patternsthatconnect

Dan Coombs has suggested that the abstract paintings of Tomma Abts are better understood “not so much as material objects in the abstract painting tradition but as surrogate people with their own personalities. Each painting is a portrait …of something that does not yet exist[1]“. Seeing the Tomma Abts painting at The Indiscipline of painting exhibition at the Mead Gallery, I was reminded of Coombs’ article. The painting is entitled Thiale, a first name I believe. The format looks like a portrait as does its size (48cm x 38cm).

Tomma Abts, Thiale, 2004, Courtesy of greengrassi, London

It draws us in for closer inspection, I mean for us to inspect the painting, not the other way around, though who knows, maybe whilst I am studying it, it is also studying me? And studying is the mode of viewing that it seems to elicit. Some of the other paintings in the show need to be simply enjoyed, breathed in almost, but not this one; it seems to require close attention or study. And studying it slowly reveals the slowness of its making as evidence of corrections and underpainting becomes apparent.

It isn’t the only ‘portrait’ here. There is also the much larger scale work by Moira Dyer entitled The Vanishing Self-Portrait. There is underpainting of sorts in this one, but hardly in the sense of ‘corrections’. In the Tomma Abts I get the sense of painstaking application and revision, until the ‘correct’ form is arrived at. The Moira Dyer seems more about following a pre-determined course, and quickly. Painted in 1990, only two years before she died at the age of 34, it is balanced on a small tree trunk, rather than hanging on the wall. I could imagine it having been painted right there, the lateral brush strokes in a pale blue/grey with a slightly bluer frame painted around the edge with one blue paint run on the left hand side, that has been allowed to follow its course almost to the bottom edge. The paint looks like it was erased rather than applied, the erasing of an image of the artist perhaps, yet the brush strokes and the dimensions attesting to the artists presence, and body. She was here, and this ‘image’ is what is left of her performance, the record of it hasn’t vanished.

And in looking at these abstract portraits I am reminded of the Clare Woods exhibition at Hepworth Wakefield: The Unquiet Head, showing until 29 January. As well as the large abstract landscapes, which themselves allude to figures in rock formations, there are some smaller works of rocks that are specifically presented as portraits, a series of Idol heads. And then there is a small painting on aluminium entitled Hollow Face, a portrait ‘read into’ the negative space, a hole, or a clearing, in a hedge or some shrubs.

Clare Wood, Hollow Face, (my photo)

This also vanishes, if ever it was there, or only there because we see the absence as a presence and see in that a face. The painting is already there in ‘nature’ but always only inside the imagination, a portrait of something that is both there and not there at the same time, a visual metaphor perhaps. The Moira Dryer portrait is of an event, a performance that once took place, now a nominalisation, whereas the Abts portrait is of a ‘personality’ that exists only because it has been painted into existence.

The Indiscipline of Painting: International Abstraction from 1960 to Now is showing at Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, until 10 March 2012.

The Unquiet Head is showing at Hepworth Wakefield until 29 January 2012

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.

I was writing about Jeff McMillan’s interview with Rose Wylie, featured in Issue Ten of Turps Banana, when I realised that I didn’t know the work of Jeff  McMillan.

One of the many things about Turps I like is that it is written by painters. So immediately following  an article or interview there is usually a small photo of a painting by the writer/artist. Finishing reading the Rose Wylie interview I saw the little reproduction of McMillan’s Prop, 2009, an intriguing painting that looks like it was dipped into a container of pink paint… because it was! Even the description of the medium used sounds interesting to me, almost poetic: “Oil on found painting”. Where do you go to find a painting? It seems to me like something you have to go looking for, perhaps at a jumble sale? but does it then become a bought painting? Anyway, I hurried over to his website at jeffmcmillan.co.uk. to look for more. Click on the link to do the same, and page through the works.

There’s a series of dipped paintings, and other found paintings that are arranged rather than dipped, and a set of dipped cardboard boxes. It sounds easy and gimmicky, but they are somehow the opposite of that, the paintings are complex, beautiful even. I find them visually stunning, with an emotional charge that I am at a loss to explain.

I learned from his artist’s statement at Walker Art Gallery that he has, for many years, been collecting second-hand oil paintings from car boot sales and charity shops, and that during the last ten years or so, this collection has made its way into the studio to become a material part of the work. Found paintings are dipped into a large container of paint, with the intention of creating ambiguity by the simplest of actions. There is something nihilistic about it, almost an act of vandalism, yet yielding beautiful results.

There is something awkward about the paintings of Rose Wylie, and it’s part of what is so appealing about them. In Issue Ten of Turps Banana, Jeff McMillan interviews the artist (actually, it’s more like a conversation than an interview). He says to her “…your work has a kind of awkwardness” and she answers “Well, I am awkward really”. The awkwardness of the work comes from the artist’s own awkwardness, and I think I respond favourably to it as a viewer because I am also awkward really. Is it just me, or do we often find ourselves in situations where we don’t quite know how to act or what to say? In those moments we find that we lack grace, or ease of movement. Of course, we learn to overcome it, we become comfortable and the ease of movement returns, we no longer feel awkward in that situation. One of the things I like about Rose Wylie’s paintings is that they seem to keep you in that slightly uncomfortable experience.

