Something In The Night...

 

The Boss: Bruce Springsteen at Coventry Ricoh Stadium 2016

Any readers of this blog, even the occasional one, will have probably picked up on my passion for Bruce Springsteen’s music as reflected in my exhibition titles, writings on his concerts and records, and various other references from titles of individual paintings and my peppering of blog posts with references to lyrics and quotes.

A couple of weeks ago I saw him play live with the mighty E Street Band once again at Coventry’s Ricoh Arena. It was another amazing performance by the band, this time more stripped down to their core following the large ensemble, which included a full horn and percussion section and backing singers, which accompanied the last tour. The pared down band seemed possessed of a raw force that was at times very moving, always exciting, and also lots of fun as ever, particularly as the show reached its three and a half hour climax. One had to wonder as you joined the fifty thousand fans that drifted out the stadium in a state of euphoric awe and wonderment, and sheer exhilarated exhaustion, how Bruce does it at each night. I’ve never been to any gig that becomes such an immersive, emotional experience such as these. I was nearly in tears when at the start of the gig, after a lovely opener of ‘For You’ played unaccompanied at the piano, the whole band joined him onstage to open with ‘Something In The Night’ from ‘Darkness On The Edge Of Town’. It was an incredible moment as the piano intro started and the drums rumbled in the song’s slow build-up and Bruce’s howl (link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWZTduaV8vY)

 

I could hardly believe I was hearing it, it’s such a great song, and it set the scene and atmosphere with such a powerful and tense grip that the hairs on my arms literally stood up.  And from there you find yourself on this incredible 3 hour journey, where you really feel you are seeing something magical and thrilling unfold before your eyes as the setlist is skillfully built from a heady mixture of requests from the crowd, the popular and more well-known songs (this time including a blistering ‘Born In The USA’, a real highlight in a gig full of highlights), covers, and Bruce’s own selections from 40 years of songs.  

 

Bruce with guitarist Nils Lofgren

I feel so alive at these gigs that it is difficult to explain in words to the uninitiated, but you can see it in the sheer and unadulterated joy and love you see in the faces of the fans at each gig which are frequently projected onto the large screens at the front and side of the stage throughout, so caught up in the moment. It’s a wonderful and inspiring sight and testament to the experience.  

 

 A few days later I went to a gig by Hugh Masekela with some friends who had also been to see Bruce at Coventry. We talked non stop about the concert on the way there, and when we arrived we met a friend of theirs in the bar who had also been, and for him, despite being a music nut, this had been his first time at a Bruce gig.  On Facebook he had apparently posted, “I can’t believe it. Why have I never done that before?!!!!”. On meeting him, I recognized that familiar ‘Bruce glow’ I always have following one of his concerts. It’s a mixture of warmth, joy and inspiration. I know I go about these things, but I’m not the only one. Here’s a link to a recent Guardian article that says pretty much the same as I just have, only better. I should have just directed you there at the start of this post:

https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2016/jun/10/bruce-springsteen-makes-you-feel-alive-wembley-stadium

 

Bruce with Little Steven Van Zandt

And here is a link to one of the best Boss fan websites, Backstreets, where you can see for yourself the diversity of Bruce’s setlists and some great accounts of the recent British leg of his current European tour: http://www.backstreets.com/  

 

Richmond Fontaine

When I return to earth I visit the studio and listen to nothing but Bruce for the next few weeks (as well as my other new favourite band, Richmond Fontaine, whose songs seem inhabited by the same sort of characters in many of Bruce’s songs), re-read ‘The Wanderers’ by Richard Price, watch lots of Bruce on Youtube (if you’ve not heard his recent Prince tribute of a cover of ‘Purple Rain’ you must check it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XavU8vH1ZLg ), start to read ‘Independence Day’ by Richard Ford, and follow lots of other Bruce threads and connections from David Simon to Rob Brydon….  

...The journey continues...

