Random Writes.

A Rant with Perspective.

Part 1.

These views are entirely my own, I make no apologies for what follows…

Some noble but misguided notion lead me well and truly off piste last week with regard to the subject of my Wednesday drawing class. It has been a while since I gave much thought to my old frenemy: perspective. We go back a long way but we’ve never have liked each other much.

Until I became a professional artist, by which I mean showing and selling commercial painting, I had kept like a guilty secret, my avoidance of the dark art of perspective and managed to find quite adequate ways around it. “IT” seemed like a very grown-up, mathematical and secretively mystical like something akin to the Masons.

Around that time I was invited on a painting trip with a well-known artist to…Venice. To begin with I was utterly overwhelmed especially as I was daily, painting with someone who oozed perspective confidence. I began to tentatively paint the bits that stuck out of the Venetian skyline, small, unassuming dove-filled turrets. One day my painter friend with consummate 3 point perspective skills, called my bluff and insisted on teaching me and reluctantly I let her. At the time it sort of made sense, in that I began to paint buildings, lots of them and lost my fear. I realise now though that Venetian Architecture although stupendously beautiful wasn’t what inspired me, I would have been better off painting people and buildings only where they got in the way. But I was young and impressionable.

Over the next twenty years I gained a lot of teaching experience and taught perspective only as an adjunct to looking. My adult groups were richly diverse and I became fascinated with the way other people see the world and over time I saw a pattern emerge. Often (but by no means always) men liked the idea of perspective and sometimes came to class with an already extensive knowledge and a few bearing home-made Heath Robinson type alarming-looking mechanical aids. They related perspective to their drawings in a practical engineering, concerned with gravity, way. Generally speaking (*) women were more likely to favour contour and line drawing with a marked interest in surface and texture. And if that all sounds sexist well that’s how it was…

The best example of what I am talking about is the time I had in my class a technical draughtsman, highly skilled at conceptualising 3 dimensional forms and translating them into two. His resulting drawings were practical in that they were believably functional but lacked character of place, history and uniqueness. The following week in an attempt to get the students really looking I took them out into the landscape to draw and paint ancient crumbly Tudor buildings. It seemed as though, away from the college in the real world, the students had referred back to ancient default settings, the draughtsman produced competent solid box-like, all weather structures, generically Tudor, as did most of the other men to some extent, almost as if the technical parts of their brains had been triggered. The women on the other hand struggled with structure and concreteness but…the sense of crumbly ancient, lived, specific human dwelling was almost palpable especially in the details.

What one gender lacked the other seemed to exaggerate. This all started to feel like the contrast between convergent and divergent thinking styles, and set me off on a quest that I am still pursuing, which is, Could there possibly be (subtle) gendered perceptual differences?

*When I say “Generally speaking” I am referring to the 70/30 rule.

(Part 2. To follow)

Comfort Marks.

Crikey, it has been over two months since my last confession/blog post/diary or whatever this is, the guilt of neglect has kicked in. Between my husband’s dodgy foot, regular teaching commitments and the NEW PUPPY, I have been distracted but often delightfully so. I am learning to snatch and use random bits of time much like when my children were young. And now that the puppy (Woolfie) is sleeping through the night, work is finally beginning to flow again.

However as always happens after a creative drought I have to literally go back to the drawing board so the first and second pics are ink “comfort marks” to help me loosen up and stop being so self-conscious. So with mark-making on my mind I went to the private view of the exhibition Making Painting with the work of Helen Frankenthaler and Joseph Turner and completely inspired by the uninhibited, gloriously loose and painterly marks of Frankenthaler’s large oils which are like uplifting passages of music and so ahead of their time in treatment of materials. There is a real integrity about the mark-making and you can feel her constant and risky experimenting.

I also enjoyed the beautifully curated juxtaposition with Turner’s sometimes surprising works that relate across the years in colour and bravery of treatment. I really hope you get to see it.

Whilst there I had a proper artist’s chat with Clare Smith and this dialogue helped me formulate my thoughts about the work more clearly. The following week she invited me to an experimental and collaborative workshop with other artists in a shed, with materials and thread. I looked forward to this immensely and prepared four canvases in preparation. And then fate in the shape of a large sink hole on the M2, conspired to stop me going. I was gutted and having set aside the time and put myself mentally into experimental workshop mode, I decided to be intrepid and do it anyway.

