Art School Thesis on Epic Painting

      The graduates of art schools were required, beside a show of their work, to have written a thesis before the Scots Department of Education gave them a diploma. This was mine. Epics are dear to me because I had entered art school wanting to make myself both writer and painter of big works. In 1953 (my 2nd year) I decided my book should be, like Dante’s big Comedy and the Ulysses of Joyce, a national epic, for I had just read Tillyard’s The English Epic & Background, which said that the epic form combined every genre, and that future epics were likely to be novels. The self-conceit of this essay, written in ink upon folded sheets of lined foolscap, amazes the much more conventional old man I have since become. Hey ho.

      EVERY WRITER ON VISUAL ART is condemned to use jargon – a set of words without generally accepted meanings and usually borrowed from other arts and sciences; words like Classic, Romantic, Heroic, Architectural, Literary. This is the penalty of dealing with one art through the medium of another. Such words rarely have the same meaning for two, even intelligent, even educated men. For instance the word “Classical” will suggest to some the culture of ancient Greece; but for one man this culture is represented by the clarity of Euclid and the splendid balance of the Parthenon, while for another it is represented by the doomed interplay of Gods, men and women in the great tragedies. To a third man “Classical” may not be associated with Greece at all, but with the symphonies of Beethoven. Every other word in the jargon of art-writing may be as differently understood.

      There is a kind of painting I value above all others. The jargon adjective that fits it best is epic, I think – a word that was most commonly used in literature, before Hollywood producers began calling big films with casts of thousands screen epics. Ezra Pound said the literary epic was poetry with history in it. It was certainly the longest, most ambitious kind of poem, and as written by Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton, combined the politics of this world with the theology they thought universal. This thesis will describe paintings I think are also of that kind. To avoid as much vague jargon as possible I must clarify the meanings of my words, which can only be done by relating them to a philosophy. The thesis will therefore start by giving mine, thus. First, my view of mankind in the universe. Second, the use of creative artists to mankind. Third, the main artistic categories. Lastly, the epic category and some pictures belonging to it.

       THE CONDITION OF MAN IN THE UNIVERSE

      To understand the condition of man in the universe we must first put aside memories of any religious or philosophical system accepted from family or society. Systems are popular less for their truth than their comfort. This does not mean that popular systems are untrue. The men who originally preached them wanted to justify the world’s black horrible things, not to minimise them. But unless we begin by divorcing what the eye sees from systems, which try to explain what the eye sees, we will never fully be able to understand these systems, and our acceptance or rejection of them will be glib and shallow.

      What we see in the universe is this: Everywhere life is fighting to dominate matter. Matter continually and unmaliciously engulfs life, which in many forms infests, tortures, kills and eats itself. Men exploit and murder each other, often unknowingly or unwillingly. Each one of us encloses thoughts, feelings, intuitions and sensations that frequently co-operate to help us survive but also often contradict each other.

      Every philosophical and religious system accepts the truth of this vision, and has various ways of accounting for it. My own system is cobbled together out of bits from the work of various writers. I give it here, not to assert a doctrine, but to give my basis for the statements on painting in the last section of the thesis.

      When introspective men examine the bit of the universe they know best – themselves – their proudest discovery is that their basic self is basic to all selves and looks out of all eyes – even eyes that glare belligerently into each other. Many of them also discover that their basic self is basic even to unliving things, as Wordsworth and Blake discovered.

      Each grain of sand,

      Every stone on the land,

      Each rock & each hill,

      Each fountain & rill,

      Each herb & each tree,

      Mountain, hill, earth & sea,

      Cloud, Meteor & Star,

       Are Men Seen Afar.

      Such discoveries are only made after long terrible periods of self-doubt and self-questioning, and they are accompanied by a feeling of delight which does not last long; but to anyone who feels it the memory of that delight is a guarantee that the discovery was valid. The success of an artist or a mystic depends on his ability to share that delight with those who know his work; or at least to persuade them that he felt it. Those who participate most deeply in the delight are aware of something eternal, fundamental, unvarying and limitlessly generative underlying, supporting and infusing the apparent chaos of the universe, and they are identified with it for a rare moment. The delight is at once a sense of unity and a sense of expansion.

      Note that this conviction of the universe’s underlying unity can be arrived