patternsthatconnect

Regular visitors to this blog will have noticed that I have been enjoying the exhibition The Indiscipline of Painting, International Abstraction from 1960 to now, that started out at Tate St Ives late in 2011 and moved to Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, in January 2012. Well, today is the final day of the show and bidding it farewell seems an opportune moment to reflect on what I got from visiting it many times.

The early Sean Scully painting East Coast Light 2, was a surprise to me. I like Scully’s work. especially the Wall of Light series, and that the earlier paintings look so very different to the more recent ones was more of a surprise than I expected. I was surprised by the surprise. I had read in Scully’s book Resistance and Persistence that this early work was “frankly illusionistic” and I saw a photograph of East Coast Light 2 in that book. But seeing it for real it is frankly illusionistic! much more so than in the reproduction. Seeing it here opposite the Bridget Riley Painting Cantus Firmus was interesting, as there are obvious connections and also differences. The space in the Scully is illusionistic in that it it opens up “inside” the painting, whereas Riley’s space is “outside”, between painting and viewer.

Sean Scully, East Coast Light 2, 1973, Courtesy of the artist and Neo Neo Inc.

Just down from the Scully, Karin Davie‘s lovely painting is highly gestural and though there is space “inside” or “behind” and “through” the gestural line, it is less illusionistic, much shallower than in East Light 2.

Karin Davie, Symptomania No 7, Image Courtesy of the artist

Richard Kirwan‘s painting Depth of Field seems also to be about what we might call “optical space”, a magnificent painting of the simplest motif repeated many times: an asterisk, possibly a reference to text and therefore to language and sign. Is our attention being brought to multiple footnotes? One of the experiences I have whilst viewing this, and many other paintings in this exhibition is the pure pleasure of seeing. Then my internal dialogue kicks in asking what it is that provokes that pleasure, seeking to ‘unpack’ it intellectually, to follow-up on the “footnotes”. So I read the catalogue, finding out more about the works and the patterns that connect them. At the gallery talk last Saturday with Bob Nickas and Alison Green (both who write in the catalogue), Alison Green commented on the many “back stories” of these paintings suggesting that the pleasure of looking at art includes learning those stories, and that it is not a solely visual experience. I think she is right about that, even though looking without knowing is immensely pleasurable. There seems something very playful about being amazed at how the asterisks seem to rotate. When you have seen the painting before you know it is going to happen but you are still thrilled by it when it does!

Richard Kirwan, Depth of Field, 2011, Copyright the artist / Galerie Hollenbach Stuttgar & Zurich

No Other Home by Daniel Sturgis, the artist who selected the work for this show, has a similar optical buzz, only more so. As I look, I notice my breathing change, almost a sigh, that seems to signal a change of state. Exhaling, my shoulders relax and I ‘take in’ the painting, puzzled by its structure and almost laughing when those chequer patterns seem to dance. Then I get fascinated by the blue discs, and getting up close I just cannot tell whether, for example, the disc on the right looking like it is balanced dangerously close to a cliff edge, and the other one slightly further in (almost immediately left), are the same physical colour, the surrounding colours making them look quite different to each other, or whether in fact they are mixed as different colours. However many times I step nearer and further away from the painting I am unable to verify which it is, though I suspect the former (and later, asking the artist, he confirms it).

Dan Sturgis, No Other Home, 2011, Courtesy of the artist / Galerie Hollenbach Stuttgar & Zurich

At the gallery talk Bob Nickas likened abstract painting to the Hitchcock film The Trouble With Harry, about a dead body that is discovered, hidden, buried, dug up and rediscovered etc, the trouble being that it just “won’t stay dead”. Painting, and specifically abstraction, have been pronounced dead umpteen times but the discipline (or rather the indiscipline, its status being highly contingent) just won’t stay dead.

This show, with 49 artists represented, gives me 49 reasons to continue making abstract paintings, or I learn 49 ways to do abstract painting now that it is dead, or I get to see 49 responses to what to do with abstract painting since its demise: possibly three ways of saying the same thing.

Sarah Shalgosky, Curator, University of Warwick, in her guided tour of this exhibition suggested that it was a “walk through the mind of Daniel Sturgis” and she also said that in bringing these works together they wanted us to have “visual fun”. Judging from the numerous conversations I have had with people at the gallery since the opening night, I am sure that I am not the only one for whom this goal was amply met.

