patternsthatconnect

In 1976, Angela Kelly was my photography tutor at Nelson & Colne College when I was an art & design foundation student. It was an excellent two-year course and there were some great lecturers/tutors, especially her. I can still hear her voice speaking passionately and intelligently about photography of all kinds, and particularly fine art photography and conceptualism. She was equally intelligent about politics, history and painting. I also recall that she arranged trips to galleries in London and other cities and to art schools. (It may have been that the faculty arranged them and she was present, but it is her that I remember.) She introduced us to the big London galleries as well as the commercial galleries then on Cork Street and Bond Street, and the Photographers Gallery, when it was at Great Newport Street. It was with her that I first visited the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and the Anolfini in Bristol. I also remember that she encouraged my reading and writing as well as my studio work, suggesting to me to read above my comprehension, a strategy I consciously adopted and that has continually proved to be fruitful.

So when I saw that she has a chapter in the new book Photography and the Artists Book, edited by Theresa Wilkie, Jonathan Carson and Rosie Miller, and published by Museums Etc  later this month, I ordered my preview copy straight away.

I am already glad that I did, because with a preview copy you get access to the book’s content online as it develops, which I am finding really exciting. There’s already lots of good stuff to think about, and when I have thunk some more I will write a review for a future blog post.

Walking along a Nottingham city centre street I dropped my glove, and looking down I noticed (surely not for the first time, though I cannot remember noticing it before) that there are wonderful geometric paving designs all over the place.

When I have an afternoon free I could travel the city street and document as many of them as I can find. I wonder who commissioned them and when, and who designed and laid them and in what conditions. Anyone out there know anything about them?

Is it a sign when it signifies nothing at all? It neither says what I want it to say nor what someone else wants it to say (thank you Gillian Wearing)

Is it a sign when people give me funny looks when I’m taking my holiday snaps ?

This one is my favourite snap from my holiday in Tenerife

(Also check out the signs at this blog I saw recently)

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.

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?

I don’t mean paintings that take photographs, they would be very clever paintings indeed!

It was about time I got some better photographs of the paintings so Matt Selby of SLBImages took these for me

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I found this post recently on the serial photography of Lewis Baltz. Is it monotony he emphasises or the beauty and variation in repetition?

” Often displayed in a grid format, it is important to Baltz that his pictures be seen collectively as a group or series. The series format suits his desire that no one image be taken as more true or significant than another, encouraging the viewer to consider not just the pictures but everything outside of the frame as well, emphasizing the monotony of the man-made environment. The pictures themselves resist any single point of focus, framed as … Read More

via MUDFAK