Level  5  Module:     Developing Practice    September 2015

List of Exhibitions I have been to see during the course of this module

Arnolfini, Bristol:  Richard Long.  Time and Space
Tate Modern, London: Agnes Martin Exhibition
Chatsworth House: Beyond Limits
The Ikon Gallery, Birmingham. Fiona Banner Exhibition
Eastside Projects, Birmingham
The Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre: Making It: Sculpture in Britain 1977-1986
Leamington Art Gallery and Museum: Medicate
The National Stone Centre, Derbyshire: The Milennium Wall
Tate Britain, London: Barbara Hepworth Exhibition
Royal Academy, London: Ai Wei Wei Exhibition
The Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh: Jonathan Gibbs. Life is but a Dream
The Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh. Resistance and Persistence
The Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh.
The Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. BP Portrait Prize
The Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, Exhibitions


While in Ireland during last summer I stayed in our holiday cottage which is situated on the south side of Galway Bay and very close to The Burren , a magical place which consists of 250 square kiometres of mostly bare exposed limestone rock.This whole area has a multitude of  dry stone walls which divide the fields and form enclosures.  These dry stone walls  were built by the local inhabitants hundreds of years ago.  Over the summer I spent a lot of time exploring the  Burren and  took numerous photographs of the walls, many of which have a  "lace-like" pattern, with gaps between the stones. The logic of the walls is simple: a wall with holes is less vulnerable in strong winds than a solid one and therefore in theory more stable. Finding that the spaces between the stones made some very intriguing shapes I took hundreds of close up photographs of the view through these spaces. The randomly built stones in the wall create a multitude of different shaped frames for the landscape and put it in a different perspective.

I have selected  a number of these images and glued them to a canvas which I painted black to make a collage:

I am intrigued by the notion of abstraction in painting and I have started to make a series of paintings which are semi-abstract. The inspiration for this work is "wall flora" or lichen as it is more commonly known. While in Ireland I was seeking out stones that I might be suitable for carving and I became fascinated  by the variation of colour and pattern made by the lichen on some of these stones. Some of the colours are so vivid that it looks as if they have been painted on!

I have made two paintings so far that have been inspired by these patterns:

I have also commenced doing a series of paintings using some of the images  from the collage of "spaces

between the stones:" 

As a further experiment in looking at the landscape from a different perspective I have again used one of the   images from my collage of "spaces between the stones". I drew this image in pencil on a piece of board measuring 26ins x 14ins and using a jigsaw I cut around the pencil line. I then cut another piece of board to exactly the same size and fixed both pieces together. I  used acrylic paints on the board to paint this image:

Using another image from my "spaces between the stones" I cut out an aperture in another piece of board the same size as the above. I painted the cut out piece in acrylic paints as below:

I then painted the land ,sea and sky image on the second piece of board as below:

And placed it behind the cutout to make this image:

Having discovered that using two pieces of board as above created a sense of depth in the image I went to try out this method using a piece of limestone. The stone I chose is a piece measuring approximately 26, ins x 14 ins and varies in thickness between 4 ins and 3 ins.  Using the cut out board as a template I marked the image on the stone in pencil as below and started to chisel into the surface:

I carried on cutting deeper and deeper into the stone, stopping very often to resharpen the chisels. I finally cut through, then turned the stone over and finished the cutting from the reverse side.

The two photos below show the finished piece of stone set on a plinth in my studio at college

After  attending printing workshops with our college technician James, I experimented with doing some dry point etching and screen printing. 

I found the process of screen printing particularly interesting and I made prints on both paper and canvas.

The image I made is based on a photograph of the artist Sean Scully. To create a different effect I printed one copy slightly offset on top of another as seen below:

I used a photo of a landscape with a dry stone wall, etched it on to an A4 size piece of acetate and printed this image:

I found both the etching and screen printing very intriguing and I will definitely want to do some more in the future.

