Composition: Choosing a subject to paint

Finding a subject matter is notoriously difcult - for proof, look no further than the greats, says the Observer's art critic
Laura Cumming
Laura Cumming
Sunday 20 September 2009 12.00BST

What to paint? Writers are always advised to write about what they know, but what should artists depict? If
they all only painted what was in front of them, or what was inside them, art history would be short of all
sorts of masterpieces, from The Sistine Chapel to The Last Supper, Liberty on the Barricades to The Raft of
the Medusa.
Finding subject matter can be a lifelong struggle. Mondrian spent decades painting windmills and rivers
before he found form with geometric abstraction. The American painter Philip Guston tried socialist
murals, allegories of children's games, and years of abstract impressionism before he eventually hit upon
the queer and tragic-comic near-cartoons of contemporary life that sealed his fame for the future. He was,
he said, embarrassed to be ddling about with ethereal tones when news of Vietnam was on the radio.
Guston was well into his 50s by then.
In the past, academic tradition conveniently chose the subjects for you. You could do portraits, religious or
historical scenes, genre paintings, landscapes or still lifes. If a court artist, like Van Dyke or Velazquez, you
painted the monarch and his entourage, working your magic in that narrow circle. If employed by the
church, like Caravaggio, the Bible supplied you with stories.
For Rembrandt and Hals, the rise of the middle classes in the new Dutch republic created both an
immediate subject and a market. Every profession, from banker to philosopher to orthopaedic surgeon,
wanted to be in the picture, along with their families, and portraits became the pretext for tremendous
innovation.
From Aelbert Cuyp's cows to Ruisdael's twilight landscapes, from the tulip to the guttering candle and the
checkerboard oor, 17th-century Holland pioneered so many subjects. Vermeer closes the door on the
outside world with his women lost in thought, in letters, in music, sessions of still, silent thought. But his
interiors show exactly how the content of a painting can be so much more than its subject.
Every seed in a loaf, every brass tack, every tuft of a rug has its moment, but Vermeer's true theme is the
passage of light. Look at The Artist in His Studio: the artist painting his muse as light navigates the map on
the wall, sheening across the tiles, burnishing bronze, marble and satin, glancing from sketchbook to
canvas and, eventually, the hand that holds the brush. The artist paints light as the source of revelation.
Light is the subject for Turner and Constable, with their seas and skies, and later for the impressionists,
trying to catch its eeting eects on the open-air world. Monet paints the grainstacks over and again, from
dawn to dusk, as mutable as the melting facade of Rouen Cathedral. By the time he gets to the last
magnicent waterlily ponds, his subject expands panoramically to encompass the liquid ux of the water
and all its chance reections of the bright void above.
Monet sailed to London to picture smog on the Thames. Drer once risked six days on a freezing boat to
paint a whale washed up on a beach. But artists such as Chardin and Morandi barely left the house, nding
everything they needed at home.
Chardin painted what he saw - silvery condensation on a glass, the reected glory inside a copper pan, a
peach's velvet upholstery. His paint brilliantly imitates what it depicts, and his slow-won observations teach
the eye to relax, slow down, relish the pleasure of simply looking. Morandi, by contrast, shows that every
incident in a still life can be psychologically thrilling: a couple of bottles and a box edgily at odds, a
maternal jug menacing its small brood of cups.
Willem de Kooning once said that esh was the reason oil painting was invented, and for some painters the
medium determines the subject. Czanne's apples take on both the luminosity and the weight of the paint,
more glowing and monumental than reality. Frank Auerbach's portraits, great hulks of clotted pigment
densely painted and overpainted, evidence of each successive sitting, each previous attempt to get across
the face and character of the sitter, represent both memory and mutability.
And Lucian Freud's naked gures, of course, are bodied forth in paint to such a degree as to make sense of
his remark that, "As far as I am concerned, the paint is the person."

All painters contend, to some degree, with those who came before them, and perhaps some subjects are
denitively taken: Van Gogh's sunowers, Degas's ballet dancers, Czanne's Mont St Victoire. But Canaletto
has never blocked the Venetian view and Rembrandt can only inspire further self-portraits. If you don't
know where to start, take Leonardo's advice and look at the stains on your walls: there you will nd endless
new forms to jump-start a painting.

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