Not Norway

oil on canvas, 170 x 170cms

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This isn’t Norway. This isn’t a painting of a forest. Those aren’t trees set against the dark background. They are in fact the reflections in a canal in Smethwick of the concrete columns that support the enormous motorway that roars above. The scene couldn’t feel further from Scandinavia, and yet, as soon as I finished this large canvas the other day after many hours work, I was immediately struck by how much it felt like the Norwegian forest I found myself in exactly a year ago this week, especially the long nights staring into the silent, dark spaces between the trees. So maybe this is my first major painting of Norway? Or Smethwick? Who knows?

In response to my last post where I discussed the enjoyment of working on a piece for much longer, over six weeks in fact, compared to the usual one day I take on a piece, I enjoyed working on this in one sustained effort so much the other day that I found myself reflecting once again on the approach that I have taken for the last ten years or so. These are hard won things. The deep level of concentration required and total immersion in the act of painting was such a fulfilling experience.

I showed my wife, Diane, a photograph of the painting later. She was not particularly impressed. She questioned why would she be interested in an image like this? Her words bought to mind a quote by Schopenhauer, via Ad Rienhardt, that:

‘Interest is of no interest in art’

I like this quote. This idea is one of the other key things I’ve been mining in my painting for the last ten years.  

Notes From The Studio....

We are living in this country under an extremist government. Every day we witness a systemic attack on society’s poor, which the government seem to openly despise; the vulnerable, with the shameless treatment of the disabled and the sick at the sharp end of the Atos axe and the vile bedroom tax; and the state, as it is ruthlessly stripped back and away as we step back to a pre-war England that serves the vested interest of the very few at the behest of the rest of society (but of course, there is ‘no such thing as society’). And we have an opposition party that sits dithering at the side, not wanting to rock the boat, upset the middle. I am genuinely frightened every day, and angry, but also feel very disempowered and helpless, like a lot of people, about what to bloody do about it, and where we will be as a nation at the end of these catastrophic times.

I recently enjoyed a series of Ken Loach films on Film 4, including the recent ‘The Spirit of 45’. I found this documentary about the building of the Welfare State after the Second World War by the Attlee led Labour Government incredibly inspiring and affirming that things can change for the common good when working people and communities work collectively together. The final part of the film however, which covered the rise of Thatcher and the brutal beginning of her assault on the State and working class communities, particularly in the North and Midlands, and the celebration of an ideology based on individualism and competition and materialism depressing viewing. It also highlighted just how dangerous these times are that we are living in in this country as this coalition drag us gleefully back to pre-war times, when any societal gains to be made are for the benefit of the very few rich, not the many. Britain is a country of such enormous inequalities. So no, don’t ask me to be pleased about the birth of the next ‘heir to the throne’.

Archive photo of the construction of the M6 motorway, Bescot, near Walsall 1960s

I’ve travelled fairly extensively around the UK and Europe, and visited New York a few times too, but probably, and somewhat bizarrely, one of my favourite journeys is the small stretch of the M6 between Walsall and Birmingham. It has a grey, bleak beauty that really appeals to my sensibility. I love the views of the rusty train sidings, the large, anonymous, block factories, the football stadiums, digital advertising hoardings, the wire and steel fields of pylons in the skyline; the skeletal frames of the gas stations, the looping concrete highway of Spaghetti Junction as you leave at exit 6 to swoop roller coaster-like into the city, taking in the strange architecture of Star City on the left and the older buildings of Aston on the right. You feel pulled underground into the belly of Birmingham by the Aston Expressway and spat out again on the other side by the Queensway tunnel, which has taken you in and out so quickly that you haven’t witnessed anything other than the enveloping tunnel walls that speed past. For the same reasons regarding the industrial, bleak view I also really like the small stretch of the M5 from Junction 5 to 1, which brings you into West Bromwich. I travel this most weeks as I visit my parents, and it is underneath here, just by Junction 2 in fact, that my current paintings are based in a location in the canal basin near Smethwick hidden underneath the monolithic, roaring motorway above. 

These journeys into cities are romantic, even in their own way the ones into Birmingham or West Brom. Two other favourite journey’s like this include the trip into New York from the airport on the New Jersey Turnpike, which has many mythic rock ‘n’ roll associations, from Bruce to Dylan to Chuck Berry. It’s incredibly exciting whizzing along, dodging in and out of the busy lanes of the highway as the impressive New York skyline starts to appear, mirage-like, on the horizon.

