Tail Whips and Back Flips

 

i-Pad study, local ramp park

It’s half term and I find myself at some of the local ramp parks as my six year old gets rid of some of that energy he’s full of on his stunt scooter and bike again. We go most weekends for a few hours whilst his sister naps in the afternoons, but as he was quick to tell me as I reminded that he had a week off school, ‘Brilliant! That means we can go to the ramps every day!’ At six, he is the only one on the planet.

Anyway, I did this i-pad study there the other day getting colder by the minute. I spend a lot of time there, often with a book, and always with a sketchbook, and have begun to amass quite a few drawings. I have been mulling over whether to develop something further about these cast concrete landscapes. I’m tempted to see if there are any ramp parks illuminated in the evenings to make studies from, as this would appeal to me more with my interest in the nocturnal landscape, now that the evenings are drawing in. 

Painting in my WASPs studio space, Edinburgh 1998

It’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for years the more I think about it and remember: scenes of illuminated parks and football grounds etc. It first came to me when I was lecturing at Sunderland University in 1998. The Fine Art Painting office was five floors up and overlooked a local park. One evening as I was preparing to leave and catch the first of my trains back to my home in Edinburgh I noticed the park below eerily lit up with brilliant floodlights and a small crowd of young guys playing football. Obscuring the view however, was this wonderful screen of silhouetted trees and branches. The combination of black against the artificial light of the park seemed such a good image and really captured my imagination. I consequently made some drawings and over a few months made a rather dismal attempt at a large painting of it back in my Edinburgh studio. I remember it as being my first serious attempt at a landscape painting and trying to move my work somewhere new. It felt exciting with possibility.

 

Jock MacFadyen, 'Mare Street Snooker Hall', oil on canvas, 1996 (?)

 Jock MacFadyen, 'Cambridge Heath', oil, 2004

Half way through making it, I ventured across the city to the Talbot Rice Art Gallery to see a very large exhibition of new Jock MacFadyen paintings. As a student I had enjoyed MacFadyen’s paintings of working class life similar to my own background, peopled by caricatured but always realistic characters set in the urban wastelands, but hadn’t seen any of his paintings for several years now. I was therefore shocked to see these new paintings where the figures had largely disappeared and the artist had foregrounded the buildings and the gritty, blasted urban landscapes. Several of them were also of floodlit parks with gangs of youths playing football at night just like the scene I was attempting to paint just a mile away in Gorgie! I felt gutted and unbelieving (this is all true by the way! I take this stuff pretty seriously!) I walked round the exhibition somewhat dazed, and then under grey Scottish skies staggered down The Mound and through the early evening headlights of Princes Street back to the studio, feeling that I had been totally beaten to it.  I went back and enjoyed the show several times, and reluctantly tried to finish my own rather lame painting.  I didn’t attempt anything serious with landscape again for several years, instead finding a route out of the corner I had found myself in by focusing instead on my portrait work.

Jock MacFadyen, 'Limehouse Basin', oil, 1998(?)

Now, having developed more of a ‘vocabulary’ in landscape painting of my own, sixteen years later, I feel more ready to return to this sort of subject again. If anything I’ve learned is that so often the development of certain ideas is a long, slow, and often unexpected process. You have to be patient. Also, knowing me I also know that I probably still won’t do anything with this idea, as it’s just one of several ongoing things I’m thinking of…

(There are a couple of nice Jock paintings on this blog of scenes at night, but I sadly could not find any examples on the internet of those floodlit football matches I was fed up that he’d done. Sorry.)

(It’s strange to observe the old photograph of the landscape painting that I found out and scanned for this blog and notice how much it looks like one of my present day nocturnal landscapes. I’ve still got it rolled up somewhere. When I have my major retrospective at the Tate it will feature in the first room you enter, ‘Early Beginnings’…! Or maybe not..)

Kids and Painting

oil on canvas, 140 x 70cms, 2014

It’s been a long and tiring couple of months. I don’t think I have quite recovered physically or mentally from the school summer holidays and the looking after of my two children daily, especially my six year old boy, as I too am on holiday from my lecturing job at this time.  From seven in the morning to seven at night I would be continually on the go in parks, zoos, skate ramps, museums and of course at home in the garden, before eventually throwing them in bed, opening a beer and collapsing on the settee after another day’s action. Some children are great at amusing themselves, and my youngest seems happy to do so but not so my son who needs more support with this. And then back to work at college, which I’m glad to say I have slimmed down to three days this year, taking an extra day off to look after my daughter. We were straight into an Ofsted inspection at the start of term, which is always the most stressful time as you get used to new groups and crank up the engines for another year. Only thing is, as you can probably tell I think my engine has been running constantly without much of a break and is in need of a service.  Please don’t get me wrong though, I love the time with the kids and consider myself incredibly lucky to be able to have some good quality time with them.  We have all had lots of fun this summer, as well as the usual ups and downs of parenting. It’s just really tiring is all I’m saying…! I don’t think I’m unique to any other parent.

