Sweating On A Donkey

No, not Sancho Panza in La Mancha! The place is Redhill and the donkey in question is one of those clackety wooden ones that resembles something you might find in the school gym. I like them, actually, great to sit astride and paint and draw. Makes you feel like a real hard-workin' artisan. And boy do I feel like that this week! Temperature in the 30's during the day, and night-time up to 24. 24!!! That, apperently, is one degree higher than the average DAYTIME temperature for this time of year. Never again will I moan if we have a cold July! Much as I feel sorry for people who actually have to work for a living (art doesn't count as work, does it..?!) I do feel the urge to whinge a bit after hours life drawing and sleepless nights. If we could all strip off like the model I think we'd all be a lot better off!!
I am actually seriously considering being a life model. The guy who's ours is definately a few sandwiches short of a picnic, the only requirement seems to be to be able to sit for a while in a set position. Now, I admit this does require a certain amount of strength, stamina, and self-discipline, and I'm rather concerned that my physique wont be up to the strain (I dont care what I look like, but the floppy bod may well collapse into a sweaty lardy puddle!), and the hyperactivity will have to be severly dealt with, but on the other hand life drawing classes are usually pretty laid back and oblivious to faults and failings and you dont need any qualifications and the are desperate for female models.. and I get to steal ideas!

A PUNCH-HOLE THROUGH LIFE

Just woke up from a dream where I was in an acting workshop directed by Christopher Eccleston (the Northern Doctor Who). It was fantastic. He had us all on the floor in feotal positions in situations like having the physical attributes of the opposite sex (to put it delicately), and other scenarios. When we became ourselves again I told him the experience was like "a punch-hole through life" - that statement stayed with me and it isn't as aggressive as it sounds. What it means is: life is a bunch of paperwork and the punch-hole is the space through it. Its the "flow" I guess, something which I am lacking at the moment. My punch-hole doesn't go all the way through and I cant see through, the paperwork of life is blocking the way.
I would love to be able to create that space again!

The Many Sides Of Flat

Flat Walls
Flat Fences
Flat Screen TV

What is behind them?

Well, consider this. Consider that painting was once a flat screen and people would gaze upon it as they would a scene in plasma electronica beamed from miles away. Consider the difference in technologies. But now.. consider the similarities.. both depict "other" worlds, ours but somewhat different, celebrate successes, initiate the innocent, stimulate shame, and laugh and despair at the figures on the screen which may or may not be human. The way I see it, painting is therefore certainly NOT dead. How different are the figures milling around in Impressionist paintings to the idle layabouts in Big Brother or the promenading crowds at the World Cup? How different are Kirchners prostitutes hanging around the street corners to the "hoodies" and "chavs" of today?
Behind each screen is a story.
What's behind your next door neighbours' fence?
It's probably very entertaining!

Shows and Sleeping

I'm conserving my energy at the moment. I should be upstairs sorting out all my artwork and tidying up, but its like an oven in my loft/studio. I should be going to London tomorrow to meet up with fellow artists for my upcoming show, but I can probably e-mail them all they need to know. Its in the 30's temperature-wise and I'm feeling very unwell indeed. I hate to whinge, because its only a bit of sun, but I just cant haul myself up to South London on a stinking train when I am well enough, let alone now when I have a summer cold! What can possibly be gained from listening to an over-anxious latino panicking, like last time we got together??
I will have to make it up to them. I shall e-mail them right now.
If its daft taking 2 hours to travel to London to take back a library book then its equally daft to turn up and try and get a word in edgeways while someone else is having kittens.. boy dont I love the internet and e-communications. Straight to the point, no messings, and all the illustrations there in one place. Call me lazy if you like. I just call it being on holiday.
Sleeping makes a nice change from commuting!

Anyway. Its not as if I'm not doing ANYTHING. I'm doing some little fun bits for e-bay (yeah, yeah.. I know..) and they are a nice no-brainer break; and I'm doing some oil landscapes of suburbia - which I think will look good in the show. (I wont need much space there. Most of my canvases are standard sizes). I'm my own boss for the next few weeks at least, but then I will be doing some short courses so I will have some critiscm again. Not that I dont get any from my e-bay groups. They dont ALL gush!



I ONLY WANTED SOMETHING ELSE TO DO BUT HANG AROUND

Seperated At Birth?

Tank Girl and Lara Croft!!



Who came first?

Adventures in Living Colour...

Just because something is just a canvas covered with paint, doesn't mean to say it cant be an experience in itself. Otherwise how would Bridget Riley and the Op Art movement succeed? And why shouldn't that type of painting continue to succeed? One only has to look at the craze for Magic Eye pictures just a few years back to see what a popular and powerful phenomena can be created just from a flat print, and painting can offer MUCH more than that! Architects and planners continue to utilise Bauhaus type notions of space and colour in their designs to help human beings commune with their places of work and living. So why has Fine Art abandoned these simple ideas that still have a lot more life left in them. There is so much possibility in the world of colour, just pigments suspended in a carrier applied to a surface.
Here are some explorations I have had using colours mixed from bog-standard acrylic tubes...