  I also really like the trip into Paris from the autoroute, as you head through the outlying Parisien suburbs of graffited tower blocks and concrete tenements (a place brilliantly captured in the film ‘La Haine’ in 1995). These are the places that the Parisien working class were forced into decades ago, as the French capital became more gentrified and exclusive. You can see the same thing currently happening in London where all the current shameless benefit cuts are forcing people out of their long established communities. Anyway, my first trip to Paris was accompanying students on a residential visit. It was particularly memorable as being my first trip to this mainland Europe, travelling overnight on the Eurotunnel and reading all about David Bowie, Brian Eno and Iggy Pop and their creative adventures in Berlin in the 1970’s. It seemed to aptly set the scene as we headed into the city and the museums and galleries. In the next few days I would find myself understanding painting on a much more profound level than ever before, staggering from David to Courbet to Picasso and everything else, totally giddy, leaving museums with pockets full of postcards I would line around my small hotel room each night. Seeing these great artworks in the context of this great city made me realize just how important painting really was, and how different Europe’s relation to art and culture was than England’s tired skepticism. 

 'La Haine', film still, 1995

I love travelling (it was this time last year I was in Scandinavia), but this romanticism for the local motorway journey, underscores a lot of my current thinking about the idea of home and identity as I develop my interest in landscape, in particular the edgelands of my native Black Country. It’s surprising to me that my landscape work has settled into looking at the places I have always known, yet I realize that this is what all the landscape painters I admire, current and past, have done. It’s not really profound, but it’s only now that I’m trying to carve my own place in painting the land that I have really reflected upon it more deeply.

The recent death of Thatcher bought up a lot of memories and feelings about her destructive ‘legacy’ on the Black Country and the industrial landscape of the West Midlands when I was growing up in the 1980’s. I’m trying to bring some of this experience into some of the new paintings I’m working on to exhibit in Nuneaton in January next year. The exhibition will be called ‘Black Highway’.

 

I’ve been working on this current painting (above) for about six weeks, which is not like me (readers of this blog may know that I normally try and execute my paintings in one session), but I’m enjoying it. It’s borne a bit out of circumstance, as my summer holidays these days are taken up looking after my children, whereas before becoming a parent the six weeks break were a very productive time. Now I have to accept it has to be a break from the studio. It’s not finished yet. I’ve been looking at the treatment of architecture in Giotto’s paintings in the last couple of days for some new ideas. I’ve particularly struggled with the factory in the background, as I remain unconvinced by what I’ve done.

This summer I have also become a parent again to a beautiful baby girl, which has been lovely. I’ve therefore only been able to work on this painting for a couple of hours each evening after throwing the kids in bed, but it has been a good experience. I’ve just been chucking a great deal of paint and turpentine on the surface, rubbing it back, building it up, responding to accident, thinking each day in between parenting (I know doesn’t sound good!) about what next, until I return each evening. I’ve wanted to throw a few different things in the mix with my painting for some time, and with my new arrival, it looks like this may be the way I’ll be doing things for a while. It’s all good though…..it certainly helps keep things in perspective.

We Are Alive....

This was an interesting article from The Scotsman ahead of Ken Currie’s forthcoming exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, which I’m hoping to visit at some point:

‘THE oil painting, once the pinnacle of artistic expression, has fallen off its easel.

Ken Currie, one of Scotland’s most critically acclaimed ­artists, believes art students today are no longer prepared to dedicate years to mastering the canvas and instead view the video installation and conceptual work popularised by the Turner Prize as shortcuts to success and fame.

On the eve of his first exhibition in Scotland for more than a decade, Currie, who was part of the 1980s art movement known as “The New Glasgow Boys”, said the personality of artists has become more important than the work they produce and that art schools are increasingly hostile to ­traditional painting.
He said of painting: “It is a very difficult way of making art and I think people are neglecting it because it is too much like hard work.

“The art school is kindergarten, then it takes eight to ten years to gain your voice visually, so from 20 to 40 years old, you are trying to develop your work and I think that, for a lot of people now, is just too slow.
“They want an instant result, they want instant success and fame and a lot of them are not prepared to go through that hard graft.”

Despite the fact that he ­believes painting remains in “rude health”, students keen to paint are being ill-served by art schools.

“The younger generation want to learn how to paint, but this is not being delivered at arts schools in Scotland and all over the world,” he said. “Most of the tutors in art schools, with a few notable exceptions, are themselves deeply hostile to painting. They themselves are not painters.”

