Making Grey

The Exhibition Grey at Harrington Mill Studios, curated by David Manley includes work by Chris Wright, Rachael Pinks, Dee Shiels, David Ainley, Kevin Coyne, Patrick Prentice, Steffi Richards, Joe Kelly, Paul Warren, Clay Smith, Sarah R Key, Lisa Denyer, Susan Disley, David Manley, Michael Finn, Louise Garland, Rob Van Beek, Shiela Ravnkilde, Jackie Berridge, Alison Whitmore, Kate Smith, Michelle Keegan, Simon Marchini, Beth Shapeero, Paul Crook, Fi Burke, Hayley Lock, Andy Parkinson, Helen Stevenson, Maggie Milner, Kate Smith, Tracey Eastham, Mik Godley, Flore Gardner and Justine Nettleton, very different kinds  of work in different mediums: performance, text, sculpture, drawing and painting.

Andy Parkinson, Grey, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 14″ x 17″

The theme for the show was inspired by a painting, in Manley’s collection, by Michael Finn, entitled Grey Blue. In the gallery notes Manley writes “it got me thinking…wouldn’t it be nice to ask HMS associated artists…to reflect, in whatever way they choose, on the colour grey?” The exhibition is a result of their responses, shown alongside the Finn.

I am intrigued by the multiple ways that the Finn painting presents itself, due in part to different lighting (physical factors) and in part to the subjective participation of the viewer (psychological factors). The appearance at first sight is of a grey ground upon which a darker grey frame is hastily drawn, echoing the vertical edges of the support. On continued viewing, the nuances of the coloured ground come to awareness. Colours shift and change, violet now uppermost, only to be succeeded by other colours: green, blue, red, ochre etc. This variability is a function of the process of layering one colour over another, resulting in a mixture surely more optical than physical.

Michael Finn, Grey Blue, 2000, acrylic on canvas, my photo

It is difficult to photograph, the auto-focus in my camera cannot work out what to do, and though I switch to manual and manipulate the resultant, under-exposed image afterwards in photo-shop, I acknowledge that the snap hardly does justice to what I am actually seeing.

I think it is the case with many of the paintings here, including my own, that they almost defy being photographed, and it is certainly the case with David Ainley‘s Hidden Shafts: Grey, what you see in the reproduction hardly reproduces what can be seen in the work itself, and this is generally my experience of viewing paintings by Ainley compared with seeing photographs of them. Could it be that the paintings are much slower than photography allows? Standing in front of Hidden Shafts I am quite prepared to put in the the time that viewing requires and it is then that some of its hidden properties are revealed, layers of events becoming visible through the very process of being covered, like a stain that cannot be painted over.

David Ainley, Hidden Shafts: Grey, 2014, acrylic on drilled panel, 32 x 28 x 5cm. Image by courtesy of the artist

The tiny painting/collage  here by Rachael Pinks, entitled Tales of Ancient Pain, only just grey, more black, white and blue, lots of blue, prompting, for me, sea and sky associations, includes along the top edge, a scrap of text torn from a book. If I had brought my glasses with me I might be able to determine whether that fragment of text is the source of the title.

Rachael Pinks, Tales of Ancient Pain, 2014, acrylic and collage on paper. Image by David Manley, courtesy of the artist

The text, the title, and the seascape associations trigger for me a search for narrative, whether found in imagined content, perhaps a storm or a shipwreck, or in the process of assembling an image form torn paper, a narrative of sorts, perhaps a “process narrative”. I am especially interested in this narrative that is embedded in the act of making, and I think I find something of this also in David Ainley’s work as well as in Sarah R Key‘s.

I wrote briefly about Key’s painting An Equivalent Other, at Constructed Realities, wondering whether it might contain “some hidden or mysterious narrative”. The cluster of triangles becomes a depicted object, almost box like, with what could be opening tabs that create hints of a dimensionality, all against a dark ground that refuses to provide a context. The lighter blue/grey triangles at top, bottom and right can also be read as negative spaces, or a window through which two triangles one green, one violet, can be seen, if ‘floating’ in space they are anchored at edge or corner, so they never quite ‘escape’ to any place beyond this configuration. Even in describing the action I am doing so in terms of a narrative, again of sorts.

