Walking Into the Light

Feeling less than chipper today. I thought that the studio would be buzzing this week as they have an opening and summer party on Saturday, its like a morgue. It is difficult to get to know who the other artists in the studios are. I don’t like to disturb people because I know that they are here to work, not to entertain me. We all know what studio blocks are like, all closed doors buffering the sounds of industry within.

Having said that, the artists that I have met here are really friendly and they all speak good English, which helps. My German is not up to much, but I am trying to practice. This is not easy as everyone answers immediately in English.

On top of that it is raining!

It was raining on Saturday, but that did not stop Florian, a really old friend of mine here in Berlin, from giving me a tour of the beautiful parks and gardens of southern Berlin. I am sworn to secrecy about this, to prevent a tourist avalanche in this quarter, but I think that most people will be aware of Templehof, the former Airport. I will definitely go back there to do some filming, it is an incredible space.

I feel as if I am continually walking in gardens whilst here. Unusual you might think for such a big city, but Berlin is blessed with a great deal of open space. This varies from traditional formal gardens like those at Charlottenburg, to very informal, like Mauer Park, which is barely more than a strip of untamed ground. Then there are the new formal gardens being created from the carnage of the 20th century.

On Friday I spent the morning photographing the amazing landscaping that has taken place where the Mauer (wall) ran along Bernauer Str. Very close to the studio. It is like a Richard Sera sculpture park, making a three dimensional map of history. A subtle and beautiful sculptural statement containing a moving narrative.

I also visited the Hamburger Bahnhof, the National Gallery of Contemporary Art, they have extended the museum into a huge corridor like exhibition space to the rear of the main museum. The exhibition there, Archetektonika 2 was extremely inspiring for me. Containing work by many of my favourite artists, all pertaining to architecture in some way, mainly sculptural and spatial work and some photography. It made me want to start working 3 dimensionally. Not easy, I keep wanting to go skip hunting, but then it rains and I don’t want a studio full of damp garbage.

Link to information about exhibition

http://www.smb.museum/smb/kalender/details.php?objID=36493&datum=05.04.2012+00:00

I have been doing a lot of drawing and am continuing to make water colours from the photographs of Mauer Park. Yesterday I took more photographs, in Charlottenburg Gardens. It was wonderful to spend time in the imagined landscape of the 18th and 19th century, where every turn in the path brings a picturesque vista. Very peaceful and meditative, very egalitarian now, unlike it’s elitist past. I started to see a connection between the hedges of the formal gardens there and the hedges that mark the passage of the wall through Mauer Park.

The last 3 days have been beautiful and sunny, Monday was incredibly hot. This gave me plenty of opportunity to get used to the bicycle that a friend has lent me, definitely the best way to explore the city, Berlin is very bike friendly. However it is an old fashioned “sit up and beg” sort and far too big for me. Well I guess the rain should keep me in the studio continuing to try and make some sense of all my explorations.

See the latest photos here

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16808392@N02/

So I have been in Berlin one whole week already, I think that my time here will go very quick.

As well as meeting old friends and making new ones I have been looking at a lot of Art.

On Saturday I went right up into Wedding, which is an untrendy part of the old West Berlin. There in a defunct Osram factory there between the usual fashion outlets and furniature stores are a couple of very large scale galleries, . At Galerie Guido W Baudach, there was a show by Thomas Zipp, a large scale spatial installation of wooden buildings, or rooms that on entering were completey mirrored.

I enjoyed the experience of being in there spaces as a few days before I had visited Charlottenburg Schloss and was very inspired by the Porcelaine Cabinet of Queen Sophia Charlotte.

This completely exotic cabinet is actually a whole room designed purely to display the Queens porcelaine collection. The cieling is painted with a mural of Aurora chasing away the night (which I could write a thesis about), and, as in all the rooms in the Baroque part of the Palace the painting turns into sculpture which enters the space. The walls are covered with chinese porcelaine, held out to us by chinese figures, cups sit on sculpted tree branchs, and plates in the laps of smiling buddhas. The whole thing is outrageous. But the thing that interested me most in this room was the fact that mirrors in the corners of the room extended to collection into imagined space far beyond our reach. I started to think of ways in which I could use this technique with the doll collection.

The other thing that struck me at the palace was the way they had painted the ceilings in rooms where the original murals had been destroyed during the war. There were just clouds, the heaven above. This seemed to fit with my thoughts about the sublime, an archetectural sublime, filled with fantasy rooms where we can touch the exotic. The exotic of other cultures including the extravagent past of the Hohenzollern dynasty.

The gardens here are very interesting, I shall have to go back and film and photograph.

Yesterday I visited several exhibitions, Roman Ondak at the Deutch Guggenheim and some small galleries in Mitte, but the highlight for me was to go into The Altes Museum and see the Casper David Friedriechs. They are beautifully hung here and having been studying them in books for so many weeks it was really fantastic to stand before them. Some I find strange and beguiling, some not so interesting. A couple just astound, there is something much more contemporary about them, in the same way that through Turner we see the shape of art to come.

In the studio I have started to make a series of small watercolours from the photographs I took in Mauer park, and in the mornings I run through this landscape to try to fix it through my body. This work, combined with the Friedriechs seems to be consolidating ideas born 4 years ago when I made the Char Dham pilgrimage in the Himalayas. The image of a small figure fixed against a vast landscape. This is what I was hoping for in Berlin, but I am not sure how it will resolve into solid shape yet but it is very exiting though.

Well it is a long time since I wrote in this blog. I have been in the waiting room, so to speak, but now I am here in my new home for 2 months. My live/work space at Milchhof, Berlin

http://milchhof-berlin.de

It is situated in the very trendy area of Prenzlauerberg, which has been vibrating with exitement all weekend, partly because of Euro 2012, and partly just because it is summer. Mauer Park was full yesterday afternoon, there were dogs and jugglers and acrobats; sunbathers and Turkish picnicers and musicians demonstrating their talents, it seems it is like a mini festival every weekend. I took about 100 photos. You can see some of these on Flickr

http://www.flickr.com/photos/16808392@N02/

It is strange but wonderful to be in this space. To be in the studio building when no other artists are working, like last night, when it is totally quiet. Equally strange to be here on Saturday night when some artists were working all night. It is quite comforting to go to sleep with the sound of electric saws, believe it or not.

Yesterday I started a large drawing, just to have something in the studio to break up the whiteness, this too is a new experience, to get up this morning and to see it there on the floor, to add a few marks before breakfast. If you have had a live/work space you will know how this feels, but for me it is new. It is also amazing to be be free from all the clutter of everyday life, and to have a blank space to work in. No appointments, no housework (well the bare minimum) and not so many distractions. The time stretches in a way that I am not used to, being here, in the studio all the time means that thoughts are always centring around the work.

I have started to explore the way landscape exists in this city, I think that I will start by mediating this landscape through photography, film and large scale drawings see where this takes me.

In addition I am going to visit a friend today who is a landscape architect, this should result in some interesting dialogue I hope. I am also going to call into Boesner (the German equivalent of Atlantis I am told. I need to stock up on provisions, I only bought the bare minimum with me.