[…] it is just this potential for the literal surface to be transformed into the point of entry to a world that endows it with it’s potential for psychological depth. The picture plane is the defining condition of our relationship to what a given picture shows.
I have been giving thought to surface.
The literal and the invisible.
A ‘plane of conversion’
where the materials and the content become visible as separate parts and the surface of ideas is perceived.
From the front from the back. The present and the past.
Looking for things that cannot be seen.
Feedback this week following my formative assessment indicates that I’m on track with all the criteria, which is great. More interesting though was the conversation about subjective responses to the colours I use. I realised whilst speaking that although my colour decisions are made for particular reasons I had not made a connection between colour and the surface of that colour in the memory of it. I sense that this is very important for me.
An entry point.
1Charles Harrison, Painting the Difference: Sex and the Spectator in Modern Art, 2005, University of Chicago Press. Pg 14
2 Jacques Ranciere, The Painting in the Text, from The Future of the Image, Verso, London 2007, P89
Do I see then paint or see when I paint?
Does the painting replicate the seeing experience?
Does the painting need to be anchored in the seeing experience?
Just a few of the self directed questions from my mid-term tutorial review form (which we bring completed to the tutorials) The tutorial was a helpful conversation in the week following the Contextualisation Powerpoint presentations which prefigure the one we give in May, and only two weeks before our formative assessment.
Reflecting on my work is a strangely passive out of body process at the moment, one of watching myself at work, viewing all the activity as parts of one action. Each question progressing swiftly into the next and the next; no answer required. As part-time students we have been in this level since February, and there is for us a sense of preparing for what comes after the course. Our full time colleagues are preoccupied with their dissertations and by the amount of time taken away from studio practice, which they are all desperate to give themselves to. Our dissertations sit on the staff office shelf; marked but the grade not given until the final result. Our thoughts hover around what our practice means to us outside of the uni. I have just looked at the timetable and added up our official studio days; 44 remaining. Four years of tutorials and modules, crits and conversations, and still more boxes to be ticked. Yet when I walk away in June it will be me and my practice, how well do we know each other? How authentic is the relationship? There has been a shift. No longer what and why, but how?
Beware All Inexperienced Boatmen is the randomly selected title of a student show in the uni gallery space, swiftly yet thoughtfully curated by our tutor last week. The quote is from the essay, The River Po, from The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger, that I had on my desk. It seemed to make an immediate connection although I felt a little guilty at the haphazard method of choosing it (I did say swiftly). I re-read it. Berger is writing about the film Gente del Po made in the mid 1940’s, by Michelangelo Antonioni. He describes the river as, ‘A sprawling story of regular repetitions and unpredictability’,* with a still surface and hidden currents, and a famously un-penetrable fog that shrouds visibility; hence the warning. The work relates well together all having been previously exhibited separately and is now presented together here at the beginning of our final academic year. A point at which forward motion is necessary and urgent, ‘to negotiate and finally join the beyond.’*
Beware All Inexperienced Boatmen
Buckinghamshire New University Gallery
Saliha Elhoussaini
Gill Gregory
Marion Piper
Cally Shadbolt
* The Shape of a Pocket, John Berger, BloomsburyPublishing Plc, London, 2002.
Mmm… convergence or divergence? a good prompt for a post, thank you David Riley for your comment.
My painting activity at Angelika involves converging points. Elements coming in from different directions, both formally and from source. I’m letting them in and taking their lead. I plan to move these canvasses down the road to the uni studio to work on them there next week. I don’t want there to be a divide between the two spaces.
The work I started at uni has a divergent character. Two canvases begun in the same manner, side by side. The concertina sketchbook shares the same first step and then I have decided to activate the same decision in the book as on the canvas but translate it differently. As the two canvases develop I expect the 17 pairs of pages will also take a other directions. So many things happen on the canvas during painting slipping between the layers. I am interested in the ‘Sliding Doors‘ question and wonder myself what might happen.
Studio spaces have now been allocated for the first six week period, with detailed guidelines and expectations for how they and the shared workspaces are to be used. It is a different way and there may well be some problems. We final year students need to get on with working now and not let it distract us. The reduction in teaching hours for our staff has resulted in a re-plan of the timetable and a re-adjustment to how teaching hours are used. Moving furniture and cleaning up the studio (along with constructing it!) etc are the responsibility of the artist and part of studio life. It is our studio. Use it or loose it.
The first deadline of the year approaches, for 10 minute power point presentation for the Context and Presentation module. This is a practice run for the new contextulisation section of the viva we give at our final. I am finding that this process is far from limiting. It is helping me to identify the heart of my practice. I don’t want to make work ‘like’ anyone but I’m not making in a vacuum either. It’s a multi-lingual visual world out there, witness Frieze, and I suppose I want to know my language well and to communicate it clearly.
I have started two groups of work. In my studio space at Angelika, I am working with the starting point of a small pencil drawing continuing the Massena series. At uni I am pursuing a series using the concertina sketchbook drawing/painting activity I have been doing throughout the course.
?
Massena- Standing
Concertina – Moving