This link shows the Mondrian on view at The Hepworth,Wakefield: Composition C (No.III) with Red, Yellow and Blue  1935. I am making studies of it. It is nearly square.

Sean Scully says somewhere that if you have Mondrian, Matisse and Rothko, then you have his (Scully’s) work, and he also says that its impossible to get to the artist’s touch in Mondrian (that’s how I remember what he said anyway, what I have forgotten is where I read it). If that’s what he said he certainly has a point.

However, there is something of Mondrian’s touch in the paintings. Though it never approaches gesture, I do get a sense of the numerous re-workings. In Scully’s paintings you can clearly see lots of layers of under-painting, whereas in Mondrian you discern them.

Don’t you also get a strong sense of the thinking process of making the work, the creative tension between thinking and doing?

Thinking of Sean Scully as I have been doing recently, I was remembering the exhibition of paintings and works on paper at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal in 2005.

Was it really that long ago? Visiting it was my birthday treat that year, and I took the trip up a few times during the three months it was open.

I liked that there were so many pieces of work (there were 23 in all) in a relatively small space. It was possible to get to know them over a period of time and to see how they related to each other. Although we wouldn’t think of Scully as a systems artist, the fact that he works in series means that you do see relationships between works very clearly and that the work becomes more than each individual painting.

In the catalogue for that show Scully says:

…very often with painting, when you see someone’s painting for the first time you can’t really relate to it. You have to see it over time, and you have to see different kinds of works by the same artist, and kind of live with it, live with the experience of that painting and come back to it until you sort of connect to it

If I have a favourite artist it is Sean Scully. I remember once visiting Tate Modern with a friend, and in the time it took him to see everything in there I had viewed only the three Scullys that were on show. I was literally mesmerised by them. For me, the type of naturally occurring trance state, or reverie, that Franz Anton Mesmer (re)discovered is just the kind of experience provoked by many of Scully’s paintings. Whilst in some ways all aesthetic experience comes into the category of naturally occurring trance, (or if you prefer ‘flow’ state), the work by Sean Scully seems particularly to put me there.

In Issue Ten of Turps Banana, Scully, talking to Peter Dickinson about the bad reception abstract art gets in the UK, says that looking at abstract art “requires contemplation and time”

Sean Scully, Soft Ending, 1969, Acrylic on canvas (226.1 x 226.1 cm). Courtesy of the artist

You could imagine that a gallery might be a good place to find time for contemplation. .. unless it is such a gigantic space that walking past the art becomes the norm.

Sean Scully, Moon, being walked by at Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2008, my photo

Surely he is right about abstraction, it does require contemplation and time, and isn’t it also the case that it rewards the time and contemplation given to it. That is certainly my experience with Scully’s paintings, even the early, minimalist-leaning work.

In Turps Banana, the interview is supplemented by some excellent reproductions, all of early work. I have come to like the more recent Wall of Light series (like the one in my photograph above, taken at Centre Pompidou) so much that I had forgotten how powerful some of the early works are. Soft Ending 1969, for example, seems to have an opticality that is understated or resisted in the later work. The development of Scully’s oeuvre could be read as an increasing emphasis on the physicality and objecthood of painting. Of course that physicality includes the optical much as it could also be seen as a container for the spiritual. Scully talks a lot about the spiritual in art, but I don’t remember him defining what he means by it. What he says in Turps Banana about contemplation and time possibly hints at a way of viewing that approaches spirituality in the sense of meditation.

The new issue of Turps Banana also includes interviews with, or articles about painters such as, Tomma Abts, Christopher P. Wood, Che Lovelace, Gavin Lockheart, René Daniëls and Rose Wylie.

Check out this post at Abstraction Blog with some good photos of three new Scully paintings at his current show at Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, and a link to itunes where you can download Turps Banana.

Abstraction Blog posted about a new exhibition at Tate St Ives: The Indiscipline of Painting, subtitled International Abstraction from the 1960s to Now. At last! A big show of abstract painting, and it’s outside London too.

It opened yesterday and continues until 3 January 2012, bringing together paintings by British, American and European artists, made during the last fifty years.

