patternsthatconnect

I didn’t want to watch a wedding on TV,  so to somewhere outdoors with art….. Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  Surely, the most accessible modern and contemporary art venue in the UK.  I went with six members of my family, some of whom were less interested in art than others. We did get some of the usual comments resembling “anyone could have done that” along with genuine surprise to find that certain pieces were actually exhibits. And just for a moment Arcadia, my favourite piece, took me by surprise. I mistook it for a real sign! (I don’t believe I am admitting to that, and it was only for  moment).

Leo Fitzmaurice, Arcadia (one of a series scattered around YSP)

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On the way back to the railway station my son said that he had become conditioned to seeing sculpture in with the landscape and was expecting to be surprised by an exhibit here and there on the journey. No exhibits, but lots of signs, none of them for Arcadia. I  missed the sign for the railway station.

What better to do on a sunny day than to go and visit your local contemporary art gallery (mine is Nottingham Contemporary)?

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I set out on my quest to see some abstract paintings in Nottingham. I found art even though I didn’t find abstract painting. (Actually, I found it quite by chance on my way to the railway station.)

The Hopkinson gallery is on Station Street in Nottingham and is currently showing work by a student collective Strength in Numbers. I wandered in, and saw this piece that I liked.

by Jess Buckley, showing at T.B.C. Hopkinson Gallery, Nottingham

I commented on how much I liked it, and found that I was talking to the artist, Jess Buckley. I liked the humour of the piece. Jess told me that the pressure to be creative all the time can be too much and that you have to be in the mood to make art. Sometimes you’re just too happy. I wondered if another piece might be “too sad to make art” or “too busy to make art”. I asked her if anyone is making paintings any more and she said not many are doing that. For her, painting is more like a hobby, when making ‘serious art’ she is unlikely to paint. Is she too happy to make paintings, or too happy not to make them?

She believed that there would always be a place for painting even though it was not being done much by many contemporary artists.  I said that there was something painterly about her conceptual piece, well she had painted the wooden letters, and they looked like they were layered with different coloured coats of paint showing through the uppermost layer.

we talked about performance art, and sculpture. The sculptural pieces in the show were the remains of performances.  Joe Hindle’s performance apparently featured a boxing match where the opponents once having entered the ring, with all the theatricality of a real boxing match, sat down to play Jenga. Just seeing the ring, and the scattered Jenga blocks it was obvious what had happened. I wondered whether the performance was strictly necessary, maybe what was left over was enough.

What was left after a performance, by Joe Hindle

I speculated that a painting, and especially an abstract painting is also the remains of a performance. I really did want to see an abstract painting. It may be true that there will always be a place for it, but there aren’t many places actually showing it. (I have an idea for a performance: take a trip to find abstract paintings on view, documenting where you go and how far you have to travel to see any.)

Jess brought my attention to the painted pieces in the room.

One was a ‘reconstruction’ of a Picasso (Crying Woman). I think it was by Darren Ralphs. Painted in planes, each plane on a polythene (?) sheet, hung one in front of the other, so that the planes showed through. it was a cross between painting and sculpture.

There were two other paintings, by Rosie Burnett, slightly more like conventional paintings. If I remember the label rightly, it read something like: “perhaps that’s what a family is … a collection of individuals who miss the same spaces”. The paintings were of interiors. They were nicely done, and then I got annoyed that I couldn’t read them properly because I kept seeing my own reflection. They were painted on ‘acrylic glass’. (Is that the same as perspex?) I became interested in how they had been fixed to the wall and I couldn’t work it out, any more than I could work out why they had been painted on acrylic glass.

I asked Jess if I could take some photographs of the work for my blog and she was happy for me to do so. We talked about intellectual property and copyright and she said that she thought all art was copied from something else that had gone before it.  I agreed.

When I photographed this display cabinet and asked if it was part of the show I think I already knew the answer. Of course it was not.

not an exhibit

Then, leaving to meet my train, although my desire to see abstract paintings had been thwarted, I felt glad that I had stumbled across this exhibition.

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I am looking at these sketches I did ages ago

I like to paint them quickly, leave them for a long time (years) and then come back to look at them

They are both miniature paintings in their own right, and studies for larger work.

For me, because they are on a very small scale they don’t matter, and that means I can be more spontaneous  than in my larger paintings. Sometimes, I think that I would like to simply ‘reproduce’ them as large canvases. Other times I prefer that the approach taken finds its way into the other work.

In the sketches the unconscious or somatic mind is more ‘in charge’. If I am not careful, the larger paintings can become all too conscious or cognitive mind.

Integrating the two minds, is one of the things that painting can achieve.

I promise to leave the subject of subjective squares for a while after I have shared this experimental sketch. The question I am starting to explore is “what difference does colour make to our experience of the subjective square?”

I think that the one with the complementary red (complementary to the green ground that is) works least well. Maybe it is because the rules that govern colour complementarity compete with the rules for constructing the subjective square?

What do you think?

Someone said, in relation to the subjective square, that I was easily impressed. Admittedly, I was going on  and on about how amazed I was when seeing the edges of the subjective square, not just the corners (they are not subjective), but the edges, that I really could  see and, at the same time, I knew for sure were not there.

Maybe we too easily lose our sense of wonder, and then amazement looks like being too easily impressed.

As our eye/minds construct the square, I find myself wondering what else of ‘external reality’ is similarly constructed? and I’m hearing an answer… “All of it!”

Just ‘cos you see it, doesn’t mean it’s there.

Does your eye/brain do the same for you as mine does for me in regard to this sketch?

The pink ground becomes figure in the centre between the blue and yellow shapes. (?)

In a previous blog I compared a coloured sketch to a subjective square and reflected on whether something similar was going on in each. (By the way you can see subjective squares and a whole load of other things explored in Donald D. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence, How We Create What We See.)

What happens when you square four subjective squares?

Subjective Squared, Ink on paper, 84cm x 84 cm

Relationships do develop between the figures, yet those subjective squares, slightly brighter than the paper ‘behind’ continue to assert themselves, occupying a space a few millimetres in front. Don’t you agree?

I don’t want to see this as a landscape

I just don’t seem to be able to help it. And when I change only the orientation, rotating it anti clockwise, it becomes figures (in a landscape admittedly).

Unless it’s just me…