Category: Creativity

Originally designed as a sales presenter program, the rigid way in which Powerpoint forces information to be structured means that it can be a dangerous liability when used in complex situations where comprehension can mean the difference between life and death.

Indeed it is widely thought that the rigid structure of Powerpoint that was – at least in part – responsible for the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster on February 1, 2003

When Marshall McLuhan, declared that “the medium is the message”, he surreptitiously slipped a remarkable and revolutionary new idea into late 20th century popular culture.

This seemingly innocent idea signalled the realisation that the very act of reading a text is often of greater significance than the information contained within the text itself.

And it is this insight that can help us understand the problem with Microsoft Powerpoint; the presenter programme which has become notorious, as much for its characteristics as a medium, as for its ability to communicate a message.

Powerpoint was invented in the mid-1980s by Robert Gaskins, a visionary entrepreneur, who spotted the opportunity for a dedicated sales presenter software programme offered by the the emergence of graphics-based personal computers. and the vast – but largely unrecognised – market for preparing business slides.

As a sales tool, Gaskins designed Powerpoint, to give the presenter the ‘power’ to make their ‘point’ in a structured, hierarchical fashion.

However, Powerpoint presentations are often linked less by internal logic or narrative coherence, than by the illusion of hierarchical structure created by the program.

And it is this combination of the lack of a coherent narrative, and an unrelenting hail of bullet points, that has made PowerPoint notorious for its unique ability to reduce audiences to catatonic states of mind-numbing boredom.

But the real problem these days is that Powerpoint is no longer restricted to use in sales pitches. Indeed you will now find Powerpoint presentations anywhere that one person needs to address others in a formal setting.

This includes organisations like NASA, and the US military. Where Powerpoint’s inability to deal with complexity and it’s rigid hierarchy have meant that ‘Death by Powerpoint’ is no longer simply a metaphor.

Whether it be for a high level Joint Staff meeting in Washington or for a platoon leader’s pre-mission combat briefing of his men in a remote valley in Afghanistan, the amount of time spent creating PowerPoint presentations, has made it a running joke among many members of the US Military.

But apart from the time wasted, and behind all the jokes about PowerPoint Rangers, there have been some very serious concerns among senior staff that the program itself stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making.

In an article by in the New York Times entitled “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint”, journalist Elisabeth Bumiller describes how the program has become deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering brings the illusion of order to a confused world.

““PowerPoint makes us stupid,” Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said in a speech at a military conference in North Carolina. (The speech was delivered without PowerPoint.)

And Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat. “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said…“Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control…Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”

General McMaster. us army

But this is to miss the point. The real strength of Powepoint is as a propaganda tool… as journalist Elisabeth Bumiller puts it, quoting one Senior US Military, Powerpoint is ” handy when the goal is not imparting information, but the opposite, as in briefings for reporters…. The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake… Those types of PowerPoint presentations, are known as “hypnotizing chickens.””

Perhaps the most infamous example of the US Military “hypnotizing chickens” was when General Colin Powell, then acting as As Secretary of State for the Bush administration, made his pitch to the United Nations Assembly for war in the Middle East, (“Go up there and sell it” Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have said to him beforehand) with a highly imaginative presentation of the “evidence” for the existence weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Edward Tufte is the world’s leading thinker in the visual display of information. Since the publication of “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”, in 1982, he has consistently championed the importance of good information design.

In the wake of the tragic 2003 Columbia Space Shuttle disaster, Tufte published an article in Wired magazine entitled: “PowerPoint Is Evil” and followed this up with a more scholarly, less dramatically titled pamphlet, “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,”

Here Tufte argued that the programme encourages “faux-analytical” thinking that favors the slickly produced “sales pitch” over the sober exchange of information.

“Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time, and degraded the quality and credibility of communication. These side effects would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.

Yet slideware -computer programs for presentations… is everywhere: in corporate America, in government bureaucracies, even in our schools. Several hundred million copies of Microsoft PowerPoint are churning out trillions of slides each year. Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.”