Sarah. R. Key, An Equivalent Other, 2014, my snapshot.

Whereas for many abstract artists geometry suggests rationality, with Key I almost want to say that her geometry denotes the opposite, though I realise that this is entirely interpretive on my part and it could simply be that I am inventing a link between her abstract work (she would say “for want of a better term”), and some of her more figurative paintings, (and again one could say “for want of a better term”). What I think I find in Key’s work is a challenging of the distinction. Rather than the polar opposites of either/or, black and white, we get both/and: shades of grey.

Grey, continues at Harrington Mill Studios until 28 November

 

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Grey at Harrington Mill Studios

See Constructed Realities for a brief review of paintings by Sarah R Key, Lisa Denyer,Terry Greene, Susan Disley, David Manley and Michael Finn currently on show at the exhibition Grey, curated by David Manley, at Harrington Mill Studios,

Sarah. R. Key, An Equivalent Other, 2014, my snapshot.

Also, watch this space (patternsthatconnect) for a further review of a few of the other paintings in the same show.

Dystopia at HMS: Interview with Clay Smith

Viewing images by photomontage artist Clay Smith in the exhibition Dystopia at Harrington Mill Studios, I am reminded of the constructedness of our present and that we do not necessarily live in the best of all possible worlds. All is not what it seems, just beneath the surface of civilisation is flesh and the ‘civilising’ itself may not be a good thing. There’s a series of images here that runs in a sequence revealing the process of social and technological development as beginning with control and ending in cannibalism. Yet all the images have beauty, whether in the soft magenta and tan colours or in the subtle blemishes that are as near to painterly that a photo can get. They pose questions for me about beauty, meaning and process. Rather than attempting to think through these questions on my own, I asked the artist for an interview. My questions are shown as headings with Clay Smith’s responses below each one.

Clay Smith, Blue Collar 1, 2012, C-type print. Image by courtesy of the artist

To what degree do you think of your images as “abstract”?

My works are very recognisable, you can easily spot the imagery in them but I use them in a way that changes the culture or meaning of the originality of the image. I see that as an abstract variant. I change the meaning and use of the image, making the viewer look differently at the work, to think about the piece perhaps on an abstracted level. I love abstract paintings, I even tried it myself many years ago, but failed terribly! I prefer to look at paintings than photography as they allow the viewer to interpret the piece as they wish. I’d like people to perhaps do the same with my work although not abstract in aesthetic they could be abstracts in how we would deal with them intellectually.

How do you make them? Surely not physically cut out, nor likely to have been made in a darkroom, are they digitally manipulated?

I use photographic slides, I find them, buy them and get given them. I also make my own. I look through hundreds of them to find the images that I need, then I scan them. I used to send them to the Palm Labs in Birmingham but I now own my own scanner so I do them myself. When they are scanned and made into TIFF files I only adjust the contrast a little and that is it! I leave everything else as it was, the dust specks, the hairs, water stains and grit. I love em! Then they get printed onto light sensitive papers using a Chromira printer. The files are projected onto the paper as light, then it goes through another machine that fixes the image, then hey-presto! Out it pops. So, they are kinda produced in a dark room but on a modern technological ground.

Clay Smith, Landscape with Superimposed Cannibalism, 2012, Image by courtesy of the artist

Do they exist primarily as digital images that could then be printed, or are the physical images the artworks?

I usually have an issue of say 3-15 depending on the work, but I would like to start working on issues of just 1 so that the piece would be the artwork. I’d like to make photography just as important as painting, and for it to be viewed the same. I don’t like the idea of reprinting work over and over again, to me that takes away some kind of layer from the piece. Perhaps it begins to destroy its originality and heart. The sizes of my work mean a lot. Depending on the condition of the slide and its content, I will only print the work to a size according to how best the image will be displayed. Some of my pieces can only be printed at a small size due to the unfocused nature of the image or how busy the image is, and some can only be printed large because of the content of the image. For example, open mountain scenes that are pretty well composed and shot can be printed large as this gives a better impact.

