Posts Tagged ‘colour’
Postcard-sized drawing
Another postcard sized drawing…
Derby Tetractys 2, 2013, watercolour marker on paper, 4″ x 8″
…that could act as a preparatory study for a very large painting.
Transcribed and transposed
Whitby Tetractys 2
Andy Parkinson, Transposed Transcription: Whitby Tetractys 2, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″
Transcribed from marker pen on paper 12″ x 12″ to acrylic on canvas 24″ x 24″ and transposed from horizontal to vertical orientation.
All Poets…
All
Poets
Understand
That practising
Tetractysing
Sequences
Can be
Fun
Whitby Tetractys 3 (Drawing), watercolour marker on paper, 12″x12″
ABCBA (sketch)
Something I am working on in my sketchbook. The sequence of colours follows the pattern ABCBA, where A = violet, B = orange and C = green.
ABCBABCBA, 2013, Permanent Marker on paper, 9″x9″
The orange is slightly towards red, the green is towards teal and the violet is towards lilac. With the greens and violets present the red/orange looks much redder than it would do if seen together with other colours or indeed against white. The photo is quite near to how it really looks.
Callum Innes at Whitworth Art Gallery
The exhibition of recent paintings by Callum Innes at Whitworth Art Gallery is astounding, quite literally breathtaking.
It includes works from his series of Exposed Paintings, where using turpentine, he removes layers of black oil paint to reveal underlying colours, leaving the evidence of his process on the canvas and around the canvas edges.
Callum Innes, Exposed Painting Green Lake, 2012, Oil on linen.Oil on linen, 205 x 200cm, Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London
As I am examining the edges of the canvas to attempt to discover which colours were laid down first a man interrupts me to ask
“have you found any?”
“any what?”
“any brushmarks”.
I think there are some, but the removing of paint is more evident and the multiple layers tend to prevent the perception of individual mark-making.
There are paintings here also from the Monologue series, in which washes resembling a waterfall or a mist cover the entire canvas. Innes’s paintings are rarely ever strictly ‘monochromes’, but I do think that they speak from and to that tradition, and I wonder if the title of this series hints at this.
All the paintings here are of a fair size, big but not massive. There are paintings that do not appear to belong to a named series, Untitled no 31 for example. On second thoughts, they do form a series: the Untitled series in which the canvas is divided vertically into two sections, sometimes into roughly equal halves, but not always.
Callum Innes, Untitled no 31, 2012. Oil on linen, 160 x156cm, Courtesy Frith Street Gallery, London
Sitting down, I look at Untitled no 31 for a long time and it is only the nagging awareness of an upcoming appointment that eventually motivates me to get going. I want to say that there’s something timeless about it except that it also seems to mark the passing of time both of the artist in the making of it and of the viewer who wishes to stay on and gaze. It may be more accurate to say that it induces a time distortion. I get absorbed in the process of seeing, at first accompanied with internal dialogue but less and less so. Time seems to have stopped. It’s not altogether a reverie, nor is it all emotion; whilst there is something emotional about it, there is also “something for the mind to do”. I become fascinated by the line that separates the two ‘halves’ or that joins them, there does seem to be an actual line which can be seen very close up, absent from middle distance but becoming magnified optically after prolonged viewing from where I am seated a few feet away. The surface also takes on a slightly undulating quality. I have the impression that these optical effects are bi-products of the painting process rather than deliberately sought after or designed-in by the artist.
The exhibition also has a selection of works on paper and 20 new watercolours made especially for the Whitworth.The watercolours are displayed laid flat on a long table in a manner that recalls the process of making them. Innes lays the sheets of paper out in sequence and works on them in order, beginning each one by masking off a square in the centre of the paper, blocking it out with a wash of watercolour and leaving it to partially dry before removing the masking and adding further layers allowing them to be slightly larger or smaller than the initial square, so residues of the unmixed colours remain at the edges.