In “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint” Tufte’s analysis reveals that Powerpoint has a number of specific design faults which render it incapable of communicating certain types of information.

Firstly, Tufte says, it is designed to guide and to reassure the presenter, rather than to communicate with the audience. Secondly, the outliner function causes ideas to be arranged in an unnecessarily deep hierarchy, itself subverted by the need to restate the hierarchy on every slide. (What’s more, the audience is forced to follow the presenter’s thinking in lockstep linear progression through this hierarchy – whereas with handouts, readers could browse and relate items at the same time). And thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it has a natural tendency to oversimplify thinking, with ideas being squashed into bulleted lists, and stories with beginning, middle, and end being turned into a collection of disparate bullet points.

A central part of this analysis was the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster which Tufte demonstrates, was caused, in part, by the use of Powerpoint.

The Columbia Space Shuttle was destroyed on February 1, 2003 while attempting to re-entering the atmosphere after a 16-day scientific mission. A hole was punctured in the leading edge on one of Columbia’s wings, made of a carbon composite. The hole had formed when a piece of insulating foam from the external fuel tank peeled off during the launch and struck the shuttle’s wing. During the intense heat of re-entry, hot gases penetrated the interior of the wing, destroying the support structure and causing the rest of the shuttle to break apart.

Exhibit A in Tufte’s analysis is a PowerPoint slide which you can see below and in more detail here, and which had been presented to NASA senior managers in January 2003, while the space shuttle Columbia was in space and they were trying to understand the risk posed by the damage caused by the piece of insulating foam to the shuttle wings.

Unfortunately, as you can see from Tufte’s analysis, the critical piece of information – the piece of information that could have prevented the disaster – is buried so deeply in the rigid PowerPoint format that it is effectively useless.

“It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,” the Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded, citing Tufte’s work, and strongly criticized the culture within NASA in which, it said, “the endemic use of PowerPoint” had been substituted for rigorous technical analysis.

It is now more than twenty-five years since Powerpoint was first launched as a sales presentation aid. It is now installed on over one billion computers around the world, and its use is no longer confined to the sales pitch. It is used everywhere from church services to military briefings, from schools to hospitals.

And you don’t have to be a NASA rocket scientist to see what a dangerous idea this is…

Spectacular images with names like ‘Mystic Mountain’ and the ‘Twin Pillars of Creation’ that have been produced by the Hubble Heritage Project have redefined how we imagine the universe around us.

And yet, on closer examination, it would seem that the way in which these images are constructed, says more about the culture that created them, than it does about the phenomena that they appear to portray.

Because what most people do not realise is that many of the dramatic views that are published by the Hubble Heritage Project bear little resemblance to anything that can ever be seen in reality, anywhere in the universe.

‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’ as Lord Darlington says in Lady Windermere’s Fan.

And if you look up into the night sky for long enough, you may catch sight of a mysterious glinting object sailing silently across the face of those stars.

This is probably a satellite; one of more than a thousand such objects, which currently orbit our planet.

Most satellites are faced back down towards the surface of the Earth, in order to perform such mundane tasks as providing weather reports, maintaining phone networks or beaming television channels into people’s living rooms.

One however, is orientated in accordance with Lord Darlingtons epithet and faces in the opposite direction, away from the Earth, up into the stars.

This satellite is the Hubble Space Telescope, which, from its vantage point, high above the Earth’s atmosphere, has fundamentally changed the way that we think about the universe.

In 1995, the telescope was used to take a 10-day exposure of a seemingly empty area of deep space. Many doubted the value of this operation, but the resulting image, known as the “Hubble Deep Field”, revealed an abundance of new galaxies, beyond the Milky Way. This exercise was repeated in 2004 with an experiment called “Ultra Deep Field,” in which more than 5,000 new galaxies were discovered, some as far as 13.2 billion light-years away. Since the light from these galaxies has taken this long to reach our solar system, these images offer a window onto what the universe looked like only a short time after the Big Bang, some 13.7 billion years ago.

