To capture, tick, name or what?

In reviews of art shows, especially paintings, you often read that So-and-so has "captured" a likeness or mood or whatever.  It's a word (or cliche) that even celebrated critics use all the time without, it seems, a second thought.  It's quite irritating.  The dictionary defines the verb 'capture' as "imprison, arrest, detain, incarcerate, take into custody, jail, confine" etc.  The antonym is "liberate".  None of these seems applicable.

Of course it's perfectly reasonable to use the word occasionally, but it is used all the time when the writer could say, "conjure up, represent, stand for, symbolize, correspond to, signify, embody, characterise, epitomize" etc. 

I personally use the word 'reflect' quite a bit: any self-portrait is in effect a double relection.

In a previous life, involved in field ecology, I noticed a form of bird-watching and botanising that involves folk traipsing round the countryside hunting for new species to tick off or simply identify.  Nothing wrong per se with that but the desire to amass more and more species, or find even yet rarer ones, has the effect of blinding them to the actual things they are looking at.  Yes, they will notice the amount of sepals or petals,  or spot the faint eyestripe, but that is all: tick it off and move on.  It is of course a form of hunting.  So is capturing: it subtly speaks of the desire of human kind to dominate, acquire and control. 

With paintings, it all too often blinds us to the quality of paintwork, subtle message or observation on life and composition etc.  It's why abstract painting became popular with many painters.  It removes the tendency to read a painting in literary terms, even though we still might desperately try to. 

Some great painters in later life give up on this and return to a more figurative mode.  And locally I'm thinking of the wonderful painter Henry Israel.  Maybe they have just ceased to care what others think and have earned the right to do what they feel is right. Other great painters hold fast to their figurative roots throughout and eschew pure abstraction, while others, notably Picasso and Cezanne, manage to combine the two fundamental strands magically.  

For me, I always try to look just beyond the surface and see the work and the thought processes that are there for all to see if we can just stop  this knee-jerk need to always judge a painting by something else.

Oh, a footnote, BTW you'll be pleased no doubt to know that that minx Gregory's girlfriend (see previous entries) has returned from walkabout to the fold.  The two friends are together again and residing currently at The Camelford Gallery in North Cornwall.  If you are in the area, possibly on holiday passing through to farther west, please do call in and say Hello to them and John... and while you're about it to me here too in North Devon!