The ridiculous to the sublime....

We all really enjoyed visiting Copenhagen. It’s a very friendly place, especially when you have children in tow, with an impressive mix of old and new buildings.  On one of the days we visited we took a boat tour around the city which I would recommend. It’s a great way to get a better sense of the place and how things relate to each other. When we were with Jamie we discussed places to visit over an open map. ‘You want to avoid this place, though’, he said taking out a pen and scribbling intently on a spot on the map. ‘It’s full of tourists, and is the site of the most horrible, horrible sculpture!’  He was of course, talking about the famous Little Mermaid sculpture in Copenhagen Harbour! Jamie thought it was a dreadful piece of art and told with some relish how it had twice been decapitated, once by an artist who shared a similar sense of outrage at this popular tourist attraction that seems to grace most guide book covers. I couldn’t help laughing to myself as we passed it a couple of days later on our boat tour.

Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art

A twenty minute drive up the coastline out of Copenhagen took you to the Louisiana Museum Of Modern Art, which must be the best located art gallery I’ve ever visited. It is based right on the coastline, with spectacular views across the North Sea from the wonderful sculpture garden or the café. It was very exhilarating, and the continual views of the ocean that we had all week in Denmark from places like this, but also as we drove along the coastline, and the days we had at the beach (which I’ll get to) are one of my abiding memories I have of this region and one of my key inspirations.

The Louisiana was exhibiting a rarely seen installation by one of my favourite sculptors, Ed Keinhoz, called ‘Five Car Stud’ (above). In this violent and disturbing piece the viewer walks into a large, darkened room illuminated only by the headlights of four cars and a pick-up truck surrounding a horrific scene of a group of white men castrating a black man as his white girlfriend watches. The figures are life-size mannequins wearing masks and you are eyeball to eyeball with these characters as you enter and walk around the scene , making you feel uncomfortably complicit in it, which is the point. Floating letters in an oil pan on the victim’s chest spell out the word ‘nigger’. Kienholz’s aesthetic is as uncompromisingly bitter as Goya’s. People are mean and stupid, and things don’t get better.

 It was the best thing I’d seen in a long time, and it is terrible to think that until it’s recent restoration by his widow, Nancy Kienholz it had been rotting in the collection of some wealthy Japanese collector. This was art with something real to say and one couldn’t help thinking how much the Chapman Brothers must owe to Kienholz, and yet they seem to be stuck in a trap of increasingly banal, ‘conceptual’ shocks in their own work that seem empty and meaningless beyond an art world audience. Kienholz’s work reaches far beyond this and that is one of the reasons it is so powerful. The visceral experience of exhibitions like this are a welcome reminder you of what can be so exciting about modern and contemporary art at its best. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aio76zf5Yqc

http://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/edward-kienholz-five-car-stud

Friends Reunited...

Denmark. On the Sunday we travelled to my friend’s Jamie and Mette Wallace who live in Naerum a suburb of Copenhagen. Jamie is a painter who I studied alongside on my MA in Fine Art in Norwich  all of seventeen years ago (that just sounds wrong!), and Mette, his Danish wife, is a glass and ceramicist. All three of us studied our BA (Hons) courses in Sunderland too, and even lived in the same street, but did not know each other then.We were pretty close during the year at Norwich, and I fondly remember evenings at their place talking into the night and all being rather poverty stricken, but we went our separate ways at the end of the course: me to Yorkshire and then Edinburgh, and they eventually to Denmark. We hadn’t met since then but as we greeted each other on the Sunday time just collapsed and it was great to be back in their very easy-going and pleasurable company. It was like slipping on a pair of the most comfortable shoes, so different to our time in Norway.  Last time they only had Lewis, who was just fouryears old then, now they had Olly, Tulleeh, and Sookey too!

Jamie had recently completed a PHD which had brought his previous experience as an engineer together with his painting and interest in materials and how we use them in our everyday lives. He was now working as a lecturer at The Danish University for Education. His PHD studies had been entirely funded by the state, with a grant thrown in. Lewis was also now at University with a maintenance grant to support him, not a future millstone of at least £30,000 worth of debt to look forward to like students in the UK. I think, and would certainly encourage, more students from the UK will look overseas for their education. I already have students asking me about these opportunities this year. Mette was working for a well-known Danish ceramicist, producing work from her designs, which she both found frustrating but also glad to be using her very gifted skills as a maker. She is very versatile and always has something of her own on the go.

Their house in Naerum was a big renovation project of its own which they were busy working on. Jamie had recently built a new chimney on the roof, and they had made a workroom for themselves which had some brilliant reclaimed double doors from a hospital. These opened into a music room for Olly, who is an extremely gifted saxophone player.  At just 16 he had recently started at a very prestigious music academy that only accepts 10 students a year, with most students usually in their twenties. Olly played regularly in the world famous Tivoli Gardens Brass Band, but also frequented the jazz clubs of Copenhagen and regularly played at open sessions alongside veterans from the city’s thriving scene. To say he was driven is putting it mildly. He was very inspiring. He also knew a bit about Dylan too which I think is important in anyone’s musical education!

