Hope Springs Eternal
In this new post I continue thinking about hope, the subject of a book I’m working on for Thames & Hudson. I consider the special relationship between art and hope.
Simon Morley, ‘YES No.4’ (2024), watercolour on paper. One of a series in which I painted the words YES paired with NO in a trompe l’oeil style. The flora is gathered around where I live near to the DMZ.
In this post I continue thinking about hope, the subject of a book I’m working on for Thames & Hudson. I consider the special relationship between art and hope.
Art deals in the ‘as-if’. It’s where alternative possibilities are tested and explored. Artists are potentially involved in re-thinking the shape of the future using their imagination, shifting the boundaries of experience and knowledge to make more room something different. The imagination is characterized by mental mobility, and its antithesis is the passive perception of given forms, the docile acceptance of already existing reality. In this sense, imagination and hope share the same goal: to go beyond the tyranny of what is. Artists produce images that help foster futures that often look very different from the visions, dreams, or nightmares with which we are familiar from lived experience.
On a basic level, hope and art are connected in broadly three ways. Firstly, artists use symbols, visual metaphors, and analogies to represent the abstract trait called ‘hope’. They draw on a familiar corpus of cultural signs that derive from our responses to the environment in which we exist and the experience of our own five senses of our bodies. Hope can be likened to a rainbow, a sunrise, or a newborn child, or represented as something contained and fragile, or something rising up and elevated above the terrestrially earthbound. But artists have also striven to create less obvious ways of representing hope, ones that avoid worn-out clichés and challenge simplistic notions.
But art can also address hope in a second way, one that is more indirect. In one way or another. artworks can the kinds of things in which people place their hopes - historically and in the present. Artists consider the human resources of hope though the representation of myths and cosmologies, visions of progress and more perfect worlds that have been the powerful and perennial concerns of all human cultures. Through their representation, we recognize that humanity has always confronted obstacles and struggled to survive, and that hope is often strongest when times are darkest. This means that the history of art is an invaluable historical archive of hope’s objectives and goals, and can make us in the present more mindful in relation to the framing of our own hopes.
But there is also a third possibility: art can be an active constructor of hope. The two possibilities discussed above – hope as a symbol and as a narrative – are supplanted by a third possibility: hope as a relation to art. This involves a dimension of choice: in order for art to have the power to directly generate hope within us, we must believe the work of art can actively change our life, and we must choose to make ourselves open to its power.
Simon Morley, ‘Franz Kafka Der Prozess (1925)’, 2024, acrylic on canvas, 53×45cm. An example of my Book-Paintings.
And to end, here’s a really clichéd image of hope, but one that I can’t resist sharing: a photo of some of the cherry blossom that was recently decorating the road into our village near the DMZ in South Korea!
