants an answer, a clarification. If one is trying to be specific about a feeling, a meaning, like Grey November how can one do it? Everyone will have different associations with this expression. Names for many paintings are ‘footholds’ or ‘ways in’. Is this his November, the artist’s November, or my November? It is a directive to an emotional world that may or may not have resonance for the viewer. I think the only approach is to be open to the language of the paint, and the only education needed for this is developing a sensibility to paint. The work of Fielding as an educator must have encouraged his students to open up their sensibility to the sophistication and liberation of paintings voices.
Look at Ground Plan: for me the ‘ground’ makes me think of rugby pitches at school, places that were cold and unpleasant, ice on the ground…black shorts, and a grinding feeling of distress and heaviness, with, somewhere in the distance a hope of escape…This is one reading of the work from my stance, what I associate with it. On another occasion it will perhaps be something else. Raw and basic to it is the way in which the paint is somehow alive, allowing these feelings. This is what happens when an artist is capable of this level of ability with paint. One might find works by others, there is even a website that sells works ‘in the style of’ anyone you like, but it misses the point; it is not about a look. So much of the art market plays into the hands of a commercialist system, a rarified product, like designer clothing. I believe Fielding dismissed this notion of art as product.
While painting lends itself to become object and is not dematerialised work (as many artists of his time were trying to affect), his work is speaking about the dematerialised. It is not possible to own what he is doing in the paintings, even if you own the painting. Many of the painters of his generation were believers in the idea of works being in public collections so that they were available to all. Naturally the market finds other buyers and private collectors. There is something special about owning the works of artists and having them in a domestic environment, almost to look after them for a while. It has nothing to do with decoration, it is the antithesis of that, it is cultural warmth and may not even include the exchange of money. Barry Flanagan, in 1972 made his own money and put these lino print notes in a suitcase. He ‘bought’ other artist/friends' work with the ‘artwork/money’. It was symbolic of ‘cultural exchange’ rather than financial.
Where does a painting go…? A painter I once knew used to worry his works were ‘working’ for a while and then somehow ‘died’…he referred to it as "long since past their sell-by date". What is absorbed from a painted surface between one person and another? Painting is saying something, it is speaking, it has ideas. Too often people appear to be educated with questions and answers and there is no value for ‘vagueness’; yet emotions are often vague, non-specific, at the same time that they are, in a sense, precise, certain, meaningful. Translate this into paint and I look at works by Fielding which allow the possibility of specific-vague-meaning; a place, a position which is very much where painting thrives.
Fielding's works are deeply aware of painting's history within the language of paint. This generation of artists seemed to re-see paintings by Renaissance artists only in terms of the nuances of human sensibility realised in the handling of paint on a surface. Equally one can use ‘insensitivity’ as another form of this language, as the Bad Painting School did in the 1980s. One has to become attuned to it in the way one has to become attuned to conceptual ideas, the way ideas develop and speak to the audience. It is a nuanced language of poetry in paint.
During the late 1990s and early 2000s a move away from 'Conceptual Painting' to a process of using the art market as the art itself meant that the works themselves did not matter except as ploys to the action, the process. This ultimately becomes very harsh. I sometimes think how appropriate it was that ‘The Shard’ (meaning a sharp fragment of glass or metal) should have been designed during this period. It seems to symbolise a cultural shift which celebrated the hard, cold, triumphal, cutting and repulsing. What could be more contrasting to these paintings by Fielding of gentleness, warmth, humility, allowing and embracing?
Michael Bracewell put it very succinctly when he coined the phrase ‘when surface was depth’, this is a world away from the mindset of works like these by Fielding. They do not consider the notion of detachment or removal. They are bodily, often painted on the floor or on canvases one can almost enter due to their scale.
What does the artist do who does not want to involve themselves in established structures of recognition? Many artists of Fielding’s generation found the hardness of commercialism interfered with their working practice; the increasing need for an artist to become a self-promoting businessman. Rather they were brought into consciousness of art seen from a much more Romantic point of view: the artist as monk, or contemplative, spending many hours before making the next mark, a way of working that was perhaps influenced by Zen Buddhism. The artist Basil Beattie has referred to this time spent looking. He talked about "looking obliquely": a contemplative form of driving at something but not quite knowing what.
I think it is right that artists should try to liberate art from a system that turns it into a form of pure commodity. The Pop Art movement was ‘against’ commercialism, particularly American, and yet it has now become regarded as a celebration of it. Many talk of new technology as a means to free art from pure product which may well work, but the sensibility of touch that is involved in dust ground into oil and applied to cloth seems unlikely to be possible digitally.
If it’s not broken you don’t need to fix it. Modernism broke around the time Fielding died. It could no longer fulfil its promise; a curious mix of left-wing politics and anti-religious belief, admiring of literal forms paired down to the ‘basic form’ based ultimately on the Enlightenment rationalism and a Protestant mindset that had become cultural rather than ecclesiastical. But the beauty of Modernism was the desire for this pure form, this basic ground of felt experience that could be articulated directly. Like the Protestant revolution that dispensed with ritual and votives and said the believer had a direct line to God. So the artist pared down to the point of pure feeling into form, directly from mind to the material. The marvellous and generous works of Fielding are a gift to those who spend time with them. They humbly speak through the language he was so evidently masterly with. They are not ‘about the artist’s feelings’ they are about feeling made into a form. This language cannot be used any more, we who are ‘Post’ Modern are stuck with being self-conscious, conceptually aware of ourselves in a way that did not exist before the collapse of Modernism.
The delicacy of handling and speaking through paint, controlled with authority that is gleaned from the process of looking and thinking in that medium. It is a deeply enriching experience that has nothing to do with the external workings of market forces, but is its own purity. The realities that create it are, like food and drink and health, necessities, but that is all. What is really going on is something special and invigorating, a mind's felt experience actualised in a material form that is visually transferable, a feeling eye. There is a beautiful drawing by Roger Hilton, the gallery called it Nude and Object but it is quite obvious to me that the ‘object’ is an eye and the tentacle lines coming from it are its feeling out towards the ‘Nude’. I always think of it as the feeling eye which I think is an appropriate description of Brian Fielding’s achievement as a painter.
Images courtesy Jonathan Clark Fine Art https://jcfa.co.uk/artists/158-brian-fielding/works/
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