We also discussed the farm the family own in Sweden, which they had bought a few years ago when property was cheaper there. Jamie had converted a large barn there into a studio and invited us to come and stay and work there sometime, which is a very exciting proposition, which I hope to take advantage of next year. The farm will be a great place for us all to go too with the landscape very inspiring, according to Jamie.

Later in the week, Jamie and I spent a great day together painting and drawing on location in the woods nearby. Vast in scale, and leading to the Royal Deer Park at Klampenborg, the woods were a great place to work, but also to walk and talk, which we did a lot of of; catching up with our respective lives, but also talking about painting, which we both enjoyed. When it came to trying to do some painting later I found it very hard to settle and work. Perhaps there was too much to see and take in. I made a couple of pieces, one which was heavily laboured over as I just wrestled to try and wring some life out of it, and another which I was happier with where I cleared my head a little and thought of Cezanne: building up colour next to colour, tone next to tone, and shape next to shape until something emerged. Away over the spot we were worked, Jamie was under a tree making some beautiful and unusual drawings of the area. It was interesting to note that Jamie had, like me, become very inspired in working from direct observation over the years, despite his previous passion for abstraction. He enjoyed and appreciated the struggle more in my first painting (above).

In the evening, we all came together again at the house in Naerum and ate and drank wine out in the garden, talking until late before bidding farewell, and promising not to make it so long between visits next time! Jamie also kindly gave me one of the drawings he had made that day, as thanks for the day and the inspiration we had both found out in the woods. I’m so pleased with it. The two days we had spent with them felt like it had been real soul food for me, and was my personal highlight of the whole trip.

Klampenborg drawing, Jamie Wallace

The Culture of Painting...

Ken Currie, 'Dead Stag' oil on canvas, 120 x 210cms, 2012

Alex Katz at Timothy Taylor Gallery, Ken Currie at Flowers East, Robert Motherwell at Bernard Jacobsen, Ray Richardson at Beaux Arts, Luke Elwes at Adam Gallery, Jim Dine at Alan Cristea, and Edvard Munch at Tate Modern. I really gorged myself on lots of exciting painting on Saturday when I visited London for the day. It was the Katz, Currie and Munch shows I had gone to see in particular, but I ended up discovering lots of really vibrant work in Cork Street, whose status as the centre of the commercial gallery scene has long since diminished in London, yet I managed to find loads of brilliant painting on show. I came away with my head spinning from it all and more catalogues and books than I could carry. Here are some examples of the great things I saw that hopefully illustrate the wide and diverse culture of painting that I love so much, and why it still remains a vital force for expression.

Alex Katz, 'Chris', oil on canvas, 240 x 300cms, 2012

Robert Motherwell' Elegy', lithograph, 1973

Luke Elwes, 'Glimmer', oil and acrylic on canvas, 120 x 180cms, 2011

Ray Richardson, 'Irish Frank', oil on canvas, 130 x 90cms, 2012

Edvard Munch, 'White Night' oil on canvas, 120 x100cms, 1893

Saying that, despite its vitality, I did watch a good film the other day, ‘Painter’s Painting’ that looked at the rise of American painting from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. In it Barnett Newman discussed the sobering reality of how painting is seen (and especially bought) by so very, very few people. On a more cheerful note it was also seen how many great artists that I love like Newman, Rothko, Gottlieb, Hoffmann, De Kooning, didn’t have their first solo exhibition in any major galleries until they were about 46, so there is hope for me yet…







To The Sea....

It was exciting coming into Copenhagen on the ferry in the morning. We slowly passed a huge line of wind turbines that extended out into the sea and greeted us with an eerie wave of their huge ‘arms. In the distant mist we could see the epic sixteen mile bridge that crosses from Copenhagen to Malmo, Sweden that had recently been the lead character in our favourite Scandinavian TV noir. As we disembarked onto the dockside and caught a taxi to the airport, where we were to pick up another hire car for the week, I was immediately struck by how different the place felt from Oslo. It felt much more cosmopolitan with a familiar urban beat that made me feel more at home.

It wasn’t long though before we were heading off the motorway out of Copenhagen into the flat arable landscape that seemed typical of much of Zealand, heading out towards the coast to Vejby Strand, which wasn’t much further than a half hour’s drive. Here we had a wonderful summerhouse waiting for us, complete with grass on the roof, which we had rented for the week.

