Your Smile
Your smile…
Your Smile...,2012, acrylic on canvas, 12" x 12"
...makes my temperature rise
Like a summer with a thousand Julys...
Throw away your Television
When I am relaxing, I like to prop a painting I have been working on up against the TV and study it. Because the design always holds surprises, being always already existent, found art in a way, in the sense that Bob Nickas uses when he says that all abstract art is found art, it seems OK to spend a long time just looking, rather than watching the TV.
Quite literally it is art on the TV.
Didn’t the Red Hot Chili Peppers sing about throwing away your Television?
David Thorpe at THW
‘David Thorpe’s installation comprises new watercolours and meticulously crafted sculptural works, presented for the first time in Europe. Thorpe’s sculptures explore his interest in rehabilitating ancient craftsmanship and labour-intensive artisanal techniques. Drawing on the Arts and Crafts Movement and the work of William Morris and John Ruskin, Thorpe explores new forms of utopianism, where past and present intersect’. (Information from The Hepworth Wakefield website). ‘Endeavours and Private Lives …
A postcard from MOMA
Thanks Gayle Alstrom for sending me a postcard from the Museum of Modern Art
How did you know that I am a fan of Ad Reinhardt’s paintings and writings? I don’t necessarily agree with his purism, though I do find it compelling.
Construction of Internal Polygon # 1 (order 4)
‘Self similarity’ within the geometry from macro to micro scale is resultant from the relationships between the same shape in factored scales. Order 1 Order 2 - Isolated Order 2 - Overlap of order 1 Order 3 - Isolated Order 3 - Overlap of order 1 and order 2 Order 4 - Isolated Order 4 - Overlap of order 1, order 2 and order 3 Internal Polygon # 1 (order 4) Photograh © Pawel Kowalczyk Internal Polygon # 1 (order 4) Detail Internal Polygon # 1 (order 4) Detail
On Smithy Row in Nottingham
On Smithy Row in Nottingham, so long as you look down, you are likely to see street tiles with geometric designs like this one.
In “appropriating” it I realised that one of the things I like about this kind of design, like the others I have been exploring in my most recent paintings, is that no one can claim ownership, they are always already existing.
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the same and different
There is a sense in which these are the same
The same rules are followed for the structure, but the colours are different – making all the difference, I think.
About “About Painting”
The exhibitions Working Against the System and Fade Away that were held at Transition Gallery and Gallery North were the occasion for a small publication (158 pages with nice photos) about contemporary painting called About Painting.
The book has essays by Barry Schwarbsky and the curators of the respective shows – Helen Baker and Alli Sharma, information and images from all the artists who participated in the two shows, in-depth texts by the Working Against the System artists, transcripts from the Working Against the System symposium and studio interviews with Fade Away artists Phillip Allen, Paul Housley, Jo Wilmot, Claire Undy and Phoebe Unwin.
I got my copy this week and I am enjoying it lots. The images are small but study-able, and seeing them here I want to see them for real.
I like the short essay by Barry Shwarbsky about the reconfiguring of the distinction between abstraction and representation (or, as he prefers it, between abstraction and images) and find a lot of resonance with it. In Alli Sharma’s interview with Phoebe Unwin she asks about abstraction and image, working methods and materials as well as about the painting Sponge Pallette that was shown in the Fade Away exhibition. And there is a fascinating piece by Paul Goodfellow about systems thinking and painting, suggesting that painting is the perfect laboratory for thinking about the issue of what happens in the border area between a well-defined system and its transgression. He argues that it is the responsibility of the artist to embrace systems thinking in order to highlight its own limitations. The description of Sly Lost Games (and the system outputs exhibited) gives just enough information to imagine what was there, and whet my appetite for more. Again, wanting to see it ‘for real’
The book is a joy for having no list of contents and being rather haphazardly arranged. Finding my way round it is a bit like negotiating a path through an exhibition, or rather two exhibitions, both that I would have liked to have seen.
About Painting is priced at £6 and is available from
Transition Gallery and Gallery North.
Four individuals?
Here’s something I am working on at the moment. Mybe it is just too simple, a system of tessellations, merely a pattern not really a painting at all (?)
Yet I am so fascinated by it that I feel I could make hundreds of them and still have more to do.
Anyway, is it just me or is it almost impossible not to see, in this next one, four (eccentric) figures?
Four individuals, doing their own thing, (they probably don’t realise that their behaviour is entirely a consequence of the system in which they operate).
A show I wish I had seen
I only recently found out about a painting show that took place over a year ago at Transition Gallery, and that I wish I had seen. It was called Fade Away and it featured artists working in the “expanse between representation and abstraction”. I got to know about it whilst checking out where A Thousand Living Painters blog had got their image of a Mali Morris painting and hoping to find out more about it.
Mali Morris, Surfaced Later (3), 2010, acrylic on canvas, 26 x 31cm
Well, it is titled Surfaced Later and it was one of the paintings in the Fade Away show. It has an archeological feel to it. Those wonderful coloured circles being “excavated” from beneath layers of acrylic paint. There are others under there that the artist has chosen to leave buried. They are making a difference to the way the painting looks but we can never know in what ways. We have more idea about how the ones that have surfaced animate the painting, creating space and light. There is a sense in which the space is shallow and another in which it seems deeper than such a small picture could allow, almost like the circular forms are floating over a massive chasm, the yellow up close, almost invading our ‘personal space’ and the red one receding, not quite to the other side. And then doesn’t it shift, and the red circle looks like it might be slightly in front of the yellow one, yet the orange staying put, as if stuck to the canvas edge?
Apparently it was a few months in the making, and hung about the studio unresolved, until the cream paint was applied across the surface and partially brushed away, a gestural drawing directly into the wet paint, both hiding and revealing.
I wish I had seen it, along with the other paintings including works by Phoebe Unwin, Clem Crosby and Andrew Graves at either the Transition Gallery in London or at Gallery North in Newcastle.
The show is documented and expanded upon, (along with Working Against The System, another painting show that was held at Transition Gallery and Gallery North in 2011), in the book About Painting, available from Transition Gallery.