I am even more delighted to discover that this project is a collaboration between Tate St Ives and Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, and that when it has closed at Tate St Ives it will travel to the Mead Gallery and show between 14 January and 10 March 2012. Coventry Arts Centre is near where I live (no matter that every time I have attempted to visit this year it has been closed). I can go see it in St Ives and then visit regularly from January to March.

Of the 49 painters included in the show I am particularly looking forward to seeing work by Tomma Abts ; John M. Armleder, Daniel Buren, Mary Heilmann, Blinky Palermo, Bridget Riley, Robert Ryman, Sean Scully, Frank Stella, Myron Stout and Dan Walsh.

The Tate write-up about the exhibition says

The contemporary position of abstract painting is problematic. It can be seen to be synonymous with a modernist moment that has long since passed, and an ideology which led the medium to stagnate in self-reflexivity and ideas of historical progression. The Indiscipline of Painting challenges such assumptions. It reveals how painting’s modernist histories, languages and positions have continued to provoke ongoing dialogues with contemporary practitioners, even as painting’s decline and death has been routinely and erroneously declared.

Painting is dead. Long live painting!

The mail arriving through my letter box this morning made a nice loud thud. The new issue of Turps Banana had arrived!

The only magazine I know written for painters by painters, and it’s top banana as far as I am concerned.

This issue, among other things, includes Peter Dickinson‘s interview with Sean Scully, (and there are some lovely photos of Scully’s early work), and an interesting article by Dan Coombs about the work of Tomma Abts, where he thinks of her work as abstract portraiture.

The reproductions are wonderful, I like that, a lot of the time, I am seeing good photographs of paintings I have not seen reproduced elsewhere. Nick Smith’s photograph of John Hoyland sitting in front of one of his last paintings is moving and charming.

So I’m off to do some reading and looking at pictures…

I have written before about public art and how it gets walked by. I enjoyed this blog showing some great art-as-signs by Robert Montgomery. In most of the pictures it looks like the art is getting walked by.

Robert Montgomery is a London-based artist, or maybe a poet, who hijacks billboards, empty ad spaces on the streets and backlit metro lights with his words of wisdoms. Instead of illustrations, he uses typography to get his message across, which are melancholic “post-Situationist’ truisms. He aims to surprise commuters and tourists by placing art in unexpected places, challenging the viewer to explore what public spaces really stand for. Inspired … Read More

via Mashlyn’s Blog

and perhaps not so new according to this blog http://travelbetweenthepages.com/2011/07/03/words-in-the-city-at-night/

It is a nice idea to think that an artwork challenges the viewer. But first you have become a viewer. whether it is ‘public’, street, home, workplace or gallery art…

Sean Scully, Moon, being walked by at Centre Pompidou, Paris in 2008

…until the a ‘public’ becomes a ‘viewer’ then art is just something to walk by.

I came across this post recently, it reminded me (by contrast) of my experience at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, of momentarily not knowing the difference between art and non-art.
some of this was arguably “art like everything”. Here Scully argues for an art “different to everything”

Sean Scully, “Wall of Light Beach” (2001). Oil on canvas. 40”× 50”. Private collection. Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art In Robert Hughes’ The Mona Lisa Curse, there is a thoughtful exchange between Hughes and painter Sean Scully. Their brief conversation touches on many of the distinctions I have been writing about here over the years. Hughes states his belief that painting is exactly what mass visual media is not—about specific engagem … Read More

via Slow Muse

Somewhere Sean Scully says “what fascinates goes the distance”.  I have long been fascinated by things within things, infinite regress, self reference etc. and I am fascinated that I am fascinated by that. There’s that story, about William James, meeting an old lady who told him that the Earth rested on the back of a huge turtle.

Professor James: “But, my dear lady, what holds up the turtle?”

Old lady: “Ah, that’s easy. He is standing on the back of another turtle.”

Professor James: “Oh, I see, But would you be so good as to tell me what holds up the second turtle?”

Old lady: “It’s no use Professor” ( realizing he was trying to lead her into a logical trap) “It’s turtles-turtles-turtles, all the way down!”

A photo of a screen showing a photo of a screen showing a photo of a painting, made up of smaller paintings made up of smaller paintings…