Thinking About Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas, 'Evil Is Banal', Oil On Canvas, 1984

As an artist, what Marlene Dumas does is some distance from my own work, (I should be so lucky or accomplished).  Nonetheless, I’m massively impressed by her achievements as a painter.  Like all the medium's best contemporary practitioners, she combines heartfelt emotion with philosophy and psychological insight; explores the relationship between painting and mass-media reproduction; and still fully exploits the sheer plasticity of paint as material.

Marlene Dumas, 'The Painter', Oil On Canvas, 1994

I have a nice coffee-table book [1.] full of Dumas’ work, to which I often turn when I want a reminder of what grown-up painting can do.  Like most such books, it contains relatively objective commentaries on her output, but also includes many of her own intriguing, often oblique writings.  Here’s an example that jumped out at me while browsing through the other day.

“Forget  Love and art used to be places where all of this [naming and identification] could be forgotten, disappear, break down.  As Paul Valéry says, seeing is when you forget the name of what you are looking at.  This can be a frightening and alienating experience if you’re an anxious existentialist.  But it could also be a wonderful ego-vanishing sensation – a liberation from prejudice and retrospection.  Why do I draw? To remember or to forget?

First Name  You draw before you can write.  The child’s doubt about what it is he’s doing is not there from the start.  The critical moment for the child and his drawing arises when he writes his name for the first time.  The letters still struggle to represent themselves as autonomous shapes instead of referring to something else.  After that moment, drawing and writing go their own ways.  I don’t long for childhood or innocence lost.  Even though some of the most touching drawings have been made by children, mental patients and prisoners.”  [2.]

Marlene Dumas, 'Young Boys', Oil On Canvas, 1993-94

Although my own current work doesn’t necessarily reflect it, I have sometimes thought that the purest, (if impossible), thing an artist could strive for is to see the world as if for the first time, without knowing what anything is.

[1.]:  Dominic Van Den Bloogerd/Barbara Bloom/Mariucca Casidio/Ilararia Bonacossa, ‘Marlene Dumas’, London, Phaidon Press Ltd, 1999.

[2.]:  Marlene Dumas, ‘Name No Names’ (Extract), Centre Pompidou, Paris, August 2001.  In: Dominic Van Den Bloogerd/Barbara Bloom/Mariucca Casidio/Ilararia Bonacossa, ‘Marlene Dumas’, London, Phaidon Press Ltd, 1999.