Painting by Numbers Never Worked.

Last week, at Tate Liverpool, I saw the exhibition Chagall, Modern Master. Chagall’s paintings are recognisable by their dream-like qualities: people and animals float above landscapes; perspectives are distorted; colours evoke mood and there are visual references to his home town, Vitebsk, Russia. His images are varied but his style is so constant and distinctive that it has become a successful ‘brand’. (Witness its ubiquity in the gallery shop where it shifts the merchandise: mugs, place-mats and tea-towels are all given the dreamy makeover - and the designer price-tag).

Although I have always been attracted to his paintings as objects of beauty, I have been flummoxed when it comes to interpreting their meaning. I found it helpful, therefore, to have been given some background information about the man and his times. I learned that his Hasidic ancestry had left a profound mark upon his work, that he travelled to Paris where he was exposed to the influences of Cubism, Fauvism, Constructivism, Orphism, Simultanism and, most sinister of all, Suprematism. For me, however, it boiled down to the gratification of discovering that the romantically involved, gravity-defying couple depicted in one of his better-known paintings represents the artist and his wife, Bella.

On the wall in front of me is one of my brother’s paintings - one which needs no explaining to me. It’s a landscape – a view from where he once lived, high up on the side of a valley in West Yorkshire. It shows the buildings down in the valley petering out into the fields above on the opposite hill, all painted in tones of green, brown and grey - except for an intriguing and apparently random sliver of red in between a chimney and a wall.

I mean to ask him about that sometime. Why is it there? Is it a painterly device which works on the viewer in a subliminal way? Or is it simply a smudge of background colour that escaped his attention in the finishing?

Assuming the latter is unlikely, the painting benefits from its presence in a way that defies layman’s logic. A seemingly misplaced splash of colour contributes to the imaginative evocation of the landscape, not a precise depiction of it and, in doing so, demonstrates the artist’s ability to interpret a scene while eschewing logic.

But artists, as we know, are licensed; and as I look up at it now I am conscious that I cannot employ any such license in the process of writing. I write not to make an impression, nor even to make myself understood. I write to make sure that I am not misunderstood. Choosing the precise word, the right phrasing and timing are all critical to ensure the elimination of ambiguity. The written equivalent of a random sliver of red is likely to alter the meaning of a piece - as in “eats, shoots and leaves”.

I am not suggesting that the process of painting does not involve rational thinking (I have no experience to call upon) but, if it does, it is trumped by creative visual expression. On the other hand, I am not so sure that the process of writing should rely entirely on thinking, remembering Niels Bohrs’ famous admonition “No no you’re not thinking, you’re just being logical”.

Chagall lived through troubled times – the First World War and the Russian Revolution - but, by judicious migration, avoided harm and continued to work as an artist into the 1960’s. He lived and worked in St. Petersburg, Paris, Moscow, America and the south of France but, after all that, his paintings consistently bear his stamp: evidently you can take the man out of Vitebsk, but you can’t take Vitebsk out of the man and his ‘brand’ will endure.