Now Has Already Gone! (How Soon is Now, Abstract painting in Nottingham)

Still on the theme of shows I cannot get to, there’s even this one in Nottingham for the next few days, and although I live there I am just not around enough to actually get there. This is especially annoying as I am the one often complaining that it’s difficult to see abstract art on show around here.

That it is a pop up show means it’s here and gone in no time so aptly titled “How Soon is Now?” (27 Jan to 3 Feb only, with an opening night on Saturday 30 January from 6.30pm till 8.30)

Claudia Bose, Make Words Flow, 30 x 30cm

So a very hurried post this one to highlight what’s happening and maybe to say more about it another day.

The venue is the Nottingham Society of Artists gallery, 71 Friar Lane, Nottingham NG1 6DH

Twelve artists work are featured in the show, spanning a range of disciplines; painting, mixed media, screen-printing, photo montage and sculpture. Showing fifty artworks highlighting the inter-connectivity of the featured artists’ work, in particular; adroit handling of colour and imaginative reworking of everyday materials.

Noela Bewery, Counterflow-Khaki

Many of the artists are primarily painters, Noela Bewery, Lois Sabet, Claudia Boese for example, make paintings that are full of colour: acid yellows, warm pinks and vibrant greens. Jai Llewellyn, David Manley and Terry Greene all have a careful eye for colour, form and geometrical arrangements, mapping out elegant, sophisticated paintings.

The work of Rachael Pinks, Lauri Hopkins, John Stockton and Laine Tomkinson transform discarded book covers, cardboard, waste materials or rejected screen prints, re- imagined as vibrant digital collages or stunning mixed media works.

Lois Sabet, Eclipse

Clay Smith and John Stockton make beguiling photo montages that have an immediate and disruping political connection; featuring aircraft, sheep/cars in surreal displacement, or views of the landscape as if from an intrusive reconnaissance flight.

John StocktonUntitled-254 small

That’s it…more another day!

 

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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

 

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

Only quick at first sight

Whilst this pattern looks visually ‘quick’ it is really only quick at first sight. Prolonged study elicits multiple interpretations.

Quaduo, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″

How to encourage the viewer to linger a while, that’s the question.

A few days ago I delivered one of my new paintings to the Old Lockup Studio in Cromford, ready for our pop up show Salon 1, on 18 August. Whilst I was there I tried to persuade Clay Smith and Rachael Pinks that my work took only a few minutes to make and that anyone could do it. When Rachael suggested that there was more thinking time than I was letting on I dismissed her comment, genuinely believing that I did very little of that. Since then I have become more aware of just how long I spend viewing and thinking (sometimes with little or no internal dialogue and sometimes with lots of it – two very different modes of ‘viewing’). Because I enjoy it so much, time flies and I hadn’t been noticing the passing of time. It turns out that it is hours a day, looking, thinking, editing by which I mean turning canvases around to see different variations and paying attention to what changes and how the colour behaves. Early mornings, sometimes I find that I have spent an hour without realising that I had been doing anything it all. And it is through these time distorting experiences that I come to appreciate that these patterns are indeed much slower than they may seem at first sight.

Pop up at the old lock up

The artists exhibiting at the pop-up exhibition Salon 1, the  Summer Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Old Lock Up Studio in Cromford on the 18th August 2012 are: Diane Atherton, Jackie Berridge, Clay Smith, Nick Hersey, Ivan Smith, Anthony Hall, Rachael Pinks, Jen Aitken, Filomena Rodriguez, Amanda Collis, Kim Sharratt, Vitor Azevedo, Nicola Eleanor Waite, Gareth Buxton, David Manley, Andy Parkinson, Justine Nettleton, Deb Allit and Dermot Punnett.

Having a quick look at the web sites has got me in the mood for seeing interesting work of many different types, whether abstract paintings by David Manley, narrative paintings by Jackie Berridge, photomontage of Clay Smith (by the way, am I the only one making a distinction these days between montage and collage, and have I even got it right?) abstract landscape collage paintings by Rachael Pinks, sculpture (?) by Ivan Smith etc.

What I am noticing most is that much of the work is classifiable with a / sign, whether it is sculpture/environmental art, painting/collage, abstract/figurative. I like the “neither this nor that/both this and that” of many of the kinds of work being exhibited. Even my own work which mostly stays put in one specific discipline is increasingly becoming painting/construction.