My usual default setting for a new piece or series of works is triggered by a verb that pertains in some way to a proposed female sensibility, taken from the lived, real world. However, to avoid familiar tracks, instead I let my materials lead the way, my “canvases” were stretchers covered in an old wool jumper that I boiled until it morphed into felt, this felt (pun unintentional) very used and bodily. After fiddling about with various bits of gathered and hoarded materials, at some point I got the urge to de-construct/cut-up an old worn bra (inspired I think by Elena Thomas’s bra-related work) and harvested the underpinnings. I was fascinated by the shape of these and they caused me to reflect on a lifetime of bra wearing and how the old bra had to some extent taken up the shape of the wearer and almost certainly the wearer’s body would have traces of support/chaffing of daily use. Finally after agonising pinning-tacking-sewing, reversing and repeating, I over-sewed the bra-bits with some hand dyed silk thread. Having made one, it seemed right to make a matching pair. By the end I knew that the new verb would be: To Constrain.

So from my female perspective with the body as a vehicle for textiles and physical epression of wear, it still came as a shock when the youngest male member of the family, aged nine, seeing me sewing came over to look and as I showed him he went slightly pink and said: “Ah boobies.”

However my daughter well-schooled in this game when asked for her thoughts said, “smiley faces? Winky eyes? The Thompson Travel Agent’s logo?” Fascinating.

The thing is I don’t know if I would ever used such a “dangerously” obvious symbol in my work if not for the heady freedom of the phantom experimental workshop but now that this work exists, I am loath to put the cork back in the bottle…so I am going to run with it and see what gives. Thanks to Clare Smith and Rosie James and please ask me again.

Here is a blog about the workshop, Thread, Paper, Cloth. http://threadpapercloth.wordpress.com/2014/02/14/mesh-thread-lines-photos/

And here is a link to the exhibition: Making Painting at Turner Contemporary https://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/making-painting-helen-frankenthaler-and-jmw-turner

Standing in the Shadows of love.

The last few weeks I have been in a limbo-like state as recently, while returning from fishing, my husband turned his ankle and fell. The ensuing damage was extensive and he needs several weeks in a cast, with no weight put the leg at all. Not having so much time for my work has increased the desire to do it and at and at the same time helped me face up to the fact that I was hanging on to a piece of pretty weak work. It is an intervention to a sack, and has been hanging about in corners making me feel guilty for too long. I am going to burn it in the hope that fire will destroy and purify at the same time.

And so for the interim I have only short bits of time and the obvious thing to do was draw as this does not have the gravitas of “real” work. However I have only recently returned to drawing after a long absence and am still not back to a regular habit. I decided to use husband as a model as he couldn’t escape. I toiled for four hours on a “serious” drawing of him and made us both miserable. I still can’t look at this drawing without feeling physically sick.

No one could understand what I was so unhappy about as they judged it a good likeness. This made me think about lots of other artists who have driven themselves and close family and friends potty in the pursuit of betterment. The thing was, I was trying too hard to be better, to improve etc, instead of finding something to say.

The next evening the thought of trying to draw Peter’s head again gave me a nervous tic so I drew his great big blue foot instead and as I was drawing, his head (made small by perspective) crept into my peripheral vision and so I was able to come at it sideways, by stealth. Bingo. I have called the drawing Bigfoot and am able to look at it without my usual drawing dysmorphia.

Grayson and Dorothy.

When this thing happened to me that I will tell you about shortly, I was in standing in a gallery filled with an installation by Dorothy Cross called Connemara at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. It is a thrilling mix of Steam-punk zoology, gothic anthropology, darkly Darwinesque with a spiritual otherworldliness. Anachronistically and ecologically speculative Cross explores the human/nature relationship sometimes with dashes of unexpected wit in a theatrical, properly immersive environment.

I had become deeply engaged with a piece on the wall of lost footware retrieved from the sea and cast in rubber and bronze and just at that moment I saw another work in another room across the way, from a distance. It caught me off-guard and I made and un-made snap judgements about it as I struggled towards processing its possible meaning.

