The Great Receiver...

BRILLIANT! These seem like the only words I can use to describe seeing ‘David Hockney: A Bigger Picture’ at the Royal Academy, London on Thursday. I left the exhibition grinning from ear to ear, feeling totally uplifted and as if I had just enjoyed an immensely satisfying meal. I haven’t enjoyed an exhibition so much in years. The exuberant colour, the light, the sheer continual, restless inventiveness was just so wonderful to participate in. It made me feel so alive. How many contemporary art exhibitions can you say that about these days?

At 74, Hockney’s playfulness, skill, and visual intelligence and creativity just seemed to knock so many younger artists into a cocked hat. Aren’t the young meant to be the ones with all the fresh ideas? (Not if Birmingham’s Eastside Projects current ‘Painting Show’ is anything to go by either. In stark contrast, I left this exhibition feeling thoroughly frustrated and empty recently). ‘A Bigger Picture’ was brilliantly hung, taking the audience through the development of Hockney’s involvement with the East Yorkshire Wolds and the many developments he has made in the last 5 years in his attempts to capture the ever changing landscape through the seasons. My particular highlight was the room of paintings of the Wold Woods (above), where things just seemed to come together incredibly well: the handling, the language of marks, the colour and light, and the scale.

I also found myself really liking the more recent work created more from memory, which I thought I wouldn’t enjoy so much as it seemed so mannered or stylized, but they made perfect sense in the flesh, particular with the enormous final painting, ‘The Arrival of Spring’ (above). I loved these, and felt so ‘there’ in these landscapes. They seemed so rooted in a Modernist tradition to me, and reminded me a lot or Rousseau as well as the more obvious touchstone of Matisse. I think Rousseau’s landscapes are terrific, and have always admired his treatment of forms and the clarity of his vision. These are some of the qualities I think were reflected in Hockney’s most recent paintings. The works created on his i-Pad were also amazing, (below) and really got me thinking about whether this would be a good tool for me with my efforts at working on location if I could get to grips with the technology…

This all seemed a perfect start to 'A Portrait of The Edgelands'. I sit and write this tremendously excited by the possibilties, my head full of ideas, thinking, 'Yes, I can!'.

And what does The Great Receiver mean? Come back in a few days....

A Painted Life....

I’ve been thinking a great deal in the last few days about ‘Lucien Freud: Painted Life’, the riveting film that was aired on the BBC on Saturday, about the life of the late painter who died in July last year. I was immediately gripped and very moved by the opening scene of him painting in his studio, filmed by his assistant David Dawson from his perspective as the model posing for what would prove to be his last, unfinished painting. In fact what moved me even more was the fact revealed that this would prove to be the last day he actually painted, as he died a few days later aged 88. I just found it unbearably sad when you consider the utter and total commitment he had towards his painting throughout his entire life, and here he still was still alert and so focussed still in his studio on this day, but looking frail. One sensed a feeling projected by him that time was running out, that there was a sense of fighting against the dying light. And yet maybe I’m projecting this idea a bit, because what came across in the film and in the work he created was that this was how he approached everything in his life: with a ceaseless energy and scrutiny totally committed to the moment of what he was working on at that time, usually portraits, often for months and months, pushing and pushing to something beyond mere appearances (In contrast if I could get my own portraits stripped further back to something even more minimal and essential I would).



It’s this side of things that I have never really enjoyed about Freud’s paintings: all the psychology that can seem heavily laden on in those early works and the later stagier paintings of Leigh Bowery etc. They can also appear very cold and clinical in their examination of the naked human sitter as ‘animal’. I prefer in his, and other painted portraits, the ones that do just deal with appearances, believing that the rest will follow if the other elements work. I think appearances are mysterious enough. The Freud paintings I really like are the portraits that are more intimate and restrained. I like most of all though his portraits of his dogs and horses, feeling these seem to project a warmth and love oddly not found in his paintings of people. The documentary talked about his love of animals throughout his life, especially when he was young, and I think this is reflected in these, compared with a deliberate distance and detachment from the people in his life. It was probably this that made him able to work as he did, and lead the life he wanted, free to just paint every day 24/7.







Someone remarked this weekend that my own paintings have a dispassionate quality too. I’m aware of this, and do try to be as objective as possible when I’m recording something as I like the idea of the subject revealing itself to me, rather than trying to force things into being. To be honest though, when trying to paint within the limited time I have, if I wasn’t so organised and practical I would never get anything done, and I think this can add to my work looking impersonal at times. But I’m also aware that this is part of my character; always on the outside looking in. I know many painters are like this. I’m convinced that for many, including Lucien Freud, it is why they do what they end up doing what they do.