Earlier you were using real moths, clearly a mix of digital and real, has that changed?

I was going through a transitional state when I was using moths and butterflies. I wanted to use two different ‘cultures’ with my work so I tried using insects and photography as a way of displaying two different objects within the same frame and making them work. My photographic work still uses two or even three different images in the same way as the butterflies did but I have gone completely photographic now. There is more material out there and of course I can make my own. With my new work I want to get across something very different then the butterfly work.

What specifically is the difference?

The butterfly works were objects of collage that would just be looked upon as objects of collage. Any attachments people would  have had would be more about how the two collaged objects worked well together. My new works are more about how the photographic images create an entirely different meaning and direction to the original image. They hopefully question the image, create dialogue that will change the way we look at images perhaps, if it’s only whilst looking at my work. I want the images that we recognize in the work to have new meaning for the viewer.  I have a lot more scope and flexibility with pure photography then I did when using insects. This alone gives my work more freedom of expression and expansion that’s open to reinterpretation and analysis.

Clay Smith, Landscape with Superimposed Masters, 2013. Image by courtesy of the artist

Do your pictures come together by assembling disparate found images or do you have images in mind and go looking for them?

I collect as many slides as possible (good and bad) and go through them to find images that I am currently working with like open landscapes, empty townscapes or planes. I organise my slides into sections of ‘landscapes’ ‘planes’ ‘medical’ ‘towns’ ‘people’ etc. If I need to find some people to put into a medical image I know where to find them. If I receive a bag of slides I may just make a series of work from that one bag, keeping them together. I was given a bag of slides from the artist Laura Ellen Bacon and with the slides I was able to make just one image, that’s good enough for me! It is a good image. So sometimes I will keep a collection together or I will mix and match to find what I want from other collections.

Clay Smith, Hedonic Nothing. C-type print. Image by courtesy of the artist

How important is the content for you? And what are your main interests in relation to the content?

The content is everything but its meaning means nothing to me. I try to par images together in order to create for the images a completely different objective. Images that I work with are usually amateur holiday and family snap shots, when I make my images they become semi political and questions societies and their cultures a little. Using slide film allows me to flip the image around which also allows me to flip its content around, this works well for me as I feel the world from how people see it should be flipped about a bit!

What artists do you appreciate?

I tend to lean towards established artists for various reasons: Werner Herzog the film maker for his directing methods and character/actor choices. Shomie Tomatsu for his ambiguous photograph of the glass bottle, Jan Saudek for his backgrounds, Gottfried Helnwein for his scale and the ability to prove just how powerful art can be and Alberto Burri for his choice of material.

Clay Smith, Inverted Space, Demagogic Device, 2014. C-type print. Image by courtesy of the artiist

To what extent do you see your work as participating in a tradition?

My work lends itself to exploration of a theme rather than tradition. It is because of this I’ve been able to find myself as an artist. Tradition to me is craft, and I think a lot of artists get trapped in the tradition of making and not creating. I use photography but I wouldn’t call myself a photographer, far from it. I am an artist that uses photography. In fact I could go as far as to not even call myself an artist! To call yourself something traps you in its meaning which doesn’t allow you to breath properly. I see really amazing printers using acid, copper, etching etc, but some of them are trapped in their tradition as printers and produce work that only displays a great skill in printmaking and not art. I can say perhaps that I am a photomontage artist.

When people look at your pictures what do you hope they will experience?

I hope that they will walk away feeling a little different then they did when they walked in, and that they will say ‘thank you’ when they leave.

Clay Smith, Stenographic Child 10, 2014. C-type print. Image by courtesy of the artist

Some of your images have shock value (some for example are obscene) is that a reaction you seek?

I think some people are shocked by viewing something in a gallery that has an erection in it or scenes of a medical nature because of the environment they are in. These same people wouldn’t think twice about flicking on the t.v and watching A&E or enjoying some private time with an erection or two! Some of my images are extreme, such as the use of Marilyn Monroe. I find her very extreme, nothing normal about Marilyn at all, so I will use an image that I think is equally as extreme but taken from the other side of the wall. In the Marilyn case I used an image of a medical nature, and it worked. I have used pornography, but after I have worked with it the final piece of work no longer has any attachments to pornography because I have perhaps merged it with a photograph of an English gentleman. I think it’s this that people are offended by. People don’t like to view things out of its rightful context. I don’t make work in order to shock, that would be too easy, I use certain imagery in order to get across the extremism of people.

