Having accused elements of both Eric Ravillious and Paul Nash of being 'unresolved’, I thought I’d better expand. I suppose it means a problem solved rather than a problem explored. It’s a kind of mastery – akin to what musicians call evenness of tone - the particular limits of which are dictated entirely by the work in question.
It’s an overwhelming sense of pictorial completion that is immensely seductive yet might very well come at the expense of ambition; and can easily lapse into style. In any case, great technique is often suited to only a limited range of subject matter; whereas genuine enquiry is unembarrassed by falling short and therefore – in theory – without such constraint.
Achieving such a sense of resolution in one image does not necessarily promise any wider mastery of image making. In this respect, for example, there’s only one good Ed Ruscha. There are many one hit wonders, (and plenty of artists utterly uninterested in producing a hit).
These woodblock prints by Kiyoshi Saito are brilliantly resolved. They happen have a simple graphic sensibility about them, but that’s not a prerequisite.
