Customer Reviews

On Not Being Able to Paint

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This is one of my all-time favorite books. Reading it slowly, I learned to see the interplay of relationships in which no firm line is drawn between objects, and so to see beauty. I learned that wrapping my imaginative body around my experience is essential to loving and knowing reality. The author sees her struggle to paint symbolized in her key painting of a parrot, that part of us taught in schools to regurgitate, as it angrily fights to protect the treasure of imagination which lives within us.... She compares the eagle-eye view--wide and expansive-- with the narrow focused view emphasized in our schooling.

On Not Being Able To Paint would perhaps be better title, Why One Should Paint. Trained as Freudian psychologist, Joanna Field all too painstakingly analyzes her rudimentary drawing and painting efforts in an attempt uncover what ultimately transpires in the process. An ancient quest for sure but depending upon one's knowledge in either the art, education or psychological fields, the road thus traveled is relatively interesting. As a professional artist, I found her all too subjective diatribes tiring, boring, even stretching the limits of believability in the sense that she was able to draw such cataclysmic conclusions from the bad visuals she produced. Her analytical training was obviously taking the upper hand as she "read" so much into own work. However, at the end of each segment, she manages to pull her rantings together for some thoughtful and genuine insights as to what took place throughout her process. Midway through, she departs from her dependence upon the sketches, begins to analyze in a broader, more universal context and salvages the book. She then rather clearly and poetically takes us through dreams, visions, both disillusion and illusion, realizing that, "the inner subjective and outer objective aspects of reality are in a continual state of change and development" and feels that a painter beautifully solves the problem of navigating these (constructed) worlds by inventing a "half-way house between the dream receiver and the external one". She then offers rather keen insight as to how the artist has to "pay" in communicability for this navigational privilege for with others able to share his/her dream, s/he is more "absolved from the guilt or defiance of common sense reality". Of course then, there is the psycho-analytic relation of visual symbols to our sexual development but here her training shines and I found myself thinking of parts of my visual practice in a new light. A colleague, well versed in the history of psychoanalytic development made the astute comment that considering the limited scope of the practice at the time, (she comments on just finishing a drawing at the precipice of WWI), the relationships she manifests are insightful and progressive. Her final strength is her exploration of how this new found knowledge should be boldly carried forth into the classrooms as it would all but revolutionize not only our thought process on the role of visual creation, but our perception of our reality as well. One is deeply saddened however as we realize how we have seemed to regressed rather than progressed in that area in our society's educational role. One absolutely maddening fact however, is the that this current edition omits the a crucial drawing to which she constantly refers on its cover; something the publisher should be taken to task for sure. She ends on a phenomenological note, finding it a pity that the word `reverie' is no longer a part of the language of psycho-pathology for painting, like analysis, provides a safe setting where one can be indulged in its grace and produce the same subsequent and ultimate effect for the person who looks at it. Great for an educator interested in the arts, probably a bit stale for the professional analysts of today and a bit too naive for those in the professional arts.

Marion Milner's book deserves to be read by students of Object Relations theory and art therapists as well.