Why are the aeroplanes upside down?

To give us the viewer the impression that something isn’t quite right. To establish a kind of dystopian environment to which I feel we created by how we treat each other. The abnormal and surreal action of the plane is a metaphor for our times.

 

The exhibition Dystopia is on at Harrington Mill Studios. Long Eaton until 7 October 2014.

Painting Too at Harrington Mill Studios

Painting Too, at Harrington Mill Studios, forms part-two of a duo of shows about abstract painting, demonstrating that, to quote its curator David Manley: “current abstraction is in rude good health”. If part-one, featured that strand of abstraction that foregrounds a “formal” as opposed to “informal” approach, part two concentrates on the other strand, work that is looser in execution, more “provisional”, “casual” “informal”, more Romantic than Classical, or possibly even, more Dionysian than Apollonian.

Installation shot, from left: Lisa Denyer, Rachael Pinks, Terry Greene, Matthew Macaulay. Image by courtesy of HMS

The most provisional are Vincent Hawkins playful paper cut-outs and paper folds that might be the biproduct of some other process, as if the paper that he was resting on has become an event in itself, rather than being discarded it is presented as uncomposed image, unconscious design, a strategy similar to that of displaying a used artists’ pallet as a painting. I love their simplicity (of sorts) and audacity, and the challenge they pose to my preconceived ideas about what a painting might be. The folded works bring attention to the way a painting might be more a construction than a composition, and even though I started out thinking of these as ‘provisional’ or romantic my distinction already breaks down as I see connections to the constructivist tradition, which for me adheres more readily to the classical pole.

Vincent Hawkins, Untitled. Image by courtesy HMS

Rachael Pinks‘ works on paper, made from pages torn from second hand books and painted, are more consciously constructed than Hawkins’. I feel invited to get up close and study them, and as I do so I find detail that fascinates me just as I might do if I was viewing a miniature. I read them as abstract miniatures, a notion that would have been unthinkable say twenty years ago. This seems to me to be one of the things that makes them contemporary. In this show, they are simply attached to the wall, unframed, bringing my attention to the slightly irregular shapes of many of them, emphasising the way they have grown into being, if not quite organically, rather in a dialogical fashion, in conversation between artist and material. That they are grouped so closely together also highlights the off-straight edges and the relationships between pieces.

Stephen MacInnes’s decorative 12″ x 12″ paintings on paper from his ‘long series’ are also organised together for maximum effect, creating an impressive tiled wall of arching forms. Works that might have looked casual take on an architectural quality.

Stephen MacInnes, selection from the Long Series. Image by courtesy HMS

Rachael Macarthur‘s small works on paper, again unframed and simply attached to the wall, seem closer to Hawkins in their nearness to the provisional or at least casualist approach. Seeing Tabula Rasa again confirms my appreciation of this piece, I continue to feel surprise at how something so slight can have such an impact. There’s a lot more going on in Russia, there is more drawing, and like Pinks’ little paintings/collages there are landscape associations, but they are residual, the sense I have is that the more the painting attempts to capture a memory of something, the more it resembles only the process of attempting to recall.

Rachael Macarthur, Russia. Image by courtesy of the artist

Terry Greene‘s paintings have a casualness about them too. They look like the paint was applied quickly, perhaps in an attempt to prevent the conscious mind from interfering too much in the process, yet with time gaps between painting sessions, creating for the artist opportunities to study them, to reflect and even to forget, whilst for the eventual viewer, layers of underpainting slow down the resulting image. I hesitate to say ‘image’ because these small paintings have so much materiality about them, the paint often over spilling the edges of the canvas. It occurs to me that the tension that is created between quick graphic image and slow build-up of material is a large part of what I am finding so interesting in Greene’s paintings.

