Milly Thompson has just visited the studio. As usual I talked through my older work and then moved on to the newer pieces I have been doing at Standpoint. She felt that what I (maybe the work) projected most of all was a grappling with the guilt of painting, something common around painters, after all it makes little sense to paint as a contemporary artist, and yet for so many of us it is the driving force.
She was fantastic with being harshly critical about my work in places of our talk. She was especially critical of Clout which is perhaps the piece of work that I have been known for. She felt that this work could easily be misread and taken as a gimmick and seen too much as being isolated and ‘liked’ by people because it has an sign/image that they recognise. She also felt that the new work is far to close to a cheap and nasty poster manipulated on CAD and sold to be pretty on the wall. Something that pulled me up short. She felt that the work was more successful when i became both less referential and less reverential to the original paintings. she felt this was closest with one of the newer works where i had broken free of the figure and the edge.
in terms of moving on, she stressed repeatedly several things. Firstly the absurdity for making rules for myself for work, that make for a practice that has a project based mentality rather than a holistic approach. She thinks making things so logical holds me back somewhat and is almost certainly right. The rules if they need to exist should only be there to get things started. She thinks I should take a year off from being logical and felt the most logical thing for my practice is to be illogical for a big space of time; to let things happen rather than predetermining them. She felt with this then my work could really go somewhere, but at the moment is too often stifled.
We talked a lot of the relevance of painting and how I should focus on perhaps the most pertinent reason to be painting at the moment; that if it being a place where one can slow down and retreat from the business and bustle of the everyday contemporary world. She felt that maybe I should really retreat from the world of twitter, Google and mobile phones when in the studio. This was made in response to me telling her that I do not drive and that because i walk everywhere then I see things that might normally be passed over if one was traveling at speed. She felt more than anything that my work and a painting practice allows for a slowing down. This also makes logical sense in an illogical way of my feeling towards work such as Clout and Various Titles and how I am now more interested in making selections from these than displaying the mass as I have previously done.
Finally she feels that I should focus on being a painter more, letting myself do what I want to do with paint, rather than thinking of others, or a theoretical response to the validity/death of painting. I am conscious that I am far far away from a Stuckist attitude to painting and I am uneasy with the recent revival in purely abstract paintings, but letting the paint and gesture come to the fore could make the work become more personable and more interesting. She pointed out that it took two hours for me to talk about the activity of painting, when I said how i have achieved a gestural mark with gouache paint and felt I should let this come out far more often. Can I get over the guilt of that though and would I be happy with it?
I have just had a studio visit from Ingrid Swenson who runs Peer. I feel fortunate to have spoken to her as they are currently showing a fantastic updating or re-evaluation of John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gum, which is one of the best shows I have seen during my time in London.Peer as an organisation is a very thoughtful one and Ingrid was the quite naturally of the same nature. We started by talking about John Smith and also the prerequisite discussion about Richter. I then talked her through lots of previous work, and then what I have produced on the residency, i imagine she had to digest a lot of rambling, but made many insightful comments at the end.
We talked about why I am almost battling with painting/being a painter and she asked why I can not just accept that I am and let things go from there. I do not have to be like Sisyphus and carry painting on my back. It is so interesting that this comment is coming up a lot in London, where there is a lot of painting and yet I perceive in Manchester I have to justify a reason to paint. She felt it was also ok to take away control form the work and to let things go far more, she felt I almost try to be intellectual (her words!) about the work and maybe I should let things happen. We talked of what is it that makes Richter or Chris Marker so great and how she things a lot of it is how natural their work is, that there is not struggle, but how it has been made naturally. She mentioned how the trinagle motif does contain the allusion to Modernism, through Buckminster Fuller and cubism that I referred to, but perceptively she also said of how it also harks to the doodle. She felt, and almost certainly rightly, that I should let the forms I paint become more like doodles in their attitude.
Towards the end we talked of two of the shows she has responded to most warmly recently, Richard Tuttle at Modern Art and John Thompson at Anthony Reynolds. She felt that they both offer an antidote to the monumental art that is somewhat invading the London galleries at the moment, there was a quiet reflectiveness in these two shows that played against the brashness of a lot of work seen out and about.
We did not talk so much about the film I produced ( you can see it here ) and i wonder if this is telling? However this did seem to get a good reaction from my students who visited this morning, maybe the lightness and humour was something they related to, or the anarchy of fighting in or running through the gallery appealed to them. It was interesting talking to them about the importance of the studio and the residency as being a testing ground for practice and how stepping outside a normal pattern can allow yo to take risks and try things in your practice form another position and stance. I think it was god for them to see me making mistakes and to see the importance of wrong avenues taken with the work that build into successful works. This is certainly something I want to take back. I took them down Brick lane, via the amazing bagel shops to revisit Wilhelm Sasnal at Whitechapel which really is a phenomenal show. The opportunity to return to these shows is important and something I shall miss about London.
This morning Mike and myself did the first of three colours on the lithograph. i am very excited, it is so far from the immediacy of paint, but something that certainly appeals as a process. We hope to apply the 2nd colour tomorrow.
Andrew Bracey – Observing Gallery Behaviour
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