BA Top Up with sixteen in our cohort. A variety of disciplines from photography to painting and installation. An eclectic group of people that leads to interesting and lively debates on most things – not just art. An excellent set of tutors who are well established artists. They offer brilliant advice and have assured us of an excellent year – we will see…
I have just spent a very busy morning with the Updown Gallery in Ramsgate helping them to set up the wonderful Piers Secunda’s show.
Another wonderful insight into the workings of this gallery. The owners are such lovely people and are genuinely very happy for any help. I was mainly set to work with the painting of a plinth and labelling – not too taxing! Being sat at the reception desk it was great to watch the goings on within the gallery.
Piers’s work is tactile, quiet and beautiful. All of which belie the violent sources of his inspiration. He is fascinated with how oil is such an integral parts of our daily lives. The attached image is of Texan oil fields printed onto slabs of floor paint together with an exquisite puzzle ball of seventeen mobile layers.
All the amazing sculptures and paintings are made with the floor paint and so even the three dimensional works are described as paintings.
The show runs from the 21st June to 27th July and is well worth a visit.
Well, it’s finally over. One door shuts and another opens. The past weeks have been chaotic, stressful, joyful and just plain hideous but at least we were all working towards a goal. I am so grateful to the people on my course that were so instrumental in helping towards a wonderful degree show. Once all the work was put up it looked fantastic and my littlest boy served fresh Kentish strawberries to all the visitors.
The feedback I had on my work was overwhelming and a gallery bought two pieces – one is going to hang next to an Anish Kapoor! I can’t quite believe that myself but there you go! So far the feedback from the tutors has been enormously positive and I am keeping my fingers crossed for a gold star!
Rather than feeling bereft that it is all over, I am rather excited. Helpful friends are suggesting contacts and I have some teaching in schools over the forthcoming weeks. I have also donated a painting to a charity auction (obviously to raise money and also my profile!) I sold the piece that I was going to donate so I had better get on and make another one pronto! It is an exciting prospect being let loose on the world and I hope that I can keep up some sort of momentum. I have entered some competitions and will restart networking again. Hopefully I will be invited to join the Collective at the London West Bank Gallery this autumn again which will give me a goal to work towards. A friend from Brighton has asked me to be involved with Coastal Currents and I am meeting her at the PV at Hastings College next week to talk it through.
I will be taking my work down on Monday and now have the dilemma of how to transport all the paintings at once. They are very fragile so I have a feeling duvets will be involved in their journey home!
The countdown is well and truly on. Questions are being asked about the dimensions of our final works and how we would like to display them. I am unsure as to the allocation of spaces – do other colleges give equal spaces to students? It seems that we are going to be allocated space on a ‘who needs what’ basis. I have a feeling this could be a recipe for disaster. There has been a definite shift in atmosphere and a lot of twitchy peeking at everyone’s work. A last minute rush to raise funds for a brochure coupled with a serious summit meeting has resulted in a great design for both the brochure and the ad. Phew!
I am fairly sure now how I would like my work to be shown. I will have four large (ish) paintings together with some small sculptures that I would like to display on a light box. I am off to a Perspex shop tomorrow – if I get the right size our technician has told me she can make the rest, which is handy.
I have had a go at filming the surface of my latest work. It is so tricky to photograph a shiny surface and Richard of a-n suggested filming it – so attached is a debut film. I don’t think there will be any Oscars awarded but you might get the idea. I have buffed the wax to a high shine so any viewer can see their reflection. We all experience the same emotions to some degree and sometimes these feelings are so intense and overwhelming that we can only liken them to something of great magnitude – like earth. Often we will use geographical terms to describe our feelings for example – waves of emotion. We control our exterior and keep our inner turmoil under wraps. The surface of the paintings are reflective so the viewer can see their own image – we are not alone, there is always someone out there that is experiencing a similar emotion.
This piece is called ‘Fissure’ def: a weakness or flaw indicating impending disruption or discord.
Ps: couldn’t work out how to attach video – will try later
A little jaunt down to the very tip of Kent has revealed a new place to go. The Updown Gallery in Ramsgate is a real gem. It’s current exhibition is of incredible Howard Hodgkin prints, beautifully curated in an elegant Victorian villa in the heart of the town. Kate Smith, the owner, was so accommodating and helpful, taking me through the journey that she has taken with her career; starting in the Bernard Jacobson Gallery, opening up a branch in New York and how she set up the Updown Gallery. She even talked me through the lighting, flooring and shared her personal favourites that hang on the walls of the gallery. It was interesting to hear that, if she has to, she frames the works in her gallery in a way that she would like to see them in her home. She obviously loves what she does and is happy to share her knowledge readily and without condescension. This is a London gallery situated in a seaside town almost on my doorstep!
We are very lucky in this corner of Kent. It seems that it is becoming a real hub of creativity. We have the Turner Contemporary in Margate and a plethora of creative outlets springing up in the area. Whistable has the Horsebridge and Canterbury has the Sydney Cooper Gallery to name but a few. And now Ramsgate has the Updown Gallery. All worth a trip.
I have just finished the triptych and I am pretty pleased with it. However, a comment from a friend has left me concerned. She felt it would not look out of place in a shop! The hours that have gone into making a smooth surface, the process behind the accreted wax – all for a commercial bit of work. Is it wrong to be making work that appears to be commercial? I cannot seem to escape the dreaded C word. I forwarded the image to a friend who told me to look up Freud’s Instincts and their vissitudes. Very interesting reading and quite appropriate. He even describes instinct as lava flowing – the initial layer dictating the behaviour of subsequent layers. I have been making two large stretchers today. And while the glue has been drying I have been covering the paper in my sketch book with wax and burning it. It is interesting how paper behaves with a coating of wax. I think I will be doing some mono-prints tomorrow. Last week I visited the home of a prolific collector of 1950s abstract expressionist paintings, medieval sculpture and some beautiful bronzes. It was interesting to see how he curated his collection in his medieval farmhouse. The work was stunning and vibran, full of energy and life. On piece by Bram Bogart was so heavy it had to be hung by taking a brick from the exterior of the house and inserting steel rods into the wall. The painting (made on a steel frame and painted in concrete) took three men to lift it! His knowledge was extensive and impressive. He no longer takes advice from an expert, instead he has educated himself and is now an expert himself. I will take the ‘commercial’ work into college tomorrow and see what my fellow students have to say. Attached is the final piece for you to see. Sorry about the chintzy curtains in the background!
