Bowen Blog #8 — Painted Quartets

1 year ago

From Meurig Bowen
Music Festival Director

The Music Festival’s specially-commissioned Painted Quartets exhibition is now up and running at the Summerfield Gallery, Pittville Campus. But not everyone is happy about it…

First, read this! It’s an editorial from the world’s most admired magazine for string players and instrument makers, The Strad:

Painting pretty pictures on instruments simply degrades them, argues Ariane Todes…

“Clay, stone metal, paper, canvas, glass, timber: just some of the media available on which to imprint your imagination if you’re a visual artist. So why does anybody insist on painting flowers, clouds, pretty patterns or cherubs on violins?

The subject came up in The Strad office recently when were contacted by the Cheltenham Festival in the hope that we’d cover the painted violins that are on show at this year’s event. Little did they know that they’d inadvertently stumbled on a pet peeve of mine, and no doubt they were surprised by the vehemence of my reaction.

Why do I get so upset when I see violins covered with a layer of paint? The first problem I have is that I just don’t get it. Why paint pictures on violins? No doubt many of the perpetrators are great artists. A quick internet image search brings up some cleverly imagined, well-executed images (as well as some monstrous kitsch). But why use a violin as merely a background? Why not just paint these images on a blank medium? To haul out the old cliché, is it art? And I don’t mean to suggest that it’s not possible to make art using real violins — it is, as long as their fundamental nature is understood and honoured, rather than simply being painted over.

The violin form is similar to great architecture and furniture in combining functional perfection with aesthetic beauty. Centuries of human care and attention have brought it to that state. To paint over it is to simultaneously ignore and destroy both.

Chemical layers rob an instrument of its power to create sound. The implication is even that the sound doesn’t matter — it is merely an object. As a player, having been around violins most of my life, I find it upsetting to see one that is no longer able to do the main thing it was brought into the world to do.

Apart from its functionality, the violin shape is intrinsically beautiful, so what is the point of superimposing an unrelated image on it, however beautiful? Would you paint a picture of butterflies and pansies on the side of a Baroque cathedral, or geometric shapes on a classic Shaker chair? Not without ruining the beauty of each of those forms. I can only imagine what luthiers feel about seeing someone’s hard work on purfling, planing and the rest swathed over with paint, but I can’t think it feels good.

I know that the instruments used in these artworks are usually past worthwhile repair or are cheap and factory-made, but isn’t it better to throw such instruments away and leave them their dignity rather than turning them into sterile objects? The only persuasive rationale I can see is that they are often used to raise money for worthwhile causes — usually struggling ensembles, youth orchestras, educational programmes — but maybe society should be looking at more secure ways of finding a future for classical music.

When I see painted instruments I’m reminded of the iconic image from the James Bond film Goldfinger, in which the villain’s secretary lies dead in Bond’s hotel room, asphyxiated by a layer of gold paint for having helped Bond. And that’s how I feel about painted instruments: to paint a violin is to kill it.

What do you think? Do you love painted violins? Do you paint them yourself?”

So — where do I start?! Perhaps with a few words from one of the artists who has contributed to our Painted Quartets exhibition. She reckons The Strad article is ‘a badly-written and poorly-argued piece of puritanical soap box nonsense’.

Ariane Todes quite clearly didn’t read the initial press release we sent her magazine. She has totally failed to recognise the project as a visual arts String Quartet homage to Haydn in his anniversary year, instead referring to the ‘pretty pictures’ on painted violins only.

Ms Todes is right in saying that the ‘sound doesn’t matter’, that the violins, violas and cellos have become merely ‘objects’. Yes, I fully own up to that. This was the idea all along. The Cheltenham Music Festival this year features eight string quartets from around the world — including the Borodins, Endellions and Quatuor Diotima — performing lots of Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and many more composers from their own countries. In those eight World Quartets concerts, the sound very definitely does matter. The Painted Quartets project is something else. The instruments are never intended to be played again — and they probably didn’t sound too good in their prime either.

She would rather have these clapped-out instruments destroyed to ‘leave them their dignity.’ Oh dear — not only does she need to get out a bit more; she’s actively espousing destruction in favour of recycling. That’s quite brave in this day and age. With such an un-green stance, I suppose it makes her the Jeremy Clarkson of the violin world.

She disparages them as ‘sterile objects’. How presumptious, having not seen them! How insulting to the artists, who have given much time and thought to working on the instruments.

Most of them were strongly motivated by the charity-fundraising aspect of this project. Ariane concedes that this could be a ‘persuasive rationale’. And perhaps, in time, she could be persuaded to visit the new Creative Arts Centre at the National Star College, a fantastic educational facility for young people with acquired brain injuries. Proceeds from the sale of these Painted Quartets instruments will go towards the capital campaign for this new Arts Centre, as well as the inspirational and affecting workshops that Cheltenham Music Festival put on every year.

I’d say she is on very shaky ground when talking about butterflies and pansies on the walls of baroque cathedrals. Isn’t extra-architectural decoration intrinsic to church architecture of that period? Didn’t a lot of interior stone surfaces in earlier, gothic buildings get lavishly decorated? And what does she think about renaissance frescoes? How about Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel?

She is also so very wrong about what the luthiers would make of this; simply because we didn’t use a single instrument that any proper luthier would have had any contact with. To re-work a phrase, no string instruments of any worth or quality were hurt in the making of this project. The only people who would have been pained by the ‘killing’ of these instruments would be those who press start and stop in the Chinese factories where these myriad cheapo instruments are made.

I spoke to Kai Thomas-Roth, who is giving a Music Festival talk in Cheltenham on the Science of String Instruments with scientist Martin Coath on Saturday 17 July. (He’s one of the country’s most admired cello makers, and is a past Chairman of the British Violin Makers Association). I won’t say exactly what he said about Ariane Todes’ view on this, but suffice to say he doesn’t agree with her and finds the Painted Quartets project admirable and intriguing.

I’d like to leave the final words here to the artist PJ Crook, who has set aside major international commissions in the last few months to paint an entire quartet for the exhibition. She hasn’t painted ‘pretty pictures’, cherubs or clouds. She has been inspired by Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, by his Farewell symphony and by Britten’s Peter Grimes Sea Interludes. Many people have been admiring her work since it went on display at the weekend. Like the other artists in this exhibition, her skill and commitment to the project has shown up Todes’ editorial as the reactionary, patronising insult that it is.

“As an artist I can think of nothing more fulfilling creatively than to take a beautiful object that has come to the end of its working life and which is destined for the wood burner, and to be able to breathe new life into it so that it becomes once again an object of desire. To paint one’s heart upon its surface, knowing that it is going to be reborn and resold for such a good cause as the National Star College. Thinking of composers like Handel and artists like Hogarth who gave to Captain Coram’s Foundling Hospital, what better legacy could there be for an artist and exhausted instrument than to serve such ideals.”

PS In case some think that I have a death-wish on string instruments, or that I am an un-reconstructed brass player, you may like to know I used to enjoy playing in a student string quartet with Ariane Todes’ brother…

We’ve tagged this post with Meurig Bowen, music, painted quartets on Tuesday 14 July 2009.