Painting again - unfinished

After my recent operation painting was at first difficult because sitting down was hard - and with my current lack of studio and thus painting in my bedroom status, it's the only way I can paint. Which I guess accounts for the calmer paintings in some ways. In my studio I would dance around whilst painting (I know - nobody wants to see that). But before the operation I bought some ply wood from Castorama to experiment with. It's cheaper than canvas, and I like the idea after looking at some of Howard Hodgkin's works on wood at the Tate. So here it is - not finished I think.  I prepped the wood before the op, so it has been waiting for me for some time - a blank piece of wood the other side of the room. Now not so blank. I have masked off the outside of the sheet of ply to leave a natural wood frame. Anyway, not finished I think. But this is what I have now:

Over There

Yeah I think it needs some work when I see it here. So no doubt will change. Not sure it fits together properly at the moment - not sure about the blue area on the left, or the bottom black area with symbols. Well at least I am painting, and unusually showing unfinished work. Am less happy with the frame area than I imagined - partly because the grain only goes one way which means it doesn't look right. I think it's exactly the wrong size. Should have been larger or smaller. This is just too noncommittal. We'll see.

It's my birthday - again. Seems to come around a lot.

Today is my birthday. 54 today. Shortly I will be getting drunk so I forget how old I am getting. A couple of weeks ago I had an operation which also made me feel old, and physically made it difficult to paint, so that explains the recent lack of posts. And painting. Also hard to sit on an ordinary chair for long periods. But let's not go there. What I have done is some more iPad pics of digital animals - so here are some of them - enjoy:

Cat on Rollerskates

Hippo on Skateboard

Cats in boxes

Truffling

Levitating Donkey

Milo

Red and Black

My primary colours are red and black. The colours of communism and anarchy. I strive for deep dark blacks, and like to contrast with bright reds. In this painting though I have combined and overlapped different blacks - carbon, ivory, lamp - and different reds - cadmium, vermillion, carmine, crimson. The touches of blue add depth and points of contrast. I paint because I must, but I have such a long way to go.

The Turner Prize 2012

"The king is in the altogether, the altogether, the altogether..."

I was in London last week and decided to visit the Tate Britain gallery and take a look at the 2012 Turner Prize show. Often controversial, often interesting, but usually a good way to spend a rainy London afternoon. I took the tube to Pimlico and ignored the signs to the Tate which take you past the extension to Chelsea Art School, preferring to walk along the banks of the Thames. I walked past the old Government Office for London building, and noticed it was being refurbished or knocked down - or perhaps was just Christo's latest piece of art.

While taking the above photo I was accosted by a Big Issue sales person. I bought a copy off him, and we walked together along the banks of the Thames. He was an interesting man - clearly well-educated, about the same age as me, Irish, and friendly, we chatted about life on the streets, and he told me he was writing everything down with the intention of writing a book. I wished him luck, and we parted ways as we reached the Tate. To get into the Tate Britain nowadays, you don't enter via the Thames, because of building work going on. And in fact the side entrance makes the whole layout deeply confusing, with the "free maps" (£1 "donation" and please give your map back for recycling when you leave) completely unhelpful. I found the ticket office, where they tried to sting me for a further "donation" on top of the £10 ticket price.

Not seen the Turner Prize show this year? Take a look at this film from the Guardian website ("found footage") - everything you need to know is here and you'll save yourself £10 - but take everything Adrian Searle says with a large lump of rock salt:

Paul Noble

First there's the "scatological" drawings and sculptures by Paul Noble. Imagine doodling in a notebook with a pair of pencils whilst listening to a tedious lecture. Imagine drawing an imaginary town. Imagine that it looks a bit like lumps of poo so you expand on this theme and make the whole town "poo-based". Yes? Possible to imagine doing that isn't it? Now imagine spreading this doodle across the entire notebook. OK, a bit obsessive, but it's one damn boring lecture. Now imagine spreading that onto  enormous pieces of paper and other pieces of paper joined together so it covers metres of wall space. That lecture must have been unbelievably dull, because that is what Paul Noble's work is like - poo doodles, loads of them. And some poo sculptures. Ho ho. Unfortunately the whole effect is... boring. There is nothing to excite the imagination - the drawings have no great aesthetic appeal, and are not so technically marvellous you are in awe. There is nothing there of interest - just something Paul Noble doodled whilst he couldn't think of anything better to do.