As well as affording such extraordinary insights into the origins of the universe, the Hubble Space Telescope has also been the source of some of the most spectacular images of the cosmos that our world has ever seen; and these images have profoundly altered the way that we now imagine outer space.

These images are actually created here on Earth by an organisation called the Hubble Heritage Project, a dedicated group of astronomers and image processing specialists, set up by NASA to promote the benefits of its work to a wider public.

Since its formation in 1997, this unit has produced a series of spectacular images of nebulae, galaxies, and other celestial phenomena that have become the standard visual representation of the universe in anything from school textbooks to science fiction movies.

And yet, on closer examination, it would seem that the way in which these images are constructed, says more about the culture that created them, than it does about the phenomena that they appear to portray.

What most people do not realise is that many of the dramatic views that are published by the Hubble Heritage Project bear little resemblance to anything that can ever be seen in reality, anywhere in the universe.

This is because these images are in fact a product of the creative imagination, made up of, on the one hand, data that is not visible to the naked eye, and on the other, the combination of multiple sets of visible data.

For a start, the Hubble’s onboard digital cameras only record grey-scale pixels, and the actual ‘pictures’ that the telescope captures are rather dull, blurred black and white affairs.

The Hubble Heritage Project takes this rather unassuming visual data – as well as many elements, which are not visible to the human, eye – and make their own visual interpretation of this information. Firstly they decide which way is ‘up’ in the picture (in space there is, of course, no ‘up’ or ‘down’) then invisible elements are given physical form and colour and lighting effects are introduced to create highly dramatic forms of composition. In this way, otherwise formless shapes are purposely arranged to look like a fantastical, yet strangely familiar physical landscape.

The resulting images feature a highly distinctive visual language.

Elizabeth Kessler, in her book called ‘Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime,’ has shown that this distinctive visual language in fact bears a striking resemblance to the work of 19th century Frontier Artists of the American West, like Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt.

‘Reference to the familiar visual iconography of 19th century landscapes of the American West threads through the Hubble Heritage Project’s efforts to reach a broad audience. The comparison of Hubble images and Romantic landscapes begins with their shared features, similarities in appearance that link two sets of images made more than a century apart: their color palettes, a focus on small regions within larger objects, dramatic backlighting, towers and pillars, a sense of overwhelming size and scale.’

Kessler who has spent a lot of time studying this imagery and talking with members of the Hubble Heritage Project goes on to say that:

‘Rather than creating something entirely new, astronomers… extended an existing mode of visualization and representation—one associated with exploration—to a new phase of discovery. The mythos of the American frontier functioned as the framework through which a new frontier was seen.’

These days, few would deny the enormous contribution the Hubble telescope has made to the sum total of scientific knowledge, however, to understand why the Hubble Heritage Project, and presumably NASA itself, might want to evoke the spirit of 19th century American Frontier Art in its portrayal of the cosmos, it is important to remember that this was not always the case.

With an original estimated cost to the American taxpayer of around US$400 million, NASA had hoped to launch the Hubble Space Telescope in 1983, but the schedule had slipped as deadline after deadline was missed.

When the Telescope was finally made ready in 1986, NASA was to suffer one of the greatest blows in its history. On 28 January that year, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated over the Atlantic Ocean, killing its crew of seven. The disaster grounded the shuttle fleet for the best part of three years. Without the shuttle, Hubble could not be launched into orbit.

When, the telescope was finally launched, in April 1990, some seven years late, and billions of dollars over budget, NASA scientists were devastated to discover that its main mirror had been polished to the wrong specifications.

The fault was miniscule, yet it was enough to render the telescope incapable of performing most of the tasks for which it had been designed.

In the months that followed, the telescope and NASA itself became the butt of many jokes, and the project was universally regarded as a white elephant. So, in July, a Newsweek magazine cover branded it as: ‘NASA’S $1.5 BILLION BLUNDER’ and the following year the comedy film, The Naked Gun 2½, depicted the Hubble telescope alongside the Titanic, and the Hindenburg. The name Hubble had become a byword for misjudgment on a spectacular scale.

