Studio Visit: Andrew Tift

Andrew Tift, 'Self Portrait', charcoal on paper

Andrew Tift, BP Portrait Prize winning artist, visited the studio yesterday to critique my recent work. I originally approached Andrew to support my grant application to Arts Council, asking whether he would act as a ‘mentor’ and offer more critical support, anticipating that I would be trying to develop some new portraits during my two years. This hasn’t yet materialized, but I do have a few ideas floating around. I’m just waiting for the right opportunity to present itself.

 'Tony Benn', acrylic on canvas, 160 x 168cms,1998

'Harry Coleman (You Know Not The Day Nor The Hour',  160 x 168cms, acrylic on canvas,

Andrew is a very perceptive and committed artist. He is easy to talk to and was also very direct and honest in his responses to my motorway paintings and Scandinavian studies. I sensed that he initially found it difficult to ‘key in’ to looking at my landscapes, as he is just so devoted and singularly committed to portraiture, which we discussed in some detail, but it wasn’t long before we taking the paintings apart, and talking at length about lots of related topics and shared enthusiasms, which included Chuck Close at the Hayward Gallery in 1999 (an exhibition that changed my life! I’m currently reading Close’s ‘The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close in conservation with 27 of his subjects’- an amazing read if, like me, you are interested in the New York Art scene from the 1950-1980’s and all the great ideas about painting during this period); Alfred Munnings; the use of photography as a tool; Bill Brandt; and Pierro Della Francesca’s ‘Baptism of Christ’, which was coincidentally one of our mutual favourite paintings. For many years I’ve held this as my own ‘desert island painting’, and often run up the stairs at the National Gallery when In London to spend some time with just this one work in that room on the first floor. Andrew’s deep passion and enduring conviction in portrait painting was very inspiring when we got onto the subject, and I really enjoyed the couple of hours we spent.

Chuck Close, 'Self Portrait', 180 x 150cms, oil on canvas, 2004

Piero Della Francesca, 'The Baptism of Christ', egg on poplar, 1450s

One of the lingering thoughts I was left with was when we talked about Scandinavia, and how the trip was connected to a desire I had to try working abroad. Andrew wanted to know straight away how I had found this, as he himself has made numerous trips overseas to make work, from New Mexico to Japan, but never found it that satisfying an experience. He explained how he always felt like an outsider and that despite his best efforts always felt that the work he made had a ‘tourist’ quality to it. He said that for him the most satisfying work he has made was when he was able to spend long periods of times with the sitter, but also when he looked closer to home for inspiration, particularly his native Black Country. This view confirmed some of my own feelings about the Scandinavian work compared to the motorways made from places ‘in my own backyard’, so to speak. That’s not to say the contrasts aren’t interesting, but by the evening I found myself excitedly working on some new drawings based on my recent photographs taken underneath the M5 again.

But for me this is a strange and new position, as for the last ten years I have striven to maintain a ‘distance’ from my subject, and keen not to ascribe one as being more important than another. I’m trying to develop new work though, and it is important to maintain an openness to where the work may take you to try and find an honest place with it.

 Andrew Tift, 'Tsukijo Fish Market,' acrylic on canvas,122 x 46cms

Andrew Tift, 'Bandana', charcoal on paper

Andrew Tift, 'Steel Workers', acrylic on canvas

Andrew Tift, 'Absorb', charcoal on paper

Andrew Tift, 'Peace, Love, Hope and Faith (Ken), charcoal on paper

I share Andrew’s views about his own work, and do really enjoy his powerful portraits of Black Country steel workers, and local bikers etc. Our techniques are a million miles apart, but we share many of the same passions in our subject matter (it has been said that his paintings owe as much to the art of Super Realists as to the films of Ken Loach). The imaginative intensity he brings to his portraits (as seen in this portrait of ‘Ken’ which I’ve posted before) is something I really feel I could learn a lot from if I am to develop any new portrait work in the future….It was a great privilege to have Andrew visit the studio.

www.andrewtift.co.uk/

Outside...

I’m obsessed

with cambered tarmacs, concretes,

the washings of rain.

Roy Fisher, excerpt from his poem, ‘Wonders of Obligation’

 Despite all the work that went into my recent exhibition in Rugby, I’ve been very busy in the studio lately working on new things; playing and experimenting with the material I generated in Scandinavia last August.  Much of my thinking has been informed by the reading and other things I have been doing since January. This includes an anthology of Birmingham born poet, Roy Fisher, ‘The Long and Short Of It- Poems 1955-2010’, published by Bloodaxe Books,  which I’ve enjoyed spending some time with most days. Many of Fisher’s poems often detail his long walks through the scarred Staffordshire countryside, and his inventive prose is often punctuated by his descriptions of the sights and details he observes along the way.  One feels like you are walking alongside the him, in good company, and it reminds me a great deal of my own long walks along the Black Country canals that weave through and under West Bromwich, Wednesbury, Great Bridge and Tipton that I used to make when I was younger, and revisit now to paint and draw. I’m looking at things with a different, older and more purposeful eye now though, not with the lost reverie of youth, when any sense of purpose was unimportant.

