12/03/2012
On day two I decided to plan a timetable as Jane has been amazing in organising site visits and pencilling in times for me to visit the stores and collections at the gallery.
Today Jane took me to look at the watercolour and print stores, the Victorian and Georgian store and the Painting store. I was amazed at how many works that belong to the belly of the Art Gallery. Having already had a look at the Staffordshire Museums Collections book, I was looking forward to seeing the works in their flesh. I wasn’t disappointed.
I came across a lot of artists that I haven’t heard of and a lot of work that I didn’t know the gallery owned. This was very refreshing. There are some many resources for me to use for a starting point for my work, the problem is going to be deciding on where.
Many new artists that I came across were David Bates, George Armfield, Henry Mark Anthony, Thomas Gainsborough, David Cox, Francis Danby, Jack Simcock, Robert Gallon, Gorge Morland, Josphe Vickers Deville, George Vicate Cole and John Crome. To my surprise they also had the print by Christopher Nightingale that is of the female tennis player that reveals her bottom! This is the calendar that also appears in comedy series the IT crowd! This made both me and Jane laugh a little.
I am looking forward to meeting Rachel Lambert-Jones to ask her questions in order to gain further insights into these paintings and the artists that created them.
Jane had also brought in a catalogue from an exhibition by Thomas Bewick an exhibition hosted in the Ikon Gallery for me to look at. As I had mentioned that one of my main influences for my work is landscape and rural areas. I decided to spend the afternoon looking further into some of the collections and also reading about Bewick’s work, I couldn’t help feel similarities between his work and Dan Hancock’s work, as both of the artist use space within their work.
Previously to this residency I had also been exploring the space and whiteness of the paper in relationship to the subject, composition and the mark/s that would be place on it. Lately my prints have been looking at parallels, contrasts and the play between the subjects. Often this results in a drawing depicting the urban vs the rural or nature.
This is something that Bewick explored long before me. His was concerned with nature and often used it as the context for his wooden engravings. He also tried to convey a moral, they were more often than not humorous.
The thing that intrigues me most about his tail pieces were the fact that they were not framed within a boarder, the drawings bleed into the page, much like Dan Hancock’s work, but at completely different scales, one just as big as a thumb and later artist’s on average at 5ft by 4ft. Both use the whiteness of the paper to blur the boundary between reality and the subject/s, they both do this by not framing the work, and by bleeding the key features (rock, trees, buildings) in the works into the whiteness of the paper. They both choose to abandon the rest of the painting that could potential exists. This creates “A romantic blurring of art and reality”
After reading this and looking at the works by Bewick and Hancock. I decide to start sketching and isolating key motifs that make up a common Victorian and Georgian painting. The features that I have and will experiment with will be taken from paintings that exist within the art Collection.
