On a whim (meaning: not working on any of the three studio projects I feel I ‘ought’ to be working on…), I thought today I’d try something new: drawing in a concertina-style sketchbook directly from film stills. This was inspired by a video on YouTube of a dance piece called ‘Faun’. The two dancers have extraordinary fluidity and strength to their movements. I also love the sturdy muscularity of their bodies.
My paintings and drawings never usually take photos as a starting-point, but when I went to see Jenny Saville’s reproduction drawings series at Gagosian recently, I felt that she’d probably used photography as a part of the drawing process, and it had worked really well. Saville’s work had a sort of true inner muscularity to it, a sort of integrity and authenticity that I don’t often detect when an artist has used a photograph.
Today’s work is not to be compared with Saville’s, for lots of reasons including the fact that it’s on a much, much smaller scale. I’m interested in what I’ve done though; maybe it’s the start of something…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKWXFoLqYeg&feature…
A long and probably ultimately fruitless day in the studio today, wrestling with the acrylics… How anyone gets it to work is beyond me! Two major issues: (1) trying to get the ‘stuff’ to work, the physicality of it all (‘the alchemy’ as James Elkins might say); (2) the big ongoing struggle which is always so intrinsic to my work: the struggle of working on the edge where a kind of emotive beauty meets something more visceral, raw and edgy. (The kind of emotive beauty I’m thinking about here lies in an appealing face, for example, perhaps with a soft expression.)
Your strength can also be your weakness. In my case, the ability to draw a face in a certain way. The thing is, I do want my work to express aspects of human physicality, imbued with the emotional and (dare I say) spiritual qualities that we can infer when we look at it. On the other hand, there’s the danger of the work being ‘sweet’ and even pretty. I am conscious that I am really working on the edge of sweetness a lot of the time, and this I find invigorating, infuriating and really challenging. Quite often I seem to dramatically visualise it in my mind (remembering school geography lessons) as an arête, a knife-edged ridge. The path meanders, so you have to keep checking you are following the ridge exactly, being constantly careful not to slither down into sentimentality/prettiness on the one side, or – or what on the other? Loads of risks there too, ranging from brutishness to blandness to meaningless gesture to you-name-it. The other thing about ‘sweetness’ for me involves colour. The moment you move beyond monochrome black-and-white, you get caught up in people’s assumptions and responses to colour. The vivid magentas I often use – to me they speak of vigour, but to some people it’s prettily pink. And to others, these colours are simply distasteful. (To me too, sometimes! – I loved Thomas Hylander’s and Nick Goss’s subdued limited palettes in their paintings at the Jerwood art space, wondering for the nth time why I didn’t work this way…).
Of course, it’s all really subjective. There will be plenty of people who find my work distasteful because of the types of faces I tend to paint, or the colours I use. And my own views change over time, too. A lot of my past work now appals me… Which is probably as it should be. Keep moving on.
I went to the Jerwood space yesterday, to hear a panel discussion focussing on opportunities for emerging artists. The panel consisted of Josh Lilley, a gallery owner; Julie Lomax, Head of Visual arts at Arts Council England; David Rayson, Professor of Painting at the RCA; and David Cotterrell, an artist.
I suppose I mainly wanted to know whether there was anything I ought to know/do that I didn’t already. In respect of that, there probably wasn’t much that came as a surprise. The fact that galleries like to feel they’ve spotted you, not the other way round – people have been telling me that for years! The fact that networking really matters – all the Private Views and stuff like that – ditto (unfortunately, for a shy soul like me).
But what I came away feeling generally encouraged, and glad I’d come all the way up from North Essex. I can’t remember why, but early on the audience was asked for a show of hands, to see how much of the audience would describe themselves as painters – and a large proportion did! I hadn’t expected that at all. I suppose my preconception is that the majority of artists would identify mainly with installation and photography. Does it matter? After all, you could say that if there are lots of other painters out there, it only adds to the competition. But I don’t feel that; I just feel some sense of camaraderie, of a shared endeavour.
All the panellists came across well, I thought. I particularly enjoyed what David Rayson had to say. Such as ‘Live in your own film – do it to such a degree that it becomes a reality’ (he elaborated more on this, but I can’t write that fast, so didn’t get it down on paper). The event was being filmed; we weren’t told what for, but I’m assuming it will go on YouTube or something via A-N.
I had a quick whisk round the Jerwood painting show again; I saw it a couple of weeks ago and have been meaning to blog about it, but haven’t yet got around to it. I shall soon.
A sense of community with other artists is important to me. But I’ve never been someone who is comfortable networking in the traditional way: cosying up to the ‘right’ people at exhibition openings, for example. Which is part of the reason I began writing and reading artist blogs: to get a wider sense of engagement with other artists – especially painters – and an awareness of, and perhaps also dialogue with, what they are doing and who they are as people.
And I want more videos! Ones in which artists speak about their artistic practice and concerns, and which show them at work or at least in their working environment. Thanks to the website of the wonderful Millennium gallery in St Ives I discovered a beautiful little film by Stuart Lansdowne about Naomi Frears; really worth watching. If anyone reading this knows of other short films about contemporary artists, please let me know. Surely, there must be loads out there, but I can’t seem to find them.
http://www.millenniumgallery.co.uk/naomifrears/interview.htm
I had a wonderful day of gallery-hopping in London with a painter friend on Saturday. We went to a lot of shows; the ones that resonated most with me were Phyllida Barlow at the Serpentine, Angela de la Cruz at Camden Arts Centre, Jenny Saville’s ‘Reproduction Drawings’ series at Gagosian, and Audrey Reynolds at Arcade. I’d never even heard of Audrey Reynolds before. As my friend said, ‘she really is a painter’s painter’. I loved the work and I also loved the piece that Jonathan Griffin wrote accompany the show. He writes beautifully about stains: ‘there is something reassuring about the indelibility of a stain. It is an index of an event that refuses to budge, a memory that promises to hold fast until we choose to discard it, along with the surface it’s anchored in. It is also personal: a stain belongs, by and large, in private and indoors’. Reynolds’ work has a quiet, delicate lightness of touch that stays in the mind for a long time. She also makes me think again about trying different supports, such as wood (perversely, since I have so many fresh new canvases stacked up in the studio!), and different media, such as household paint.
http://www.arcadefinearts.com/
