The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [45]
7.
In the spring, after three years of work, Taylor helps a driver load up a van with thirty-two studies of the oak tree. Their destination is an art gallery at the edge of the City of London, where large commercial towers abruptly give way to irregularly shaped streets lined with small offices and shops. The paintings will be hung on the walls of the gallery’s ground and basement floors, while the large plate-glass window facing the pavement will play host to a single twelve-centimetre-high canvas depicting the tree in early autumn.
The oak looks oddly foreign in this hard landscape, with its crowds heading brusquely for their offices, its cranes looming high above and its planes crossing overhead on their way to airports to the east and west. There are people out buying coffee, sandwiches, papers or new heels for their shoes, servicing their essential and practical requirements. In the midst of such activity, it seems logical enough to ask exactly what Taylor’s art might be for.
To help us to notice what we have already seen. The tree paintings endeavour to excite and command our attention. They are in a sense comparable to advertising billboards, though instead of forcing us to focus on a specific brand of margarine or discounted airline fares, they incite us to contemplate the meaning of nature, the yearly cycles of growth and decay, the intricacies of the vegetal and animal realms, our lost connection with the earth and the redemptive powers of modest dappled things. We might define art as anything which pushes our thoughts in important yet neglected directions.
Nevertheless, Taylor is suspicious of any attempt to summarise art in words. He insists that a worthy painting will automatically render all commentary inadequate, because it must influence and affect our senses rather than our logical faculties. To convey the particularity of artistic work, he quotes Hegel’s definition of painting and music as genres dedicated to the ‘sensuous presentation of ideas’. We require such ‘sensuous’ arts, Hegel suggested, because many important truths will impress themselves upon our consciousness only if they have been moulded from sensory, emotive material. We may, for example, need a song to alert us in a visceral way to the importance of forgiving others, a notion to which we might previously have assented purely in a rote and stagnant way after reading of it in a political tract – just as it may only be in front of a successful painting of an oak tree that we are in any position to feel, as opposed dutifully to accept, the significance of the natural world.
The great works of art have about them the quality of a reminder. They fix that which is fugitive: the cooling shadow of an oak on a windless, hot summer afternoon; the golden-brown tint of leaves in the early days of autumn; the stoical sadness of a bare tree glimpsed from a train, outlined against a heavy grey sky. At the same time, it is forgotten aspects of our own psyches to which paintings can seem mysteriously conjoined. It can be our unspoken longings that surprise us in the trees, and our adolescent selves that we recognise in the hazy tint of a summer sky.
8.
Sales in the gallery are slow over the next eight weeks. There are no reviews in the national press. It is hard to buy paintings when one knows so little about what prestigious forces think of them.
Still, a few customers come in off the street, without appointment, responding to instinct. One tree is sold at lunchtime to a trader from Deutsche Bank, another to a printer from Bow, a third to a couple visiting from Melbourne who have lost their way to Liverpool Street Station.
During the last week of the show, the smallest oak of all, a mere ten centimetres high, made up of oil paint on board, is bought by a dentist from Milton Keynes. Susan hangs it in the living room, where it coexists, and competes for attention, with a television, a set of wooden camels from Luxor and