The Guardian, 15th October 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/oct/15/miles-richmond-obituary


Painting has led me to question the assumption that we simply look out at the world. My research suggests that we both look out and look in, and the world is literally within the mind of our complex identity.

My work sets out to plot some of the geometries of a new sense of embodiment. Inevitably these representations will hardly seem recognizable or typical to eyes conditioned by the renaissance view of incarnation which photography has made ubiquitous. But they may help illuminate some who feel old ways of seeing are outworn.


Miles Richmond died on the 7th October 2008. His funeral was held at St Lawrence's Church in the village of East Rounton, North Yorkshire on Friday the 17th of October.
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Miles Richmond, Cliff Holden, Dorothy Mead and Dennis Creffield, Epping Forest, 1952

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Letter from Miles to David Seaton, February 2008:

Middlesbrough Feb 4th 08

Dear David,

I was grateful for the opportunity to go drawing with you. That great place where the light enfolds the mountains and the mountains enwrap the light is magical, and I was grateful seeing the work you are doing since it is obvious that my days in such places, if not over, are numbered, but you can look forward to years of solid work in the wonderful laboratory of light that surrounds Ronda, where the light can stir us with their stick, and you now have a body of work showing a serious commitment to nature.

It has long been my concern (as it was for Bomberg) that too many of the talents of the C20th, after finding an aesthetic, opted for celebrity in a city, rather than for testing and probing it in the face of nature, so that Victor Pasmore could say: 'We're not interested in the world out there any more', which he spoke like a VIP. But I think of him as a very indifferent painter. It is the continuing research into the mystery surrounding us that makes the European tradition important. After their stints in London, working, teaching, exhibiting, Constable and Turner got back as quickly as they could, to the fields and mountains. It was the same with the French painters until the C2Oth. Physical theory has moved so far and so fast since then and it is a wonder to me why so few painters are adapting their aesthetic to the modem world and testing it in the face of nature. Without a theory of art we simply stare blindly at nature. Without a new theory of art we can only see nature as our predecessors saw it. Since I am no longer of any practical use: others do all the practical things for me, and as the time and energy I have left for working may be brief, it may be useful to describe a line of research that may be worth pursuing, or may tum out to be nonsense. But unless we continue research in all fields, as vigorously as we can, we risk falling victims to the confident authority of fundamentalists, growing in confidence if we lack enlightenment.

My theory is that we exist as individuals in a world of individuals but we also exist at the quantum level. The painter, confronting nature, gradually leaves this macroscopic identity and approaches the field of quantum energies. The chemistry of our bodies is continually emitting quanta of energy. The inspiring subject (the bowl of light we stood in around Grazalema) is another powerful field of quantum energy. The desire to establish some living relation to ones subject stimulates a discharge of quantum energy. This stream of energy encountering the quantum energy of the subject creates a polarisation (since calling it my subject gives it an opposite charge). These quanta are, according to relativity, called 4-vector, (three space and one time vector). Meeting as apposed charges causes a flash, destroying each pair of 4- vectors. Out of this explosion (since no energy can be lost) is created a new photon of light and a graviton. This physical event produces in consciousness that extraordinary illumination and sense of power and grandeur beyond space and time totally other than ordinary seeing. Blake was right: 'All that we see is vision, by generated organs gone as soon as come, permanent in the imagination.' It is, literally, a generated organ, gone as soon as come. It is the recovery of the trace left in the imagination that can make drawing at times an arduous business. But your work shows that you are seriously engaged and this may all be old hat to you: the world moves on. You gave us such love and care I wanted to share a thought with you. If it' s off the rails, into the bin!

Much love to you all, Miles


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The Red Studio, 1970, 122 x 122 cm. Oil on Board

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Whitby, Frosty Morning, 1986, 91 x 122 cm, Oil on Canvas.

IMAGINATION


To talk about imagination today must be with a sense of emergency, of crisis. It is more than forty years since Henry Corbin wrote “the degeneration of imagination into fantasy is complete”. It has been further degraded into the meaningless.

I believe imagination will be restored only when it is accepted that its location is in an area of human experience that is neither physical nor rational.

Many years of historical materialism have conditioned our habits of thinking. The idea of imagination as seated in an immaterial world is usually dismissed as absurd. To suggest, as I do, that we all have access to this world by an invisible potential within each one of us, is dismissed as the rambling of outmoded romanticism.

The world we live in, which makes these judgements, has been called the Society of the Spectacle. In this society we weave a web around the world, using all the resources of sophistication and technology to protect us from everything above and below, in which the Spectacle takes place. The Spectacle includes “Sensations” and “Apocalypse”, the more spectacular the better. Andy Warhol has assured us there is nothing beneath the surface. A generation has emerged knowing no other society than this. So Damien Hurst can say:

“It’s theatre. It’s about raising expectations and lowering expectations. Theatre! It’s more like a joke with a punch line. You can say it’s manipulating. But you can say a joke’s manipulative…. And what if this is the first time money’s become important for artists, where money’s an element in the composition? You’re a conduit from art to money. It’s getting closer and closer and closer.”

So in this society art is a manipulative joke and a conduit to money.

The Society of the Spectacle was named and described by Guy Debord, a Marxist. In 1992, in the preface to a third edition, he wrote:

“This book should be read bearing in mind that it was written with the deliberate intention of doing harm to spectacular society.”