Ken Currie, 'Nightwork', oil on canvas, 210 x 270cms, 2013

The artist also believes the quality of education at the Glasgow School of Art is suffering as a consequence of the city’s success in playing host to so many winners of the Turner Prize for Modern Art. Since 2005, 29 per cent of all Turner Prize nominees and three winners – Simon Starling (2005), Richard Wright (2009) and Martin Boyce (2011) – have all been graduates of the GSA.

Currie said: “The problem with Glasgow School of Art is that it is a victim of its own success. What has happened is that since the 1980s and the emergence of these artists and the Turner Prize generation, is that lots of people want to go to Glasgow School of Art, not just in the UK but around the world. Of course, in these times, that is such a temptation for the Art School and they are packing them in like sardines.

“A lot of them are paying top dollar and I think what is happening is that there is not enough staff to cope with the number of students.

“I find it significant that two years ago Glasgow School of Art came third bottom for higher education institutions in terms of student satisfaction. A lot of students go there with high hopes, given the high reputation of the school, and come out feeling just completely disillusioned.

“They should get more staff in, or accept fewer students and stop being greedy for money. It is as simple as that. It is also part of what has happened over the past 30 years which is this dreadful academicisation of art. You get artists who are called things like ‘Professors’, or a paper, or video artist goes in and they are called ‘research fellows’.

“It completely academicises it. It professionalises it. When I was there 30 years ago, it was absolutely not the case. A few of the tutors may have been old buffers, but they painted and they were not bothered about what they were called.”

No-one from the Glasgow School of Art was available to comment.

After graduating in 1983, Currie contributed in 1985 to the New Image Glasgow exhibition along with Peter Howson, the late Steven Campbell and Adrian Wiszniewski, the artists who collectively became known as the “New Glasgow Boys”.

His new exhibition, Meditations on Portraiture, will be unveiled this week at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh and features ten new paintings, including Night Work, in which two men are in the process of making a death mask, a macabre object which runs as a motif through the new collection.

The National Portrait Gallery already displays Currie’s haunting painting Three Oncologists, a spectral portrait of three cancer specialists who work at the oncology unity at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee.

During the 1980s, Currie’s art celebrated a romanticised red Clydeside of heroic shipyard workers and firebrand shop stewards and was a political response to the policies of Margaret Thatcher, who he believed was destroying the culture of labour. The artist’s focus may have moved on from Scotland’s labour history to deeper, more universal questions of mortality and the human condition, but he still felt the demise of his bête noire should be marked.

“I was fascinated by the whole funeral, the kind of ­ritual and how the power ­behind this society shows its hand and how reverential they are to their own. 

“I did download Ding Dong (The Witch is Dead). I felt I had to make a con­tribution.” 

 

Ken Currie, 'Unfamiliar Reflection' oil on canvas, 210 x 150cms, 2009 

Currie makes many salient points about painting and art education. I’m heavily involved in both, and although I do not lecture in Higher Education, I am very aware of current trends in universities from the annual visits to the degree shows I make with students, and the help I give them in preparing to apply and then be interviewed for various art and design degrees. I agree with him that painting takes many years to become any good at. Another favourite painter, Alex Katz has often said that it takes the years you study and then about another seven years painting every day to become pretty good, and I agree with that.  That’s what I did. I would just add that it is more like seven years plus the rest of your life! 

I also agree with Currie’s assertion about how dreadful the academicisation of art has become and the need for all staff to be studying PHD’s or to be known as ‘Professors’, or ‘research fellows’. I’m never convinced about what much of it adds up to and how meaningful much of this research is, but more importantly I feel it goes against the grain of what it is to try and be an artist. It seems that artists feel the need to be seen as being on an equal footing with more academic research. It is a different model for looking at the world and this is what makes it unique and worth celebrating. So much of the research I have read on sites such as academia.eu is pretty banal stuff. You feel like shouting, ‘Go away and just make something for goodness sake!’ However, I will always defend the idea of education for education’s sake, and will never buy into the Thatcherite idea of it being a ‘luxury’, or for Blairites ‘good for the economy’. I never want to question it’s value on those terms.

Despite all this talk lamenting the state of painting I was really impressed by the painting on show, which included my own (although I’m not necessarily impressed with that, I hasten to add) at the Worcester Open when I attended the Private View last Friday night. It certainly seemed to be a discipline in rude health in the region, and seemed to hold it’s own in the exhibition amongst a broad range of work in photography, sculpture, print and video. There were lots of exciting examples of committed painters in control of their craft, but also with some very clever, sly, witty, and serious ideas. Here are a few examples: 

 

Neill Fuller, 'Flea it', oil on canvas, 30 x 45cms, 2012

 

Carolyn Blake, 'Return To The Silence' oil on canvas, 13 x 18cms, 2012

 

K J Pocock, 'Brutal Facade', acrylic on canvas,  50 x 70cms, 2012

http://www.carolynblake.com/
http://neillfullerpaintings.com/home
http://www.kjpocock.com/

 

 

Fingers In Pies...

