'Depot 2', oil on canvas, 150 x 100cms, 2014
Earlier this year, in February, together
with my artist friend, Andrew Smith, I became a member of Birmingham’s Eastside
Projects’, an artist-run gallery in Digbeth,
‘Extra Special People’. This is a membership scheme that offers artist’s
access to a range of different opportunities that the gallery is involved in
directly or indirectly, including seminars; residencies; exhibitions;
networking events; funding etc. Andy I both put ourselves forward for the monthly
‘crit club’ that they organise. It seems to be programmed as a series over a
block of four months within the year, where each month three different artists
present and discuss their work and ideas to any other ESP members that may be
interested (not many in my experience so far- it’s mainly just the artists that
turn up and me and Andy), with the session, which lasts approximately two
hours, being led by one of Eastside’s Artist-Directors.
Andy’s went well in May, where he discussed
his paintings and previewed ‘Orfeo’ (1), the film he recently made with artist
friend Hugh Marwood which featured in their recent ‘Mental Mappings’ exhibition
in Rugby. This looked great projected onto a big screen.
In July I took my turn at The Lombard
Method, a studio group and project space in Digbeth, with artists James Harris
and Nick Mobbs. Sadly, Andy couldn’t make it this time due to ill health. The session was presided over by Anna, the ESP
coordinator, who early on apologized for her lack of knowledge about painting
but she was the only one from Eastside Projects available to facilitate the
session, and then followed that with declaring that she had no interest in the
‘enclosed and closed space’ of the traditional gallery experience, which was
even more of a pity as we were all making fairly traditional wall based work
which would normally find a home in such spaces! (I found that sort of a bit
ironic though as it is a criticism often leveled at institutions such as
Eastside Projects: that they operate in a very ‘enclosed and closed’ esoteric
world). She was very nice though. The only other person present was an artist
friend of James’.
I enjoyed listening to James, a young
artist, who happily discussed his homo-erotic drawings, which were shared
around the group. There were quite a collection of these, some of them very
explicit with obvious debts to Picasso, and just one abstract painting hanging
on a multi coloured pastel stained wall, which in many ways seemed pretty
unrelated, a point not lost on James. The wall was a bit lost on me to be honest, as
I thought the staining was just left over from some previous activity until
James drew our attention to it. James discussed with passion his lack of
interest in exhibiting his work anywhere: it was the process of making it that
was more important. These are feelings I am totally in tune with on one level,
but did think that the work would benefit from some sort of focus of some kind,
which I think an exhibition can offer (or perhaps a crit like this). I have no images of James’ work to share I’m
afraid.
Nick Mobbs, 'Game', screenprint, 2011, 61 x 54cms
Where James was very ebullient and happy to
talk freely about his work, Nick Mobbs held everything back, more interested to
listen to our responses to a recent print hung on the wall and a video work in
progress of cowled, or hooded, figures, an ongoing theme (2), but more recently
represented in absurdist images from the internet of celebrities masking their
identities from the spying paparazzi with blankets or other things over their
heads. As we discussed the work, Nick recorded our responses in a small
notebook. Our responses ranged from enjoying some humour in them, to, in my own
case, being disturbed by them and reading in them a more social and political
dimension: the veiled, or covered head, and my relationship to the Muslim
community I work at the heart of in Birmingham.
I don’t think this was that popular a view when shared, except with
Anna, who it transpired lives in this community too. The images of celebrities
were culturally lost on me, as I have so little knowledge or interest in this
these days. For me, it highlighted the issue of how important the idea is of how
we individually always bring our own social and political perspective to our
encounters with art, particularly when Nick was not interested in talking about
them himself. It was all really intriguing but can be more fully explained in
the interview link with Nick from his website (3).
I can’t find an image of Nick’s related to
our discussion, but here is one (above) from his website that we did also touch upon
when I bought this up.
'Cargo', oil on canvas, 65 x 90cms, 2015
When it came to my turn I too decided that
I would just show the work and say nothing about it beforehand to see what
people thought without any direction from me. I had taken seven of my fairly
large paintings of lorries and vehicles, the most that night, and spread them
across the studio wall. Much like my motivation for exhibiting these at the
college Arts Festival I wanted to gauge people’s reactions to this new work. Slowly
people started to comment. Anna remarked upon their ‘humanistic’ quality and
the idea of what was behind the black windscreen shield of the lorry: were the
drivers sleeping? with a prostitute? They seemed ‘funny at first, then very
sad’ to others; ‘Edward Hopper’ like; ‘obsessive: I should narrow it down to
just doing the same truck for the rest of my life‘; some seemed like they
contained a narrative, other ones were like an advert for a cool truck, which
was ‘not a bad thing’ apparently; the scale: some should be bigger and others,
like the advert one, smaller (I didn’t take my smaller ones).
'Dirty From The Rain' (re-painted)
The drips that have entered the most recent
paintings (“Under The Bridge’ and ‘Dirty From The Rain’) troubled people the
most though, which I found interesting as they also trouble me. It was agreed
by all of us that they looked most like ‘art marks’ (my phrase, paraphrased
from Chuck Close ). That is, those gestural marks in painting, most often found
in abstract painting, that somehow aim to convince the audience that this is
‘real art’ borne from the struggle and sweat of the artist’s brow, but can
often actually carry very little real meaning. Now, I like gestural marks, but
I also like to disguise them, and have tried for years to attempt to create in
three marks what I would in the past have created in thirty. I think the ‘Under
The Bridge’ painting is a little problematic in the sense that the heavy drips
and runs of turpsy paint look somehow more ‘arty’ but in a more superficial way,
which is what I’m clumsily trying to explain here, although that was far from
my intention; I was just trying to push the materials to see where the image
could go that was different to the others. (This was generally picked up on and
liked in the crit: the fact that they were all paintings of the subject, but
all seemed very different). When exhibited at the college it was the painting I
was least happy with, but actually was most people’s favourite, which I felt a
bit cynical about because of these reasons of ‘artiness’ discussed above. I was
pleased that the crit also shared my reservations, but in some way I wish I
hadn’t taken the piece as it was also a bit distracting as too much focus ended
up being on what in my mind has become one of the least interesting pieces of
the last few months.
Still, I have found myself painting over
the excessive drip-work since in both of these paintings in an attempt to get
them looking simpler and tougher, but I’m not going to change them too much.
'Under The Bridge' (re-painted)
Anyway, it has been good to put the work,
and myself, out there in both events; the college exhibition and the crit.
Overall, the work has been positively received. My friend, artist Andrew Tift,
commented recently that he thought my lorries were the best thing I had done
and that they were much more ‘fresh and original’. So it’s keep on truckin’ I
guess…
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