The Cultural Tourist

Uninspired workings

I’m back to collecting rubbish. Strangely the streets are relatively rubbish free at the moment so I will have to give it time. The reason I am back to collecting local debris is because of what I am currently doing art wise.

I had been feeling particularly uninspired since Christmas. In fact I haven’t written for a couple of months. It had been a busy November and December as I was involved in a couple exhibitions plus Christmas at my home is a bit of a festival of cooking art event in itself.

Come January I entrenched myself in the studio to see if I could kick start myself into anything but it hasn’t been easy. One of the big advantages of this type of situation is that I get so frustrated that I get to the point I think ‘to hell with it’ and just get started on anything.

A few months ago I had begun work on my refugee series and this had come as a complete standstill. It wasn’t that they weren’t working as such, but more that my initial ideas for developing them felt flat. Looking back at these small pieces on canvas I started to paint into them. I realised as I worked how inspired I was by the ‘Making and Unmaking’ exhibition by Duro Olowu that was on at the Camden Arts Centre last year. It certainly had lingered on in my head and I think that perhaps the vibrancy and positive vibe of this exhibition was just the thing I needed to propel me into a new art year.

My initial work had originated from internet and media images of refugees and migrants. I then had digitally manipulated these images to focus on the small things, blurring the faces of the individuals concerned as an utterance about invisible voices. Whilst this premise is as valid and importance as ever, I needed personally to have a different focus and to cut loose a little.

I started playing with the patterns, shapes and colours within these pieces. I seemed to be abstracting the abstract. I like the idea that I was using the materials and textures of the clothing of the refugees as a way forward, celebrating the beauty and preciousness of cultural diversity.

They are very small so physically hard for me to work on. It was easier to work on them all at once so I didn’t get too tied up with them. It also meant that I was continually refreshing my aspect with them and seeing new potential every time. Some of them have lost their original visual context but I think this has made them more successful.

I tried not to think about them too much but just enjoyed the doing. It has helped me think about my next steps and how I would like to work on the same basis but using the debris that I find around me. So we are back to the rubbish….

November is a busy month for me. I was fortunate to have 3 small art pieces selected for the 2016 ING Discerning Eye exhibition taking place 17 – 27 November at the Mall Galleries in London, SW1. In addition I have been asked to do an artist demonstration at the Friends and Members evening on the 16th November. As there are quite a number of processes involved in my work, I had to think long and hard as how to achieve this and make the most of this opportunity.

I have decided its best I take a ‘Blue Peter’ type approach where I have various pieces ready at different stages to work upon. This takes away the necessity of demonstrating the computer and digital aspects of my work which whilst important to my process would make rather dull viewing. Also at times, as with most artists, my working can become extremely messy. However I don’t think doing this in a smart gallery, with people with drinks milling about would be advisable either.

Hence the necessity to get cracking on my work at different stages. The pieces that were selected for the exhibition were essentially about bits of the urban environment, buildings, trees and weeds coming together in a kind of urban collage, using my mixed media processes. I wanted to carry on with this idea of using my urban and every day surroundings as inspiration.

I recalled this fantastic exhibition at the Royal Academy years ago by a Danish Artist called Vilhelm Hammershoi. Austerity, limited tonal palettes, glimpses of a person from behind or side on sitting or standing looking out a window or walking from one place to another, interiors of houses, more specially bits of a room, simply focusing on the space, light and shadow. The works are understated, quiet, celebrating the banality of the everyday.

I decided to do a modern take on this, using my own home and family, but with a slight twist. Yes, I used a limited palette but rather than the neutral colours that Hammershoi employed, mine are much more vivid. I also included singular people in my works going about their business, but in a contemporary environment, such as using a computer, or wearing headphones. I also focused on bits of my home’s interior such as corners, the walls, landings and hallways, emphasising the space, light and shadows.

This of course I did using my own mixed media processes. Starting with photography as the first instance, then digitally simplifying and playing with the photographs until I roughly get the image that I want to eventually paint and draw upon on canvas or board. I display a couple of the digital images here. My plan for the demo is to have a number of pieces at various stages to give a flavour of what I do. Wish me luck.

Little voices

Sometimes there is a natural lull in one’s art work. Caught between a mixture of wanting to try new things completely, to wanting to use my tried and tested methods to communicate current concerns. Ideally I should both.

My present dilemma surrounds 8 very small canvases I am working upon. Actually, its early days – I am still at the stage of playing with images digitally with the view that they are likely to end up on these small canvas squares. These works follow on from my squashed drink can migrant and refugee series called ‘Jewels’. These recently were on display in a UAL one night pop-up exhibition called PArt of Us which focused on the potential of creative ventures engaging with social issues (with special emphasis on the Calais Jungle.)