It has to be said though, that the crazy days out with the kids, has really helped me focus my energies in the studio, where I found myself most evenings, relishing the quiet time to myself.  In this time I’ve found myself working on three new paintings, working more piecemeal, on different parts of a particular painting each time. Admittedly, two of them were nearly completed in single sessions, but then subsequently slowly worked on, a process I have found very satisfying.

This first painting (top) seems to signal the beginning of a break with all the black that has dominated all my recent paintings, and was painted in a much more relaxed way over several weeks. It began with the pink sky over a red ground covering a previously failed painting, and went from there. Although I had a plan for it with a drawing, when I started adding the colour more unexpected things seemed to emerge with the artificial lighting in the scene (it is a transport depot, still at night, and the red rectangle is the back of a lorry cab) suggesting a mood to follow, and I enjoyed trying out different things with the paint application and the different brushes used.  It’s really rough in parts with some things pretty undefined, but having a ‘rightness’ in my mind that I didn’t want to interfere with. I like it.

 oil on canvas, 150 x 90cms, 2014

 This second painting is bigger at five feet tall and is a different version of a painting I attempted a few months ago and shared on the blog. I believe this is a much better realization of what I had in mind, after making some further drawings, which suggested simplifying things and adding more space to the top of the composition. 

 

pastel on paper, 25 x 17cms approx

As well as being a noticeably bolder with the purple motorway column! After an initial long session on this one, I was unsure how to resolve the difficult middle of the painting with the railings overlapping the lorry (yes, these are two lorry cabs again at the same transport depot). Eventually I was inspired to keep things more abstract after chancing across some images on the net of Ad Reinhart’s early abstract paintings, which contain lots of overlapping shapes and forms.  I think this abstraction creates a sense of dislocation in the image that I’m pleased with. My friend, artist Andrew Smith said that both paintings had a sci-fi feel too, with some of the details in the lamps and other forms, which I had also recognized, although this is accidental. It’s a happy accident though, as I’ve also been continuing to talk with artist Sian Stammers about developing the ‘By The Way’ project with a focus on the canals that link the West and East Midlands. In a proposal we have been working on, Sian discussed the idea of a return to the use of canals in a future ‘post-oil’ world, where motorways may lay desolate and empty. It planted a seed of thinking about these images of lorry cabs, of which I’ve now done three, where there is a sense of them being abandoned by the edge of these canals underneath the motorway, in a wider context or meaning such as this world envisaged by Sian.  Andy also thought I should work more on the railings in this one. I think he’s right. He usually is. 

 

'Shoulder To Shoulder', oil on canvas, 90 x 150cms, 2014

This final large painting has a slightly otherworldly quality too, but largely in the ‘reflected’ composition and the sense that the whole image is floating and mobile. It’s an image of a mountain-like collection of wooden palettes in a factory alongside the canal bank. I like the strangeness of the image, and the repetitive pattern made by the structure. I had imagined making something more expressive with this one, but it wasn’t where it wanted to seem to go, so it has ended up like this instead. I had thought it completed, but having since looked at the building-like structures in artist Viera De Silva’s paintings, I think I’m going to work on it further and try and be bolder with pushing the abstraction of the pattern. We'll see...

 

oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2014

I’ve also been continually playing about with this painting too, which I’ve now flipped from a portrait to a landscape format and again, simplified things. This is the starkest, and certainly most abstract, thing I’ve done, and when I took it to this stage I didn’t think for a minute that it was finished. But since then I’ve been living with it around and I’m not so sure. I’m like it as it is just now, but things change. I certainly have no more ideas for it at the moment…As I reflect in this blog I can see how I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting of different kinds in the last few months, and with these recent paintings I feel like I’m beginning to push things on a bit more successfully and with a renewed sense of purpose. It’s hard though isn’t it? Creating stuff. 

 pastel on paper, 25 x 17cms approx

There seem to be a few key words to this blog: abstraction; simplification, experimentation, now that I’ve completed it, which reminds me of my how I talk to my students this last year in summing up our lessons, with an emphasis on promoting English in the classroom. It seems a bit sad really and a reminder how much I’ve had the Ofsted blues in the last year and the horrible pressures at work this has carried…Like so many in the profession, I really feel I’ve begun to lose my motivation and confidence with teaching lately.

This has been an uncharacteristically long blog, but it’s been a while…Kids and painting: that’s all I seem to do these days. Seems pretty good to me..

