What are the results of dull negation

mixed media on paper, a3, 2024

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.

Drawing board.

Shot from the new studio.

Drawing board in the new place.

Thinking.

where vision leads

“My vision of painting,” Auerbach once said, “was of an explosion.”

From here (the guardian)

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

Explaining iii

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.

Chimera

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….

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.

Air That Tickles the Throat

I have something lacking when it comes to talking about art – and it goes beyond impatience. In the pub I’m very happy to throw ideas around – similarly at pvs & exhibitions. Describing my own work, putting it into writing, I find gruelling, reductive…?

I’ve had people tell me it’s conceptual and I’ve had people tell me it’s figurative and I’ve had many conversations on what it means to be abstract. I’m not sure I find these terms greatly definitive – sometimes useful – but in conversation rather than absolutely.

The movements I admire are all in the dust – reviving the terms seems foolish, maybe furthering reductive processes on art language and joining the general cacophony of nebulous art speak.

What a thing is can change – things can be repurposed. To imbue a thing with meaning… requires what…?

I had an idea for an installation – take a gallery space in one of these big old art museums, calculate (hah – somehow) how much dust n cobwebs would’ve been cleaned out of it – in say the couple of hundred years of its lifespan – & return it. Ideally filling it up wall to wall top to bottom.

Growth out

rest your head (w.i.p.)

each paints have specific qualities – there’re rhythms – or that’s my experience. build up and cut back – create forms and then erode them, reveal and obscure – apply layers and remove layers. several paintings in varying states – working between each. In rhythms.

potentially a never ending process

Cut