box surrealism
I used to be a bit of a surrealist at heart. But not any more! Until the arrival of the box into my life (thank you Stephen MacInnis). Participating in this project requires a completely different way of working than I am used to.
The nearest I have come to this recently is finding some drawings from 30 years ago and adding to them. I feel that a similar approach is appropriate where I seek to preserve what is already there and add to it. In adding I know that sometimes I will also subtract and that seems to be a bigger responsibility when working collaboratively than when working on my own.
Working in this way I am becomeng surreslaust again! (Any good surrealist would leave those typing errors just as they are.)
In progress…
Taking some of the smaller works and acting as if they were studies …
…
Pink does not exist
I saw an exhibition announcement on Art Licks for Pink Does Not Exist and thought it looked good.
The title of the exhibition is a nod to Newton’s discovery of the additive nature of the spectrum of light: white light is a mixture of all the colours in the spectrum – ROYGBIV – while pink, or magenta, is the only colour which does not actually have its own frequency. As such, one could legitimately claim that pink as a colour does not exist, and yet, because of the human brain’s extraordinary malleability, of course we see pink every day. But does this make pink real?
I like the idea of it, and the photos of the works look equally interesting. The artists are Ross Sutherland, Freddy Tuppen, Trevor Kiernander, Catherine Hyland, Henrietta Williams, Nick Love, Ben Woddeson and Gregory Sale, and the show, at Flat C, is curated by Crystal Bennes. I wonder if I could arrange a visit before it closes on 2 June 2012.
6x6x2012
Rochester NY’s international small art phenomenon returns with thousands of original artworks, made and donated by artists of all kinds and stature.
The online gallery is open for previewing on 25 May at www.roco6x6.org and global online purchasing begins on June 5 at 10am.
Thanks to Maria Kazalia for bringing this great idea to my attention.
Studio Visit, David Manley
Two studio visits in one day. One was a visit to the dance studio for a lesson, and the other was a visit to an online friend, David Manley whom I have now met in “the real world”, at the Harrington Mill Studios in Long Eaton. What a space, and some great work being done there.
Thank you David, for showing me around and for chatting with me about your work, art in general, painting in particular, abstraction, some recent and current exhibitions and some of the exhibitions that you have curated.
I like the deadly delicious series you are working on just now, and I am interested in how you get from “real world” source to painted object/image. There’s a sense in which the sources of these paintings, certain viruses, are already images, not so much the photographic images of the viruses as the viruses themselves, made visible, as you explained to me, by the use of dyes. (Deadly and dyed.)
The earliest two of these seemed quite similar to a series of yours that I saw at the Tarpey Gallery last year, a show entitled From the Earth Wealth, paintings based on North West Leicestershire settlements. Since getting back I have looked up your blog about the way the series developed and enjoyed it. There was a time when I used to like reading Marvel comics and especially the origin stories, how for example, Peter Parker first became Spiderman. In transmuted form it remains a fascination: how did this abstract painting get to look like this? Your own method seems very different to my own, which I guess is one of the reasons that learning about it is so instructive.
Thanks also for bringing my attention to the show by Beth Shapeero, Pale Uneasy Shapes, abstraction of a different kind again, and a show which was so minimal that if you hadn’t pointed it out I might not have seen it at all.
Do the arts make us better?
In the chapter entitled Do the Arts Make us Better? from John Carey’s book What Good are the Arts, he answers his own question with a resounding no. Apparently the arts do not make us better. “Better in comparison to what?” I hear you say. Well, here he has in mind mostly ‘moral betterment’. I am interested in the question with a therapeutic meaning: do the arts make us better i.e. heal us, or at least make us feel better (than we did before looking at the art)? More specifically I am interested in the ability (or otherwise) of visual art to do this.
I saw a blog post at air about an evaluation of their arts programme in Derby Hospitals carried out by the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham in 2010. It concluded that visual art in this environment implied, for many, a taking of pride in creating a high standard of care, that artworks also acted as a distraction from health issues and as a therapeutic aid to well-being as well as providing a practical means of “wayfinding” within the hospital.
I recall that about a year ago I was at Sandwell Hospital, accompanying my son who was having an operation, and what a stressful experience it was. The paintings on the wall (many really good ones) certainly acted as a distraction for me and as a kind of therapy. I wasn’t the patient but I was in need of cheering up and I got that from the paintings. Clearly, not everyone did, I was already interested in seeing paintings, and much of the ‘therapy’ may have been simply the pleasant surprise of seeing good art in this environment. I would much rather be in a gallery than a hospital after all! Nevertheless I have no doubt about the positive effect it had on me.
I am also connecting the qualitative study by the University of Nottingham, my experience of wellbeing, and an upcoming talk I am looking forward to hearing on 27 May 2012, at the Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno by Jane Raymond PhD, Professor of Visual Cognition Psychology, Bangor University and University of Birmingham, entitled From Seeing to Feeling: what does the human brain do when it looks at paintings? A gallery talk specifically with the paintings of Mali Morris in mind (and in view).
Thinking about how to proceed with the contents of the box
Since opening the box over two weeks ago I have done very little work on it. Mostly I have been looking at the contents and thinking
…come to think of it, great though Rodin’s work of art is, that’s not a great posture for thinking. It seems to emphasise the (unhelpful) separation between thinking and doing and that has been precisely my problem. Thought-in-action is a better model, reflective practice.
I’d better get on with doing something.
Coincidences
I’m always a little surprised about the coincidences that crop up…who would have thought that one of the blogs I follow would have just received artmail from Exeter – where I was born and lived till leaving for college at 18. Or that another I follow should mention within a day or two the Ikon Gallery where I worked from 75 till 80…and that he would then reveal that Mali Morris (who we showed in that period – see above) was his favorite painter.
The side view and objecthood
Seeing this painting from the side reminds me of its objecthood and its making
…those drips are needed for the complete picture, though strictly speaking it is not a picture, it’s an object that is also an image, a narrowly 3 dimensional object, without quite being sculpture, a dialectic perhaps of object and image.
that comfortable armchair
It was Mattisse who said
It is my dream to create an art which is filled with balance, purity and calmness, freed from a subject matter that is disconcerting or too attention-seeking. In my paintings, I wish to create a spiritual remedy, similar to a comfortable armchair which provides rest from physical expectation for the spiritually working, the businessman as well as the artist.
Would it have been less bourgeois if he had said “worker” instead of “businessman”?
