Continuing the deep delve into the processes and influences that run through my work and the methods of working. We enter more new ground in terms of what I’m willing to allow into the blog. The front page of this site is a selection of the marvelous photos Luana took of the studio I just dismantled. These are my own photographs of activity in the studio. Fairly regularly I post photos of the drawing board on instagram illustrating how I might keep many paintings going at once.
Newnham, Cambridge Studio 2024
Not shown is the mess of paintings strewn across the floor.
Starting point might be a colour, a design, a pattern, an idea of weight balance or perspective, or maybe a simple shape given repetition or extra angles.
As I develop the colours so I compare how colours are working in each painting – or I might press a couple together to spread the paints about, shake up the more settled painting.
Below the paintings are Polaroid photos – sometimes a direct source for images sometimes background atmosphere, sometimes inspiration.
The red circle has been growing and shrinking, & there’s line drawing at the bottom that has been mutating through many forms. Broad blocks of varying degrees of opacity are brushed over areas then partially removed… sometimes totally removed. Those colours are brought into other paintings – usually adding to texture or breaking up stolid forms.
There are elements of chaos to my methods, in fact there are elements of chaos to my thinking.
And then the wish to make compositions with figures. For this I had to make (quickly I thought; in passing), one or two studies from nature, just enough to understand the construction of a head, of a whole figure, and in 1935 I took a model. This study should take, I thought, two weeks and then I could realize my compositions…I worked with the model all day from 1935 to 1940…Nothing was as I imagined. A head, became for me an object completely unknown and without dimensions.
Alberto Giacometti in: Peter Selz, Alberto Giacometti. Museum of Modern Art in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago [and others], distributed by Doubleday, 1965. p. 26
I’m going to rewind a little – it’s useful to me, plus this blog is a substantial part of the MA. I have been in an excellent position where I have been able to be as awkward as I like. Reveal this – reveal that – and deliberately avoid explaining a something quite obvious. For fun. The MA requires me to explain myself, so I’m going to do that instead.
My studio is moving. It is shifting to a space purely for itself – I won’t have to sleep in it or eat breakfast in it (unless I really want to). It will even have an oil painting annex (or garage). But while this move is going on I am at a loose end – until the studios are up and running I am in existential crisis… more than is usual.
I can take a little time to explore my development as an artist. From beginning to uh now.
Back in 2002 I found myself in a shed like structure on a hill called Crouch End, in North London. It housed a tiny art school and I was there for life drawing. I was attempting dipping ink sketching – it was the first time I had drawn the human figure in the flesh – the teacher whose name escapes me was insisting we draw ‘mass’. Focussing not on outline but everything between. She had studied ‘in the classical manner’ so she told us, and that meant grids in front of easels and detailed studies from memory. The experience had left her cold – she felt the creativity in drawing was lost in prescriptive method.
In the corner of the class was a table of books placed there by Helen – I forget her surname. Helen’s website was – when last I looked; probably 10 years back when I still remembered her name – a series of her drawings and paintings following the oeuvre of Alberto Giacometti. Inspired by Giacometti’s work, and exploring his methods, his subjects, his philosophies…
I have a very clear memory of her chasing me away when I was speaking with a woman, who had been life modeling, after class. We were out in the courtyard in front of the studio.
The room for life drawings was fragile with lots of places for drafts. Big windows, lots of light. There were many heaters all aimed at the nude figure in the middle of the room. Amongst the books on the table was a book of drawings by Giacometti, I remember holding it and staring at it. It uh was quite a moment. What I saw in the drawings I find difficult to relate – I have told this story before – in fact I think I’ve told it many times.
What I saw in the reproductions of drawings by Alberto Giacometti was the product of a thing worth doing. Something beautiful and profound and dizzyingly unexpected. It was an epiphany I think. I had never seen anything like these drawings before and it was a shock.
Up to that point in my life I had attempted some writing; some creative prose and a little bad poetry. I had not pursued it with much vigor and the results were weak, unfocused and lacking direction. Bad writing.
In Giacometti’s drawing I saw – and still see twenty years later whether in uh reproductions or in museums – is work in a peculiar state of contradictions. These picture look ancient – have strong sense of having always existed yet there is something unworldly and futuristic to them – something that may be found at then end of the world perhaps. Figures manage to be dense and ethereal, incredibly vibrant and impressively still, full of life yet curiously brutal and impassive….
In this book of reproduced drawings I saw something that I wanted to do – a potential way to explore ideas that were swirling, indistinct and impossible to qualify – around my head. And they could not be swapped out by words.
Notes
Helen’s teachings pointed me to always draw with the intent of tracking structures.
Up until this post I have not posted anything that is not my own work – but since I am being more open I’m going to break that particular rule.
First a little preamble. In 2005 I was attending a life drawing class in the Lewisham Arthouse run by an amazing painter called Stephen Palmer (apologies this is the only link I could find for him – his more abstract painting aren’t present – and they are worth searching out). Steve had a beautiful book of Russian icon paintings (one I picked up 17 years later in Cambridge Oxfam).
