in the Attic

A few hundred yards from my hotel in Swansea (see yesterday blog), there is the Attic Gallery, apparently Wales’ longest established private gallery.

The Attic website says that the gallery “was founded in 1962 to highlight the work of contemporary artists working in Wales.” I think the word ‘contemporary’ here refers to ‘living and working today’ as opposed to ‘modern’ or, in more recent usage, ‘more modern than modern’, which may also imply ‘post-modern’ and ‘having “high Art” pretensions’. I wouldn’t describe the work on show at Attic using these other definitions of the word ‘contemporary’.

I saw paintings by Kathryn Le Grice. I liked them. Here’s an image of one the paintings in the show, (on until Saturday 2 July), Central Park NY (Bridge II) . Painted in 2010/11, I understand that is is more typical of her earlier work.

Kathryn Le Grice, Central Park, NY (Bridge II), mixed media, 17.5 x 23 ins,image courtesy of Attic Gallery

And here is another, more typical of later work, Circle of Trees.

Kathryn Le Grice, Circle of Trees, acrylic, 11.5 x 7 ins, image by courtesy of Attic Gallery

Both these paintings, like all her work in this show, are abstract in the sense of ‘abstracted from’. (If my memory is correct Harold Osborne uses the term ‘semantic abstraction’ for this type of abstraction, which is actually a form of representation, as opposed to ‘syntactic’ or ‘non-iconic abstraction’ for work that claims to represent nothing other than itself. In the late 70s, when he was writing about this, I think the distinction might have mattered more than it seems to do today.)

Le Grice abstracts from nature and architecture “the patterns which form part of our everyday world” making paintings in acrylic or mixed media, that are quite modest in size. The forms she paints inhabit a shallow, cubist-like space, if I have the chronology correct many of the later works are larger in size.

Circle of Trees is a later painting, but small at less than 12″ in either direction. It is the stained-glass-like luminosity of the colour that impresses me. Even from a distance it looks bright. It is reminiscent of a Rouault, with the thick black lines adding to both the stained-glass look and to the luminosity of the colours, arranged in complementaries of green/red and blue/orange.  It has a rhythm based on a central diagonal line around which the tree shapes seem to curve, creating a single arabesque shape.

It is supposed to be decorative, and it is! Decorative is a bad word in some circles. It’s not a bad word for me. And not for the circle of trees either!

Swansea, a tale of two cities

I was working in Swansea, South Wales for a few days. I had arrived in the city centre hungry, when everything was closing. Taking a walk, I felt I was battling with the heavy traffic, in the rain. It seemed quite an unpleasant place to be and I was unimpressed.

The next day I arrived in the city centre earlier in the evening, the sun was shining, I had eaten at the Pizza Express, I had drunk a glass of Beer, and I had found some art (which I will write about for my blog another day). It was a different city – and I loved it!

 

It is amazing still to me, how our ‘internal’ or ‘emotional’ state makes such a massive difference to our perception of the ‘external’ world. The map is not the territory, but at times it might as well be.

 

Rothko in reproductions

I read a story about Mark Rothko in this blog post recently

http://mdmommusings.com/2011/06/23/let-me-tell-you-a-tale-the-rothko-story/

I wonder what he would have thought about all those reproductions of his work. They’re everywhere. Often they are poor and they tend to get framed (and badly at that) and mounted with black borders, like these that were on the wall in a hotel I stayed at recently.

I love Rothko’s paintings. I hate the reproductions.

Beyond the crisis in art – making and doing… (via CONTEMPORARY ART CRITICISM) thank you artdog

Thank you art dog for reminding me to dig out my own yellowed copy of Beyond the Crisis in Art by Peter Fuller.

You reminded me of the crisis that this book provoked in me, a welcome crisis, but one that took years to resolve.

I have long been a fan of the Sharkforum and resident artist/critic Mark Staff Brandl’s take on the present state of art criticism. This is by way of a practice run to ‘scope’ the afore mentioned ‘art criticism now?’ agenda I love that word ‘scope’ you’d think we were shooting bears..maybe we are…certainly foxes… His latest project involves asking artists to write about their practice and its theoretical basis as a challenge to the curren … Read More

via CONTEMPORARY ART CRITICISM

I have been foolish enough to dig out my copy.