I delivered the two paintings that were selected for the Worcester Open to Worcester Museum and Art gallery today. I was greeted by the ever affable Nathan Pitt, one of the key figures in organizing the exhibition from his position as director of Pitt Studio, an artist-led gallery/project space located in an old coach house in his garden,  which now also has a commercial outpost in Malvern. I worked briefly with Nathan years ago, from 2006-07, at the previous college I lectured at, when he joined the Art Department. He had just set up the gallery then and it has really grown since then, as has the art scene in Worcester, thanks largely to his efforts.

Nathan was telling me today how the competition had been very fiercely contested this year, with just 30 artists selected from well over 300 entrants, and that the judging panel had been made up by some pretty ‘hardcore’ selectors (his words) with strong links to Arts Council. These included Wendy Law, Director of Turning Point West Midlands, and Gavin Wade, director of Eastside Projects in Birmingham. I did know this as it was one of my motivations for applying this year. I thought it would be a good opportunity to get my work seen by some of the regions key arts figures, possibly make some new connections, and more importantly get my work more widely seen as this is a big regional show. There will be an accompanying catalogue, which will help. The Private View is this Friday. 

Shaun Morris, 'Drift' pastel on paper, 25 x 40cms, 2013

Earlier in the morning I collected my large paintings from Park View gallery, as one of them was needed for the Open, and it had been agreed that they would only be shown until the end of June. Nothing has been sold, but Roger Palmer, the gallery owner, wanted to still keep and exhibit all my mounted and framed drawings, and wants to continue the link with me submitting further paintings over the next year to see how things develop…we shall see. It's good to see that I'm now on the website as one of their stable of artist. Not so good to see my name spelt incorrectly.

Indigo Octagon have also been meeting in the last few weeks. That is, artists Chris Cowdrill, Andrew Smith, Harvey Smoke and myself. We’ve met in my studio where we all bought some new work to discuss, and then in the pub to talk about a new project, possibly a publication of some sort for the autumn.

Lots of fingers in lots of pies right now…

http://www.pittstudio.com/aboutus.ht

http://parkviewartgallery.com/ 

Big Heads

Chuck Close, 'Self Portrait', oil on canvas, 240 x180cms, 2006

I finally completed reading ‘The Portraits Speak: Chuck Close Interviews 27 of His Subjects’ the other evening and am left feeling rather bereft now. It has been such a great companiable read over the last couple of months but also an education and inspiration, offering much needed food for thought which is certainly influencing my thinking in the studio at the moment.

For those who are not familiar with his work, Chuck Close, now 69, is one of the world’s most well-known painters, who in a career spanning over forty years is recognised for his multitude of different ways to ‘skin the same cat’ in his large scale  portraits.  His subjects over the years, as well as featuring various close family members, have always been his friends. These friends however,   happen to make up some of the most important and interesting artists in the New York art world where he lives and works. Hence this book makes a fascinating read with a wide range of interviews with some of them.

'Alex', oil on canvas, 1988

So we have artists as diverse as Richard Serra, Elizabeth Murray, Eric Fischl, Judy Pfaff, Roy Lichtenstein, John Chamberlain, Richard Artswager, Janet Fish, Lorna Simpson, Joel Shapiro, Alex Katz, Mark Greenwold, Philip Glass, and many others all discussing an equally diverse range of art-related topics, from working with galleries and dealers, the 70’s women’s movement, race and gender, learning disabilities and education, public and audience, materials and concepts, and the contextual influences of the day. I enjoy reading stuff like this much more than fiction, and am fascinated in reading about other’s creativity and lives, especially when told by the artists themselves. Close’s paintings are viewed as an important ‘portrait’ of the New York art scene, and this book is a perfect complement to them. When it was first published in 1998 (I think) a copy was placed in every public library across America.of the most original, challenging, creative and important artists in the post-war period.