'A Portrait Of The Edgelands'

‘A Portrait Of The Edgelands’ is the title I gave to my recent successful grant application to the Arts Council. I thought I should discuss this a bit as this will be shaping the work over the next two years which I’d obviously like to share on the blog, and use the blog more like a digital sketchbook where I discuss and share some of my experiences, ideas and work as it develops…

For those who occasionally read the blog, in May last year I wrote about a book I was enjoying, ‘Edgelands’, by Paul Farley and Michael Symons Roberts. Briefly, the book was a collection of writings and prose about the areas of our native landscape that often get overlooked, the places found on the periphery of cities and larger towns; landscapes of wasteland, landfill sites, ruins, allotments and wild gardens, graffited road bridges, sewage plants, woodlands and unexpected paths: the so-called ‘edgelands’. I also blogged about many of the interesting artists signposted in the book, such as Edward Chell and Keith Arnatt. I found the book very inspiring at a time when I was looking for a more original route to direct my interest in painting the landscape than the work I had been making. I’ve occasionally painted aspects of the edgelands I know, particularly some of the motorways, but also wild flowers and weeds, but I felt it was about time I took the bull by the horns, and tried to tackle a more distinctive, and personal, aspect of the landscape with ‘Edgelands’ as my guidebook. So I poured these ideas into my proposal and this will be my focus for the next two years, the period I have been funded for.

It is important to state that this funding is for a period of research and development to help me get my painting practice on a different footing, but I am not expected to make work for an exhibition or have any clear outcomes in mind: it is allowing me to explore and experiment and hopefully also expand my practice into new areas, including writing, further printmaking work, a film, and an international residency in Scandinavia this coming August. It’s not all going to be landscape though: I intend to develop my portrait work and interest in still life too. It is all very exciting and I feel very fortunate…

I’m also going to be working with a small group of mentors too, who have agreed to regular visit the studio and critique the work, which is something I’ve been a bit desperate for and was keen to cost into my proposal. These include Andrew Tift, the renowned portrait painter, Marian Edwards, a former lecturing friend whose support and opinion I have always valued very highly, and Angela Swan, an Arts Consultant who will offer advice and support to help me seek out further opportunities throughout and beyond my project. I always hoped the blog would be a better forum for dialogue and debate about my work, but sadly this has proved not to be the case, so I’m really excited about this potential input, hoping it can only strengthen things.

I think that’s all I want to say at the moment, as I don’t like the blogs to be too long. There will be lots to talk about as things develop. In the meantime, I hope this will be a good introduction to my activities from here on in….

The pictures that accompany this post are of a few things I’ve been working on in the studio this week: another large nocturnal of the M5, and these two small still lives which are not finished yet. The bottom one depicts a screwed up paper bag is a bit of a mess, but there was something in it’s form that inspired me to attempt to try and do something with it. I think a drawing might work better…The colour is all wrong in the other still life’s background, but I have some other ideas of how to improve it.

Altered Images....

As I walked home in the twilight the other night the dark form of a black tree against the leaden sky caught my eye and put my thoughts back to an exhibition of George Shaw’s paintings that I had seen the previous weekend at the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery in Coventry. Normally a big fan of Shaw’s work, on this occasion I had found myself coming away disappointed and questioning the work and it’s intentions.

The exhibition itself was a well put together and extensive collection of his humbrol enamel paintings from the very first one he did of the Tile Hill estate he grew up on in Coventry itself, to his most recent ones of the same location. If you are unfamiliar with the work it is well worth a visit. As ever, the paintings were powerful, but what I found problematic was a collection of notes about each piece in the exhibition guide written by the artist himself, in which the ideas and motivations were laid bare. They seemed to take away much of the power of the images and replace them with a series of sentimental reminiscences of events such as ‘my mom coming back from the pub…with crisps and lemonade for me and my brother late at night’….or ‘the goalposts reminding me of the football match in ‘Kes’’….that I found increasingly irritating. Maybe because I am of a similar age and background to Shaw I found these references all too familiar, which is why I found them irritating in their obviousness. Yes, I know these things are there in the work, and yes, I make the connections too because of my own background, but I don’t want it to be so spelt out to me. I’m always wary of exhibition guides and this is the reason why- it can take away the mystery. It’s like when a singer reveals the meaning behind the song you love so much and you are so disappointed because it doesn’t tally with the version of what it is about that you have held in your own head all this time. Suddenly, there is just one reading of it and it becomes very one-dimensional. Shaw’s sentimental lamenting for past times really got to me after a while. The title, ‘I Woz Ere’ even grated with me. It made me reflect on my own lack of sentimentality and my belief that we can only ultimately live in the here and now. I'm not sure what I thought of these feelings, but I just couldn't imagine myself in his shoes, forever looking back.

In an adjoining gallery there was a collection of Shaw’s drawings and paintings that he had made as an idealistic and passionate student at the local Art College studying for his A levels and Foundation Course. These were really interesting, and very proficient, with Shaw himself appearing in numerous self-portraits looking like a young Morrissey. The passion and skill behind them, the passion of youth admittedly, leapt off the walls and as I returned to ‘I Woz Ere’, I was struck this time by the seemingly pathetic nature of the work now; the sentimental attachment to this period of time, and even the paintings themselves with their over reliance on static photographs compared to the student’s skills and powers of observation as a young man.

George Shaw is an artist I admire, with great depth and honesty to be found in his work, as the paintings of his on this post demonstrate. This exhibition perhaps presented to me an alternative reading. One I wasn’t expecting, or one I enjoyed…