My next paintings are two small landscapes on canvas measuring 18 ins x 12 ins. They are inspired by a photographic  image I saw on the cover of a book called The Green Road, written by Anne Enfield. I have used acrylic paints on both of these pictures

One is semi-abstract, consisting of  three horizontal bands of colour, and the other is a more traditional landscape:

My next painting is another small canvas measuring 16 ins x 12 ins. This painting was inspired by photographs I took during the past summer of the area in the West of Ireland called The Burren. The Burren means "Stony Place" and I was particularly fascinated by some of the areas which are very desolate, are covered in limestone paving and divided by dry stone walls that seem to zig-zag upwards  in random fashion or as the artist Sean Scully described it they "lurch in song with the lay of the land". 

Doing this small landscape painting spurred me on to doing something on the same theme but on a much grander scale. Using a painting that had been discarded by a previous student I stripped off the canvas and removed all the staples from the wood frame. Our brilliant technicians at college, James and Tanya, cut a new piece of canvas, and as a lesson for me on how to stretch a canvas, they very expertly fixed the new canvas on to the old frame. They then assisted with fixing the new blank canvas to the wall in my studio space ready for me to paint. I primed the canvas using white emulsion paint mixed with a bit of crimson acrylic to make it a pale pink colour. 

This new painting measures 83 ins x 72 ins and was much bigger than anything I had worked on previously. I found this a bit challenging to start with, as using acrylics the paint dries very quickly which makes mistakes more difficult to correct and also the quantity of paint that needs to be mixed is so much greater. Having got past these initial problems I found that the size of the canvas enabled me to work more freely and made the whole experience very enjoyable.

Although quite clearly a landscape the painting is semi-abstract and refers to what Sean Scully described as  

"the eternal horizon." Personally I prefer to call it "the unobtainable horizon" because we are never quite sure where these elements of land and sky or sea and sky actually meet. The Oxford dictionary gives two different meanings for horizon: 1. The furthest that you can see, and 2. The limit of your desires, knowledge, or interests. Perhaps they both mean the same thing.

Below is a photo of the painting in my studio at college: 

Art in Theory and Writing

Thoughts,    Ideas:     Abstraction------------------------------The Universal Language?

                                 Sean Scully------------------------------Bricklayer of the Soul

                                 Land, Sea and Sky--------------------"It's our World"

                                 Limestone-------------------------------Formed of trillions of tiny marine lifeforms over millions of years 

"We are all victims or products of our birth and upbringing" Sean Scully 

                               
Abstraction:   
I am intrigued by the subject of abstraction in both painting and sculpture and the movement between abstract and figurative modes of representation which started to happen at the beginning of the last century.

Abstraction became an international and identifiable style of painting in about the year 1910.

The french artist Maurice Denis predicted this in his essay in 1890 titled: A definition of  Neo-Traditionalism: "Remember that a painting, before being a battle horse, a naked woman or some anecdote or another is essentially a flat surface covered with colors assembled in a certain way."

Referring to abstraction Paul Klee stated: "Art does not try to reproduce the visible, it makes visible."

Gerhard Richter seemed to have a somewhat different view when he said: "It makes no sense to expect or claim to make the invisible visible, or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable".
"The only true reality is always the reality that we see and experience directly".

Patrick Heron has written: "A purely abstract shape is easy to invent, what is difficult, so difficult that only genius can fully accomplish it, is the forging of a new and formal image out of familiar, well known forms.
What we look for in a painting is a recreation of the natural order, a significant transformation of everything we experience through the eye."

Abstract art can still manage to rile or provoke the general public.

When an artist makes an abstract image with one thought in mind, viewers can bring to it any number of other interpretations of what it looks like or means to them.

The view that representation can be emptied out of a painting, so that it is pure abstraction remains a controversial one.

In 1939, The German Baroness Hilla Rebay, referring to non-figurative painting, which she felt very passionately in favor of, wrote: "Like music, these paintings are harmonious, beautiful and restful. They elevate into the cosmic beyond where there is no meaning, no intellect, no explanation, but something infinitely greater--the wealth of spiritual intelligence and beauty. They help one to forget earth as most people do when they are looking up into the vastness of the starlight sky. One does not ask there, either, for meanings, symbols, titles, sense or intellectual explanation. One looks up and sees a vast beauty, and when the eye turns to the ground, its troubles seem to be so much smaller."

I have set out recently to try to discover what it is about abstract art that has compelled so many painters since the beginning of the last century to move from figurative to non-figurative work.