Roy Fisher, poet

Fisher has long been seen as an ‘outsider’ in the UK poetry and literary establishment (he is also a Jazz musician), and gained early recognition in the US. Interestingly, it was because of the negative connotations for outsiders of "Birmingham" that the city's name did not once appear in Fisher’s early long poem City, which seems to sum up a lot of attitudes towards the second city that I’m sure all its residents have experienced from outsiders at some point. I know I have. But if you think that is bad, try telling people you come from the Black Country.  Especially to a Brummie! I’ve experienced that too, and my Dad, Tipton born and bred, holds a great deal of resentment towards Brummies even now, which is a common feeling in the Black Country. This stems from his experiences of working in factories alongside men from Birmingham in the 60’s, and constantly being talked at by the Birmingham workers  as if he was an idiot because of his thick accent, and being accused of nicking their tools, which the Birmingham workers would not share with their fellow workers from  across the Black Country border. Somehow, to come from the Black Country is to always be seen as ‘outside’.

Edwin Butler Bayliss, 'Furnaces', 1920 approx

I felt I could sense some of this funnily enough in the paintings of Edwin Butler Bayliss that are currently on display at Wolverhampton Art Gallery. His paintings of the Black Country landscape at the height of its heavy industrial past, are all dark, tall chimneys and scudding smoke, and are being celebrated there in a major exhibition of this artist’s work.  Although I found much to enjoy in the paintings when I visited, I couldn’t help but feel they didn’t deserve this sort of attention, and were typical of this period of nineteenth century painting, owing more to France than Tipton. Bayliss was the son of a wealthy local factory owner, and for me the lack of any meaningful portrayal of the workers in these forges and furnaces, apart from a few anonymous figures seen from the back furtively moving across the landscape, who were more often than not working in the most appalling and dangerous conditions, was troubling. I guess his subject was the ravaged and melancholy Black Country landscape, but it served to create a somewhat disturbing ‘distance’ from the reality of the subject and the lives of the people working in Bayliss’s family factory. My own family, from my Dad and his brothers who all worked in factories like their Father, my grandad, and my grandmother’s brothers who all worked in the local mines,  they all worked in places like these and have dark tales to tell. These paintings stirred in me an uneasy sense of alienation.

Edwin Butler Bayliss, 'Evening In The Black Country', oil on canvas, 1920s

Alongside Bayliss’s works, in an adjoining room, were a selection of current interpretations of the Black Country by members of the RBSA. Please feel free to shoot me if I ever make anything like this in my portrayal of the edglands landscape. My A level students make more exciting work.

Slade in 'Flame'

I recently watched ‘Slade In Flame’, the 70’s movie starring the famous Black Country rockers, and despite it actually being filmed in Nottingham and Sheffield, I noticed  as the credits rolled up, it reminded me more of the industrial region that I grew up in. This was something to do with the black and dry gallows humor of Noddy Holder (who was great) and the band, and the other supporting cast that reminded me a great deal of the characters I grew up around that my Dad worked with. But what a bleak and dispiriting film it was too! It was an incredibly cynical tale of the perils and the reality of fame for a rock ‘n’ roll band in this era that left me quite numb as it rather abruptly ended, almost as if the filmmakers had become too jaded themselves to carry on with this story any longer than strictly necessary.   

                                                 Tom Thomson, 'Tamaracks', oil on board

I have also recently read ‘Painting Canada: Tom Thomson and The Group of Seven’, an extensive catalogue for the recent exhibition in 2011 of this group of painters at Dulwich Picture Gallery, which I sadly failed to get to. I opted for Richter at the Tate instead, but think I may have got more from the paintings of these guys, which are pretty new to me. I think it would be too much to describe their work as innovative or as important when compared to others of the period in Europe who they were greatly influenced by, such as the Post-Impressionists, the Expressionists and Munch, but I have really enjoyed the many strengths and qualities to be found in these often dynamic and colourful canvasses. Thomson’s small ‘plein air’ paintings have a special intense and dense quality that lifts them to another level, that I think is lost a little when they are developed into the studio pieces. I had a similar comment levelled about my own work at Rugby recently, which compared the energy in a smaller piece to a larger painting of the same motif where the person felt the energy had become ‘dissipated’. ‘Plein Air’ studies are always going to possess a certain quick, spontaneous energy by the very nature of how they are made.  Many people prefer Constable’s oil sketches for the same reason, and it was also commented on at the recent Thomas Fearnley exhibition at the Barber Institute, but the studio pieces are often something else entirely. But still, it is an issue I have been considering since the Rugby exhibition, but more in relation to scale, and have been working on many smaller pieces on the studio since in pastel and oil on paper.

