The Art of Classical Dressage
I have
been thinking about this while working in my studio. Many of our modern
riding masters write with sensitivity and passion about the art aspect
of classical dressage. However, they write from the viewpoints of professional
horsemen; I am an amateur horseman but professional artist, so it might
be interesting to look at the phrase from this angle and see what truth
there is in it. Or what truth I find in it, to be more accurate, as
I can only write about that – but I hope you will find it an interesting
change to leave your riding stables and join me in my studio.
The atmosphere in my studio is similar to that in a classical rider’s
indoor school: calm, serious – but not humourless – where
time is forgotten and one’s eyes look inward and outward, the
senses take over. Feel, rhythm, balance, volume, form, interior and
exterior forces, the power of the force of gravity, diagonal energy
that gives life to the art, all these go into my work and are familiar
terms to any horseman.
I often work to classical music. This seems to help me channel my concentration
into the sculpture I’m working on. The music is not background;
it seems possible to live ‘within’ the music while creating
with my hands. Perhaps it helps keep the artistic right side of the
brain stimulated, so avoiding the everyday bother of the left brain
interfering.
Many ride to classical music too. Nuno Oliveira rode to Verdi and recommended
to his long-term student Michel Henriquet – who was having problems
with editing an article Oliveira had written for him, Oliveira agreed
to Henriquet making the cut he wanted, but advised Henriquet - that
if he were to lower the lights in his riding school and play Fauré’s
‘Requiem’ and ride pure paces, he would understand better
why his original text was correct!
From the musical carousels of the 18th century, when all the court gathered
to watch the riding displays, to the great riding halls of our day,
music is more than just an accompaniement; it inspires riders and horses.
Horses seem to find it easy to associate a particular piece of music
with a certain set of movements – sometimes with tragic results.
The eigth century Chinese Emperor Xuanzong had a special troup of 100
trained ‘dancing’ horses which danced to the ‘Music
of the Upturned Cup’ at each of his birthday celebrations. However,
when Xuanzong fled during a rebellion, the horses were dispersed to
various stables. One day, when the military band started playing ‘their’
music "the horses, unable to stop themselves, began to dance. The
servants and lackeys considered them bewitched and took brooms in hand
to strike them. The horses thought their dancing was out of step with
the rhythm and stooping and rearing, nodding and straining, they yet
tried to realise their former choreography. The stablemaster hurried
to report this grotesquerie, and Ch’eng-szu ordered that the horses
be flayed. The more fiercely this was done the more precise became the
horses’ dancing. But the whipping and flogging ever increased
until, finally, they all lay dead in their stalls.’ (1)
Bartabas, creator of the equestrian theatre Zingaro, and founder and
director of the school for equestrian arts at Versailles, uses music
from around the world for his performances. He doesn’t use words
at all and says he seeks music as far as possible from the natural rhythm
of the horse’s movements. He finds it fascinating the way music
allows people from very different cultures to communicate.
Though writing about the art of writing, the 18th century poet Alexander
Pope could easily have been thinking of riding to music when he wrote:
‘True ease in writing comes from art, not chance.
As those move easiest who have learnt to dance,
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense
The sound must seem an echo of the sense.’
Many riding halls have paintings on the walls, as inspiration and as
a reminder of the traditions. The Great Winter Riding School at Vienna,
home of the Spanish Riding School, has a portrait of Emperor Charles
VI who was responsible for completing this Imperial manége, hanging
on its walls. Every rider who enters salutes it.
Rather less grand I have a miscellany of my work, photographs cut from
magazines, postcards, important quotes, notes on how I’ve solved
a particular technical problem, sketches, cartoons from the French satirical
newspaper Le Canard Enchainé, pinned on my studio walls. These
all help to create the work atmosphere that is both personal and intimate.
Just as a horse needs to concentrate his mind and body, I need to have
all these things around me to enable me to start working. I ‘warm
up’ with a cup of tea as I look at the work in progress and regain
the emotions I was feeling when work stopped the day before. This is
always difficult – sometimes I have to trick myself into starting
by tackling something very easy, cleaning my etching press, changing
a scalpel blade, anything to get going. Once working, though the concentration
is enormous, I’m not really aware of how hard I’m working
until I stop for the day, already looking forward to the next day’s
work.
Something that is very important is to learn to really use our eyes,
not just to look but to see. We have so many visual preconceptions.
For example, we tend to think that if we look in a mirror we see ourselves
as we really are. If you stand at arm’s length from a mirror and
put your middle finger on the point where the top of your head is reflected,
and then your thumb on the reflection of the bottom of your chin, you
will almost certainly be surprised to find it is only half the size
of your actual head. And really look at the head of someone you think
you know well. One ear probably will be higher and a different shape
than the other, the jaw slightly to one side, one eye higher than the
other, the mouth wider one side, one cheekbone more pronounced. All
or some of these or other variations show that what we assume to be
symmetrical is not – just as in our horses.
With the advent of slow-motion photography we can now see many irregularities
in the horse’s movement that we can’t see with the naked
eye, although the great French Impressionist painter and sculptor Matisse
isn’t the only artist to have suggested that ‘reality lies
in what you see and not in what is.’ However the inner truth of
the work is best perceived by touch, by feel. Sculptures are made to
be touched and it is a shame this is so often forbidden in a museum
or exhibition context.
A piece of sculpture is built up on an armature – it is the skeleton
of the work. Usually of metal it is essential that it is right, that
it works, that it provides a true and stable base, because however much
you might try later, if this basic essential is not right nothing will
work and the sculpture will be a failure. It will be necessary to go
right back to the basic armature and start again – a familiar
idea to horsemen!
The discipline of the material used always dictates the work produced.