Terry Greene, The condition of things which they have finally settled into, 2013, acrylic on canvas stretched over hardboard and stretcher, 12 1/4″ x 9 1/4″. Image by courtesy of the artist

Something similar is going on for me in the paintings on plywood by Lisa Denyer. Their materiality is both posited and negated in the diaphanous quality of the resulting form. The word ‘image’ seems even less appropriate in that each piece looks so little like a picture of something other than space, and ‘object’ seems equally wrong because of the immateriality of the washes that the eye perceives more as gas than as liquid, despite the carefully crafted wooden support.

Lisa Denyer, Cross, acrylic on plywood, 30cm x 25cm. Image by courtesy of the artist

There are four confident paintings by Matthew Macaulay on show here. Two of them are painted on table tops, which lends them a solidity and a presence that seems to transform confidence into authority, especially so in the magnificent Thinking about Painting, 2103 (see installation shot above). Whilst the linear landscape format and the bold gestures in strong colour, for me recall Ivon Hitchens and Howard Hodgkin, there is something entirely contemporary in the experimentation with support and the unorthodox approach to ‘composition’, it might even be an anti-composition, approaching a cataloguing of visual statements, that resists, at least for a few moments, forming into a picture.

Painting Too is on at Harrington Mill Studios until 24 November, Viewing by appointment Tel 07891 262 202

Coming Soon to HMS

The Discipline of Painting, curated by David Manley, 6 Oct to to 27 Oct, with View on Saturday 26 Oct, 2PM to 5PM, at Harrington Mill Studios, Long Eaton.

Paintings by Susan Disley at HMS

My ongoing quest to see abstract paintings north of London brings me today to Harrington Mill Studios in Long Eaton, where there are paintings by Susan Disley. There are also works by Rosie Kearton: photograms, etchings, collagraphs, related to walking in the landscape, very enjoyable, just that it’s the painting I have specifically come here to see.

Like Kearton’s prints, Disley’s paintings are related to landscape, abstract landscapes perhaps, some more clearly connected to their starting point than others. It’s the ones that are the most ‘abstracted’ that interest me the most, pared down to almost no-thing, as if in a search for ultimate form.

Susan Disley is better known for her ceramics, and even if I had not known this I think I would still find something vessel-like in the forms she arrives at. Mr Blue Sky, shown in the installation shot above, has just three parts, a widened out, light blue “U” shape at bottom that is virtually impossible not to perceive as sea, but could also be read as a cup or similar container, cradling an earth-space that takes up most of the one meter square canvas, and a dark blue line at top that is probably the blue sky of the title. However, this blue strip is darker and heavier than sky. I find it slightly disconcerting.  Surely, in the normal scheme of things, light is up whereas dark/heavy is down. Here it is the other way around. The hint of threat contained in this inversion seems to create an element of seriousness without quite becoming angst. It’s abstract impressionism this, rather than expressionism (acknowledgements to Zak Braiterman for a novel application of this distinction). For the most part it is warmth and joy that the painting communicates, something like that feeling of well-being that comes over me on a hot sunny day. The central part of the painting, a muted earth colour, seems to reflect not just light but warmth back at the viewer.

Where the earth and light blue areas meet they form an indecisive edge, as if we can’t be sure where one ends and the other begins. In nature, boundary lines are fuzzy, but we go ahead and assign them anyway. According to George Lackoff and Mark Johnson, “When things are not clearly discrete or bounded, we still categorize them as such, e.g. mountains, street corners,hedges etc. Such ways of viewing physical phenomena are needed to satisfy certain purposes that we have: locating mountains, meeting on street corners,trimming hedges. Human purposes typically require us to impose artificial boundaries that make physical phenomena discrete…”

Susan Disley, Enclosure I, Enclosure II, oil on board, each is 35cm x 35 cm. Image by courtesy of the artist and HMS

The boundaries in Enclosure I and Enclosure II, are more distinct than in Mr Blue Sky, the paintings appearing to be about the very act of demarcation. Contemplating these abstract images I am impressed by the beauty of the resultant forms and at the same time reminded of the political implications of land enclosure. Imposing artificial boundaries helps us to understand the world around us, and is also a means of exercising power. The birds eye view emphasises this for me, picture making here becoming similar to map making, again a means both of understanding and control.