These are Monkeys that I did before my Foundation course. I was really interested in complementary colours and the optical disturbances they cause. I was trying to re-create the moment when I was reading my Tom and Jerry cartoon annual when I was a kid and the light blue and red shimmered and seemed to move and jump right out of the page!
I hope to recreate this effect in a grand scale, room-sized scale, maybe for my final project in the 3rd Year. In the meantime, I wanted to put down as many colours at a time as I could, with bland but striking repetitive patterns that would accentuate the placement of hues and tones..






Just imagine a whole room filled with this butterfly pattern! How overwhelming would it be? How long could people stand to stay in a space like that?

Music On Canvas

I still have a carful of detritus and tools to unload from Friday.
And a canvas.
What is ON the canvas doesn't make much sense!
But then, how can you make sense of an experience?
Some experiences are so individual that the illustration of the moment, when borne witness to, is nonsensical. In that respect, Dadaism was right: Human beings are absurd, irrational, unreasonable, and prone to affect. My painting is a collection of affects, so therefore I am not that bothered that people dont understand it and have trouble with it, and prefer some depiction of a story or recognisable figures. Many opinions abounded as feedback including "It was a distraction from the music" and "It should have had a narrative" and "It should have been a picture of something and maybe the style changed when the music changed". But the audience was mostly music students, so my guess is that they are aurally inititated. My sister, on the other hand, has neither a leaning towards music or painting particularly, so for her the visuals ENHANCED the sound. She actually said that it was like looking at a star sideways, it seems more brilliant when you dont stare straight at it - in other words, the performance of painting during the playing of music made you not concentrate on the music too hard, and that it could then enter the subconcious in a more intense way. That was echoed in another comment that it would've worked better for wider audience, one not so focussed on classical music.
It was an interesting experiment and throws up lots of questions.
Would I do it again? Definately!
Would I do it the same - ie spontaneous actions to a previously unheard score. Yes. But I will also do versions taking in other ideas (such as, planning an overall landscape with people and paint in the historical style of the time the music was composed.. one of the musicians suggested that, but I think that misses the point of synesthesia they were interested in to start with).
Would the musos do it again. I dont think so. Apart from the fact it was alien to them, a lot of trouble to organise, and we didn't get much of an audience, it was only part of a college project for them, and once they've ticked their boxes they'll move on. I know, cos I do PPD projects that I dont really have my heart in and are just so as I can get a good final grade.
Pity there is no time and resources to explore the concept tho. It was really stimulating - for me at least!!

Kandinsky....



Hoffman...




Me....!


"Kandinsky, himself an accomplished musician, once said Color is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul. The concept that color and musical harmony are linked has a long history, intriguing scientists such as Sir Isaac Newton. Kandinsky used color in a highly theoretical way associating tone with timbre (the sound's character), hue with pitch, and saturation with the volume of sound. He even claimed that when he saw color he heard music." http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/kandinsky/

Little Pleasures Little Treasures!

What better day to write about the pleasure in art than today, Miros birthday! Blessings to Google for bringing that to our attention!

I would like to point out this fervent belief that academics and intellectuals have in the present-day that pleasure in art somehow cheapens it, makes it like Disneyland or a Chocolate Box.
I dont agree with that belief, and am relieved to find I am not alone.
Fine art doesn't have to be for beating oneself over the back with, or for shoring up ones morality. That's what the Guardian is for!

Here's whatChristopher Butler says:

We worry a good deal about the moral and political significance of the arts. But this seems to me to be far too easy. Anyone can think up or obey political or moral principles and apply them to art, and many do. Such arguements are parasitic on those that we have all the time, and they often just use art to make familiar moral or political points which are usually believed in by the critic on grounds quite other than the examination or art. For example, if you know that patriarchy abuses women by displaying their bodies for the male's pleasure, then it can hardly come as a great surprise to be told that Titian's Venus of Urbino is somehow 'implicated' in the system and somehow bad. It is the fate of the pleasure the picture can give that interests me.

Some people are completely implacable when it comes to the idea of pleasure, believing like Protestants that any enjoyment must be evil, and that things should have a "higher purpose". But what higher purpose is there but pleasure? It elevates the person to a place outside themselves, neutering self-obsessiveness and neuroses, and enabling the viewer to become whole and truly oceanic, far more useful in the world than they would be if they were blindly (and lazily) bandwagonning!

