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| I DON’T NEED INSPIRATION Pēteris Bankovskis After finishing the Riga Secondary School of Applied Art in 1965, Henrihs Vorkals went on to graduate from the Textiles Department of the Latvian Academy of Art in 1972. He has taken part in exhibitions since 1969 and became a member of the Artists' Union in 1975. He is possibly Latvia's greatest watercolourist. His art is a blend of constructive, geometric thinking, possibly from his textile studies, with an apparent sense of nature that comes from the soul. He has a characteristically open mind, possibly from the Pop Art days, towards the world of objects (including the works of others), which we could (but shouldn't) confuse with the so-called unfortunate habit of quotation attributed to the postmodernists. We shouldn't forget that art has not managed without quotation in any century. In the one drawing or canvas, Vorkals can reveal himself to be a national romantic, a cosmopolitan cynic and a human being. That's interesting. | |
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On the day I met Vorkals in his Āgenskalns top floor studio, he was working on Van Gogh's painting Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889). The painting was almost ready; all that remained were a few essential strokes in the "sky part". Scattered around were several art books (from Taschen, Thames & Hudson and other houses) opened at exactly the pages where this work had been reproduced. Because Vorkals' painting was almost finished, the initial gridlines on the primed canvas were no longer visible. But they were certainly there underneath; a fine division of the areas, each carefully transferred to exactly the same place as the stroke forming lines seen in the original (as far as one can see them in reproductions).
Vorkals tells me: "A copy has to be done as if you're painting from life, then it works." He continues about the still to be finished Van Gogh: "This reminds me of the Abava river valley near Kandava. Just think, he doesn't mix a single tone. Very interesting, such discipline. A couple of tubes are all he needed." Nearby is another (also unfinished), no less familiar work - Claude Monet's Impression: the Rising Sun (1873). "Imagine," enthuses Vorkals, "he painted that with two colours - cadmium red and a blue close to ultramarine. By studying and comparing the reproductions, by working on it myself, I can see it well. Look!" We return to Van Gogh. "You know, I want to get that feeling that what I paint and what comes out of it is not my work. That's why I make such a precise analysis. You see there, in the sky, his stroke is a touch skewed, but the accents and the intervals are absolutely precise. I studied it, made a careful analysis and then transferred into my own painting. But for him, just like for the other great masters, it simply comes out that way. To be honest, after Cézanne and Van Gogh, there's no point in painting." As if pre-empting my next question, subdued and almost humbly, he says: "In winter I get depressed, that's why I paint like that. Copies - that's pure psychotherapy." Henrihs Vorkals was born in 1946 in the Rēzekne district in the East of Latvia, but has lived in Riga since he was a boy. As a pupil at the Riga Secondary School of Applied Art he had already shown himself to be a precise and sharp observer of nature; with a few lines and an inborn sense of spatial proportions, he could create on paper a kind of subjectively observed "imprint" of nature, a laconic primary image that in the viewer's perceptual machinery probably becomes a quite different but no less subjective an experience. We can see this in the ink drawings of his adolescence. One of them, a 1961 view of Zaķusala is reproduced here. His mastery as an observer of nature particularly comes through in the clear watercolours that he continues to paint. Again and again, with his vision of a kind of primeval space, free from the presence of man, he opens a window onto nature's perpetual pulse, where man's self-created everyday bustle has no place. This seemingly estranged watercolour depiction undoubtedly ties him to the English tradition of observing nature (Bonnington, for example) but that is no bad thing. However, even though Vorkals' watercolours would certainly guarantee him an outstanding and original place in the second half of the 20th century history of Latvian art, they are neither the most noticeable nor in the artist's eyes too, the most important part of his work. While studying at the applied arts school and then in the, for those days quite "progressive" (whatever we each understand by progress), Textiles Department of the Academy of Art under Rūdolfs Heimrāts, Vorkals indirectly (as did all his peers), with the help of reproductions found in mainly Polish magazines and with a passionate desire to feel what it was like for real, plunged into the fashionable art of the day - Pop Art. From that moment Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein and others, but primarily Andy Warhol became his friends, partners in conversation and argument, and remain so to this day. It is quite possible that those young people studying at the Academy, steeped in traditional art and living far from the centres of Pop Art, were fascinated by its naked and unashamed courage to say that art is only a pile of things that can be compared to other things that are "eaten away by moths and rust"; but the "spirituality" and similar qualities searched for in every brushstroke even in the age of Abstract Expressionism was somewhere "out there". An interesting detail: In 1971, while still a student, Vorkals, together with Jānis Borgs, Atis Ieviņš, Arvīds Priedītis and Laimonis Šēnbergs organised an exhibition in what was then the "House of Knowledge". There was no lack of alienation of artefacts from the traditional predestination of art characteristic of its pop variety. Apparently that is why professor Indulis Zariņš argued for the exhibition to be closed. In practical terms this meant its banning and this was therefore already a judgement; if the leading, officially recognised painter and authority deemed the exhibition to be in contradiction with his feelings of what the notion of "art" allows, then it was possible to draw some kind of conclusion from the "opposite". The "opposite" as Vorkals says, had been unexpected; being then the secretary of the Acdemy of Art branch of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol), he brought along the leader of the Riga City Komsomol, Kārlis Līcis. He had looked at the exhibition and ordered it