by the way...

'Weird Nightmare' oil on canvas, 100x 120cms, 2011

 

‘That Black Country glow’ my Dad remarked at the weekend on seeing the orange sky in a recent small painting of the M5. Historically, at its industrial peak, that orange glow in the night sky from the foundries, has been well documented from people as diverse as Queen Victoria to Tolkien. It’s weird that I hadn’t thought about its own possible significance in any way before in my paintings of the post-industrial Black Country. That orange sky is a recurring motif. I’m glad that my Dad, Tipton born and bred, did though.

That orange sky fills a large part of the first painting that I did based on this landscape, ‘Weird Nightmare’, back in 2011, which was recently exhibited in Nottingham at The BoHunk Institute in ‘By The Way’. I’m pleased to say I sold it the other day.

Sian Stammers, photographer and curator of ‘By The Way’, is keen to develop the exhibition as an ongoing project and extend its reach into the West Midlands, with my help. This is exciting. I hope I can help.

The orange sky is absent, as are most things, from this new large painting I’ve just completed based on the post-industrial landscape of the Black Country. It’s not quite like anything I’ve made before. I was thinking about Giotto a lot when I made it, and listening to susuma yokota’s ‘Sakura’ album, and Harold Budd’s ‘Abandoned Cities’. I’m not sure if this is significant, but they are great records.

 





'Black Highway'...

Still Game...

Hurvin Anderson at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham

-->

You’re really spoilt for choice for great painting exhibitions in the region at the moment, with terrific shows by Hurvin Anderson at Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and Ged Quinn at New Art Gallery Walsall. 

 Ged Quinn at New Art Gallery Walsall

I visited the Ged Quinn show yesterday, being only vaguely familiar with his surreal and theatrical landscape paintings, but this exhibition also presented some peculiar still lives and portraits. All of the work is some sort of riff on different traditions, or genres, and historical periods in paintings and heavy on complex narrative that can often be alienating in certain artist’s hands, but not so here. I’m not really interested in narrative painting, but with these works there was a sense of inclusivity and openness that drew you in to the strange symbolic buildings, objects and figures that occupied the appropriated romantic landscapes of hills and woodland, rivers and forests. You didn’t feel you had to know exactly what all these things meant or stood for to enjoy the work and bring yourself to it. A lot of the work reminded me of the late, great Scottish painter, Steven Campbell, whose dense narrative paintings were also often humourous and rewarding, but with a more off the cuff technique than Quinn’s more slickly painted works. A sign of the times.

 

Ged Quinn

--> These qualities were far removed from Hurvin Anderson’s paintings at Ikon, whose paintings were lush and rich with great and varied painterly expression, experimentation and command. The landscape in most of Anderson’s paintings was that of his adopted home of Trinidad, although the view always seemed to be seen at a distance, through wire fences or windows, always just out of reach, which created a dark undertow to the light filled large canvasses. 

 Hurvin Anderson

-->

The execution of the paintings was just very exciting, with a sense that the artist would leave no stone unturned in exploring the myriad possibilities of oil painting to realize his vision. My favourite paintings in the show were a suite of works called ‘Peter’s Room’, set in a barbers shop. These were a series of repetitive paintings with only subtle differences between many of them, before the introduction of a figure in the later ones, representing the marking of time in this communal space. The revealing layers of paint and the zones where edges and shapes met and overlapped or collided are the things that really excite me (which is like some sort of sad confession).  The painting that I most enjoyed though, perhaps unsurprisingly, was a large black and grey urban scene of a street in what rightly or wrongly I’m presuming was Birmingham (top of the post)

 

 Hurvin Anderson

-->

I’ve been making some spontaneous small paintings of my own in the studio in the last two weeks, with a view to present them alongside the larger paintings in January’s ‘Black Highway’ exhibition.  If you are in the region I'd recommend these shows.

'Black Highway'

'By The Way'....

-->I enjoyed the opening night last Thursday of ‘By The Way’ at The Bohunk Institute in Nottingham, which featured four of my paintings in what was largely a photography exhibition based on the ‘edgelands’, or wastelands, or margins and the ex-mining communities surrounding Nottingham and Mansfield. There were also text pieces displayed on the gallery walls complementing or created in collaboration with some of the photography, most noticeably a very striking and evocative poem by my artist/writer friend, Andrew Smith. 

 David Severn

My paintings were hung by the gallery in a surprising and dynamic way: four closely together, almost looking like one large wall piece (see image above). I was really pleased, particularly with a new one exhibited for the first time. Of the photography, I was most impressed by David Severn’s documentary photographs of the former colliery community and landscape around Mansfield, which were laid to waste in the 80’s. An image of young men in the back of a van really struck me, reflecting on the potential of their lives, but seemingly trapped by the circumstances of their birthplace, if this doesn’t sound too condescending. It’s just that in current times, the idea of any form of social mobility in this country seems an increasingly dim and distant dream.  Helen Saunders’ ‘constructed’ photographs of the overlooked edgelands landscape were also pretty interesting, particularly one of Birmingham. I’m never very sure about anything photoshopped, however, especially in this context, but they seemed to be successful more in the commercial context of being used on the original book jacket of the popular ‘Edgelands’ book. 