'Black Country' by Bruce Gilden

 

A few months ago a friend directed me to these recent portraits (example above) by American street photographer, Bruce Gilden. They are actually taken on the mean Black Country streets of West Bromwich, where I was born and grew up, and Wolverhampton as part of an ongoing commission Gilden is doing with Sandwell community arts organisation, Multistory. My friend actually said they reminded him of my own portrait paintings of the people of West Bromwich and Sandwell that I worked on between 2006-2008, also as a commission managed by Multistory (see my website ‘Seek My Face’ page for more details of this). 

 

I was blown away by the impact of these ravaged and sometimes frightening faces and how Gilden had framed and taken these photos, and although flattered by my friend’s comparison, I just wish had had even come close to creating something so powerful. They seemed to speak to me very personally about my experiences about growing up in the Black Country and the types of forgotten and broken faces you encounter in a region blighted by poverty and hardship from the heavy manual work people used to do, and the mass unemployment that followed in the Eighties that has marked the area ever since. The poverty that has lead, as can be seen in some of these faces, to addiction to alcohol and drugs.  

But I also think these portraits are not unique to this particular corner of the world: you could find faces like this in any of the post-industrial towns and cities of the UK, or in the world as Gilden’s website contains very many similarly harsh portraits of people, particularly in his native America (see image below).

 

I was pleased therefore, to receive a link from Emma Chetcuti the Director at Multistory the other day to a short film they had made of Gilden at work, with his assistant, on the streets of West Bromwich. I was fascinated to hear of his experiences of the town, as an outsider all the way from New York, and his motivations for focussing on the more extreme faces he encountered. Indeed, he spoke of his empathy for ‘the broken’, and the underdog, a character trait that seems embedded in the Black Country psyche in my experience, which I think helps us understand the deeper, psychological drive of the artist, and remember that photography is no less subjective than painting or anything else. Are these photographs portraits of the artist? They seem part of a bigger picture to me. 

 I shared the film with my friend, Andrew Tift, the well-known portrait painter based in Walsall, who has made portrait paintings of his own of working class people from the Black Country, such as this magnificent drawing, ‘Ken’ (below) but he was less than impressed, finding them exploitative and near to, in his own words, ‘taking the piss’. This is also a view shared in this Guardian review of Gilden’s book, ‘Face’ here: http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/aug/19/bruce-gilden-face-street-portraits-photographs-book

 

I can totally understand Andrew’s feelings, and there are some questionable moments in the film, but I’m inclined to think of them as more complex, offering a deeper and uncomfortable look into the eyes of our shared humanity.  My Dad, when I shared them with him, also thought it was a narrow view of the area, but before long was recounting stories of many of the characters, many desperate and broken too by poverty and addiction, he had worked with in the factories around West Brom, Tipton etc, and before long was making a deeper connection himself with these extraordinary portraits.  Watch the video and see what you think yourself:

https://vimeo.com/165135208

George Shaw 'Plays For England...'

George Shaw, 'The Uncovered Cover (detail), humbrol enamel on canvas, 2015

It looks like artist George Shaw has been enjoying himself. This week saw the opening of his exhibition at the National Gallery in London, in the Sunley Room, ‘My Back To Nature’. It’s a culmination of his work there as the Artist-in-Residence over the last two and a half years. I can’t wait to see what he’s done in response to the collection, which is the basic remit of the residency when artists are invited to participate in the programme. These few images and this link to a review in The Guardian certainly whet the artistic appetite though….

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/may/09/george-shaw-review-my-back-to-nature-national-gallery

George Shaw, humbrol enamel on canvas, 2015

'Tragic Forms' by Ken Currie

 

Ken Currie, 'Shoulder of Lamb', oil on linen, 167 x 244cms, 2014

In my last post I shared some of my digital prints, of which I’ve since done a couple more. Working on these, where I have been re-visiting some of the images in the paintings to rework them with this different media, has begun to throw up questions for me about I’m actually trying to do, or say, with my landscape work; what’s it about and where is it going? These questions seem to nag me more persistently when I look at these prints as a collection of images, with the possible idea of presenting them as a book. What do they add up to? Are they to be seen as individual images or as part of a larger, connected sequence, which is how I tend to view things? They are obviously connected with their motifs of trucks and roads, but at the moment I have doubts about whether this possesses much meaningful expression of anything. 

