Staffordshire University Fine Art – Ali Gibson

https://www.facebook.com/kulesresidency

This saturday saw the opening event of the Kules residency programme in Stoke On Trent. Their aim is to use the empty industrial spaces around the city for short term art projects.

The opening event was well attended and featured a number of artists known from Staffordshire University. It was a very social event to meet and greet familiar faces and to meet some new ones.

I happended to be upstairs looking at the work of the artist Leigh Clarke when he was preparing to put on his make up for a shammen singing performance piece.  I happen to be a professional face painter so I offered my services to Leigh at this point and by helping him out, I managed to make another connection and meet the artist.  It goes to show, you never really know who you are talking too.  Once fully painted somewhere between a skull and a monkey, Leigh sang to the audience in an acapelo style commenting in a very engaging way about dry social observations of our time, highlights including Chicken in a box and Mother F****** Gangster.

Well worth a visit. If you are local, come and see what is in the show, the large scale installation by Leigh Clarke is not to be missed.

I was pleased with the painting yesterday ‘Review’ but my head is already racing with the comments from Cally Spooner and how I can progress my line of inquiry and develop my work.

I have found by going through some weekly downmarket magazines where people sell their stories for cash, some quite powerful headlines that I can use in my work. If I remove them from their original editorial content and reinvent them within my work, then I may have something powerful here. I have a large number of these statements up on my studio wall so I can reflect upon them and decide which I feel are the more powerful.

I need to test how to translate these headlines into paintings. I have been using stencils and spray paint but the one I felt was the most successful so far was when I turned the stencil over and pressed the residue down onto the canvas, it picked up a number of layers of spray paint and I feel this is a far more interesting resultant image than just purely spraying on the paint. So although the letters are reversed, I need to recreate this by further testing.

I do feel the union jack is very successful to use as a ground but again I need to test what works comparing some samples using the union jack and typography and just a simple acrylic white/blue/red mix.  By testing I will know what has the more power.

Also, I need to consider, I was thinking that next step was to use one of the glamourised vogue ladies, whos face stares out at the viewer and one of these headlines but then I question of the works alone would stand successfully without the need for additional portraiture? Like a Richard Prince joke painting?  I need to test this.

If I use these headlines with a female face then the viewer will empathise with the face and connect the 2.  It could be interesting.

So I feel I am in quite a strong position at the moment. I have my source material in terms of vogue ladies from advertising and I have a wealth of headlines to choose from.

Time to think and stand back a little and then test and I will find the answers.

This is my latest painting which I have just completed. I was testing the magazine cover idea and have amended my new title to Review.  I think I am already aware when I look back over this year and review what is working and what is not, this will be a pivitol piece of work.  By using the union jack as the ground for the painting (and applying clear gesso) is already gives vibrancy and iconography to the image.  It plays with the instantly ingrained symbolism already ingrained into the UK psyche.  It screams cool britannia to you.  It could well be that the union jack will become by motif of choice, similar to Gordon Chung always using the financial times in his work.  The face was painted in oil in a day.  I am finding that the speed and confidence of the execution is adding to their power. The female guaze stares out at the viewer, very aloof, sexualised but also questionning and at the same time, closed off.  I am aware that this time, I have used the oil paint more effectively, allowing that gentle smearing that is so delightful to the medium to take over, it is a definate progress on the acrylic painting I was using earlier on.

I realise now that alot of the work I did last year was about loosening up my painting style and not really about representation.  I am now beginning to realise how much my painting style and confidence has improved as a result of this experimentation with abstract painting techniques.  I threw turps on what I thought was a finished painting and that stripped back some of the hair and the top left side of the face to reveal the union jack design underneath.  This was a critical decision and really worked in terms of painterly technique and using the ground to its full effect.  I think next time I can trial this again but next time in a more sophisticated, less dangerous fashion, by using cotton buds perhaps.