Due to the enormity of the subject, it seemed better to look at a particular artist who I consider to be the one of the leading proponents of abstraction. One such artist is Sean Scully.

Sean Scully:
 Like many artists Scully spent his early years in education exploring the possibilities of figurative painting. It was in 1968 when he began his studies for a BA at Newcastle University that he began to look at the potentialities of abstraction. He was at that time particularly attracted to the work of Mark Rotko. As well as painting Scully has produced a number of works on paper that explain the ideas behind his artwork and from reading many of these and seeing more and more of his canvases, I have become a great admirer of his very extensive oeuvre.

I have also found many different publications about his work and and his life and I have been looking in particular at his connection with the country of his origin, Ireland. In doing so I have developed a great sense of admiration for his honesty about his unhappy early life and upbringing and his unbiased views on how his life and his art was influenced by this. His own exact words in his philosophical are : "We are all victims or products of our birth and upbringing"
(In doing my research I also discovered that I have a few things in common with Scully:  One;  Irish born. Two; Catholic upbringing. Three; early education in a Convent. Four; his reference to being poor and working class. Five; he calls his bands of colour bricks and his process like building a wall.)

"From the traditions of abstraction, geometric and expressive, Sean Scully's work emerged confidently in the 1960s."

"People tend to think of abstraction as abstract. But nothing is abstract: It's a self-portrait. A portrait of one's condition." Sean Scully, Zurich, March 2006

Scully has inferred that the long standing quarrel between representation and abstraction is of no interest to him.

Scully has likened his process to the building of a wall, and indeed his paintings suggest walls, as well as windows and doors, the scaffold for his lavishly layered pigments and rhythmic, textured brushstrokes.

"It is not uncommon to find people previously bewildered by abstract painting who, after attending one of his lectures , happily recognize what a coherent form of communication it can be when presented with such intelligence and eloquence."

"My paintings search for meaning", Scully has said. He has no colour theory, preferring a painterly "conversation" where colour and form convey emotion and feeling. His paintings are about relationships; As he puts it: "My work is about the difficulty and the possibility of coming together."

Scully believes in an abstract art that can be a UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE for people of all religions and none. Regardless of his Irish Catholic influence Scully has said: "I wouldn't make a set of paintings that were overtly representative of a religious dogma of any kind, be it Zen, Jewish, Muslim or whatever. I simply would not do that, and I wouldn't be the right man for the job, because I want to make art that everybody can love and everybody can feel equally invited to."

A painting by Matisse in 1909 titled The Conversation depicts the artist in a dialogue with his wife Amelie. This painting, although it is not abstract, influenced many artists including Sean Scully. In the scene the artist looks as if he is standing to attention wearing striped pyjamas while his wife is seated wearing a very deep black and green bathrobe. Matisse's use of stripes becomes a key element in his paintings and is seen as heralding abstract paintings later development into work that is more linear and geometric, but also colourful and expressive.

"Not many artists since Matisse have developed the emotional vocabulary of colour like Scully has"

I was more than pleased to learn that Sean Scully and the late Seamus Heaney were good friends in their youth, as my favorite poet after Yeats is Heaney. Some of the lines in this poem called Postscript have a sense of spiritual kinship and might have been written in response to the emotions evoked by Scully's paintings:

At some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightening of flock of swans,
Their feathers ruffed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park or capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.


Land, Sea and Sky 
In an interview with Brian Kennedy  in 2007, with reference to the stripe, which is the basic motif  in his paintings,  Sean Scully said: "Land, Sea, Sky. It's what we have. I try to show it in a way that's very simple, giving equal importance to each of those elements. So, of course it relates to the paintings, just like three bands in the painting, three stripes in a painting."

Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum

I visited Leamington Spa Art and Museum on 8th November to see the exhibition 

Medicate 2015

The works of art in this exhibition examine the physical, societal and psychological effects of disease and also the value and practice of medical science.

 Among the artists are Damien Hirst, Christine Borland, Keith Coventry, Jason Oddy, Laura Glassar, Tanya Kovats, Alexa Wright, Marc Quinn and Lyndall Whelps.

