Edward Chell's 'Garden of England'

More from the ‘Edgelands’ book (yes, it does take me ages to read anything): this time the paintings of Edward Chell. His ‘Garden of England’ series of paintings are of particular interest. They depict the ‘Vague Terrain’ of the motorway verges on the M2: the wild, unobserved flowers and hardy plant life that live there. These sights have often interested me too, and I’ve often sketched some of the flowers whilst stuck in traffic, so it is fascinating to see another artist produce this amazing body of work inspired by these ‘edgelands’ locations that inhabit our periperhal vision as we speed by in our cars. Below is a statement from the artist about this work that I found on his website: www.edwardchell.com:

The Garden of England; paintings by Edward Chell exhibited at Turner Contemporary Open, Margate and selected Little Chef restaurants
June 27th to September 7th 2009


Driving down the M2 one summer’s day, I got stuck in traffic, rolled down my window and gazed out onto what looked like the corner of a foaming English meadow. I had travelled this way many times before, but had never stopped and seen the motorway verge close up. The way the embankment reared up steeply, the abundance of wildflowers with butterflies weaving between them and crickets whirring above the idling engines took me back to childhood memories of country lanes; a lost idyll.

This series of paintings of motorway verges in Kent, The Garden of England, grew out of this moment. For me these present a fascinating paradox. On one level, the motorway network presents a nightmarish vision of the asphalting of our green and pleasant land. But these roadside habitats, referred to by the Highways Agency as ‘Soft Estate’, amount to an unofficial national nature reserve of some 30,000 hectares, which provides precious havens for wildlife; vital corridors free from agro chemicals and human disturbance.

As I painted these motorscapes, I realised that these artificially created and sometimes carefully planted ‘natural’ environments connect to the great tradition of English Landscape, which reached its ‘golden age’ in the eighteenth century. At this time, designers such as Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown created gardens such as Chatsworth and Petworth to be experienced in motion, on foot or on horseback, and viewed as a tour during which the elements changed in their aesthetic relations, presenting different aspects, depending on which point they were seen from. Brown’s ideas went on inspire a whole swathe of English landscape painters.

Similarly, as we drive, our relationship to the sculpted ravines of motorway gorges, sudden lateral views and bridges changes; different vistas open out and suddenly shut down as we move through the landscape at high speed. My paintings interrupt this commonplace visual experience to give people a kind of laterally viewed clip of a landscape, normally encountered in milliseconds.
The sensation of flickering verges, a peripheral green blur, can contribute to the soporific effect of motorway driving. ‘Tiredness Kills’ says the slogan, ‘Take a Break’. It is at this point, when we pull off the road to break our journey, that we experience time differently, and our relationship to our surroundings is shaken out of its passivity.

In addition to the Turner Contemporary Open, these paintings are being shown in entrance vestibules or behind cashiers’ desks in Little Chef restaurants. I want people to see them on their way to and from their cars, like a sideways glance, a sly, half-seen half-stolen flirtation with untouchable places of ravishing stillness out of the corner of the eye. Little Chef, with its historic association with British motorways, seems a fitting place for people to experience these paintings and catch a glimpse, a fleeting vision of these places they might never have noticed, but which surround them on their motorway journeys.

Edward Chell 2009

Cy Twombly 1928-2011

I was very saddened to hear of the death of painter Cy Twombly, at the age of 83 in Rome this week. I’m a huge fan of his work, which has famously divided critics over the yerars. Indeed, I’ve found myself defending his work to sceptical friends, artists and not, over the years too. The paintings spoke to me enormously, and I never understood the problems people had with them: they just seemed to express so deeply what it is to be human with their scribbled marks and paint pushed, pulled, dragged, smudged, thrown, swirled, fumbled and found, in that way painting does so much more than other media. They were the expression of the ‘experience’ of painting, as much as great paintings that stood on their own, seemingly willed to life.

I’m sounding a bit flowery. Twombly seems to brings this out in me. Not just me though. Here a few really interesting testaments I‘ve cut and pasted from The Guardian to share on the blog. They are from a range of other great painters that I admire too. As Fiona Rae remarks below, his death does seem to really mark an end of an era in painting and art.



Howard Hodgkin

I can't remember exactly my first encounter with his work, but it was a knockout. I think it was in Philadelphia: there was, or is, a room in a gallery there totally devoted to his work [Fifty Days at Iliam, 1978, inspired by Homer's Iliad]. The experience was one of total immersion. He painted with such emotional freedom. I went to see the new exhibition of his work alongside Poussin's at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London last week, and they were well matched. Much of his work refers to Poussin, as well as to other artists.