As we zipped along, the landscape opened up into big skies above us and a mixture of lots of different types of wonderful trees that also had a more familiar feel, strangely like much of the English landscape I love in the Midlands. After unpacking and cooking something that wasn’t barbequed, we went to explore the local landscape for an hour and to try and find the sea as the sun went down. Just ten minutes away were some beautiful rolling hills covered in purple heather that lead to a dramatic hilltop view across the North Sea. It was the most amazing pale transparent blue colour that appeared so vast that it wrapped itself around you.

A couple of nights later I found myself sat alone on top of this hill painting this view as the sun set on the sea. I felt extremely lucky being in this moment.  I tried to chase the disappearing deep purple shadows as they dramatically crept across the landscape as the sun disappeared so quickly. The small paintings made were as much informed by my memory of the scene as the scene observed. I was particularly excited when I finished by the colours I had found myself using. They seemed very Munch-like with their crimsons, blues and yellows and the light contained within them. They appeared to have a distinctive Scandinavian feel.

I was so excited as I ran back to the car across the heather hills with my canvas paper flapping in the wind, wet with oil paint, desperate not to get them spoilt. It felt like a door had briefly opened and I had found myself in a new room.



Away from here....

'The view from the ferry from Oslo to Copenhagen', i-pad painting

After my morning at the Munch Museum we climbed aboard the DFDS overnight ferry from Oslo to Copenhagen in the afternoon. It was great to shower, use a proper loo(!), and lie down on a decent bed. The three of us were in a small cabin, but after the week outside in the cabin, which had felt like a camping trip I suppose if I was being philosophical, it felt good to be moving on from Norway and put some distance between some difficult feelings left up there in the forest.



We were very weary but we all felt a weight began to lift as we headed to Denmark, which in no small part was helped by Cliff Richard singing ‘we’re all going on a summer holiday’ as the ferry pulled away from Oslo. It wasn’t something I expected to hear in Scandinavia, but somehow it seemed to sum up what had been a strange and unexpected week.

If you ever have the opportunity to do this journey I would recommend it. Below deck the ferry was like a big floating nightclub full of boozy Norwegians heading to Copenhagen for a weekend’s cheaper shopping. I was on the top deck on my own with my thoughts while Diane and Isaac slept below, enjoying the views across the open sea and seeing Oslo disappear from view. I stayed there until late, watching the sun go down and the waves around the ship get blacker and blacker. On one side you could see Norway and on the other the lights of Sweden flickering in the distance.





Munch

'Melancholy', Edvard Munch, 1895

At the end of what had a been an increasingly tiring week in our cramped cabin, especially for Isaac, I finally found myself in the Munch Museum in Oslo. We had been to Oslo a few days previously to visit the Viking Museum where one has to travel by boat out to the islands around the Oslofjord to visit the museums where many of them are located. Seeing the impressive longboats close-up was inspiring, where you could see each individually hand-crafted nail punched in the hull and almost feel the hands that made them. 

'Forest'

'Moonlight On The Sea'

'Summer Night At The Beach'

'Puberty'

Arriving in the Munch Museum though was a total revelation. I was greeted by a striking life size portrait of a woman with a dead yellow baby on her lap, her piercing eyes looking right through me (sadly I can’t find an image of this). The power of it stopped me dead in my tracks. Working my way around the other paintings struck such an emotional chord  inside me. My head was reeling as I encountered one stunning painting after another. Many of the rooms were very sparcely hung, with just one or two paintings the focus, such as ‘Puberty’. Other rooms were less so, but seeing these paintings after my experiences of the Norwegian landscape during the last few days, in quite difficult circumstances at times, I felt they just were Norway. They just seemed to capture the essence of the landscape, but also the psyche of the place in a way that made perfect sense to me. It was really uplifting and made a deep connection with me as a painter in a way that I’ve not felt from another artist in a long time. 

'The Yellow Log'

The images were full of poetry and atmosphere, but the way they were painted seemed so fresh and contemporary with an urgency and fluency that was revelatory.(if contemporary painting was only this fresh and urgent! I've just seen who won the John Moores Painting Prize today. You have to think, 'Of all the entrants  this is the best?'). I loved the scale of so many of them, which was often about 5 feet across, and the treatment of space and the forms, but especially the colour (this would make it’s way into things later…) to depict the unique atmosphere and light. I came away thinking he was my new favourite artist! Weirdly Munch was one of the first artists I was directed to as a student on my foundation course after making my first paintings. I did also see a stunning Munch show at MoMA, New York about seven years ago where I was quite shocked by their large scale, but I was in a very different place with my own work. These connections you make are often about the timing.

I have yet to visit the Tate Modern’s current Munch exhibition, but this is on the cards in the next week or so….oh, and yes a version of 'The Scream' was on display in Oslo. Despite it's familiarity, it is a disturbing and original painting that still seems to resonate.