michael sciam

It is hard to appreciate a work of art on the Web.
There are limits to the faithful reproduction of colors and proportions.
As obvious as it may sound, the real quality of a painting can be ascertained only on viewing the original.

The documentation presented in these pages is a selection of works in watercolor on paper and acrylic and oil on canvas chosen out of those produced over the last 25 years.

The images are positioned in accordance with a visual criterion rather than in chronological sequence, certain works being placed together even though produced in different periods.

My experience so far reveals within the inner space an evolutionary process that is not expressed toward the exterior in an orderly, sequential way.
A composition of 1988 can thus find its most natural continuation in a new work of 2002, other approaches having been tried out in the meantime, put aside momentarily, and then taken up again.

All the paths converge on a single“design” that is not visible as a whole.

Words are not life, but poets are able to give them greater freshness and vitality than a running brook.

The seven musical notes are insignificant sounds in themselves but capable, when arranged in certain patterns, of greater eloquence than a sunny day.

Lines, planes and colors can also serve to pay tribute to life.

But filling a canvas with just any shapes and colors is not enough to produce a work of abstract art. Like its verbal and musical counterparts, the visual language also has its rules that we must learn how to use and understand.

Painting means observing the world, breathing in its shapes and colors, and transforming its infinite variety into the most condensed forms of thought.

"Painting is not copying the object in a servile manner but capturing the harmony between numerous relations and transposing them into your own system, developing them in accordance with a new and original logic." (Cézanne)

This is the meaning of abstraction.

There are projects of which we are aware and "projects" of which we are not fully conscious: pathways that are revealed step by step, that stretch through an entire lifetime to become highways and lead us much farther than all the things we know or think we know.

The "project" of my life is revealed through art.

I began by painting landscapes, still lives, and portraits.

Very soon I realized that the true content of a painting is its form.

"I would like to see them here, all the ones who write about us, in front of your ugly mug and me fumbling with my tubes of paint and brushes (...)
They are a thousand miles away (...)
And you can imagine how little they know that you can make a mouth sad or a cheek smile by combining a shade of green with a red (...)." (Cézanne)

Content depends on form, above all in painting.

Utopian though it may sound, I imagine compositions combining the uninterrupted gestuality of Pollock and the deep, deft construction of Cézanne, Matisse, and Mondrian.

The spontaneous matter and unexpected form born out of the continuity of a gesture. A gesture that is the result of a moment of concentration. A gesture uninterrupted by thought. Sometimes the universe appears in an instant.

Sensibility, talent and intelligence are certainly necessary, but not enough.
For those endowed with the capacity, it takes an entire lifetime of work to express the universal through a spontaneous gesture.
The ancient Chinese were aware of this. Expressing the "whole" in one.

The spontaneity I am talking about corresponds to the most advanced stage of a long and patient exercise of discipline that must be completed before you can let go without missing the "target".

Matisse: "Novice painters think they are painting from the heart. Artists at the peak of their development also think they are painting from their heart, but they alone are right, because the training and discipline they have imposed upon themselves enable them to accept its impulses."

Giving free rein to your instincts is not enough to create a work of art.

Sometimes you make a sketch, work on the composition, and try to plan various colors. The plans then change along the way.

Forcing the brush to follow a path that is wholly planned leads to no appreciable results. It is necessary to take risks. You must put the whole of yourself in the brush and not only the safe part that knows. Good results are never obtained in painting solely from the part that knows.

Isamu Noguchi used to say that there are two ways to address a question. You can start from an idea and seek to implement it step by step or start out knowing nothing, following your nose, and end up with solutions which are usually deeper and more complete than the ones you could have thought of.

A “slip” of the hand sometimes elongates the brushstroke too much and the shape it was meticulously painting is distorted. Such event used to annoy me.
Now I have learned to wait, to look and see whether that “slip” means something, as it often does.

Painting teaches me how to live.

I begin with one color that is then followed by another. This relationship generates a third and so on. But color also has extension and must be given shape as it expands on the canvas.

The proportions and the relations between the parts engender sequences that must be capable of recreating the rhythms of life without being pinned down to the contingent appearance of the individual object, which today changes from one minute to the next.
As we move through the space of the cities we inhabit, the consciousness is broken down into a host of fragments that prevent an overall vision.
It is not the fleeting appearances of things that matter in the dynamic and ever-changing spaces of the present (we have photography and television for this) but rather the possibility of establishing relations between them.

In the ideal space of the painting, the chaotic flux of objects is distilled into the pure and radiant forms of the spirit to suggest more harmonious syntheses.

What is needed today is the ability to represent all things from all possible viewpoints, that is to say, to abstract and rediscover being in becoming.

The beauty and the rightness of certain combinations of color and forms are things that cannot be taught or learned and still less explained in words. They are either there or not there. You either know how to recognize them or you do not. Color has its own inherent expressive strength that a good painter must know how to calibrate, like the notes of a musical composition.

Filling a canvas up with just any shapes and colors is not enough to produce a work of abstract art, just as any combination of words or notes is not enough to create a work of literature or music.
Just as the same words can be used in verbal language to come out with nonsense or to construct splendid phrases rich in meaning, so it is with the language of forms and colors. The dictionary is the same but the difference between an image of fully expressed significance and one devoid of sense mainly depends on the use made of that dictionary.

In the absence of established rules and canons for the new form of painting, we are today at a primitive stage where everyone thinks themselves capable of creating an abstract work of art.

As usual, time will tell.