                                                   Tom Thomson, 'Sunset', oil on canvas,

Coincidently, the Group Of Seven were greatly influenced by an exhibition of Contemporary Scandinavian Art held in New York in 1912, and shared an affinity with their ‘fondness for great, open spaces and the magic radiance of the arctic aurora’, and ‘an exhilarating sense of direct communication with nature and natural forces’. It is these qualities that I admire in the Groups’ work and their relationship with their native Canada, and need to share this with the wider world as they headed off on their various painting expeditions. Here is a good example by J.H McDonald in his ‘Beaver Dam’ painting of 1919. I also really like Lawren Harris’s stylised paintings of icebergs and mountains, which in their stylization possess an austerity that I find appealing.

E H McDonald, 'Beaver Dam', oil on canvas

E H McDonald, 'Dam and Birches', oil on canvas

Lawren Harris, 'North Shore, Lake Superior'

current studio work Jan-Mar 2013

McDonald in writing of the exhibition of Scandinavian art and comparing them with the Group’s ideals wrote, ‘The painters began with nature rather than art’. My own responses to landscape with my recent motorway paintings have begun the other way around, they are more about art than nature. I’ve been trying to bring the two areas closer together with my own Scandinavian work.  

There seems to be an ‘outsider’ theme to this post, and that seems to be the theme that is emerging from my Scandinavian work as I start to get deeper into it. The experience we had in Norway, and the feelings of abandonment we felt, coloured the whole trip, and also left me questioning my relationships with people. As I’ve worked on these pieces in the last few months, I keep coming back to these issues and my own persistent sense of being an ‘outsider’…

                                   





Black Country Legend....

'Alfie', oil on canvas, 120 x 180cms, 2007

I received a phone call last night from Stuart, his son, that Alfie Smith, Black Country poet and comedian had sadly passed way last night aged 72 after quite a long period of illness. Alfie was also a subject for one of my portrait paintings in 2006, when I was working in  Sandwell with a research grant  with the intention of trying to open up my portrait work.  In fact, Alfie was the first subject to pose for me in his home in West Bromwich, which backed onto my old junior school. Only when I started chatting with him did I realise that I also been to school with Stu, who I met once again at Alfie’s seventieth birthday party which readers of this blog may remember me posting nearly two years ago to the day.

Alfie was a very funny man, and very generous with the tea and biscuits on the very rainy morning I visited him to draw. He was very proud of his Black Country roots and his poetry, spoken in his rich and thick local accent reflected this,  his performances attracting quite a following.  I’m very grateful for the time I spent with him, in which I made two good drawings,  that helped give me the confidence to pursue what would eventually develop into a major portrait painting commission that would last over two years, depicting the residents of Sandwell.  My painting of ‘Alfie’, a very large portrait, was the first painting that I made from the extensive drawings I made in the community.  I’m never sure to this day whether he liked it or not, but he affirmed that he did. He gave a brilliant speech at the opening to my exhibition of all this work in 2008 at West Bromwich Town Hall- it had a real edge that drew everyone in. The painting is now permanently on display at the Council House in Sandwell, where he used to work, which seems fitting. He will be really missed.

'Alfie', drypoint, 2008



Cold, cold, cold...

It’s been freezing today. It was just the perfect weather to take fifteen students up to the Lickey Hills in Worcestershire, on a drawing trip this morning, which is what I foolishly did. Having gone to a bit of trouble organizing things I was loathe to cancel, and to be honest early this morning, the sun was shining bright and it seemed like it was going to be a nice crisp March day, just right for walking the woods sketchbook and camera in hand.  I couldn’t have been more wrong. When we got there, the milder Birmingham breeze had been replaced by a biting bitterly cold wind up on the higher ground. It was long before everyone beat a hasty retreat to the nearby Visitor Centre café to warm up.

I was really fed up with the students though, as, despite the cold weather, most of them in a typical teenage way had dressed so poorly for the outdoors in flimsy tee shirts and the thinnest of jackets, if they wore a jacket at all, that it made working impossible. I was determined to lead by example and I headed off with my sketchbook and I-pad and made these two studies, the second one finished at home from some drawings I had made. My example failed, and most of them stayed put in the café. I felt they had wasted my time and their own as we headed back onto the minibus, and like the grumpy old man that I felt, I told them so….