An artist I admire greatly, whose own work possesses an ongoing and powerful dialogue with certain ideas about the human condition, particularly about the body as a symbolic vessel, a carrier of ideas about power and the abuses of power, and transformation, is the Scottish painter, Ken Currie. His most recent collection of paintings, ‘Tragic Forms’, were exhibited at the Flowers East Gallery in London earlier this year, which unfortunately I missed seeing, but have just bought the catalogue after viewing them online.  For someone like myself, who knows Currie’s work very well, they are, to my eyes, the most disturbing and unsettling paintings he has made in a career of creating disturbing and unsettling paintings.

 

Ken Currie, 'Ensemble', oil on linen, 214 x 305cms, 2014

Transformation of the body features heavily in them, whether that is in the portraits of mutilated or bandaged figures, often dressed in military attire, or the more surreal, horrific paintings of writhing flesh, half human, half carcass. Terrifyingly ambiguous, I’m not sure whether these figures are being born or devoured. 

 

'Tragic Forms No.4', oil on linen, 122 x 152cms, 2014

In a really interesting series of self-portraits, the artist wears a series of masks modelled on the well-known, but seldom seen, drawings made by Henry Tonks of mutilated faces of soldiers from the trenches of the First World War. These original drawings were commissioned by the Royal College of Surgeons as they pioneered the first attempts at plastic surgery to repair the faces of these unfortunate men: faces with their gaping wounds, scars and cavities, which were seen as too shocking for the wider public about the realities of modern warfare. I find it deeply fascinating that Currie has re-visited these in his own meditations about war and the violent transformation of flesh and bone. 

 

Ken Currie, 'Self Portrait After Henry Tonks', oil on linen, 61 x 61cms, 2013

 

Ken Currie, 'Self Portrait (with Henry Tonks Mask), oil on linen, 61 x 61cms, 2013

 

Henry Tonks, 'Studies of Wounded Soldiers',  pastel, c1918

He has made masks before to work from. For his well-known commission, the ‘Three Oncologists’, a triple portrait of leading cancer surgeons for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, instead of working from photographs or life of these busy doctors, who had little time to pose, he actually persuaded them to have their faces cast in plaster in the tradition of the ‘death mask’ and worked from these instead, which seemed to add a poignant vulnerability to the portraits.  Currie also spent time in surgery with them as they opened up and worked inside the bodies of the sick to remove cancerous tumours, an experience that has deeply affected the artist.   

 

'Three Oncologists', oil on linen, 195 x 241cms, 2002

Tragic Forms’ possessed some enormous paintings of shanks of meat realised in exquisite detail and colour, totally convincing, but actually half imagined alongside the observations he made from things bought at the butcher’s shop. In their large scale they appear to wrap themselves around you. They owe a large debt to Francis Bacon’s or Chaim Soutine’s paintings of carcasses, a debt Currie readily acknowledges, with Bacon one of his painting heroes.   

 

Ken Currie, 'Acteon', oil on linen, 213 x 152cms, 2014

 

Francis Bacon,' Three Studies For A Crucificion (right panel), oil on canvas, 1962

In fact, much of Currie’s painting seems to be in a rich dialogue with the great European traditions in Painting, as Bacon was with his obsessions with Velasquez. In Currie’s new paintings references to Goya, David, Bacon, Velasquez, and most notably Chardin’s ‘The Ray’ frequently occur.  In a link to a video interview with the artist below, he explains how his extraordinary and strange ‘Tragic Form (Skate)’ was directly inspired by Chardin’s masterpiece.   