It went something like this:

Oh look there’s an easel with a torpedo-bomb-type-thing stuck on it. I suppose that means it’s about art being powerful or shocking or something-Perhaps it’s anti-war? Like a slogan: War, What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing. Well that’s been done before-surely too illustrative? Is she trying to shock us? Grayson Perry was talking about art not being able to shock us anymore…

“…art has lost one of its central tenets: its ability to shock.”

I walked nearer to the piece in the other room and discovered that the “torpedo” was in fact a model submarine of Lilliputian proportions with a delicious gilded surface. The easel was elegantly old and had been modified to “cradle” the submarine. Forced to re-interpret I read the notes:

Shark-Heart Submarine 2011 19^th century easel, model submarine, laminated wood, oil-gilded in white gold, shark’s heart in glass jar with alcohol.

It was the opposite of what I had first thought, Cross was transforming the cultural identity of the shark from monster to beautiful, stream-lined, mummified, deified icon. From Jaws to Tutankhamun.

And then it all made sense (to me) in a slow-motion, quietly, reverse-shock way and again I mused over Grayson Perry’s ideas about art not being shocking anymore and that we are all too sophisticatedly bohemian. I think that the art world has been locked into a binary dialogue of Shocker and shockee a pairing that no longer serves us. Perhaps now we the audience, released from our constraining role, can allow works like: Shark-Heart Submarine to disturb or enlighten us, leaving us open to a re-arrange our thoughts but quietly, to shock us in reverse so that the experience will be less like Ian Drury’s Hit Me with Your Rhythm Stick and more like the strangely reversed drum sounds in Deep Purple’s Smoke on the Water. So that rather than an initial hit or swift pun, the effect of the art would be to fracture and ripple outwards and stay long in the psyche.

“…to detain and suspend us in a state of frustration and ambivalence and to make us pause and think rather than simply react.”

Grayson Perry (paraphrasing Professor Charlie Gere) in the 2nd Reith Lecture 2013

I like the quote above and think that the Installation by Dorothy Cross does exactly that but more discreetly and less sensationally than before.

Transcript of Grayson Perry’s 2^nd Reith Lecture http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/transcripts/reith-lecture2-liverpool.pdf

Connemara at Turner Contemporary http://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/connemara

Leaf Sewing: The Next Generation.

The mess in my studio has reached critical mass, I can’t begin to describe the layers of…well mess. I start to sort it out, titivate around the edges, I put like with like and throw out anything mouldy or rancid. And then I come across a dried up leaf conglomerate but as it almost leaves my hand on its way to the bin, I remember what it is.

In the summer we were invited to a neighbour’s special birthday barbeque party, it was a lovely day in their beautiful garden with a live band and even livelier dancing on the lawn. Early on, finding my way to the glorious pop-up bar (installed in the garden shed) I passed a very large fig-tree, oddly moving and shedding leaves. As I got closer I saw four little girls inside busily pulling off leaves and branches. They were making a den and the bit of me that is still six, got quite excited, growing up in a big family with a large garden in a village provided endless den-making opportunities.

However, I had a simultaneous thought from the tidy well-behaved part of me that worries about the fig trees and possible damage. Looking on was the hostess and grandmother of one of the girls, I relayed my thoughts to her and she replied that she didn’t mind at all, the fig tree would grow back and if the shed had not been turned into a bar she would have fetched her saw to help the children with their den. My admiration for her increased.

Later the girls left their den and were clustered, heads together on the grass. They were sewing leaves. In my previous blog Two Steps Backwards I sewed leaves, well darned leaves to be specific. Each girl had two large fig leaves and a collection of long sharp pine needles which they were using both as needle and thread (See picture). I felt like an early anthropologist coming across some potentially ground-breaking evidence of huge ethnographical importance. And I could not help think about gender itseemed to me thatthere was something so essentially female in their behaviour. I talked to the girls about what they were doing, they were making purses they said, and explained their use of materials and techniques with great seriousness. It made me think about something called Isolate Song, that is: pure birdsong the part not learned by imitating the parent, the part the bird is born with. Perhaps playing in nature releases our own wild, Isolate Song still available to us in childhood and might explain why to me as an adult, it seems almost unbearably precious.

Nurture and Nature debates aside, I am collecting leaves again which is a great distraction from clearing out my studio.

My thanks to: Ella, Connie, Willow and Grace.