I never met him, unfortunately, though I think I would have been very uncomfortable if I had: I would have felt jealous. Painters don't necessarily get on well with one another. What would I have been jealous of? I think the fact he made his work so expressive in all sorts of ways, without it becoming expressionist. At a time when painting is perhaps not taken as seriously as it once was, he was an extraordinary beacon for other painters. Certainly I learned from him, from that total emotional openness. His work became increasingly sensitive and romantic.

I don't have a favourite painting; and if I did, I wouldn't tell you

Maggi Hambling

For me, he was the greatest living painter. The life force he achieved with the touch of his paint could certainly not be achieved by any mechanical means. He was so moved by his subjects – the upward thrust of a tulip, the fragility of a rose, the noise of a street market, the abandon of a bacchanal – that he moves us, profoundly.

It is as if his paintings are being made in front of me: they are not dead, finished things. The juxtaposition of life and death is finely balanced in every mark: the paint breathes. I am taken into unknown territory that is made immediately familiar.
In these days of so much dry, clever, soulless trivia, completely lacking in worthwhile subject matter, Twombly stood a towering hero. His mixture of intimacy and grandeur, force and delicacy, creates a sexy dynamism. He advanced the language of paint – from late Titian, through Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Rothko and Pollock – and so takes his place among the elite. He is dead, but the courage of his work lives on.



Michael Craig-Martin

I first encountered Twombly as a student in the early 60s. I've been thinking about how his work seemed then, how it was thought about – which I'm not sure is the same as it is now. The dominant art of the period was abstract expressionism: a very assertive, extrovert, macho art like that of Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning, very gestural. And then there was Twombly's work, which was introspective and fragile. It was also abstract, but the mood could not have been more different.

One of the amazing things about his work, from the earliest days to now, is that you can see him in it – right through the whole thing. It is a very sustained and powerful body of work. But in his later years, when he was in his 70s, the paintings themselves got bigger and the gestures got bigger; they became much more extrovert.

He brought a certain kind of mark-making to art – that slightly childlike feeling of scribbling on paper, but which suddenly becomes very sensual and full of potential meaning. These were the kind of marks that didn't really exist in painting before him: seedy-like marks and scratchings. You can see that, say, graffiti art came after him: he is the person before [Jean-Michel] Basquiat.

He started this thing of being delicate and understated, but more sensual than emotional. His works showed different possibilities in painting. Now that he's famous and his work is familiar, it's easy to forget what an invention that was, what unknown territory this was.

The paintings themselves are very obscure, full of fleeting meanings. If you're not attracted to that, and want an explicit subject matter and message – which people often do today – these paintings are probably too subtle, ungiving. They're like a mental speculation - when your mind is slightly wandering. They're not didactic.

He was such a distinctive voice; there wasn't anybody else quite like him.



Fiona Rae

It feels like the end of an era. With Robert Rauschenberg and Sigmar Polke also gone, most of the major heroes of contemporary painting have disappeared.

His paintings have influenced me enormously. They seem full of an improvisatory spirit and embody a freedom to express and include whatever he wanted – whether words from poems, or scrawled cartoonish hearts, or loopy, repetitive drawing. To me they seemed full of humour, as well as the spiritual profundity for which he is the well-known poster boy.

His sculptures had a fantastic sense of the bathetic and hand-made, too: he was just as likely to include bits of scrunched-up coloured tissue paper on top of an object as more tasteful, sculptural materials. His paintings straddled high and low, with intensity and feeling, like sad bouquets.



Nicholas Culliman

As a student, I went to the Menil Collection in Houston, which has a whole gallery devoted to Twombly's work. It had a huge effect. When you see a range of his work you realise how adept he was at handling paint.

The first time I met him was about four years ago, when I worked on the 2008 Tate Modern retrospective with Nicholas Serota. We both spent a lot of time talking to Cy about his life and work. The word genius is used quite often, but he's probably the only person I would mark down in that category: the way his mind worked was so riveting. All kinds of things would make him laugh – not just things that were scholarly, but things that were bawdy. That combination of high and low was really crucial. It was a completely natural, spontaneous reaction; it wasn't premeditated. He was an incredibly warm, generous, thoughtful person.

It would be a shame if the work seemed different after his passing. It has an element of melancholy, but always leavened with a sense of the pleasures of life. His position in art history is assured. We're now able to go to Paris and see his ceiling in the Louvre, a permanent commission, and his uniquely beautiful works, which proliferate in museums around the world.