 

Ken Currie, 'Tragic Form (Skate)', oil on canvas, 244 x 304cms, 2014

 

Chardin 'The Ray', oil on canvas, 140 x 160cms, 1728

Yet I never feel that Currie is trying to breathe new life into old forms as much representational painting interested in these older traditions badly attempts: the ideas always seem much more sophisticated and contemporary. In this video link it is also very interesting listening to Currie talk about his methodology and techniques for creating the paintings too from a technical, more craftsman-like, perspective as he obsesses about subtle details such as how the figures or forms fit in the picture frame and what a difference an inch here or there can make. I really understood this, as I too get a bit obsessed with these details too, which is why I make quite detailed ‘cartoons’ or preparatory drawings where I carefully work these problems out before attempting a painting. I think they can make or break things sometimes. In the past I used to try and get the figures to fit the frame, now its’ all about the frame fitting the figures/lorries/heads/ motorways (delete as appropriate) and trying to work that out. It’s quite a different thing.   

 

Ken Currie, 'The Unwell (triptych)', oil on canvas, 214 x 733cms, 2015

Anyway, I’ve really got a lot from looking at these latest paintings by Ken Currie. He continues to make incredibly ambitious and challenging paintings. His ambition, skill and rigour is a quality I have always admired.  Have a listen to the video link. It’s a fascinating insight into the motivations and experiences of this great painter.

http://www.flowersgallery.com/news-and-events/view/ken-currie-in-conversation-with-christopher-baker 

Prints

 

Earlier this week I was playing with printing out some of my i-pad prints that I intermittently work on.  These particular ones are a series of stark black and white images that I have sometimes shared on this blog that originally started out as possible designs for relief lino prints. They are based on the paintings and drawings and are an attempt to strip things back even further. I really enjoy working within the limits of just the black and white and find it really creative. Some of the best of them have a sort of haiku quality I really like, others, visually, have more of a Frank Miller quality, which I also like. 

 

I have tried to create a couple of lino prints from them, but not with much success. They seemed to lack a certain energy in the cut mark of the lino tool, at least in this artists hands, compared to the much more fluent digital mark that I am able to achieve with the I-Pad. I teach lino printing to students all the while and they create some lovely results, but I have never managed to master a decent print myself in over twenty years of trying.  I’m keen to still persevere though, as I enjoy the physical engagement with the materials, as I do with painting. 

 

Anyway, I had been wanting to print these out on some heavier cartridge paper to see what they would look like and try to gauge a sense of whether they would be good enough to work as digital prints that I could possibly exhibit, or even sell if they were suitably dressed up in a mount. They did look much better when I printed them on the heavier paper, but what really snapped them into life was finding the right scale for the image. After a few attempts at different sizes I printed them at a modest 10 x 15cms and that seemed to fit the images really well. 

I’m pretty excited about it, and am now left wondering what I should do with them: should I frame them? Just mount them up and try to sell them fairly cheaply at exhibitions or different events and venues alongside my paintings? Or I have toyed with the idea of presenting them in a book of some kind. I could of course, do all of these things…

Another night...

 

oil on canvas, 200 x 150cms

Okay, tonight's another night and so I decided to re-paint a big part of my new painting. I think it looks better for being simpler. At least until I go to the studio tomorrow...

"Maybe one day I'll be a better writer..."

 

oil on canvas, 200 x 150cms

 

I’ve spent all my evenings in the last week working on this new large painting. I think it’s finished for now. I just need to live with it a while.

 I’ve really enjoyed doing it, despite feeling rather agitated each day while I have waited to get back to it. It has presented me with many different technical and formal problems: from the drawing and painting of the lorry and its cargo to deciding how to paint the background, particularly the stripes on the architecture behind. This has gone through a few different stages: from staining the canvas with the green and rubbing back to a very expressive ground I had applied, which is now virtually hidden, before being painted much more directly, wet into wet, with the canvas on its side. I worked  from top to bottom rather than left to right with a particular sized brush matching the required width of the bands. which seemed an easier gesture to control when painting them. That was fun.

The following three evenings were spent carefully developing the painting: breaking up the bands so they didn’t whizz off the edges so much, almost like improving my sentence structure or using more punctuation; to adjusting the colour and tonal values of everything; simplifying some areas; trying to activate other ones; being bolder then stepping back again; improving the drawing of the lorry’s cargo time and time again. There are hundreds of little decisions you make to try and give it some legs to stand up on its own.