The laughter continued well into December 1993 when NASA sent up a Space Shuttle servicing mission to attempt to correct the Hubble’s poor vision with what many gleefully referred to as ‘space glasses’.

And then, suddenly, the laughter stopped.

One after another, awe-inspiring images of the furthermost corners of the cosmos now began to emerge from the Hubble Heritage Project team. These spectacular images with names like ‘Mystic Mountain’ and the ‘Twin Pillars of Creation began to redefine how we imagined the universe around us.

With these images, the Hubble Heritage Project was attempting to portray, the world beyond the frontiers of normal human experience, so it is perhaps no surprise that they took their visual language cues from American Frontier artists who, in the 19th century had similarly portrayed the American West as a vast uninhabited, unspoiled Eden, for the benefit of the population back East.

The story of the expansion to the west is a cornerstone of the United States’ national identity. In 1991 an art exhibition held at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington DC called The West as America, Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, had ignited a nationwide controversy about American Frontier art.

In the exhibition catalogue, one of the show’s main curators William H. Truettner had written:

‘…images from Christopher Columbus to Kit Carson show the discovery and settlement of the West as a heroic undertaking. Many nineteenth-century artists and the public believed that these images represented a faithful account of civilization moving westward. A more recent approach argues that these images are carefully staged fiction and that their role was to justify the hardship and conflict of nation building. Western scenes extolled progress but rarely noted damaging social and environmental change.’

And yet it is too simplistic to see artists like Bierstadt and Moran, as purveyors of propaganda for the Westward expansion of the United States.

Of course, the images they created clearly had the effect of propaganda… inspiring many people  to migrate West, but this was not necessarily a conscious decision on the part of the artists involved as Elizabeth Kessler, explains  these artists were primarily driven by a Romantic vision of ‘The Sublime’ – as advocated by Immanuel Kant and Edmund Burke – and the majestic landscapes of the 19th century American West provided the perfect opportunity to express this vision. The fact that their work suited the geopolitical agenda was, perhaps, more coincidental than causal.

Similarly, to suggest that the Hubble Heritage Project images were consciously deployed in a bid to repair NASA’s corporate reputation – by adopting the visual language of the art of Manifest Destiny – is possibly a little unfair. Even though it was undeniably useful.

It is perhaps best to think that they had their minds on higher matters. Or as Lord Darlington put it: ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’ 

 

Like so many creative ideas, it all began by chance.

It was 1971. Two photographs had fallen on to the floor of his studio, and David Hockney, was staring down at them, transfixed by the fact that they had landed in a way that suggested an intriguing relationship between them…

The first of these two photographs featured a figure – Hockney’s ex-lover Peter Schlesinger, with his head tilted slightly, looking down at something on the ground. The second a figure swimming in a pool under the surface of the water. And whilst the first was a literal photographic representation, in the second, the body of the submerged swimmer was fragmented into a set of beautiful abstract shapes by the ripples on the surface of the water.

And the way in which the photographs had fallen seemed to suggest that the first figure was peering over the edge of the pool at the swimmer in the water below.

This composition was to become the basis of one of the most widely recognised and well-loved of David Hockney’s paintings – a painting called ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’. When this painting went to auction at Christies in New York on 15 November 2018 it sold for $90.3 million… making it the most expensive work of art by a living artist ever sold at auction.

Britain’s first openly gay artist, Hockney was born in 1937 in the bleak post-industrial landscape of Northern England, and raised during a time of rationing, sexual repression and rampant homophobia.

Unsurprisingly, California proved an irresistible attraction for the young artist. As he put it later: ‘I came to Los Angeles for two reasons. The first was a photo by Julius Shulman of Case Study House #21, and the other was AMG’s Physique Pictorial.’

Shulman’s photo featured a mid-century modernist building with a swimming pool that served to exaggerate the graphic quality of the steel and glass structure, whilst Physique Pictorial was America’s first and foremost gay magazine featuring the extravagantly homoerotic photography of Bob Mizer.