It is obviously impossible to carve in stone or marble a heavy horse
on slender legs, which is why bronze is so often used for equestrian
statues. This is a process where the original sculpture is built up,
on an armature, of plaster or clay – or less commonly nowadays,
of wax . This has a cast taken of it and melted bronze is poured into
the cast. This allows multiples, that is, several copies, although in
theory nine is the maximum number permitted for continued..
the resulting sculpture
to retain its status as an original work of art. In the same way the
build of a horse tends to dictate where his abilities will lie.
The armature too imposes its own discipline due to its inherent qualities,
whether it is rigid or flexible. In my case I use steel wire of various
thicknesses. This comes in large reels, so it is predisposed to curve.
Like Matisse, whose work was searching out a certain harmony that he called
the ‘arabesque’ – also beloved in the Baroqe arts –
I work in a series of curves and arches. I want the viewer’s eye
to be swept around the horse I have made in a series of circles. This
movement of the eye helps give the impression of movement in the piece
of sculpture. Even if my work is of a horse standing at ease it has to
convey that at any second, this second, now, it is going to start to life,
just as a live horse remains alert in nature for its very survival; its
awareness never sleeps.
My horse, Montanheiro, if I walk into his stable when he’s flat
out on his side after a hard night’s grazing, can give a very good
imitation of someone ignoring the alarm clock. He opens an eye halfway,
sees it’s only me, yawns and snuggles down for a few minutes more.
Sometimes I behave like an anxious mother and bend over him to make sure
he’s still breathing. But then I only have to put my hand in my
left pocket and straight away he is awake, stands and scents the horse
nuts I have taken from it. This feeling of arrested movement is what makes
the difference between a sculpture that works and a study – which
might be anatomically correct to the last detail but lacks any other quality.
Sculpture is not representation but creation. What I’m wanting is
not an exact replica, but I’m trying to show what I see based on
thythm, balance, light, form, weight, interacting tensions – the
dynamics inside the sculpture trying to get out, so it is never static
– it should vibrate with pent up energy. I am always increasing
my understanding and am trying to express my feelings about life, and
so I live more intensely through my work. I work for myself, to extend
and challenge myself, even if it goes wrong it is not a failure because
I have learned in the process so am the richer for it.
The Japanese of Chinese calligraphers’ smooth rapidity is not due
to self-abandonment, but to concentration, discipline, mastery.
The Greeks said that to marvel is the beginning of knowledge and when
we cease to marvel we may be in danger of ceasing to know.
In the classical world of Greek art the pure classical style idealized
rather than individualized. Proportions were calculated to a mathematical
ideal. It was considered that man’s body was such a model of proportion
– with arms and legs extended it fits into the ‘perfect’
form of a circle or scquare – that it was used as a counsel of perfection
in architecture and art up to the Renaissance times. Classical art was
essentially about perfect symmetry and balance. Our civilisation has grown
out of the classical world, and we cannot forget that cultural knowledge.
William Blake in the 18th century wrote, ‘All forms are perfect
in the Poet’s mind but these are not abstracted or compounded from
Nature, but are from the imagination.’
And the Greek philosopher Aristotle said in the 4th century BC, ‘Art
completes what Nature cannot bring to a finish. The artist gives us knowledge
of Nature’s unrealized ends.’
What better argument for the use of gymnastic exercising of the horse
– classical equitation!
It is no surprise to find that in the technical manuals for both sculpture
and printmaking, the advice could equally be used in the studio or the
manège.
On etching E.S.Lumsden wrote, ‘No one, therefore, need starting
working in this medium (etching) who finds it impossible to make up his
or her mind what has to be done before beginning to do it.’
‘Another quality is essential – and if the student is without
it it must be acquired – Patience!’
‘I shall try and set down those ways of working which have decended
to us from an honoured past; but in general the art has altered very little
in practice – in spite of modern ingenuity – since the time
of Rembrandt.’ (2)
On sculpture John W.Mills wrote, ‘Accumulative technical thought
should not be the sole province of industry and science but of the artist,
too. The confidence that greater understanding of the craft of any art
gives, is such that absolute freedom and command enables the progress
and maturing of ideas and images to develop without compromise. Also with
such deep knowledge of technical means the possibility of transcending
known techniques is greater. Thus the rules are broken, and the means
and range of expression of the sculpture are extended.’ (3)
Finally, and very importantly, from the greatest French sculptor of our
times, Rodin. ‘One must have a consummate sense of technique to
hide what one knows.’
Ideally our horse is our willing partner: he gives us his body to shape.
It’s not quite so in the studio where the materials not only have
a mind of their own but often seem to have a determination not to bend
or give or stay just where you want them. But trying to dominate them
by force is as useless as trying to dominate a resistant horse by force,
and ends only in breaking something – the spirit of the horse or
the metal of the armature. Patience and skill – and art –
are needed in both cases.
I believe it is very important to retain a freshness, a deep interest,
a desire to explore, a wonder, in any project in the studio. I also believe
that this same attitude is part of horsemanship.
That lift of the heart as you are walking towards the stable, the feeling
of being in the ‘right place’ when on the back of your horse.
My studio, my stable, I am at home. I imagine other artists and horsemen
will recognise my feelings whether they are artists, horsemen –
or both.
(1) Paul Kroll, ‘The Dancing Horses
of the Tang.’ T’oung Pao LXVII no. 3-5 1981, but I found this
quote in a catalogue produced by the Kentucky Horse Park in 2000 for an
exhibition called ‘Imperial China – the Art of the Horse in
Chinese History.’
(2) ‘The Art of Etching’ by E.S.Lumsden, 1924 Seeley Service
and Co. Ltd.
(3) ‘The Technique of Sculpture’ by John W.Mills, 1965 B.T.Batsford,
London.