I think it promises to be a really interesting exhibition, and with music by Corey Mwamba an excellent evening. Come and see it if you can!

Salon 1 at the Old Lock Up Studio, Cromford

Another event I am looking forward to (not least because I am taking part) is Salon 1, the  Summer Exhibition of Contemporary Art at the Old Lock Up Studio in Cromford on the 18th August 2012, for one night only!

Corey Mwamba will be providing the music, a real treat. Catch him on you tube here

What better for a summer’s evening? Come along if you are anywhere near.

More Pinks

Yesterday I wrote about Rachael Pinks‘ painted collage works on paper  at Wirksworth Festival. I said that the shapes of each piece seemed to grow out of their own making, resulting in more or less rectangular pictures, with irregular edges.

Rachael Pinks, Curled up, Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 14 x 19cm. Image by courtesy of the artist

There was also a painting that didn’t have these collage and sculptural qualities. Slightly larger than the other works, acrylic painted on canvas, mounted on board, it has fewer of the landscape associations for me.

Rachael Pinks, A Thimble Full of Red, Acrylic on canvas on board, 33.5 x 27cm. Image by courtesy of the artist

In a way, more abstract, more clearly a composition of rectangular shapes of various sizes and colour, it still looks like it was arrived at rather than pre-planned. If I wanted to read it as landscape I could wonder if the larger shape is a building with other buildings around and possibly a flag or two, the blue ground possibly has some sea or quay side associations like yesterday’s collages. But this reading is, for me, less insistent. It might be more about how the little red squares assert themselves and how the larger red-ish rectangle behind the white attempts to push forward, to gain our attention. Maybe I am reading in content of a different sort if I suggest that it may be about struggle and resolution.

Rachael Pinks at Wirksworth Festival

Some lovely abstract paintings by artist and fellow art blogger Rachael Pinks were on show in the old Grammar School at Wirksworth Festival last weekend.

I say paintings because that’s largely how I experienced them. It may be more accurate to say collages. There is something sculptural about them too, though they are tiny, nearly all works on paper less than 12″ tall, mounted in frames in such a way that you can see the whole object, including the edges. The shape of each piece looks arrived at by the very process of collaging small pieces of painted paper rather than by staying within the confines of a predetermined shape and size. They seem constructed or modelled, so the completed object is never an exact rectangle, it is irregular, handmade.

Rachael Pinks, My Hill, Acrylic and collage on paper, 13 x 12.5cm. Image by courtesy of the artist

Bits of writing show through where collage elements are painted on printed word, I thought newsprint but Rachael tells me they are books.

I find myself reading them as landscapes or seascapes, and some of the titles encourage this, though the images usually find themselves in the process of being painted, rather than in a resemblance of an actual place. ‘Real world’ starting points are more in the artist’s kinaesthetic system than the visual.

The bits of text, in an indirect way, refer to place, and to the artist’s personal history, in that they are taken from three very small poetry books, printed in 1820, seen on the way home one night when walking past in a well-known book shop in Cromford. “These old books just appealed to me when I saw them: the battered covers made me think they had been used and loved”.

Rachael Pinks, Sat Below an Almost Cloudless Sky, Acrylic and Collage on Canvas, 14cm x 19cm. Image by courtesy of the artist

I don’t know why I like it, that in Sat Below an Almost Cloudless Sky I can just make out the word “Rebellion” in capitals near the bottom right of the picture. My wife is sure that it is a picture of a boat, and I can see why. Though it has no such referential specificity, it is difficult not to see the sea in the left hand blue, with the hull of a blue boat at bottom centre, green hills higher up, along with pale sky in which is just one small cloud. I think the title refers to this reading-in, rather than to any ‘a priori’ content.

My favourite is Curled Up

Rachael Pinks, Curled up, Acrylic and Collage on Paper, 14 x 19cm. Image by courtesy the artist

A tiny edge of printed word curls away from the picture plane, whilst beneath the line it creates, a yellow triangle floats in an abstract landscape with figures, that are clearly not figures or landscape but painted, torn and cut paper arranged intuitively to form a charming miniature, intriguing and beautiful.