QUANDO QUANDO QUANDO

Tell me when will you be mine Tell me quando, quando, quando We can share a love divine Please don´t make me wait again When will you say ´yes´ to me? Tell me quando, quando, quando You mean happiness to me Oh, my love, please tell me when Ev´ry moment´s a day Ev´ry day seems a lifetime Let me show you the way To a joy beyond compare I can´t wait a moment more Tell me quando, quando, quando Say it´s me that you adore And then, darlin´, tell me when (instrumental strings and brass) Ev´ry moment´s a day Ev´ry day seems a lifetime Let me show you the way To a joy beyond compare I can´t wait a moment more Tell me quando, quando, quando Say it´s me that you adore And then, darlin´, tell me when Oh, my darlin´, tell me when Mmm, my darlin´, tell me when

Sometimes a song says it best...
WHEN...?
Even though this song is about a man and a woman, it could also be the pleading of a human for a dream, any dream, to me its waiting for the moment when a connection can bring joy. Explain? Well, that's my ambition as an artist of course. I want to show people "the way to a joy beyond compare" - not much to ask is it? Compare and Contrast (as an old O-Level paper might demand) with contemporary artists..? I would like to console not control.

The dance that goes with this song, Quando Quando, I learned at a Horley Adult Education centre. Its like a Salsa, and one I found tricky but fun. I like (to) dance as it is challenging, disciplined, and takes you out of yourself - if you let it: if you dont become anxious about being clumsy and clodhopping! Ah to be graceful and fleet of foot, or at least think of myself that way. What's the saying "Dance Like No-One Is Watching!"? - yet an audience is important and sometimes the raison d'etre.. funny that.. I like to paint for an audience, but I dont like the idea of "performance"..

Tate Modern, Wednesday 5th April and Chelsea College of Art - with a sore back

This day was hard work. I am still aching.
I often feel overwhelmed when I go into a gallery, full of seeing and thinking, emotions and contextualising. Its even worse when the work is "busy". Sometimes art can be demanding just for the sake of being demanding. This was certainly the case with Kippenberger. I wish I had not seen it after Moholoy Nagy and the Bauhaus work, left it to another day or just not seen it at all. My role as an art-student means I have to expose myself to everything and load myself with more and more, but I am not a pack-horse. I can only carry so much on this journey, and the fact I have lived this life of mine for 36 years means I carry a lot more besides. I have to put something down to make room for something else, which is why I really need to only look at one artists output at a time. I felt like I was carrying just about enough with the first show, it felt like a well distributed load as well. Just about heavy enough. Maybe call me a lightweight, maybe say that those geometric works with all their inconsequential diagrammatic forms and colours are an insubstantial load, but they were enough for me. To then heap the innumerous products of an egomaniac drunkard on top of that was too much. The weight was then uneven, I found it physically hard to walk after that, and then my companion took me to Chelsea College of art where we found a crowd of MA students in forced gaiety mode cooking food on folding tables and drinking under a sea of sickly coloured crepe decorations, looking for all the world like one of those Brownie exercises that one is forced to do to celebrate the diversity of the world to earn badges, whilst surrounded by World Muzak. Exercises in futility, the last two events. Worthy? I dont know. They probably think so. They probably think they are making some bold new comment on society - oh, no of course not, nothing is EVER new in this "postmodern" era. But whatever it is they were doing, they weren't trying, they were too aware. In my opinion you have to hive yourself off - at least occiasionally - to really "try" an idea properly, before you "try" it on your contemporaries and an audience. Otherwise its just shouting in a riot - and thats what Kippenbergers paintings looked like - just a lot of shouting in an already loud world.

Dan and Jules and Mand

It is so refreshing to bring a lay-person to an art gallery and witness them having a great experience. Its important to me that people have a good experience when taking in something somebody has created. Of course, there cant be many artists who DONT want their viewer to have an experience, and indifference is worse than anything else - worse than misunderstanding, boredom or disappointment. Certainly one could not be indifferent towards the plasticised cadavers of Bodyworks, pickled sharks, unborn lambs or a monumental quadraplegic. But I am probably different to my contemporaries in that I wish people a pleasing and contemplative experience, or if an unpleasant one - one that deals with sensual reflexes rather than cognitive ones. It was with this in mind that I took my partner to the Dan Flavin Retrospective. He is the barometer for me of what is important. OK it might not be that grand a scheme to make art that is so simple and acessible, and I may get accused of appealing to the lowest common denominator, but to be honest, I didn't see that many Sun readers at the exhibition!




untitled (to you, Heiner, with admiration and affection), 1973

I took some voice notes when I went around the exhibition. This was the first work on show (no. 1 on the plan), and the eerie green light beckoned seductively through the door. There was a strong sense of curiousity that drove me towards entering this space, as I'm sure it must have been for other visitors. The coloured glow that eminates from behind the ticket-check is mysterious and enticing. We were drawn in like moths to a flame.