The Icons bothered me – I couldn’t qualify their impact but it was persistent. The gorgeous colours, the design, the stylising and the sense they give of powerful forms in decay. Even as the images have presence, a fulsome earnestness and mystical bravura; they are clearly also in dissolution – the forms are merging or damaged. Time is breaking them down. & every time I felt I was reaching completion – when I had taken a drawing as far as I thought I could – the qualities of those icons would nibble at me and my sense of what it meant to construct an image.
Life drawing, 2016, pencil on paper, roughly a3.
I would rub out and restructure accordingly. And the paper itself would start to break down.
I found by obscuring the space that made up volume I could stylish bodies. To some degree or other the is a strong influence from medieval structures.
Later I would read about the Japanese aesthetics of Wabi-Sabi and I would see a commonality.
I can see no such thing as perspective.
In Cambridge (I think 2020) I became aware – through friends – of the old and very dead tradition of British church wall painting. The only ones to survive had been white washed over and have been slowly revealed over the last 200 years. Henry viii and then Cromwell had scourged the churches.
Church wall painting St. Andrew’s Impington, probably c15 see here photo mine 2024.
I like the image of the itinerant church painter going from church to church with their book of templates. I wonder if they were as holy as the church would’ve wanted of them. Churches filled with patterns, and demons, and saints, and doom, and parables.
Like icons they had the very creative use of space that existed where rules of perspective had yet reach and before photography transformed the images people understood.
See here for an attempt to wrestle with Blake’s reasons for inserting a swan / person hybrid in his great poem Jerusalem.
I wonder if there needs to be a precise reason. & maybe Blake held swans in a particular view – with in a particular poetic scheme – they had their own significance for him. Large aggressive birds – beautiful, soulful & affectionate family creatures…. I don’t know when they got their associations with royalty? Hm. Maybe they are boot lickers…
Since Blake tended to keep multiple meanings running concurrent – or perhaps had multiple purposes for his symbols, tropes, devices… each can support multiple understandings.
Humanity ‘s nature expressed through hybridised animal / human is an old image – present in ancient cave art – specific meaning applied to them ——-
I’ve been enjoying Blake’s chimeras – people mixed with other animals and people becoming vegetation…
He was mates with a phrenologist, who he made a portrait of as an elephant.
I dunno his opinion of phrenology – a stupid made up racist pseudoscience – I’ve yet to read anything by him on the subject though he did see animals and people blended – showing the characteristics of animals in their approach to life. Ghost of a flea being one example….
Meandering across waters of various degrees of thickness. Not all of Cambridgeshire was fen – but so much of it now seems to need swimming or wading or walking around. Beside the Cam which slowly flows, a shocking mix of sewage and all that’ll grow in that – the temperature rises and the faecal soup grows bacteria and microbes, plus there’s the phosphates and nitrates…. This is interesting — here
People mind their immediate environs only so much. Y’know. Some and some. There are plenty of people and plenty don’t look beyond their immediate convenience – just travel – picked up and put down at the doors they inhabit. The petri dishes under their microscopes, their screens, their telescopes offer them their landscapes.
It’s spring – dunno for how long – a very bright spring. Feels like the light opens everybody up. Winter goes on and I think it’s easy to to look more inwards – looking around is harder when we’re all forced indoors by the constant rain that seemed to be with us for 12 months or so.
Microscopes and telescopes, and the architecture to hold them, Cambs. has a countryside where – near or far – everything is under scrutiny…..
[security cameras too — we’re all being scrutinised — on social media you know ++]
….People breaking the world down to numbers, absorbed in fossils, pulling apart life to find further life. all of these being grand visions of landscape whether writ tiny or writ beyond our capacities to see.
Walks taking us through strange villages of laboratories. Gets my imagination on overload.
A walk I did a few weeks back has started haunting me a little. It’s partly because of Cambridge chatter about the role of the university in the economy and culture of the area – impact on the house prices and building across the outlying towns and villages…
We walked to Coton, a little village, and to get there we walked through an old university site littered with observatories, laboratories and storage. Big hunks of fossilized trees on the porch of the earth sciences storage facilities, the inevitable grand pillars. Buildings of odd dimensions. Some specifically designed to house telescopes, big dome like roves and little dome like structures. Some structures that had arcane uses once but now are storage sheds. Next to it a peculiar looking run down ex industrial unit looking like it was built out of asbestos and now, closed to all business; shuttered up with warning signs and cameras.
Further on we wandered through two large science parks. Huge buildings, most of them shiny and ugly – fully embracing their looming Ballardian nature. Little rivers running under them, some small efforts to combat the exponentially increasing flooding of the area. So much of cambs looks like it is becoming fen. Aptly – and increasingly so – silicon fen is the monicker been applied to the continuing growth of industries computer related in the region.
My thoughts have gravitated to speculation on the activities in these science parks. It’s not just computer sciences being explored but also genetics and pharmaceuticals and pretty much anything you can get financing for….
It’s worth noting at this point that we continued our wanderings we would have reached the radio telescopes just past Cottenham.
So the eery Cambridgeshire countryside – flat and full of ghosts – holds a Myriad of interrogated landscapes. Microcosms and macrocosms – bodies of every sort becoming landscapes. Under huge skies, planted in sodden earth. – glinting structures of ridiculous proportions and often absurd grandiose design.
o 