 

Indigo Octagon: 'The Compulsive Orgonists of West Bromwich'

 

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Today sees the launch of ‘The Compulsive Orgonists of West Bromwich’, the latest publication by Indigo Octagon, the small collective of artists I work which with comprises of myself, Andrew Smith, HR Smoke and Chris Cowdrill. This is our fourth publication now, with two of the others: ‘Stolen Car’ and ‘Black Highway’, accompanying two of my solo exhibitions, and the first one, ‘If A Picture Paints A Thousand Words Then Why Can’t I Paint?’, accompanying our first (and to date only) collective exhibition in 2012.  

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The general idea is that when we meet up we all bring different ideas, bits of work etc to the table and try and develop something from this. This new publication mainly belongs to Chris and Andrew and grew out of some great drawings Chris had been doing based on Victorian era beards and moustaches which seemed to fit well with some of Andrew’s recent writing and poetry, which includes ‘The Compulsive Orgonists…’ of the title, and some of his photographs. My own limited contribution was mainly working with Chris later on in developing the concept of it looking like an old book cover using one of Andrew’s photographs as inspiration.  

 

  Here is a link so you can view it online, and over the course of this week we are sharing some extracts from it on the Indigo Octagon Facebook page. We hope to sell it, alongside the other publications, at some Art Book or Fanzine fairs or stockist’s and are currently looking into opportunities for this. In the meantime, we are selling copies at just £3 each, and if anyone would like to buy one you can contact me through my website, or Indigo Octagon via the Facebook page.  There are only 30 copies, each one editioned, and each copy also comes with three great portrait cards featuring fantastically bearded gentlemen created by Chris. 

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Following on from this we are currently looking into venues and potential collaborators to organize ‘The Compulsive Orgonists of West Bromwich’ exhibition….

http://issuu.com/indigooctagon/docs/indigo_octagon4

https://www.facebook.com/IndigoOctagon?ref_type=bookmark

 

On a roll....'The Gaze' in The West Midlands Open 2014

 

'The Gaze', oil on canvas, 210 x 150cms, 2013

….And today I heard that one of my paintings has been selected for the West Midlands Open 2014, a biennial collaboration between Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, showcasing the best the region has to offer from practicing artists.  It has become a regular feature on the region’s cultural calendar since it’s first exhibition in 2006, and I’m lucky enough to have been selected twice, in 2006 and 2008. This year It was selected by Birmingham artist Barbara Walker and curator Zoe Lippett from New Art Gallery Walsall.

My painting ‘The Gaze’ was selected which I’m so pleased about for a couple of reasons. It’s great to be in this exhibition, which will be seen by so many visitors in a very prestigious venue, and on a more personal level it’s a nice validation to have one of my more recent pieces selected which have only been exhibited once at Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in January in my exhibition ‘Black Highway’. I think some of these paintings are much more unusual and experimental and you never know how they might be received. This is how I felt about ‘The Gaze’ in January, but actually it turned out to be one of the most popular paintings in the show, which encouraged me to therefore put it forward for the West Midlands Open. 

Phew, I’m on a roll in these last few weeks….

'Spirit Of Place' at Ragley Gallery, Warwickshire

 

'Silence', oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms

I’m pleased to announce that one of my paintings, ‘Silence’, has been selected for the Ragley Open Art Competition and will be represented in an exhibition on the theme of ‘Spirit of Place’ to be held at the Ragley Hall Gallery and Studios in Warwickshire. The exhibition will run from August 17^th to September 7^th. Here’s a link to the website if anyone is interested in visiting. Ragley Hall itself is well worth a visit for anyone interested in art, heritage and culture.

http://ragleygallery.co.uk/

Having made all this work in the last two-three years, what with this and the representation by Cupola, it feels good to be putting it out there to good use whilst I concentrate on making new work.

Begin Again

 

'Journey's End', oil on canvas, 120 x 200cms

After twenty years of public exhibitions, projects, commissions, and grant awards I'm pleased to say that I've finally managed to achieve some decent gallery representation. Following a really hot and sweaty trip to Sheffield with a van full of paintings last Friday, followed by a great meeting with gallery director Karen Sherwood, I'm pleased to say that the city's excellent Cupola Gallery want to represent my paintings. They have taken several large pieces and drawings for now, and want to stage a bigger show of my work next year. Hurrah! My practice just seems like a long and forever ongoing apprenticeship of things tried and lessons learned...

'Canal', oil on canvas, 120 x 150cms

This is something I’ve been trying to rather faltering strive for for a long time, but have never felt like I had the work to approach many places- largely because of the large scale of so many of my paintings, but also the subject matter. I’ve since realized that I have been misguided with this, as my meeting at Cupola demonstrated, and the level of interest I’ve had in my motorway paintings since embarking on them with the help of the Arts Council. Karen and Graham, the manager, at Cupola praised their originality, and it was interesting discussing other paintings of mine such as my tree paintings, which form part of the same series, as being less original and therefore less appealing. As for the scale, Karen quite rightly pointed out how I worked much better on a larger scale, with smaller pieces looking more ‘compromised’. They ended up keeping ‘Journey’s End’ as one of their selection (top), which is one of my biggest paintings.  They were also encouraging about some of my new paintings such as ‘Canal’ above. 