Nicholas Cullinan was co-curator of Tate Modern's 2008 Twombly retrospective, and of the current exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery



Brice Marden

I remember seeing his Discourses on Commodus paintings in 1964, soon after I moved to New York. It was the show [artist and critic] Donald Judd famously panned. There was a centralised grid and a lot of roof paintings, and I was struck by the combination of that grid and the looseness of the painting. I used to wonder what happened to them, why I never saw them around. Now, reading the obituary in the New York Times, I see that everyone hated them. Later, when I became [Robert] Rauschenberg's assistant, he bought Twombly's Panorama, white chalk on black or brown; it was quite a treat to see that every day.

I call myself an abstract painter, and he's one of the greats, so he's definitely an influence. Cy wasn't afraid of paint, and he made it do the most beautiful things. I don't think he was too affected about whether or not he was fawned over on the art scene. He was amazingly relaxed, very comfortable with himself. I never heard him discussing his work, or Roman poets. You knew he liked to hang out and watch things; everything else went into the painting.

It's always very interesting to see him in relation to Jasper [Johns] and Rauschenberg. They all came out of abstract expressionism, but Jasper and Bob are realists, they used real images; Cy stayed abstract. There is that European touch, a certain elegance – and I don't mean that in a derogatory sense.

Yesterday, I was trying to imagine him at work. I can see Richter, all these other people, but it's hard to see him physically applying the paint. There was the relaxed demeanour he had, but such an intensity to the paintings. Was the relaxed demeanour because he had to be that way to work up that kind of intensity? I don't know. I sent him a note once, about his sculpture show in Basel, and he told me he taped it on his wall. It was an unbelievable show.

'...a hundred years old'

I’ve been trying to get going my ideas around the ‘Stolen Car’/nocturnal motorway scenes in the studio over the last few weeks. I’ve been making some small oil studies on painting paper and card based on a set of photos made last autumn on location there. I’ve avoided using photos for years, but there seemed something a bit too unsafe about working on location at this particular place that made me be more pragrammatic about it. At this early stage, the ideas seemed more important than the way I developed them.




Still, I do prefer working on location and getting these studies moving away from photos to ideas about painting is proving challenging. It’s not as exciting as being there and taking my preferred perceptual approach. I must also admit however, that after years of not using photos I do have a clearer idea of what I do and don’t want from them. Here are a couple of the ones I’ve made so far.

This one of the train line, above, reminds me of Edward Hopper’s images a little.



(Never have I been more disappointed with an exhibition than at Edward Hopper’s retrospective at Tate Modern a few years ago. The technique seemed fairly unexciting and the work functioned more successfully as images than paintings. Even these seemed tired after a bit though, and I really disliked the later stuff like the image below which seemed so mannered in it’s ideas about emptiness. It was Luc Tuymans, who had a brilliant retrospective in the adjoining gallery who made me look at them from a different and more interesting perspective, when he referred to Hopper’s figures as being like ‘puppets in toy houses’. This seemed a more interesting proposition).

This other studies above are views through the trees of the motorway above me, with the motorway lights shining like two suns.

I’ve been making these to some lovely music in the studio, including the new Felice Brothers album, ‘Celebration, Florida’, and Bon Iver’s self titled new album, which is my favourite thing so far this year. I’ve also been loving Doug Paisley’s ‘Constant Companion’ over the last few months. It’s the sort of album you feel like you have listened to all your life. It’s like putting on a pair of the most comfortable slippers at the end of a hard day.

Good Night, Big Man

I’m deeply saddened to hear of the death of Clarence Clemons, saxophonist and 40 year member of Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band this weekend. . He died, aged 69, after complications from a stroke.

I’m a huge Bruce fan, and Clarence’s loss feels enormous. The E Street Band have just felt like this unstoppable gang over the years, this ‘Band of Brothers’, as Bruce has called it, and Clarence has always felt like Bruce’s right hand man. The warmth felt by fans towards him whenever I have seen them live has always swept up from the audience, as he has stepped up to the mike to deliver another beautiful and passionate sax solo. He is totally irreplaceable.

A friend texted me the news saying he had played ‘Jungleland’ really loud in tribute. That’s a wonderful choice amongst so many iconic solos to choose from and I did the same. It’s well documented how much Bruce pushed Clarence to deliver that solo time and time again in the ‘Born To Run’ sessions.