In the book there is an article on John Hoyland, I only realised in reading it again that Fuller is reviewing an exhibition that I saw, and liked, at the Serpentine in 1979.

I was interested to re-read the article along with the catalogue because Hoyland has come to mind for me recently in a visit to Leeds Art Gallery, in a viewing of some art in a workplace,

and in reading Peter Dickinson‘s interview with him in the latest Turps Banana.

Whilst Fuller is largely negative towards Hoyland, he appreciates what he thinks the artist repudiates:  the allusion to content beyond the painting, “touching upon intimate areas of psychological (rather than purely perceptual) experience”.

Nude drawing and phonological ambiguity

‘nude drawing’ is a good example of a syntactical ambiguity; is it someone in the nude doing a drawing or is a drawing of someone nude?

"Other Outcome" (drawing). pencil on paper, 20cm x 20cm

However, it’s more the phonological ambiguity I was thinking about. I meant to say… new drawing.

It’s just a few lines I drew to work out an idea. Then, when I was looking at it later I liked the spatial ambiguity. In trying to find meaning in the drawing, in attempting to make sense of it, don’t we see spatial relationships?

And I  was going to call the drawing New Direction but there’s another phonological ambiguity (you have to say it).

Icons and Salt at Ikon Birmingham

The photo-realist paintings of John Salt have something approaching the miraculous about them. Could they really be paintings? Pictures of photographs of cars, made with airbrush, they look untouched by human hands.

Tree 2001, Casin on linen, 109 x 166 cm, Tellenbach Collection, Switzerland, Image courtesy of Ikon gallery

In the Greek Orthodox tradition isn’t acheiropoieta the name given to icons not made by human hands? They were allegedly painted by saints, or they appeared miraculously like Veronica’s Veil or the Turin shroud. Maybe the images were made of the salt from Jesus’ sweat.

But these are no icons, though my eye was conned from time to time into thinking that I was looking at very large photographs rather than paintings. In some senses they are not even images, the matter of fact way in which they are produced and presented, renders them artless, real, objects, to be viewed but not worshipped. And in that they are also images, they are images of images, the subject matter of which is artless, found, material as opposed to image in the sense of advertisement, shiny gleaming mirror. Other photo-realists seem more interested in images of this kind.

Ikon Gallery Birmingham is showing work by John Salt until 17 July 2011. I wandered through the two rooms of paintings, 18 in all, spanning 42 years of Salt’s artistic output. Not wishing to be impressed (my mission, you may remember, is to view abstract paintings outside of London), I found myself confronted by a body of work that I was hugely impressed by.

I lingered longest on the 2001 painting Tree, a solitary vehicle, parked outside a disused store, next to a weedy self-seeded tree, the long shadows suggesting evening or morning.

Tree 2001, Casin on linen, 109 x 166 cm, Tellenbach Collection, Switzerland, Image courtesy of Ikon gallery

I feel it should be evening symbolically, but seeing how the windscreen is condensed it looks like it may be morning. The shadows emphasise the whereabouts of the cables running up the side of the building and bring attention to the puny tree, projecting  a larger than life image of it onto the façade of the building, rather like the projected image of a photograph onto a large canvas, the standard technique for drawing in photo-realist art. The car and the store are a similar colour, terracotta, or rust. Knowing even a little about this kind of work I think it highly unlikely that Salt is interested in the symbolic or metaphoric elements in the piece, and maybe these also are projections, but I find it difficult not to see in the terracotta, a symbol of rust and decay, also hinted at in the parked or abandoned car.  And I find it difficult not to see in the tree at least a gesture of hope, however futile. I feel sure that this is not the content of the picture as far as the artist is concerned. However, I think the NLP mantra ‘the meaning of a communication is the response you receive rather than the intention you had for it’ applies here.

I found I could also interpret the painting in abstract ‘colour-field‘ terms, enjoying the large expanse of orange, framed above by the light blue band of sky, and below by the darker blue/grey of the tarmac. Then becoming aware of the lemon yellow rectangle on the right hand edge, echoed by the adjacent dark grey or black rectangle of the door, within which is a cut-out of white. At the opposite side, there are similar rectangles in almost complementary colours of blue and lilac. In this reading of the painting the car plays almost no role at all. I realise that here I may have been compensating for the abstract paintings I did not find!