I added the ON SALE NOW at the bottom by stencil.  I felt that to totally make it a magazine cover was not needed so perhaps they are turning more into posters.  This is something I need to consider.  Does it need to be a magazine cover or does it just need to use the language of magazines of which we are so familiar already, the ubiqutious language of advertising and marketing.

I am interested in how this will be read by the audience but equally I appreciate that I need to continue to develop my own critical distance from my work so I know before opening to the public what the response will be in terms of reading of an image.

Pleased with this one as a progression of ideas piece, such as it is.

http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/performance-and-music/bmw-tate-live-performance-room-cally-spooner

On monday we had Cally Spooner visit the university for an artist talk. She focused her talk on her current projects starting in 2013 and bringing it right up to date including work she completed 2 days ago.

She described how the collaboration and performance for her  musical developed from ‘And you were wonderful’ to grow and change depending on site specific requirements, current issues/gossip of the day and how this will develop into the near future into a film.

Her manner of presentation and thoughtfulness of her explanations in terms of her exploratory nature and line of inquiry was more than a success. I found it heartening as she talked about working at the Tate this year and taking part in the Frieze Projects (the  ’commercial’ films of dancers which I saw when I was there) that she was dealing continuously with the rolling thought process of creating a new artwork and I personally took heart with my own struggles for developing my own artist voice.  The experiences we have are all a melting pot for what we create already and throw into that the environment in which we are part, that is fast moving, intense, multi media, sound bite society.

I left the auditorium thinking this is a woman that wants to take risks, you can hear her brain evolving and working out problems, reasoning and developing all the time and relishing the challenge.

I had a tutorial with her afterwards and discussed my own line of inquiry. Her advise was practical and helpful with a few artists dealing with similar subject matter to research but the key message was perhaps less is more. The idea of a magazine cover at all may be not necessary. To appropriate and use found images from magazines and sound bite slogans that are universal to the viewer being empowering and opening may produce a more successful artwork.

Time to reflect and consider. An interesting day.

I was testing my 2 latest paintings in a crit group as per the intro image on which I am developing the theme of a magazine with the end game being to question how women, and I include myself willingly in this, buy into the multi-media message of women, to have a social value needing to be beautiful above all else and that this veneer of femininity and our increasingly sexualised society in which we are at best complicit.  I want to eventually by development of this theme poke fun at ourselves, not to cover the old ground of feminism but make a political comment on the irony of our self imposed limitations by using humour. Quite how I can go about this using slap lines is a work in development.

Anyway, the image on the right of the mock magazine was painted in oil very quickly in an hour or two wet on wet and it is that energy that gives it simplicity and dynamism, the overtly sexualised lips blood red and the red banner at the top.  It was described in crit. as Luc Tuymans in style so I had to admit, although I was aware of his work, he was not a painter that I had looked at in any great detail and if there was a natural link, then I had to look at it.

So cropping a found image may be an easy link to make but there are others as I found out.

My first discovery was that I mistakenly thought he was German given his historical subject matter of world war 2 references and national weight that this endorses upon the individual growing up in the aftermath of war, but he is in-fact Belgium (b. 1958).  His frequent use of source material from film, tv, print and other found materials is another link in terms of my current practice.

On the Tate video he talks about appropriating an image and translating this into the paint and how this becomes a different composition all together, referring to painting being on a ‘different time-span’, which I take to painting being a time based media, both in terms of its time of execution and the layers of depth taken from the resultant work upon the viewer as they visit the image again and again and another layer of depth is revealed.

I am also interested in his comments about the memory being inadequate which is ultimately frustrating and it strikes me there is a parallel going on here. If he is interested in memory, then his paintings, given their speed of creating are not true to life at all, but due to their minimalist, reduced white-noise simplicity, it removes the distractions of every day life until you are left with the bare essence of a thing alone and more and more I am coming to the personal conclusion that this is what painting should be about.

It tells me that I should keep going with the painting the figurative element in one-day as the essence of the figure may be enough, especially when I am transforming a glamourized image into a more complex multi-layered character using the paint to assist me in this respect by allowing the immediacy and rawness of the medium to have its say.