There are lots of heartfelt tributes on the net, including one from Bruce on his website. I’ve provided below a youtube link to a song performed by some of the band which for me seems to sum up some of my feelings. ‘If I Should Fall Behind’ is a beautiful song, which these days always makes me think of my brother, Stu. I always find myself wiping away a tear after this particularly lovely performance, which has a great solo from Clarence. It must be terrible for Bruce and the rest of the band as they mourn the loss of their brother.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04mRvBaEku4

Good night, Big Man

Howard Hodgkin Revealed

On holiday in Devon last week I saw a wonderful exhibition of Howard Hodgkin Prints that really blew me away. It was at the Burton Art Gallery in Bideford, which I’ve previously visited, and have always seen some great stuff. Despite it’s sleepy location it exhibits some really contemporary work. It has a terrific craft gallery too, where you can pick up pieces by top ceramicists like the mighty Sven Baeur, who’s studio is based in Devon, relatively cheaply.

The Hodgkin exhibition was a real surprise and incredibly exciting. I’m more familiar with the paintings, but these prints were a revelation in their variety and sheer formal and technical inventiveness. The scale of the pieces was really impressive too, with some over six feet wide. It was just a great experience being in the room with all this colour and light. It felt really joyful.

In the shop later I also browsed through a book on popular printmaker, Angie Lewin, whose relief woodcut prints (above) seems to be everywhere these days. I really like the strong, bold graphic use of line and pattern in her work, and it made me think I should do more in print with some of my own paintings of wild flowers.

It was Keith Arnatt’s text pieces in the last blog, Angie Lewin’s prints in this one. One day I may find the time to follow some of these things through….

The Edges of Keith Arnatt

This ‘Edgelands’ book, which I blogged about in May, just gets better. I’m not sure my wife is convinced though when I tell her what a great chapter I’ve just read on ‘Containers’, or ‘Landfill’. She just looks at me with pity.

The chapter on ‘Landfill’ was particularly interesting, and led me to look up the art of photographer Keith Arnatt (above) who spent a lot of time photographing objects from his local tip and in landfill sites, as well as other ‘edgelands’ landscapes, in his home of Wales. The photos owe a lot to post-war documentary photography, which he was strongly influenced by, and also still life photography and painting in these colour photos of decomposing rubbish. He was apparently interested in the ‘conjunction between beauty and banality’. I like that phrase. I might nick it. I’m really warming to this edgelands theme.



I was also deeply moved by Arnatt’s series ‘Notes From My Wife’. They are jottings and reminders written by his wife, Jo, in the early 90s. Soon after, she was struck down by a brain tumor and Arnatt nursed her until her death in 1996. He decided to collect the most poignant of the notes and photographed 18 of them. Taken out of context and blown up, they become surreal. Photographer Marin Parr has said that ‘this is Arnatt's strength as a photographer: he understood how the smallest detail or observation could be transformed by the act of isolation’.

Most of my own favourite art, be it paintings or literature or music, reveals the poignancy and strength in the details. It is these things that, as painter Andrew Wyeth said, help to keep the art from being ‘round-shouldered’. I’ve got a few ideas for paintings based on bits of text and type that have been sat on the studio table for ages. This has inspired me to think more seriously about them…

Absolute Reality

'Anwar', oil on canvas, 110 x 150cms

In the morning you face a blank canvas and five hours later you have created something entirely new that did not exist before. It seems sort of miraculous really, and I hope I never lose this sense of wonder that painting continues to offer me. So this is the painting that I have made of ‘Anwar’ from the drawing I posted on the blog in May. I’ve been avoiding portraits for ages, but have wanted to paint this one for some time. After the recent difficulties I’ve encountered in my painting, it felt nice to return to familiar ground. Not that it felt safe, more important to reconnect with some of the core values at the centre of my practise.

The reason I painted this portrait is that I’m entering it for an open competition at The Public in West Bromwich, with a couple of other portraits. If one of them gets selected I’ll be pleased and it would be one of the few opportunities I seem to get to exhibit the portrait work, as most commercial galleries just won’t consider them. I think most successful portrait painters get initially recognized through selection in open competitions. Success in these might encourage conservative galleries to take more of a risk with what they show.

I’m pleased with how I’ve handled Anwar’s skin tones and colour. I’ve been painting a much broader spectrum of people from different ethnic groups since my ‘Seek My Face’ project in 2008, and I’ve been surprised how neglected this area seems to be in portrait painting. It is very difficult to find more historical precedents in the European painting I’m most familiar with.

Like a lot of black skin, Anwar had more reflection in his face which I chose to leave out as it seemed to interfere with the direction and mood the painting seemed to lead me (the paintings do lead you most of the time, and you try and follow). You have to remember that the paintings are not an attempt to depict reality, but are my attempt to create something that has it’s own concrete reality in the world.