A whole day in the studio. The new studio. Very exciting.
So at the MA class on Thursday we watched a performance piece of a gentleman covered in slabs of meat mishandling doves – there was some ceremony to it, some singing with horrible acoustics, and the whole thing was filmed with all the panache of a drunken paparazzi. Reminds me of exhibitions I went to in London. They left me with a the distinct impression that art’s main function was to irritate – and make us all feel a little queasy. I saw so many provocations, interventions and performances designed to raise everybody’s stress levels up just a little higher with ego centered but pointless shenanigans. Dull and edgy – the thing no one needs is more stress, stress stymies action and devalues positive protest. I’m going to come back to this but I’m pretty certain it’s a significant element to the spectacle…
Artists that function as subpar clowns is not a pastime I want a part of.
Flooded fen in March 2024, my photo.
The purpose of seeing the piece was to see provocative work – exercise analysing our response to it. Sharpen critical observation skills. This sort of art work – the aggressively provocative sort – strikes me as highly manipulative. Having a tool set which enables a person to identify and deconstruct these things is immensely useful. Media-studies was sort of useful in this – up until degree level.
Grave carved winged hour glass in a grave yard in Impington, Cambs.
I went out painting landscape in Kent once (with Stephen Palmer) probably hmm 2012? From my perspective it was a disaster – I found it impossible to focus on any one thing – the landscape was a sprawl of incomplete forms blending together in incomprehensible variations. My drawings were a mess. The wind, the temperatures, and the noise kept me in a permanent state of distraction.
It reminds me of a television programme on landscape painting I once watched. The person narrating (I forget who) discusses a painting (I forget whose) in awed tones as they had painted ‘every single leaf’ on a tree. It filled me with a sort of existential horror. Wasteful. To me it seemed wasteful. Devotion to accounting details.
To organise, to apply design to landscape was uh daunting. Practice was the obvious solution. But the sensory overload was too much… I left it alone until imaginative forms of landscape insistently kept emerging in my work.
oil on reclaimed wood, 260 x 970 x 20 mm, 2013
The walks I had been making across London were bleeding into all my thinking and painting. I would walk from New Cross, where I lived to Charing Cross, where I worked – and then back again. Not that the job survived long after I began that process.
Then and again, I resumed those earlier studies, over a decade later but keeping myself to short sketches.
Pencil on paper, a3 sketchbook, 2022.
The more recent attempts to tackle landscape gave up similar results. But I can see elements I can bring out. I can break up the shapes and how I relate them to each other. Chaotic still – and my immediate responses are retained. Moving line work into painting – then musing on the other ways plantlife can be depicted.
Mixed media on paper, A3ish, 2023
Still there’re so much more things to work with. The photo of the winged hourglass is a small, rather wonderful example of landscape
International workers day & Beltane. Here’s some digital drawings.
Remember!
The early May bank holiday on the first Monday in May was created in 1978; May Day itself – 1 May – is not a public holiday in England (unless it falls on a Monday). In February 2011, the UK Parliament was reported to be considering scrapping the bank holiday associated with May Day, replacing it with a bank holiday in October, possibly coinciding with Trafalgar Day (celebrated on 21 October), to create a “United Kingdom Day”.[30] Similarly, attempts were made by the John Major government in 1993 to abolish the May Day holiday and replace it with Trafalgar Day.
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.
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