My new works in progress are focusing on the materials and patterns that the refugees wear, trying to emphasise the preciousness and uniqueness of each and every person by drawing out the vibrancy and detail of their clothing and material items around them, even though it seems the people themselves get lost in the pure volume and numbers we see in the media every day.

Using photos from newspapers as a starting point, I used photo-shop to hide the features of individual people and then digitally drew on the images to illustrate items of material. I found it to be an uncomfortable working practice eliminating the faces of people but that was kind of the point. I am hoping that the deliberate obscuring may in fact emphasise the opposite.

Anyway, my dilemma is to do with the fact I keep changing my mind in how I think I should approach these works from both a composition and technical point of view. I feel uneasy and unworthy of trying to communicate the magnitude and complexity of this political and emotive issue. These are very little pieces and it is with a very little voice I try to communicate. It mirrors the huge sense of powerlessness I believe many of us feel surrounding this.

In life, we all appropriate in some way – whether this is retelling a joke or copying a haircut from some celebrity. But in the process of appropriation, often the thing in question becomes personalised simply in that in comes from you. Your hair with that haircut, the way you tell that joke with the incantation and tone of your voice.

Art is certainly no stranger to appropriation. We are always influenced and informed by other art, events and sights around us so that what we produce as artists is some sort of assemblage from these encounters. True appropriation in art is perhaps more recognisable when an existing piece of art is used as the basis or in the make-up of another piece of work. In my latest series of works, it could be said that I have used other people’s work to help make up mine.

On a recent holiday to France as I was walking around the cities of Nantes, Le Mans and Orleans, I took a number of photos of bits of my surroundings that I encountered in this urban environment. My new work focuses on the graffiti and bits of buildings, foliage, shadows and reflections that I zeroed in on.

The reason I chose them was because there was something about the detail or the texture that appealed to me. As I took the photograph, I deliberately apply a subjective framing (as we all do when we use a camera) as it is the focus of this frame which has inspired me in some way. It could be the movement of the mark making, the rich colour of the object or the intricate detail that is displayed.

Using these recent urban photos as a basis, I created a number of digital montages, cutting and pasting, digital scribbling and erasing – a kind of a graffiti of the graffiti. I had certain ideas in mind as I was producing them. I wanted them to be evocative, collage like, reminiscence of walls, rooms and close-up details of the buildings around us – the patterns, the surfaces, the dynamics between structures, suggestions of the elaborateness of bits of architecture and a cross over between design and fine art.

It’s not that I had exact ideas of how I wanted these to turn out, I did know however the areas I wanted to explore. Broadly speaking these are the artists Tomma Abts, Franz Ackermann, Sonia Delauney, Richard Hamilton, Albert Ohlen, Fiona Rae and Anj Smith. It’s a long list (and certainly not exhaustive) but these canvases allowed me the space to have a bit of a play with certain elements these particular artists use in their work – so yes, even more appropriation.

However the works themselves start to take on a life of their own and entice me to follow certain paths conceptually and visually. There is no doubt I am lulled into a different place, perhaps even a different story in each of these and I allow myself to indulge accordingly. Contours, colours, shadows, memories, literature, poetry, bits of films drip feed into the work, loading it up, pushing the flow one way or another. In a way it’s a bit like a meandering river in the way that each work collects and builds up along the way to its own conclusion.

The attached images of my graffiti pieces are all work in progress so may yet change considerably.

It was April last year when I found out I was lucky enough to be selected for a Cass Material Arts bursary as being one of part of Made in Arts London’s (MiAL) featured artists. This bursary provided me with much appreciated Cass vouchers to spend on whatever I wanted within the store.

Over a year later and I am still benefiting hugely from this. Much of my work over the last 12 months particularly has been focusing on playing with more mixed media and different surfaces in my art using the material that I have bought. As one would expect sometimes the experimentation goes well, sometimes it doesn’t. But that’s all good and necessary when it comes to making art.

I have been focusing on a lot of small work; 8 x 8 “, on board – continuing to focus on corners, pathways and little wild bits of the urban environment that we might pass by every day. I have still been using digital photography as the first step of my process recording a particular scene which I then transfer on to the wood board. From here things may change dramatically. After ensuring the surface is ready to work upon, I have been using a mixture of water colour pencils, pastels and pens and oil paints.

Visually it is not a huge stretch in terms of difference between my previous processes and materials, but has allowed me to see the subtlety of variance in the effect of the materials. This subtlety mirrors that which I am trying to portray. Fleeting, ephemeral, out of the corner of one’s eye, texture, beauty and ugliness packed together in a kind of natural urban collage.

The surfaces are not smooth – they are rough and sometimes kind of gritty. Patches of gloss sit aside matt and faded markings. Brush, pencil and finger painting is evident. The original digital photograph acts a springboard or a trace of what is to evolve – the final piece of art being something that is deliberately not polished or perfect but a combination of reality and man-made illusion. Such is our world around us.