Sue Disley, Landscape in Pink, 2013, oil on board, 1m x1m, image by courtesy of the artist and HMS

We’re back to fuzzy boundaries in Landscape in Pink, and the interpretive cues are almost so generalised as to lose the landscape association, except that it is virtually impossible to lose, as if we carry it with us in our bodies. Even if there was no intentional link to landscape we would probably find ourselves making the connection anyway. We refer to the very orientation of the support as either “portrait” or “landscape”, hence artists such as Kazimir Malevich and Ad Reinhardt favoured the square format, incidentally Disley’s favoured format also, as if unconsciously she wanted to make the viewing of them as landscapes problematic.

As in Mr Blue Sky there are three areas: an “above”, a “below” and a large expanse between them, this time in warm pink, with other colours pushing through a scumbled light ground. Almost the opposite of the other painting: there’s a heavy dark grey below and light blue above, but if they relate to sea and sky or earth and sky I find it fairly difficult to read that way. More than anything else I think it’s a painting of space. It reminds me of a habit I like to indulge in of gazing into the mid distance. Someone usually asks what I’m staring at and I try to mark out the area of space in three dimensions with my hands: “that’s ridiculous you can’t be staring at that, there’s nothing there”. And it’s something similar that I think is going on here, as if the attempt is being made not so much to paint an area of earth as to paint the space above the area of earth, the space in the mid distance that has nothing in it. Or is it rather that viewing the painting triggers that experience? Because here I am staring and slowly becoming aware of the space between me and the painting. I get nearer so that I can see the brush strokes and the way the surface is constructed, inspecting the canvas edges where the colours underneath the unifying ground are more easily identified, and so it is the painting I am seeing rather than the space between us. Then, as I step back to make sense of the whole it’s that mid space again. The painting wants to be stared at in this way! And it dawns on me that it’s boundaries I am thinking about again, the boundaries within the painting, then the boundary between the painting and it’s environment, between the painting and me, and that is a very fuzzy boundary indeed. I find that I can identify with the painting and also dis-identify, I can be “in it” and “outside it” just by shifting my awareness subtly, in a similar way to the shifting between figure and ground that is part of what happens in these pictures. The painting is a container, but what it contains extends beyond its own boundaries, limited not so much by the edges of the canvas as by my own visual field.

Talking with David Manley, the curator of this exhibition, we note some of Disley’s influences, there’s something of William Scott in here, especially in the drawing, and I wonder if Agnes Martin’s use of muted colour might also be an influence. I think that Scott’s paintings seem to be much more about tone and Martin’s much more about hue and I attempt to characterise Disley’s paintings using the same categories, but come to no conclusion. I do find that I am influenced by them, as getting back to the studio I realise that I have filtered out the high colour in the painting I am currently working on.

Susan Disley – Rosie Kearton is showing at Harrington Mill Studios until 31 July, viewing by appointment email or tel: 07891 262 202

(The Lackoff and Johnson quote is from George Lackoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 1980, University of Chicago Press)

Dan Roach etc.

I wish I had seen the Dan Roach exhibition at Harrington Mill Studios in 2010, having recently viewed a magnificent painting by him at the Double Vision show at the Lion and Lamb Gallery…

…beautifully painted, the way that various layers show through carefully rendered transparent shapes, themselves forming a rhythm that echoes the central figure, and contrasting with other shapes that are also made by revealing underpainted areas but this time as if clearing away the top layer to allow a gestural mark to come right up to the surface.

I am glad that David Manley recently brought my attention to another opportunity to see work by Dan Roach at the upcoming Plane Space exhibition in Worcester Cathedral from 8 to 15 September.

It also includes, Katrina Blannin and Sarah McNulty (they also showed work at Double Vision) as well as Paul Rosenbloom, Gwennan Thomas and Karl Bielik. Thinking of Bielik there’s this good write-up of a studio visit by Paul Bhenke at Structure and Imagery.

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.