Abstract painting as visual haiku?
Ella Clocksin (2000) Two Bowls, Indian ink
Haiku poems connect an inner realisation to something noticed in the external world in just seventeen syllables. The reductive editing of forms, and a sense of the interior landscape intersecting with the external landscape are central to my own visual language. And I've often associated abstract painting with the eloquent brevity of Japanese haiku.
The Visual Haiku was the name of the first open call exhibition I entered work for, via [a-n] Artists' Newsletter in 2001. I was thrilled when they took three paintings. Two Bowls, shown here, was one of them.
There's something about working with a set form that enables improvisation. Tweets, knock-knock jokes, waltzes, fugues, limericks and sonnets all impose structure within which to work. By restricting some choices, we search deeper and wider within the boundaries of a set form.
Contemporary haiku have loosened things up a bit, but there is no literal analogy in my paintings for the measurable rigour of traditional haiku. There's no seventeen-point structure in three phrases, and no signalling the cut or transition in meaning. I've been using haiku as a metaphor for abstract painting, with abstracted and reductive brush marks standing in for the minimalism of the form. But could I design a more haiku-like painting process?
Would limiting the means sharpen up the mark-making, when every mark has to count? Could I make work with just seventeen marks, unedited? Would counting marks while painting be really annoying? And what counts as a mark, anyway?
And what about changes of mind? In my process-becomes-form type of painting, earlier workings show as traces of what went before, as the workings used to show in a good maths exam. Haiku poets must do as much crossing out as any other kind of writer. But the crossed-out words don't count in the final tally. I erase as much as I add, so would barely-visible ghost marks count?
Project Visual Haiku: can abstract painting be visual haiku? Or just haiku-ish?
The following blog post was first published on 28 February 2018, and is pasted in here because it was somehow lost to when I transferred to new website on 2 May 2023. It continues the painting-as-haiku question.
'Haiku 02' Selected For 2018 RWS Contemporary Watercolour Competition
28 Feb, 2018
Ella Clocksin (2017) Haiku 02, watercolour & collage, 19 x 25.4 cm
I am so pleased to be selected again for the RWS Contemporary Watercolour Competition, for innovative work in water-based media. I took Haiku 02 up to Bankside Gallery on Monday ready for the private view this Thursday, and am hoping the beast-from-the-east snow forecast is wrong.
I've long felt that some of my small-scale paintings are haiku-like, but it’s nothing to do with physical structure. Haiku (the word is both singular and plural) is a tiny Japanese poem-form, usually seventeen syllables in three lines. I don't base a haiku painting on a particular poem, or write one to go with a painting. When I'm painting, there are no words. So how can a painting be haiku when there are no words? What is a painting like this about? It's about what's happening when there are no words. About noticing a particular moment, perhaps easily missed, in the maker’s experience that comes before the words.
Haiku poems are about a moment or cut in time. Not much happens - there is no narrative arc, just a perception of something. Or being struck by a realisation. Arguably, the subject of haiku is simply the act of noticing. And it’s this noticing that launches the project of putting the experience into language.
The haiku paintings begin with incremental marks made at different times, often when I am teaching and need to paint something to show what I mean. Despite a degree of abstraction, the original marks are made from observation - they're not invented.
But then, away from teaching, further provisional forms are added, removed, extended or reduced with paint and with tearing, cutting and collage. It’s like kneading something into shape without knowing what the final outcome might be, not referring to a pre-existing vision of what the painting should look like. They are about the experience of seeing, not about verifiable likeness.
And they are especially about the moment of seeing, easily missed, when provisional ingredients, tensioned by the cutting and tearing, coalesce into something whole. This is their haiku moment.
It's a bit like watching a slow-loading pixelated image come into focus, or arranging furniture so that a room comes alive, or putting something at the back of your mind into words. At a sub-verbal level, it's as if the painting answers an inner question or corresponds to some inner pattern or structure, as an unplanned form comes into sight. But instead of launching the project, it is the moment to apply the brakes, as the painting resolves.
The haiku paintings are about sensing a moment of resolution: an inner signal that continuing to work on it will change the painting but not improve it. It’s about stopping in time.
Haiku 02 will be shown In the RWS Contemporary Watercolour Competition 2018, 2-14 March 2018, Bankside Gallery, Thames Riverside/48 Hopton Street, London SE1 9JH.