‘I came to Los Angeles for two reasons. The first was a photo by Julius Shulman of Case Study House #21, and the other was AMG’s Physique Pictorial.’

DAVID HOCKNEY

Together, these two visual elements – the male body, and the domestic swimming pools of Los Angeles – would define the work of David Hockney work for many years to come.

Hockney had moved to California in 1963. and flying in to Los Angeles, he had been struck by the sheer number of these domestic swimming pools. As he later told Diane Hanson in 2009 ‘I looked down to see blue swimming pools all over, and I realised that a swimming pool in England would have been a luxury, whereas here they are not.’

The move was to have a profound effect on Hockney – in much the same way that moving to Provence had had such a profound effect on the painting of Vincent Van Gogh a century earlier – the swimming pools of Los Angeles being Hockney’s equivalent of the Dutch artist’s sunflowers.

And little wonder.

These sparkling and shimmering waters, that stretch out beneath the immaculate blue of cloudless Californian skies, seemed to symbolise everything that the boy who had grown up in the black-and-white bleakness of post-war Bradford had longed for.

For the first time, David Hockney found himself, quite literally, in his element.

This element was not, however, without its technical challenges.

As Hockney says: ‘It is an interesting formal problem; it is a formal problem to represent water, to describe water, because it can be anything. It can be any colour and it has no set visual description’… ‘[The pool paintings] were about the surface of the water, the very thin film, the shimmering two-dimensionality.’

But this was also a time of massive technical innovation for Hockney, for it was at this point that he switched from traditional oil paints to the recently developed acrylics which offered much faster drying times. At the same time he also began to use photography as part of his practice and this would gradually lend his paintings greater and greater representational realism. Thus in order to try and capture ‘the shimmering two-dimensionality‘ of the surface of these LA pools Hockney began to experiment various media including acrylics, watercolours, crayons and lithographs, as well as his later technique of pressing dyed, wet paper pulp into sheets of paper.

Hockney’s earliest California works from 1964 depict water as inky splashes of blue and grey, but by 1996 – with paintings like Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool and Sunbather – he had he began to develop a more stylised visual language in which he uses interlocking tubular shapes in a ‘Pop Art’ style to suggest the shimmering surface of the water.

However, perhaps the most famous of these experiments, came the following year with ‘A Bigger Splash’ painted in 1967. Here a pool that reflects a sky made up of a large flat field of cobalt blue is splashed with a Jackson Pollock style action-painting plume of pure white paint.

It was around this time that David Hockney began teaching at UCLA. And it was here that he first met Peter Schlesinger who was a student there at the time They began a long lasting relationship, and Schlesinger not only became his lover but also his inspiration and favourite model, appearing in countless paintings over the next few years. Later Schlesinger relocated with Hockney to London, where he went on to study at the Slade School of Art.

By the early 1970’s however, the relationship was falling apart.

The 1973 documentary film A Bigger Splash, directed by Jack Hazan, therefore, not only covers the long lingering breakup with Peter Schlesinger, from 1970 to 1973 but also the creation of ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)’ between 1971 and 1972.

As Hazan’s film shows, David Hockney actually made two separate attempts at the painting that was to become known as ‘Portrait of an Artist’.

The first, he started in 1971, having been inspired by discovering the chance juxtaposition of two photographs that had fallen onto the studio floor: ‘One was of a figure swimming underwater and therefore quite distorted… the other was a boy gazing at something on the ground,’ Hockney said later… ‘The idea of painting two figures in different styles appealed so much that I began the painting immediately.’

However the two photographs did not sit well together, and after months of working and reworking the image Hockney was still not happy with the composition, and eventually destroyed the painting.

In April 1972 Hockney needed new work for a one man show at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York, and although the show was due to open in just four weeks time he resolved to return to the theme of ‘Portrait of an Artist’ .

However Hockney also now realised that he needed to shoot new reference material for the composition that had been suggested by the two photographs he had found on his studio floor. He would therefore now solve the technical problems presented by his previous attempt at ‘comping’ together two different photographs, by shooting the whole scene from one POV, on one camera with the same lens.