I noted while walking around this green barrier that people who stood near it seemed to have a pink halo around them. Their body edge must have contrasted so much with the florescent green that the eye created this magenta aura as a kind of differentiation between the light/dark and area/form. I am always contantly amazed by what the eye and brain can conjure out of any given situation, and when I got to the bookshop I went mad buying a heap of books about colour and perception!
















When I got to the Icons (no.2 ) I noted that I had no idea what Masonite was! I noted I was struck by the red and yellow tubes combined together - this was my favourite piece out of this group, although I really did like the tubes over the painted coloured squares. I thought they were very interesting. Pity I didn't explain why at the time. If only I'd had a pencil and paper!









Monument 4 (piece no.6) I was very intruiged by too. My voice notes dont really explain this very eloquently "Looks like a Red Crossbow. Its arranged so that the top light only reflects off the ceiling: when you look at the reflection on the floor it just looks like an arrowhead pointing to the corner - which is quite an interesting use of reflection and the trick of the eye: what the eye sees and what the eye doesn't see. Also the fact that people are walking around casting shadows everywhere makes quite an interesting spectacle."
Sounds like something a 16 year old chav would emit doesn't it! Unfortunately I had to record something, I didn't have my sketch book, I was in somewhat of a hurry because I was not on my own, and the staff there do not like you having a mobile phone - so I was having to mutter into it rather surreptitiously!




Athough I am not as well-read as Flavin I am familiar with Tatlin's theoretical tower - and the ideas and drawings of it in various guises and by various artists did actually inform my work last year when I built a tower of clay sticks. For some reason I am reminded of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia when I look at the Tatlin tower in its original sketched state. Maybe its because of the curves and holes contained in this eccentric twisted structure soaring up to the clouds.














Voice Note 5: 'In the "Institute Of The Arts" Room you come across a work called "To Janie Lee 2" - its like magic - the colours that hit the wall are completely different colours that appear to be the fluorescent lights - and.. it IS almost like magic.'

Voice Note 6: 'With the Helen Winkler 1972* work the cool white and the warm white fluorescent lights 8 foot square its hard to appreciate the work because it instantly calls to mind office spaces - especially with the "warm white" fluorescent lights which seem to be ubiquitous."
I felt guilty making such ugly and blind/bland associations - bringing my sad and empty baggage to the spectacle - but alas sometimes you cannot help but pollute the sublimely beautiful with the mundane...


*Haven't found any reference to a work of this name since the show but I did have a brief look at Helen Winkler and her association to Dan Flavin.
A nice article on Dia...
http://www.gradewinner.com/p/articles/mi_m1285/is_6_33/ai_103672331/pg_2?pi=gdw

Misunderstood?

I just found a note I wrote when I was doing Foundation -

"Abstract Expressionism

an infantile involuntary release, a spontaneous emotional ejaculation, or an appeal to the human side of the inhuman world?"

I think I was a bit sick of Freud and PostModernsim.
Still am...!

Cindy Sherman

Dont know why, but I'm very taken by the idea of doing watercolours of her film stills. I did one because I was looking at windows and their relationship to the soul (ie people gazing out of them wistfully or light being shone on faces bathing them in some kind of radiance), and it struck me that treating her photographs in this romantic rather detatched way would do something with them that would transform them into something very different visually whilst still keeping something of the intended original mood. The idea of a film still in itself suggests another world, a fantasy world, and watercolour is a medium used a lot in fantasising and idealising environments. The room becomes them like a landscape, and the figure a mist-enshrouded landmark.

LOOKING AT ELLSWORTH KELLY

I become aware of the shortcomings of my own eyes

The pale orange looks dirty - my vision dirties it

Floaters disturb the plains

The edges jump and shimmer because of my astigmatism

The yellow makes the sockets in my face ache

Writing becomes difficult to read

The eye cant stay still

Images of lights and windows are transposed on the colours

I look for faults - vertical brush strokes, the lapped corner of a canvas, a speck in the grain

One corner is red and one is green

There's pink dots in the black

Colours jump. Surfaces swirl with movement

The glance causes ripples and whirlpools. The stares causes a shift

Yellow and green slicks slip away. Diagonals appear

Object Permanence

I have heard of this phenomena where a baby believes if you cover an object up it not longer exists, but later the child will peek under the cover...

A Sad Winters Day in March

Saw a man in an allotment straining with a rake at arms length poking a small smoky bonfire - the flat sad green and the hard-working grey figure in the sunlight was like a Van Gogh painting...

The Captive

(event time - afternoon, date -Tues 7th March 2006, venue Gothic Nightmares)

"I beheld his body half wasted away with long expectation and confinement and felt what kind of sickness of the heart it was which arises from hope deferr'd. Upon looking nearer I saw him pale and feverish, in thirty years the western breeze had not once fann'd his blood. He had seen no sun, no moon in all that time nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his lattice"


From Laurence Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey, 1768.