patternsthatconnect

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I have written before about the role of the curator in facilitating the aesthetic encounter (I borrowed the term from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Rick E. Robinson, The Art of Seeing) and sometimes gone on a bit about how some people seem to be able to see optical effects (for want of a better term) more easily than others.

I noticed something similar on holiday recently, in relation to a ‘natural’ occurrence. When this wave breaks you see a miniature rainbow in the spray. Some people could see it easily as it occurred, some could see it when it was pointed out to them, others just couldn’t see it even after it was pointed out and with repeated viewing. But then, they could see it when re-presented on this short video.

I wonder if it would it be correct to say that the curatorial skill required to facilitate the experience is that of pointing/describing,with some interpreting and little, if any, of judging.

snaps (representations) looking a lot like abstract (“non-representational”) paintings

I saw this blog recently about Victor Pasmore. It is no surprise that he is little known in Canada (he’s probably little known outside UK, and even here he may be less well known than he once was).

Victor Pasmore is, I would say, a little-known artist in Canada, and until recently I found it hard to find any publications concerning this British artist. In 2010 Tate Publishing brought out this beautiful publication edited by Alastair Grieve, and entitled Victor Pasmore: Writings and Interviews, and this book explores the artist’s career through … Read More

via Painter’s Progress

Though never a big fan, I recently saw a painting of his at The Hepworth Wakefield and was hugely impressed

Victor Pasmore, The Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White, 1950-51. Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © The Pasmore Estate, Image by courtesy of The Hepworth Wakefield

I think I have seen it before, possibly at a time that I was less open to semantic as opposed to syntactical or non-iconic abstraction (borrowing Harold Osborn‘s terms again). I don’t remember being impressed, but this time round it seemed more daring. Not as daring as Malevich’s White on White, 1918, nor even as Ben Nicholson’s White Reliefs (circa 1934), but daring nonetheless. And big! And quite beautiful, though I am not sure the reproduction does it justice.

What was it that John Hoyland said about English painters in Turps Banana?

…there was a kind of dilettantism to nearly all English art, including the St Ives people. They would go to Egypt, do a bit of drawing and do a bit of poetry then take a break and fall in love and be unhappy…

It was May 2002 and I was walking in Nottingham, when out of the corner of my eye I noticed the name ‘Mali Morris’. She had been one of my external tutors when I studied Fine Art at Nottingham Trent, many years earlier so I stopped in my tracks. An exhibition of her paintings was being advertised at The Angel Row Gallery (now replaced by Nottingham Contemporary). Around this time there had been a number of painting shows at this gallery that I liked (I thought then, and still do now, that painting is so much out of fashion, especially abstract painting, that it is difficult to see any, if you’re not in the capital at any rate).

What a show it was! Here are pictures of two of the painting that were on view

Mali Morris, Pale Yellow Curly Clearing 2001, Acrylic on Canvas, 61 x 77 cm, Image by courtesy of the artist

Mali Morris, Ripple 2000, Acrylic on Canvas, 21 x 41 cm. Image by courtesy of the artist

I was expecting large paintings. For me, at that time, ‘abstract’ and ‘large’ tended to go together; it took me a while to realise that these two terms could be disconnected. These paintings gave me some good reasons why. Pale Yellow Curly Clearing, 2001 was the largest one in the show (there was one other with the same dimensions) and still a modest size at 61 x 77cm. They didn’t need to be any bigger, in fact part of their power (my perception of them was that they were powerful images, though on prolonged viewing they became something much too subtle for that word) was their smallness. They had an immediate appeal and they seemed to draw me in for closer inspection. It really felt like the paintings were exerting this power over me.

Every Autumn, near where I live I see kids jumping up or throwing sticks into horse chestnut trees. We think of the agency as being with the kids: they jump or throw. But year on year it’s different kids, same tress. Maybe in the system of tree-kids, it’s the tree that acts, putting out conkers each year always draws the kids up into the trees.

anyway I was drawn in, and when I got up close I found that simple though the images were they rewarded prolonged attention. The colours were doing something, but not in the sense of direct excitation, somehow it seemed indirect. They slowly unfolded, yet each one in a different way.

I chose the two above for contrast. Of course there are distinct similarities, you could say that the image is the same: monochromatic, with a circular shape against a ground, framed inside an almost square rectangle. And this would be loosely true for all the paintings that were in the exhibition. But look at the differences! Yellow and blue are very different in hue and tone. They do very different things. Yellow seems to expand, whereas blue seems to contract. The painting behave differently. In Pale Yellow Curly Clearing, and I think the title refers to the act of clearing away the paint to allow what’s underneath to show through, note how that particular way of placing, painting, clearing away, leads to a picture that behaves in that specific manner. Whereas, Ripple, 2001 ripples, and it was made by rippling, with a ripple or some such a comb-like instrument. And it’s just enough, any more and we would be looking at another painting, with another way of operating, and in each case this particular painting would have been lost.

On my holiday I kept seeing structures that looked like they wanted to be art.

The other day I blogged about a beautiful book about monochrome painting

and had no idea when I posted this image that it was also a monochrome photograph of me taking the photograph. Looking carefully, you can see that it is not an unmodulated monochrome surface but that it contains in its glossiness a monochrome reflection of my hands holding the digital camera that took the picture.

I noticed another blog about the Attic Gallery, Swansea.

There’s still something gripping about sheer technical mastery. For a long time it felt like technical skill had fallen out of favour in the Art world. The assumption that recording the way things looked was best left to the camera held sway and painters went off to explore other areas. Not that depiction is ever the goal in Warren Willia … Read More

via Retouch

It was posted in June 2009. You can still see work by Warren Williams at Attic Gallery.

I wouldn’t describe his work as modern, it certainly isn’t abstract (it isn’t my cup of tea) so much as contemporary (see previous blog).

The square in revolution

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or perhaps just in rotation