In order to do this, he decided to return to a pool location he knew well. Significantly, this was not in Los Angeles but in the Massif des Maures, the mountains that overlook Saint-Tropez in the South of France.

Here in a celebrity hideaway called Le Nid du Duc, Hockney had remembered that there was an idyllic pool looking out over the mountains. Against this beautiful setting, he now staged a series of reference photographs using an assistant and a friend as models that he could use as source material for the final painting.

Returning to London he then did a second photographic shoot in Kensington Gardens, reversing the angle of the morning light, but matching the POV and using the same camera lens to capture the figure of ‘the artist’.

For this he sasked Peter Schlesinger to model for him one last time – wearing the same pink jacket his assistant had worn in the South of France.

Using these elements for reference, Hockney then set about the physical act of painting. He worked a full 18 hours a day for two weeks, until he eventually finished the artwork the night before it was due to be shipped to New York. (One of the benefits of working in acrylics is, of course, their rapid drying time).

‘I must admit I loved working on that picture,’ he would later recall of that fortnight, ‘working with such intensity; it was marvellous doing it, really thrilling.’

Given the extraordinary circumstances, under which the painting was created, and the way in which so much of this was documented in Jack Hazan’s film, there have been many who see the work only in the context of Hockney’s failing relationship with Peter Schlesinger.

However I think there is more to this painting than that.

Indeed, in an interview in 2018 Schlesinger told the Observer: “It’s an amazing picture, and it contains his two most iconic genres in one picture, swimming pools and double-portraiture, but I can’t speak to its emotional element because I don’t think it is emotional. There’s the figure of me standing and the figure in the water differently painted. It was a conceptual problem. I don’t even think it’s a portrait of me, really.”

What had initially excited Hockney about the project suggested by the two separate photographs was the opportunity they afforded him to explore two different representations of reality – one highly literal, the other highly distorted – both within the same painting.

This reflected the wider tension in 20th century painting — as well as in his own work – between figurative art and more abstract forms of expression.

In the painting, we see – as promised in the title – an artist, looking over the edge of an outdoor swimming pool, considering two of Hockney’s favourite subjects – the male body and water.

As Hockney said in an interview with Fran Morrison in 1980:

‘Water, the idea of drawing water, is always appealing to me. If it’s clear water anyway, transparent water. You can look on it, through it, into it, see it as volume, see it as surface…the idea of representing it has always rather fascinated me and I keep going back to it‘

In ‘Portrait of an Artist’, Hockney avoids the highly specific domestic architecture of mid-century Los Angeles – something that we associate with so many of his pool paintings -replacing it here with a more natural landscape that creates a more mythic, universal setting for the two figures.

The composition of this landscape has a exquisite rhythmic feel to it, formed as it is from a series of interlocking triangles. These triangles subliminally reflect the main triangle in the composition created by the vertical figure of the artist and the horizontal figure of the swimmer.

This main triangle, is designed to emphasise the central drama of the painting – the relationship between the artist and the mysterious figure swimming toward him.

Equally important to note is that the two figures exist in two different and distinct realities.

The artist stands vertical at the edge of the pool. He is clothed and cannot enter the water. Whilst the swimmer is a horizontal figure fully submerged in the water. The artist is clearly conscious of the swimmer. The swimmer, we feel, is not necessarily conscious of the artist.

And perhaps this is the key to understanding the real emotional power of this painting. Because at some level, the figure of the artist seems to represents the conscious mind and the swimmer the unconscious.

Whatever ideas you bring to this painting, however, the obvious question it seems to pose is ‘What happens next?’. The submerged swimmer is clearly a breath away from reaching the end of the pool at which point, will he break the surface and come face to face with the artist?

And, for me at least, this is the central drama of Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), because whatever else it is, it always feels like an articulation of that extraordinary moment just before something new – something that has been slowly emerging out of the depths of the artists unconscious – breaks the surface of the water and emerges into the clear air of consciousness.