Part 2
I was at the doors of Haunch of Venison as they opened this morning to see the Frank Stella show. He was a college favorite, but i have seen so few of his works in the flesh. This was a real treat, to be able to go back and forth between paintings and periods in his career and piece it together; and also in complete peace, with only one other person in attendance for the whole of my visit. Like so much painting (and very very obviously) the surface completely changes when you get up close. The bleed and pencil marks and even colour differentiation in the surface of the older compass and concentric squares work made the work so much more human. There is a great room with three relief works that are exactly the same in structure and completely different in colour, material and direction of the planes. This is something I have been attempting to do with focusing on the Virgin at the Rocks by Da Vinci in two paintings I have done at Standpoint (one more to go). Each one takes the same section of the painting to paint over and each one creates a different feel by the difference in composition of triangles and more tellingly the colour.
However it was with two later huge canvases that Stella truly stopped me in my tracks. I am not sure if these are not his best paintings that I have seen, they are certainly close. They feel a little like an artist, who has become an old man and who no longer gives a fuck what others think, but is going to do what he wants to do (like Sigrid talked of Titian in the National gallery last week). These are enormous surfaces of perhaps twelve feet square and covered with an extrodinarily complex system of marks, both flat and raised and of a huge amount of colours, textures and depths. These paintings truly zing, always an excellent mark of a god painting. The most odd thing about them is that despite the chaos of the imagery clashes, they are true moments of calm once you focus, the eye in the storm and this, to me, is an excellent analogy of our contemporary life.
Between time in my new studio in the gallery i have also popped out to see some shows in the surrounding area whilst I decide what to do next with the composition I am working on. I went to Kenny Schachter’s Rove where he has photos by Bill Wyman ( some moments of a good photogrpaher, usually when he is not trying to be one like in his portrait of Marc and Vava Chaagall, he is a better bass player though!) and Dan Rees at Jonathan Viner gallery, which I just did not get. Then on to the excellent John Smith show at Peer, his reworking of the iconic Girl Chewing Gum in both the film and ebay trail is superb in it’s attention to detail, truly a gem. I then went to see the Oliver Laric show at Seventeen, including an amazing frame made out of the board used to cover broken windows, perfectly in keeping with the delicacy of the orchid photograph it housed.
Now back to the studio, I am trying to get the painting I am working on up onto the walls by tonight, hum ho.