Another reading might concentrate more on the signs. I have already mentioned the index sign of the rust colour and the long shadows: signs of decay and death, the icon sign: the painting of the photograph, and there are also the symbol signs represented in the photograph itself: “No Parking Any Time” and “Store for Rent”.

Well, I had parked myself in front of it for long enough and there were other paintings to see, and work to do.  So I left, hoping I would get chance for another viewing before 17 July.

More on optical mixing

Not everyone sees the blue and green (see earlier blog)

…because they are subjective. Physically, there is no blue or green in this image. They are optically mixed.

I have already found that some people need to be coached to see them. It is a commonplace to say that we all see things in different ways – usually meaning we interpret data differently. It’s not always clear that we actually see things differently. If we distinguish between these three levels:

• description
• interpretation
• judgement

We often disagree about judgements. We disagree about interpretations. I would argue that we often think that we agree about descriptions – until we test what’s shared, only to discover that we disagree there as well.

The Myth Of Tomorrow – Taro Okamoto (via Tokyobling’s Blog) and public art and Henry Moore

This wonderful blog seems to have provoked a lot of interest.

Sometimes the thing about art in public places is that you just don’t think about it. Even though art has long since been stripped of it’s moral-building and society-building status (Duchamp and his art-antics took care of that back in 1917) public officials still feel it necessary to enrichen our public spaces with what they consider to be worthwhile art. Here’s one I have managed to miss for a very long time indeed: Taro Okamoto’s “The Myth of … Read More

via Tokyobling’s Blog

Public art gets walked by seems to be one of the themes (it doesn’t have to be very public for that to happen. In a workplace near me there is a lot of good art on the walls by important UK artists – largely ignored, see previous blog).
In the comments section of the Myth Of Tomorrow blog there is a piece by Visartstudio including a good story about a Henry Moore sculpture in Toronto

…works that have become significant have done so by digging into our psychological reality and insinuating itself by a process of educating the imagination. Case in point The Archer by Henry Moore in Toronto Nathan Phillips square was supported by the extensive collection of Moore donation to the AGO… More significantly a pop song
Down By The Henry Moore – Murray McLauchlan (1974) summed up Toronto’s relationship to this now significant piece of art. So much so when it alleged removal was used in the first day with out art protest, the controversy drew near 100,000 people into Nathan Phillips square. Digging a bit deeper the art fit the square and became a cultural anchor that suited the site and the Toronto’s city Hall building and has become a bench mark of how Torontonians felt about there city, there future and themselves…

I was in Castleford UK other weekend, at a dance competition in the Civic Hall, and in front of the building is a piece of public art, a Henry Moore sculpture. It is unmistakably Henry Moore so in the pouring rain I wandered across the grass to get a better view.

Henry Moore Draped Reclining Figure 1952-53 © Copyright David Pickersgill and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

© Copyright David Pickersgill and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

I knew that Moore was born in the Wakefield area, but not that it was actually Castleford. The piece also serves as a memorial.

The next four days… (via Love, Art & Fear) Loosening up

I saw this Blog the other day

Hi The Art Gallery is over.  I still feel compelled to paint.  Over the next four days I will be sharing four new peices that have arisen since the show.  Again, each will have somewhat of a synopsis but no real explaination.  I have also put up a ‘Gallery’ in the Art section of this site.  Enjoy:) … Read More

via Love, Art & Fear

and then I started wondering about how it works (the image that is, not the blog)

Am I right in thinking that it relies on

1. the closeness of the lines near where the ‘circles’ appear to throb (close but not converging),
2. that the repeated motif is not quite symmetrical, and
3. most of all, on tonal contrast?

What would happen if you loosened the closeness of the lines, introduced colour and reduced the tonal contrast?

 

Optical mixing? photography question

Here is one of my recent paintings (just a rough snap, I will ask SLB to do a proper job when I get round to it!)

When you look at this painting in the flesh you can tell, I think, that most of the colour mixing is optical. There are no blues or greens in this painting, you supply them yourself. So my (no doubt dumb) question is: in the snap, has the camera optically mixed them (surely that’s not possible) or are we doing it, and can’t tell, perhaps because it is so much smaller than the original?

Maybe, I have just got used to seeing it. You are seeing the blues and greens aren’t you?