 I really enjoyed my time at the gallery with Karen and Graham, who were both full of advice and enthusiasm, and I saw some great work there. I was particularly struck by the paintings of Mandy Payne (below), who apparently was personally selected by Sir Norman Ackroyd for this year’s RA summer show, and is also a prizewinner in this year’s John Moore’s Painting Prize in Liverpool. 

 

Mandy Payne, 'Brutal', aerosol on concrete

I’m really excited to think that for once someone else now has a vested interest in selling my work and getting it more widely seen than me.  It’s also interesting to think that my work is now getting promoted outside of the Midlands. I’ve found there are very few decent commercial opportunities in and around Birmingham, hence casting my net much wider.  So, for now, I’ve signed a six month contract with the gallery until January 2015, which we will review in November. This feels like the beginning of a welcome new chapter..

http://www.cupolagallery.com/

http://mandypayneart.co.uk/

'British Values'

Some of my portrait drawings completed at JCC Arts Festival

On Saturday the Art Department I work in at Joseph Chamberlain Sixth Form College in Birmingham held it’s annual Summer Arts Festival.  There were lots of activities and art workshops to enjoy and participate in, and also music and performing arts. I’ve written on the blog about it before and described my experiences of either painting or drawing portraits of willing volunteers. I try to do it differently each year to keep myself challenged and also not to appear to be trotting out the same old schtick each time too.

Right up until my first session at ten in the morning I was umming and ahhing about what I should do this year and came duly prepared. I was undecided whether to do some colourful pastel portraits or some moodier, large charcoal drawings. I thought I would wait to see who my first sitter was and then decide.  When Mark, boyfriend of colleague Sally, looking quite Biblical with his long hair and beard, sat down in front of me the answer revealed itself: it had to be the moody charcoal. He was a gift to draw. 

 

'Mark'

I really enjoyed working larger and exploring the versatility of the brittle willow charcoal. Working larger also allowed people to watch the process more easily, which lead to quite an audience gathering behind me at times, and I’m not sure if the scale (the drawings were A2) contributed to this rather than my drawing skills, but when I revealed the finished drawing to the sitter I received real gasps of astonishment and pleasure that, in over 15 years of doing portraits with a sitter like this, I’ve never really had before. It was a nice surprise. I was on fire! In around five hours I completed eight drawings. My head was like mush at the end of the afternoon. 

 

'Tazneem'

The drawing had been fun, but what had been better were some of the conversations I had with the sitters. In particular, a long conversation with a young Muslim guy (nearly all my students are Muslim) studying Islamic Studies and living in a nearby student hostel. We talked at length about my own atheism and his own Islamic faith, which I enjoyed, but also about people’s perceptions of him. ‘They see me coming down the street and they think I’m a terrorist because of my appearance’, he decried, understandably finding it really upsetting.  I would have liked to talk more about this, but with the drawing complete and the next sitter waiting it was difficult. He was visibly moved by the drawing, and asked if he could give me a hug, which was touching. I’d been moved listening to him. He was only eighteen, had moved from his home in Bradford to the hostel, had no family around, and had clearly found these changes difficult. 

 

'Faisal'

The experience reflected a lot of my recent thoughts about working at the college which is located in the heart of the East Birmingham community under scrutiny over the controversial ‘trojan horse’ allegations in some local schools. Many of the schools recently inspected by Ofsted, and deemed now ‘inadequate’,  and reported about by the media are our feeder schools. There have been things going on in some of these schools that should cause concern, but there has been such an Islamaphobic and racist tone to most of the coverage one has to question the agenda on one hand, but also the general ignorance of many of the commentators and journalism. I found Ian Hislop’s comments on Question Time really offensive and patronising in the week that the news broke, but also unsurprisingly Michael Gove’s, the Secretary of State for Education, whose answer, also unsurprisingly, to these problems were to turn all the schools into academies. Not that the academies programme is one of the causes of these problems of course.  His single-minded mission to privatise our education system has all the hallmarks of fundamentalism being led by a religious zealot.

 

'Mohammad'

 

'Zaiba'

The point I would like to make, however, is about my own positive experiences of working with young people from this Muslim community of Birmingham. I’ve never worked with such nice students, who come from some incredibly deprived backgrounds. They have, and continue to be, the friendliest, warmest, tolerant, generous, kind and respectful community. They also have a great sense of humour and a real commitment to their studies in the Art Department. I’ve learned so much from them and they inspire me. They seem to live and practice by example so much more the so-called ‘British Values’ currently talked about, which huge swathes of our society seemed to have left behind a long, long time ago.