 David Severn

David Severn 

                                                                                          Helen Saunders

-->It’s nice at this late stage of my current Arts Council funding to feature in a group exhibition based on this theme, which seems to be very much in favour since the publication of the ‘Edgelands’ book by Paul Farley and Michael Simmonds-Roberts in 2011, and since I made my grant application. The book, which I enjoyed a great deal, despite the criticisms made that much of the material is explored better in the writings of someone like Richard Mabey, and his ‘Unofficial Countryside’, and others, certainly opened up a door for me to help me shape my own responses to the landscape with more originality and coherence.  I think it’s success is more about capturing some sort of zeitgeist in the air at the time and currently, although the phrase ‘edgelands’ is something Sian, the curator of ‘By The Way’, was keen to disassociate herself with as it is something that seems so overused now.  I agree, but it is a phrase I’m using unashameably as a ‘hook’ to describe my own current work, when discussing it or approaching galleries etc, as I think these things can be useful when trying to boil things down for these purposes. That’s all. I don’t think it gets in the way, quite the opposite. There is the world of making the work, and then the world of trying to market it to audiences.  It seems important to be realistic about these things if you want people to seriously engage with it.  Anyway, the show is on until the 30^th November. Below is Andy's poem: 

-->

By The Way

Crossing the rosehips    

Between treasuries

Feeling the sagging vervain

Brief swellings under the felly

Beneath forgotten cornices

Lying in the gully

The concrete stadium’s purring

Shovels on the foothills fizzling

thorns and winds

The sleep of dope

***

After the Pierrot of the broken glazing

The packages of spoon-fed florets

There is the padlocked mother

Standing hard and level on the surge   

Smelling colonial  

Tinged with mould and milfoil

Recounting many short shrifts

With large predatory gulls circling  

***

After estrangement

Approaching the round table

Passing the junk food to the right

The private detective

The bulges

The areas for parley

Coming upon the view

A sex and shopping blockbuster

Marshmallows underneath

***

Striking out from the civic centre

Under the vast yardang

Passions expertly shored with broken crayons

Laden with pangs stuck on with chewing gum

Armoured with brass

Lined with dried grating     old lint   

Seeking soft underground lactations

Covered by great standardized neuroses

 

   'Weird Nightmare', oil on canvas, 120 x 90cms, 2011

http://www.bohunkinstitute.co.uk/

Some October Morning

I had an unexpected window of opportunity to go out painting yesterday morning. So, I took my pachode painting box down to the site under the M5 just outside Smethwick where I have based my recent paintings. These paintings have been largely developed from photographs taken there at night with my photographer friend, Laura Gale, but I have been keen for some time to return in the day and try and make some ‘plein air’ paintings on the spot, possibly for inclusion in my forthcoming show at Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery. I recently bought some nice wooden painting panels for this purpose.

Dropping off the main road and down onto the canal, it was interesting seeing the view again with fresh eyes as I emerged from a low, dank tunnel. I have been working for several months now on these recent paintings, and have felt very immersed in the location. So it was strange, yet pleasingly familiar, to see the large green factory staring unblinkingly at me as it has in two recent paintings, and begin to make out the shapes and forms that have appeared as mere silhouettes. 

I worked for nearly two hours on this small painting, which I’m not sure I actually like, but it hopefully may get the ball rolling to do some more. Eventually, the cold started to bite, and I could barely move my hands. Funnily enough, this is actually when the painting started to get interesting. When my wife picked me up in the car, I couldn’t talk through my frozen lips. She didn’t seem to mind though…

'Are You Recieving Me...?'

-->

‘…To me there is nothing more pathetic than an artist who, with his ‘pictures in frames’, tries to compete with pictures in movies and magazines and movies and at the same time tries to keep pace with an enormously free and stimulating abstract painting…’

artist Ad Reinhardt, excerpt from an unpublished lecture, 1943

‘You make decisions about the image and what not, but everything can seem to conspire against you as much as it can conspire for you...painting is the medium, but sometimes you can literally feel like you are the medium between something outside of you and the board (the painting), like you’re the middle ground between one world and another, like a medium in a séance…’

artist George Shaw, excerpt from documentary ‘I Woz Ere’,  2012

Both of these quotes seem to have had a peculiar resonance in the last couple of weeks as I’ve worked on this large seven feet tall painting. I have found it a very difficult piece to realize, and I have no idea what others will make of it if I exhibit it, but I am strangely excited by it. There has been more thinking about it at different stages, than the actual physical act of painting it, although most of it was painted in two long sessions in one day. I have found it challenging despite making many large paintings over the years, just not anything quite like this. Just getting the paint on the canvas took a great deal of will before then actually trying to activate the paint on the surface.

The painting seems to have opened up the work into a slightly different area. Despite its roots being in ideas about depicting the landscape, when I look at other examples of landscape painting, I sometimes feel like I’m not interested in landscape painting at all.

(as ever, the artist has to say the painting looks rubbish in this photo, and must be seen first-hand)