ARTFOCUS TORONTO ONLINE ART MAGAZINE
A free publication - Editor: Pat Fleisher

GRAHAM PEACOCK was born and educated in England. He studied at the University of London, did graduate work at Leeds College of Art and Design and then spent a year studying in Rome.

Peacock felt the best paintings were being made in North America and wanted to move there. In 1969 he was offered a teaching position at the University of Alberta which he gladly accepted.

Peacock was not satisfied with his paintings of the 60's and 70's so in the early 80’s he began experimenting with pouring, which led in 1982 to a personal style that he continues to develop. His method of making a picture can be divided, theoretically, into distinct stages: first, pouring paint onto the canvas, then hanging the canvas for shaping, then adding foam to the back of the canvas to build relief areas, and finally adding foam and other materials to the surface itself: painted canvas, reflective surfaces like mirrors, glass beads and forms created on a non-adhesive surface that are removed when dry and glued to the canvas.

Peacock, like all serious artists, has built his style by looking to the past. A direct influence on his pouring paint heavily laden with gel was Larry Poons. However, Poons tacks his canvas to the wall and throws the paint onto the canvas, then allows gravity to work its magic. Peacock working on a horizontal surface realises a much different result. A general influence on his style is Jackson Pollock. Like him Peacock pours paint onto the canvas but rather than drawing, in the manner of Pollock, he floods the surface like Helen Frankenthaler.

Peacock’s work is easy to look at but difficult to appreciate. The dilemma in large measure is a misapprehension concerning his approach to picture making and the apparent wilfully arbitrary results. Misapprehension here is simply misunderstanding. Nevertheless, if it was true that Peacock did nothing more then throw paint onto a surface and call the resulting conglomeration a work of art we would not on those grounds alone be justified in disqualifying the result as art. No method or approach or material can be ruled out of order a priori; in art all that counts is results, and that can be judged in experience only.

Peacock’s pictures can in fact be looked at and appreciated in much the same fashion as pictures of the past. This is not to say that there is nothing new here; Peacock’s work is original.Truly original art confronts the norms and conventions of the past; consequently, it carries more of that past within itself than the superficially original. The superficially original seeks newness for its own sake while the truly original goes beyond mere surface effect to realise something that lies deeper, metaphorically beneath the surface, and what lies there is what really counts in art, aesthetic quality.

Aesthetics has been marginalised in contemporary art by the forces of conservatism, which if not redressed will ultimately destroy art. Art absent of aesthetic quality is a contradiction in terms - comparable to the rejection of truth in science or the good in ethics. It is only in the aesthetic mode that true originality can be recognised. For all the physical differences in the work of Giotto, Titian, Poussin, Manet, Miro and Pollock, we sense a relationship and that relationship is an aesthetic relationship. If we could not compare Pollock and Titian aesthetically we might well assume they were involved in entirely different activities or from different planets. Aesthetic quality is what is distinct to artistic perception. In discarding the aesthetic we are left to judge a work of art as just another object, to judge it for its decorative or functional properties, to judge it for its usefulness.

Seeing for the purpose of making art is not much different than seeing for the purpose of appreciating art. Our ability to see aesthetic value is central to both activities. The artist and viewer alike learn to perceive the aesthetic historically, in art of the past. The artist must realise that learning in making; the viewer in appreciating.

To understand the present, the new, we must look to the past. We seek onvergence with that past and then attempt to establish a logical, or at least a meaningful, direction of development.

What strikes one initially in Peacock’s pictures is colour, but it is drawing that is central to the success of the pictures. His approach to drawing is comparable to that of Kenneth Noland’s pictures of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Noland would stain a large piece of canvas then place a couple of stripes along the top and bottom of the stained area, or criss-cross the stripes to form a grid. The stripes signal the presence of the artist and also organise what would otherwise appear as an impersonal and arbitrary surface.