Rose Wylie, Truss, 2000, Oil on canvas (183 x 178 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Union Gallery, London

I am not quite sure what to make of the painting. It isn’t beautiful, or sublime is it? It is slightly ugly, and that’s equally in the subject matter and in the paint handling. I think that’s a way of saying that it is well observed. The form is congruently related to the content. In the Turps Banana interview she says “I hate elegance… I like ducks”.

(The new issue of Turps Banana also carries, among other things, articles about Sean Scully, René Daniëls, Christopher P. Wood, Che Lovelace, Gavin Lockheart and Tomma Abts.)

In Turps Banana issue ten, Dan Coombs writes about the paintings of Tomma Abts. I like her work. At least I think I do, only having seen it in reproduction, and looking forward to seeing some of it in ‘real life’ soon.

Tomma Abts, Schwiddo, 2008, Oil and acrylic on canvas (46 x 38 cm). Courtesy of the artist and greengrassi, London

One of the recurring themes of this blog is abstraction and its relationship (or not) to decoration. In his Turps Banana article Coombs makes some interesting points on this subject. I have noticed that whenever the ‘D’ word is used in relation to abstract art it is usually the late modernist painters, championed by Clement Greenberg, that we have in mind.  I remember being horrified at a lecture by Peter Fuller in 1979 when he referred to the paintings of Jules Olitski as ‘terrible’ (in the bad sense) and I think it was what Coombs calls the ‘innocently decorative’ that he was reacting against, and what the earlier generation Abstract Expressionist Barnett Newman referred to pejoratively as ‘batik’. Coombs suggests that what Greenberg left out was the psychological component of art, a dimension he finds plenty of in Abts paintings and that prevents them from ever becoming ‘innocently decorative’.

I like his discussion of Abts’ painting Schwiddo, shown above, where he senses a note of disquiet invoked by the dip in tone within the smaller of the two central circles. I agree with him, and I wonder how it works: how is it that I interpret a dip in tone as a note of disquiet? And this interpretation is only secondarily cognitive, I can describe my experience in this way but first I feel it, somatically. It is this kind of experience that makes the painting more than decorative, and in Coombs’ words nudges it “towards having a subject, or more precisely, into being a subject”.  I am reminded of that famous cartoon by Ad Reinhardt of the abstract painting in a museum confronting the viewer who had mockingly asked “what does this represent?” Pointing its finger back at the viewer the painting  demands “what do you represent?”

(The new issue of Turps Banana also carries, among other things, articles about Sean Scully, René Daniëls, Christopher P. Wood, Che Lovelace, Gavin Lockheart and Rose Wylie. As usual there is a plate entitled The Banana, in this issue by Dolly Thompsett. And whilst on the subject of bananas, though nothing at all to do with the Turps Banana,  I couldn’t help but connect to the blog posts I saw yesterday at Geokult on Carmen Banana, Big Banana Time, and Going Bananas)

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 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…

Thank you art dog for reminding me to dig out my own yellowed copy of Beyond the Crisis in Art by Peter Fuller.

You reminded me of the crisis that this book provoked in me, a welcome crisis, but one that took years to resolve.

I have long been a fan of the Sharkforum and resident artist/critic Mark Staff Brandl’s take on the present state of art criticism. This is by way of a practice run to ‘scope’ the afore mentioned ‘art criticism now?’ agenda I love that word ‘scope’ you’d think we were shooting bears..maybe we are…certainly foxes… His latest project involves asking artists to write about their practice and its theoretical basis as a challenge to the curren … Read More

via CONTEMPORARY ART CRITICISM

I have been foolish enough to dig out my copy.

In the book there is an article on John Hoyland, I only realised in reading it again that Fuller is reviewing an exhibition that I saw, and liked, at the Serpentine in 1979.

I was interested to re-read the article along with the catalogue because Hoyland has come to mind for me recently in a visit to Leeds Art Gallery, in a viewing of some art in a workplace,

and in reading Peter Dickinson‘s interview with him in the latest Turps Banana.

Whilst Fuller is largely negative towards Hoyland, he appreciates what he thinks the artist repudiates:  the allusion to content beyond the painting, “touching upon intimate areas of psychological (rather than purely perceptual) experience”.

If your workplace had John Hoylands on the wall would it become a place of joy?

In an office where I sometimes work there are a few Hoyland limited edition prints from the 80s and 90s.

Early in the morning, before most people get to work, I sometimes go and view them.

Mostly they just get ignored,

They are in meeting rooms,

Unlooked at, they just ‘brighten up the place’.

I am enjoying this one a lot just now

It reminds me of one of Hoyland’s paintings from around the same  time this piece was made (1986).  The painting is entitled ‘Lust and Luxuries’ 1984 (it is reproduced in issue nine of Turps Banana, accompanying an interesting interview with Hoyland by Peter Dickinson) and is reminiscent of a plate of cakes. The workplace print (is it a lithograph?) looks more abstract than ‘Lust and Luxuries’ yet it does have plate of food associations for me. Does it for you?

I think it also has face associations. I don’t want to see the towards-violet shape near the bottom edge as a mouth yet I do.

A friend with synaesthesia once said to me that he knew paintings were good when he wanted to eat them!

When it’s not abstract colours and shapes it’s a plate of food or a face with a mouth possibly ready to eat a plate of food. I have the feeling that I am not supposed to be thinking in terms of associations in relation to Hoyland’s oeuvre, and at the same time I wonder of these food and eating associations are part of what makes the print attractive to me. Or maybe I have an oral fixation and I’m saying a lot more about me now than I am about the picture.