 Keith Coventry's work makes us question what effect prescribed and recreational drugs  affect us physically. His work is titled  Inhaler and is the cast of a genuine inhaler. However, when we examine it more closely we find that it has been adapted for use as an inhaler of crack cocaine!

Alexa Wright uses digitally manipulated photography to show us how our physical appearance can be altered  by illness and disease and how we are affected by this. 

Mark Quinn's work examines the relationship between physical appearance and mental state. The image is made by overlaying a photgraph of himself with pictures of various other peoples body parts, including the hand of his then girlfriend which is shown lying over his heart!

I found the whole of this exhibition very interesting and thought provoking but my favourite piece of work 

is The Last Supper by Damien Hirst. I think this is an ingenious piece of work, and  like Keith Coventry's  Inhaler, looks at the effect on our bodies of taking not just  prescribed and recreational drugs but also foods that have a detrimental effect on our health like processed food. Hirst has made a set of thirteen large  screenprints, (although only eight are on display). Each screenprint depicts the graphics for a pharmaceutical drug but he has substituted the manufacturers name with his own and the product name is replaced with the name of a traditional  supper dish like beans and chips, meat pie and chips etc. The name he has titled it The Last Supper seems to refer to the drug in question probably being the the last thing we will consume or our last meal before entering the next world!  

Ai Weiwei Exhibition

Ai Weiwei Exhibition at the Royal Academy

I visited The Royal Academy on 30th October to see the Ai Weiwei Exhibition

Ai Weiwei is one of China's most recognisable and contentious artists, as famous for his outspoken criticism of the government of his native country as he is for his art.

The works in this exhibition represent a powerful and coherent exploration of Chinese culture, history and material and although he has exhibited widely across the world it is the first major survey of his work to be shown in the UK.

In his blog posted on 13th January 2006 Ai Weiwei stated: "An artwork unable to make people feel uncomfortable or to feel different is not one worth creating. This is the difference between the artist and the fool."

Table and Pillar 2002
Weiwei's artwork uses materials that probe the interrelationship between power, human rights, freedom of expression and cultural history in China.

I was completely overwhelmed by the scale and potency of the whole exhibition. I was also pleasantly surprised to be allowed to take pictures and these are a selection of images taken with my i-phone:

  This image is a scratched wooden table into which a 4.6 metre cylindrical wooden pillar, partially painted red is embedded. It alludes to recent government drives towards a highly industrialised and modern China




Straight

This work relates to the devastating Sichuan earthquake in 2008 which measured 8.0 on the Richter scale and left over 90,000 people dead or missing and 11 million people homeless.
When Weiwei discovered that the collapse of twenty shoddily constructed schools caused the deaths of many schoolchildren he clamoured for the government to admit that corruption had enabled builders to ignore safety codes when erecting the schools and to publish the names and the tally of the children who died. When his pleas were ignored he diligently collected the steel bars from the collapsed walls, employed craftsmen to heat and straighten each bar manually which were then  used to to make this 200 tonne installation that implicitly memorialises the students lost in the earthquake.

Ton of Tea

Ton of Tea which highlights the universal architectural measurement of one metre is one ton of compressed pu'er
tea from China's Yunnan prefecture, which has been aged using traditional methods.

The exaggerated scale and scent makes the viewer aware of the work's surface and of their own body in relation to the object.

Ton of Tea also invokes tea's material status as a luxury item in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries, when drinking tea was the fashion of the upper classes in Europe.





Bicycle Chandelier 2015

This work which was originally a floor installation made up of bicycles calls attention to the bicycle's one-time status as China's chief form of travel, owned by Chinese citizens across the land.
Today, however, as a result of rapid modernisation, the bicycle has gone down in popularity so owning a bike has become a luxury. Weiwei has responded to this by converting the installation into another symbol of extravagance, the chandelier.
The artist, who grew up in exile without lights or even candles, further accentuates the status of this work by suspending and illuminating white crystals that cascade down from the rims of the bicycle wheels. He has taken Duchamp's concept of the readymade and in his usual style has enlarged it to a grand scale and also transfigured it.
The bicycles are no longer utilitarian items promising their owners a means of transportation and thus freedom, they now hang eternally motionless.