'Mark', watercolour on canvas, 240 x 180cms, 1971

In relation to my own work, I’ve become again interested In Close’s assertion that it is very liberating to place limits on your work and to explore your ideas within these. I say again, as it was when I first became a fan of Close (who incidently is a quadroplegic after the collapse of a spinal artery in 1988, an tragedy he calls 'The Event') after visiting his retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in 1999 and reading the accompanying catalogue that I became exposed to some of these ideas of imposing limitations, getting rid of the hand in the work, presenting subject matter in a very flat-footed and even way, instead of more expressively, and  began looking at minimalist painters such as Ad Reinhart etc. It is no less a thing to say that exhibition changed my life, and offered up a route away from all the expressionist excess of my work at the time and lead me to soon after to start making my own flat-footed, coolly painted portraits which I made for about ten years. Close’s limitations became where he only used black acrylic applied with an airbrush for those early photo-realist works, throwing away all his brushes and evidence of his hand, and working incrementally, square after square by using a grid to transfer his photos to the canvas. I’ve never been able to do something as radical, but did impose certain limitations: for a long time all my paintings were a deliberately banal A1 standard size, all the heads presented frontally, and I tried to reduce the amount of marks I would use and paint in a deliberately unexpressive way.

'Big Self Portrait', acrylic on canvas, 270 x210cms, 1969

It is only since developing away  from this in the last five years as other interests have naturally took hold, and I’ve moved away from portraiture, that older more expressive and my more  impetuous tendencies have returned as I’ve sought to seek some sort of footing in making landscape inspired work. The recent motorway paintings though have helped me ground things again, and re-connecting with Close and some of his peers by way of this book, it has helped me think more clearly about the importance of striving to always be tough with the work, and more importantly, original (and how being influenced by others doesn’t necessarily get in the way of this). 

So, I’m taking things more slowly in the studio at the moment….









...and

…and I came home tonight to an e-mail from Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery offering me a solo exhibition of my paintings after an application to them that I recently made! They are offering me a slot from mid January to March 2014 in their White Gallery, which can house up to 50 average sized pieces. I’m thrilled. And how gratifying it feels to be offered a show instead of having to organize one myself for a change, but above all of that how gratifying it is that they wanted to.  I’d better get busy. It could be the just the opportunity I’ve been seeking to create some really large paintings…some more big stuff…and strange and fitting that it will be scheduled just at the end of my Arts Council funding.

Stepping Out...

 

'Sleep', oil on canvas, 150 x 180cms (selected for Worcester Contemporary 2013)

I was delighted to hear today that two of my paintings have been selected for the Worcester Contemporary Open 2013 exhibition, which opens on July 13^th at Worcester City Art Gallery. I’m delighted because the exhibition has been approached differently this year with the entrants being purely selected instead of just the previous free for all which had two strands to it: a selected exhibition (the winners), and basically another show that exhibits everyone else (the losers). I’ve always ended up in the dangerous ‘everyone else’ losers pile before, and after last time decided I wouldn’t bother again. It doesn’t do your work any favours to end up in this other show.  But with this year’s change of format and some of high profile selectors from the region, I thought I would try again. And this year I won. Hurrah.

'Silence' oil canvas, 100 x 120cms (selected for the Worcester Contemporary Open 2013)

I’ve also been approached by an artist’s group from Nottingham in the last couple of weeks to participate in an ‘Edgelands’ themed exhibition they are curating in a new artist’s run space in the city. One of the artists, photographer Sian Stammers, came across my paintings on the internet, I think from the labels on the blog posts, and asked if I would be interested, and then took my work to the rest of the group who have also agreed they would like my work to be part of their project. This is a really exciting development, and will take place in October.  It will be great to meet and work with some other artists from outside the region. The exhibition itself was also inspired by the Simmonds-Roberts and Farley ‘Edgelands’ book, which seems to have caught a fire in many ways since it’s publication, and now I’m on board Sian suggested the idea of exploring where the fringes of the East Midlands meet the fringes of the West. I can’t wait, and am meeting Sian in a couple of weeks when she will be visiting the studio.

All this is more exciting than the experience of exhibiting at the Park View Gallery in recent weeks. How come I end up exhibiting my work at the only commercial gallery that asks me for advice about selling work? That’s their job isn’t it? Perhaps telling people that my work is actually there via the website, or at least your Facebook page may be an idea…Oh well, and on we go.

Other Notes: I’ve become really into Pinterest in the last few weeks: the online pinboards where you share your passions with others in the online ether. Whereas other people seem to have all sorts of weird and wonderful boards and themes, my passions seem to somewhat predictably just centre around painting. After initially being keen to just start an ‘edgelands’ themed board as a bit of ‘research’, I’ve now got seven painting inspired boards on the go. In many ways it seems like a bit of a game or nice distraction, and I find myself quietly addicted.  Here’s a link:

http://pinterest.com/shaundmorris/boards/

http://www.worcesteropen.co.uk/