Scattered through his pages are admonitions and advice to revolutionaries determined to destroy this society. This advice has been followed so closely in recent events that it is hard not to believe that Debord’s work has been a terrorists guide.

So it may not be unreasonable to see the World Trade Centre as the high point and its destruction as the end of the Society of the Spectacle.

This destruction has been described as Satan’s masterpiece. Since his power is invisible, this is an appropriate moment to consider whether the power of imagination also may be invisible.

But after years of familiarity with the spectacular world we have to go some way back to recover our bearings in imagination.

In 1798 William Blake wrote:

“But to him who sees this mortal pilgrimage in the light that I see it, duty to his country is the first consideration and safety the last….the affairs of life and death trifles, sports of time. But these considerations are the business of eternity"

One hundred and fifty years later, during and after the second war, Bomberg followed the same precepts and taught the same duty. When news broke of the spies, Philby, Burgess and Maclean, Bomberg found it hard to believe. Integrity of man, artist and citizen were one and inviolable to him as they had been to Blake.

But soon fellow-travelling became more and more widespread in all our institutions. Integrity of the kind Blake and Bomberg knew as essential to their vision almost disappeared. If it showed itself it was quickly marginalised by an establishment in which duplicity had become the norm. Too many of the young, bemused, confused and sometimes abused by their teachers whenever they sought serious guidance, concluded that integrity had been an illusion of youth and flung themselves into mere display, created works without depth, without meaning. The more violent the better, to show the frustration and anger of duped innocence. Spectacular Art was born!

The belief that the artist has a duty to his country, or to something invisible overriding everything else is a cry from a vanished world. And a call to recover it.

We must recover the sense that an artist’s training is a training in access to a boundless realm to which the visible is a frontier.

And recover the sense that his responsibility as an artist is to bring back, as faithfully as he can, any intimations he may receive in his journeys over that frontier as his contribution to the enrichment of the country that has nurtured him and the times in which he lives.

We must recover the sense that the commitment to materials cannot be side-stepped. Inevitably we approach our subjects with thoughts and feelings; only training in grappling with materials in the presence of the subject makes it possible for thought and feeling to go away, enabling immaterial imagination to materialise, the artist to approach the unknown, and recognise the invisible companion who walks with him, called variously spirit, angel, muse.

This is the sense of vocation Bomberg believed in and which gave him his confidence that imagination transcends the mundane. His insights, and Blake’s, have been essential guides for me through the wilderness of subject and object.

I have found Blake’s definitions illuminating and beautiful:

“All that we see is vision, by generated organs gone as soon as come, permanent in the imagination.”

“The nature of infinity is this; that everything has its own vortex…”

Blake has an unrivalled lucidity.

It is literally true that whenever one approaches a subject with the respect for another, and not as a mere construct of the mind, it begins to take on this mysterious energy of vortex, which swings one, and flings one all over the place. The frenzy of the artist, notorious in ancient as well as modern times, is the outward evidence of his determination to touch at least the fringe of this whirlwind as it escapes. Only time will tell what sense he has brought back, but he has no doubt of the awe and power he has approached.

The vortex is the passage of everything from its temporal to its eternal condition.

Drawing is the essential training of the artist for this encounter with the vortex. A training in ridding the mind of preconceptions, a training in attention to the pulse of expansion and contraction within the sensory field, a training which gradually co-ordinates, stimulates and accelerates perception to the point where hyper- perception can take place. Without this hyper-perception the vortex is invisible, as is our transit from embodiment to disembodiment where we encounter the invisible realm of imagination.

The materialist view that I am a substantial and continuous body rests on the limited evidence of normal perception.

In fact I am here, and not here, but my transit from embodiment to disembodiment is so rapid that it escapes normal attention.

But it is an important insight that has been observed and recorded by poets and artists and visionaries throughout history.

And it is the basis and core of artistic responsibility.

The artist’s trained response to the tick-tock, tick-tock of the here and not here, enables him, within the medium of his work, not only to give expression to this rhythm, or beat, but to enrich his work with some of the unknown nourishment flowing unceasingly though these minute gaps which reveal eternity between the moments of our embodiment in time.

Art must often interpret this material to normal sense, and the fleeting impressions of eternity in great art are in no way illusory. It is this positive affirmation, however tragic the subject, which nourishes us today, and inspires us tomorrow, in all the masterpieces of art.

The intellectual arrogance of systems, particularly Marxism in our day, papers over these fine gaps as non-existent. They may be non-existent to a rational mind, but they are far from non-existent in reality, and it is part of imagination’s business to keep these gaps open, so that the world can continue to breathe.

This country has an unrivalled imaginative record.

In our multi-cultural society we have, with an uncanny instinct, taken Blake’s Jerusalem as an anthem.

It is the prelude to his poem Milton. Milton, after great angelic labours, returns to England with the power of regenerated imagination.

We all know that the fundamentalist charge that the West is godless cannot be made or responded to with bombs.

As the Society of the Spectacle continues to crumble we may begin to feel we are in a bad state.

But again Blake is lucid:

“Imagination is not a STATE, it is the human existence itself.”

This existence has been defined and defended for us by Milton in these words:

“It is not within the province of any visible church, much less of the civil magistrate, to impose their own interpretations on us as laws, or as binding on the conscience; in other words as matter of implicit faith.”

This is a human existence we still recognise, and will defend with all the powers of imagination.

In this way we answer the ungodly charge.


Miles Richmond 10 October 2001

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