to be reopened. Does this mean that the Komsomol, in essence a bastion of appearances and hypocrisy, was able to find Pop Art to be truly appropriate to Soviet society of Brezhnev's day, this caricatured reflection of Western consumer society? In any case, Warhol's free operation with images and depictions, his attitude towards them as things that are simply useful has been important to his almost namesake brother Vorkals since the 1970s. And it is strange, but some people only noticed this passion of Vorkals' after the big Warhol exhibition in the State Museum of Art. Even now in 2004, when for years the art world has been rocked by scandals and disagreements over Warhol and the authenticity of his legacy, even over whether the majority of his work can be called art at all, Vorkals regards Warhol as a whole new world, different to, for example, Rauschenberg, which is the same Dadaism executed in a different technology. In one of late 1970s works Vorkals composed a group of his friends of the time using photographs taken by Atis Ieviņš. We can recognise Larisa Brauna, Arvīds Priedīte, Pēteris Kalniņš (Vorkals still regards him as an outstanding, perhaps the most outstanding bohemian of his day), Miervaldis Paulovičs, Valdis Kavacs, Jānis Borgs and others. It seems that these people, perhaps the feeling of what each of them had been, continue to feed Vorkals' creative appetite to this day. His ability to "appropriate" (to take and process, analyse and arrange where necessary) seems to consist of analytical and spontaneously creative "pieces", some of which can be seen in the contributions of the above-mentioned contemporaries of his youth. Vorkals pulls out a ragged page of a magazine from a pile of bric-a-brac. It features a photograph of Rolling Stones leader Mick Jagger. "I've had this since 1963. Whenever I've moved house, it's always come with me. I can somehow sense the Rolling Stones, always; they never repeat themselves and they have that certain something. The Beatles, for example, sometimes I don't understand them at all". The thought comes to me that Jagger is probably a kind of alter ego, the unpleasant, splintery leader, a surviving vector from his youth on which the artist threads rings of what is to be experienced and survived. Perhaps Vorkals also wants to be like that. He was a leader for almost ten years when, as an artist for the Applied Art Combine of the Latvian SSR Art Fund, he was responsible for the exposition of the Ferrous Metals pavilion in the USSR People's Exhibition of Economic Achievements. In this kingdom of the absurd, Andris Breže, Juris Putrāms and Ojārs Pētersons became important figures in Latvian art under the direct influence of Henrihs Vorkals. There is one work by Vorkals, deeply autobiographical, I think, where we see Vilhelms Purvītis' painting "Winter" (ca. 1910) and in the foreground there are Keith Richards and Mick Jagger (from a 70s or 80s photograph). And this work shows quite clearly why Vorkals is neither a charismatic Jagger type leader nor a quite backroom artist. He tells me: "Look, aren't they (Richards and Jagger) exactly the same as that clump of trees in the Purvītis painting, the same verticals that organise the composition? And see there, the black band at the bottom of the picture is proportionally the same as in the Purvītis work." And then he begins to tell me about the geometry he used to find these proportions. Yes, the black band - a mask that covers the "superfluous" or a mark of precision. In his studio Vorkals shows me an analytical depiction of Da Vinci's famous portrait of Mona Lisa. Here the "superfluous" bands have been marked but their presence is also justified. This has been done by dividing the area of the painting into ideal squares and from them into the proportions of the so-called golden section. This allows us to construct the classical "basic spiral of nature" we see in ammonite shells. Vorkals adds: "It looks like the picture has been drawn." Well, that is one of the characteristics of his work, perhaps even an obsession or (at times) a game - using tests to examine art works of the past. Eduard Manet's view of the opera balcony, Titian's Venus, Goya's etchings. He draws a picture of some work of art in precise detail and proportions. Over these he draws the plan of the composition. "I can prove precisely, which picture is a work of genius based on the golden section. Of course geniuses don't use diagrams, their intuition leads to precision. But I basically draw my pictures like a draftsman and this means I don't need inspiration. I don't have to puzzle out how and from which corner to start. Underneath I have the same golden section diagram and then I don't have to torture myself working out where to put the horizon, for example." Another important thing for Vorkals is emptiness. "Of course, an ideal work would be a blank planchette, but I'm not Malevich," he says. "I like the touching of paper and pencil, colour sometimes already shows a lack of talent." A useful example might be one of his works with the head of a laughing girl and one and a half faces of Marilyn Monroe, together with several small flying birds and a tiny, barely discernable self-portrait. This is all on a purple, empty space. "I had drawn this girl ages ago when I realised that I could sit Warhol's Marilyn next to her in a golden section. (The coloured Marilyn side was apparently added to sustain the inner discussion on talent and/or its lack.) The question that is usually asked silently - what's it all for? Vorkals says: "It has never been my aim to express something. The process is the only important thing, I‘m testing myself. For example, I drew the girl so that she could stand in front of me and I could look at her. And I make copies of works that I would like to have at home." There are probably those who would dispute Vorkals' attitude to a work of art as an object to be taken and used to satisfy his own needs. He says that in 2007, he might organise an exhibition in the State Museum of Art together with his old "comrades in arms" from the Moscow days, Breže, Putrāms and Pētersons. They could take the second floor of the classical museum and leave everything as it is. Then in the Purvītis gallery he could hang his own paintings among the originals, those that have survived only in reproductions from the time of the German occupation. "In the end, why can't copies be put on show? If Barbara Gaile makes Yves Klein without indicating what it is, then I can produce Purvītis saying clearly what it is!" A kind of conceptualism. | |
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