Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

It would be wise, I suppose, to begin by explaining the title. The games to which I refer are those sporting events involving human beings pitted against one another in contests of skill, speed and strength. Many of them are team games with a number of players working in unison to achieve some basically abstract aim — such as the scoring of a goal, or the accumulation of a given number of runs — and to achieve this aim the team or the individual must overcome and outwit the opposition, while ensuring that their own actions remain within the laws of the game concerned. Such games—Association and Rugby Football, Cricket, Boxing, Rowing, Tennis, Squash, and so on are in fact very artificial rituals, but all of them seem to achieve a remarkable balance of physical and mental action when they are played well. Each of them has a potential perfection of a kind which is in itself very beautiful. We see glimpses of this in the bowling action of Lindwall, Cowdrey as he drives past extra-cover, Matthews dribbling and passing, and in the side-step and break of Sharp. These are only a few of the instances in which the playing of games seems at times to be art in itself. Even without these glimpses of perfection the games involve much that is visually exciting — the tension between the opponents, the rapid succession of actions all linked with one another, as when the ball is passed down the three-quarter line, or the bowler bowls, batsman plays and fielder runs to pick up, and the rhythms of purposeful, trained and concentrated movements by groups of human beings. These are the sort of things that interest a painter — the moving and beautiful shapes and colours and relationships of shapes and colours that the games reveal, rather than the games themselves.

     These particular beauties, however, that can be discovered in the playing of games are intricately involved in the games themselves. Each game has its own particular nature dictated by the sort of physical actions it demands and by the rules and tactics employed in any given circumstances. The painter must understand and sympathize with the game he is painting if he is to realize at all the potentialities of his subject. The Douanier Rousseau’s footballers for instance fall quite outside the category of games pictures from this point of view. The same thing, again, applies in the painting of landscape — the painter must understand deeply and love the landscape which is to be the basis of his picture. The painter who does not understand the game he paints will almost certainly fail to discover its latent possibilities and will substitute his own imposed ideas often incompatible with the nature of the game and the picture will lack conviction and authority.

     It is in this respect that the sporting pictures which I am discussing differ from the traditional types. The tradition might be said to have begun with hunting scenes on the cave walls at Lascaux and it can be seen in the wrestlers on Greek vases, Uccello’s ‘Night Hunt’ (in the Ashmolean), Breughel’s ‘Skaters’, Devis’s early cricket pictures, even in the racecourse paintings of Monet, Degas and Toulouse Lautrec. In none of these does one feel quite this search for authenticity of movement, this groping for the special designs and actions which only one particular sport can reveal; and reveal it only to those who understand and know where to look. This is in no way intended to suggest that the works of art I have just mentioned are in any way rendered invalid by the absence of this expertise; I am trying only to define a difference in approach.

     The first and most obvious difficulty arises from the speed of the movements involved. It is quite impossible to make studies and drawings while a match of any sort is actually in progress. It all happens so quickly and often unexpectedly: it is impossible to concentrate simultaneously on a whole series of separate yet intricately interdependent actions by different groups of figures; too often (from the painter’s point of view) the development of some satisfactory and foreseeable situation is abruptly cut short by the opposition. In fact one does not seek to find the rhythms and shapes which might provide the basis for a painting in any particular incident or match, but rather in a more general recollected view of the game as a whole, remembered from years of watching or playing, approached in each case by way of a series of drawings which are altered and developed until the original idea gradually seems to take shape. Photographs of players in action seldom seem to help. It is practically impossible for a photographer to record a moment in which a whole group of players are in positions which clearly indicate both their own individual actions and the relationship between all these actions. These are patterns which must be worked out by thought and experiment. It is in trying to evolve this sort of drawing of figures in action that one realizes the enormous value of years of analytical drawing from the nude — a practice which some people regard as an out-dated and pointless exercise.

     All games involve a balance of violent activity and of rest. In some the quiet, still moments are very much part of the quality of the game, as when boxers size one another up before either launches an attack, or when one of them rests during a count; in others these moments are merely necessary pauses between periods of intense action, as the time between overs at cricket, or before a throw-in in the two codes of football. In these last instances there is little interest in the actions of the players, but in the case of boxing in particular it can be seen from pictures like Sam Rabin’s how significant the still, waiting moment can be, and how much it can imply of past and future actions. In Rabin’s pictures too one can see what use has been made of the static lines of the ropes, permanent and impersonal, cutting across the tense human shapes which are just about to burst into action.

     In the painting of the most violently moving phases of games (mostly of Rugby Football so far) I have found that the introduction of purely static elements in this way is generally unsuccessful. The slightest over-emphasis of posts, stands, or white lines seems to freeze the movements of the figures rather than to add to them by contrast. The key to the expression of movement seems to lie in discovering the moment in any action when the rest of that action is clearly implicit. For example, it is possible, in drawing two figures giving and receiving a pass, to place the ball between them in such a position that its relationship to their arm and body movements makes the giving of the pass almost inevitable. It is this sort of relationship in space that has to be searched for in a series of sketches and studies, and I think it is clear that in order to make this search at all successfully the game must be understood.

     Another problem that arises in the attempt to describe violent movement is that of simplification. Any over-elaboration of the figure, any attraction of the eye to detail which is not directly relevant to the movement, will at once immobilize the figure and contradict the action. One can see this most clearly demonstrated in press photographs of footballers spread-eagled in space without any clear indication of what they are doing. But this lack of meaning in the positions, or the treatment of the figures would be fatal to a painting in which the chief aim was the exposition and organization of the combined movements. The figures have to simplified into basic shapes in which many individual features have to be suppressed so that the main directions and implications of movement may be brought out.

     In the end one comes to the conclusion that some shapes move while others are static just as some combinations of colours and of tones seem in their own nature to be active or stationary. As one struggles with these problems in their various settings as produced by different games or different aspects of one game, the possibilities and potentialities seem to grow greater and wider all the time. The possible combinations of figures moving or still are really limitless and yet all have something in common. The breadth of physical activity ranges from dance-like precision and lightness to what almost amounts to plain brutality; the groups can be as tight-knit as a scrummage or as scattered as the fielders in a cricket match; as crowded as a forward rush or as isolated as two players in a squash court. The variations and rhythms of moving figures in space are endless.

     And these discoveries that a painter can make should be almost as interesting in themselves to those who have never seen the games concerned or shown any interest in them as they are to those who are experts. The final and basic aim of the artist is to search beyond the game itself and eventually to make discoveries about the human figure in space which are fundamental. The pictures should have far more in common with Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgement’ or Cezanne’s or Renoir’s bathers than with the sporting pages of the press.