Callum Innes, Cerulean blue / Transparent Orange, 2013, Watercolour, 56 x 77cm, image by courtesy of Frith Street Gallery, London
Each work combines two colours transforming them in the process into a new, indeterminable hue. I am reminded of the dialectical triad: thesis, antithesis, synthesis, which in turn reminds me that no ‘formalist’ painting can ever be only formal, it is always also trans-formal.
Callum Innes, Ivory Black Green / Titanium White, 2013, Watercolour, 56 x 77cm, image by courtesy of Frith Street Gallery, London
There is something right about seeing them laid horizontally, partly because it maintains the sequence, encouraging me to see each individual work as a part of a larger whole, and partly because I think the colours are slightly intensified when seen in this orientation.
Callum Innes, Red Violet / Gamboge Modern, 2013, Watercolour, 56 x 77cm, image by courtesy of Frith Street Gallery, London
These works, whether the large paintings or the watercolours, are only deceptively, simple. All the actions that are documented in the production process are in themselves very simple, and sometimes they result in paintings that at first glance also seem simple. Yet linger only a short while and their complexity becomes more apparent. And it’s paradoxical in that the process of making is never hidden, it is in one sense clearly displayed. However, the moment I try to piece it together it eludes me it all starts to seem too difficult to follow, much of the process now being obscured by the very action of layering and removal of paint. If I might switch sensory systems for a moment I could say that viewing them is akin to the experience of listening to music by Steve Reich, on the one hand simple ( I resist the ‘minimalist’ tag) and on the other, highly complex.
The Callum Innes exhibition, part of the Whitworth Spring Season, opened on 2 March and continues to 16 June 2013.
You made me love you (I didn’t want to do it)
I never intended to fall in love, until that moment when I saw her walking down the recreation ground footpath on her way home from work, and it was too late. Thirty two years later it remains one of the very best moments of my life.
I never intended to enjoy the song You Made Me Love You, (I Didn’t Want to Do It), sung by Judy Garland, but I just can’t help it. I keep playing it. It’s great for practising foxtrot to in your living room when you’re drying the dishes.
And I never intended to get into this painting again, with this rotating theme, and almost lurid colours…
Xantium 2, 2013, acrylic on canvas, 20″x20″
… I keep trying to move away from it, but I just had to do this new version, I couldn’t help it.
(Actually, I suppose the colours are somewhat over-the-rainbow-esque, aren’t they?)
Victor Vasarely in “The Tradition of Constructivism”
In numerous train journeys over the last few weeks I have enjoyed reading that collection of texts edited by Stephen Bann entitled The Tradition of Constructivism. The final chapter: The Constructivist Idea in the Postwar World 1948 -65, in many ways already seems ‘old’, perhaps because it just pre-dates the onslaught of postmodernism. Reading Charles Biederman reminds me of reading Alfred Korzybski, (I hadn’t realised until reading Bann’s collection that Biederman was so influenced by Korzybski): even though the texts are relatively recent (1940s) they seem somehow outdated both in the writing style, and to some degree in the content. I found the text by Victor Vasarely from 1965 only slightly less so. Could anyone writing today confidently assert that “the art-idea is abandoning its centuries old mists to flourish in the sunlight in the immense modern network that is being woven around the globe”?
In spite of its obvious outdatedness I did enjoy reading it, and a couple of passages keep coming back to me:
In 1955 I defined the principle of the identity of two concepts which until then had been separated: that of form and that of color. Henceforth form-color: 1 = 2, 2 = 1, constitutes the plastic unity. The unity is composed of two constants: the kernel “form” and its complement that surrounds it: the square “background”. Apart from its “biform” aspect, the Unity necessarily possesses a “bicolor” aspect which is harmonious or contrasting at the same time as positive-negative. Being thus contradictory, the resolved unity is a pure dialectical synthesis.
and
Why did I choose the square plastic unit? Because the square is the pre-eminent element in architecture. If I say square, I also say tiling or prefabricated wall…