Luke Fowler

Moving round the show (in the order you see it, not the way Adrian Searle presents it) the next thing you see is photographs and film by Luke Fowler. The photos are all two photographs side-by-side - images clashing, complementing each other (I guess is the effect intended). However there's a couple of problems: they aren't very good - not bad exactly, just nothing exceptional - and they are poorly mounted and framed. The connection between the pairs of images is often obscure - and, anyway, the images just aren't interesting enough (not well composed, not interesting subject matter, not well produced). Hmm. It emerges (see the film above)  that there is a theme about mental health in the photos - but it isn't clear, and the photos are not engaging enough to draw you in to examine them at any length. So on the theme of mental health the next thing to see is the 93 minute film about R D Laing. If you haven't got a life to lead. Anyone who sat through the entire 93 minutes of that film deserves an award. The only person I can imagine sitting through it actually, is Paul Noble: who would use the 93 minutes to do some of his poo doodling. It's a shame: R D Laing is an interesting subject - but this isn't an interesting film. The need to be artistic seems to outweigh any need to engage an audience. There really is an issue with artists making films - and I'll come back to it in a moment.

Elizabeth Price

Next along in the exhibition is a display :"about the artists" and about the galleries that represent them (who stand to make a lot of cash for having their artists chosen for the Turner Prize). This isn't very enlightening, and so i naturally moved on to the next artist, Elizabeth Price. Adrian Searle describes her work perfectly: it is a series of three short, related films about a fire in a Woolworths in Manchester in 1979. The film links together archive footage with added captions, diagrams, annoying loud click sounds and other stuff in a technically able way that leaves you with an end product that fails to engage.  I am probably very stupid, but what the hell was this about? A fire that killed 10 people 33 years ago. And? The scandal of how inflammatory furniture was at the time? I haven't got a clue. The desire to produce something overtly "arty" completely overwhelmed any possibility of informing, provoking or entertaining.

And this is the problem with film. We all see film all the time on TV, at the cinema, on our computers, laptops wherever. We are all very film-litertate. A lot of the film work we see is crap (X Factor) but a lot of what we see is of very high quality - whether it be Hollywood, a TV show or even an ad or a pop video. What then does an art film have to offer that is different and interesting? That is, a film outside of the normal context we see film, placed in a gallery setting to do whatever it is art does.  I don't know - and the reason I don't know is that I have never seen an art film that succeeded in doing so. I may have missed something - but the two art films in this exhibition only succeed in proving my point. By trying to be something different, they only succeed in being something that isn't visually or artistically interesting.

Spartacus Chetwynd

Finally we come to Spartacus Chetwynd. Hmmm. I went to art school between 1980 and 1983. At that time little Spartacus was only 7-10 years old. (She was actually called Alalia then - I know, I know, you are SHOCKED that Spartacus isn't her real name). Some people at my art college, Wolverhampton, in those days were doing the type of thing Spartacus does here. Look her up on Wikipedia and you find this quote: 

"Spartacus Chetwynd (born Lali Chetwynd, 1973) is a British artist known for reworkings of  iconic moments from cultural history in deliberately amateurish and improvisatory performances"

Well she succeeds in her "deliberate amateurish-ness", if nothing else. I have no idea what this was all about. It was irritating, pretentious, and poorly executed. I don't understand - nor care about - what this was about. Some people dressed up in some "deliberately amateurish" costumes, mucking around with some "deliberately amateurish": puppets, doing completely obscure indecipherable things, in a poorly built, poorly conceived (deliberately amateurish I guess) "set". I took a photo with my phone of part of the "set" - it looks better in this photo than it did in real life.  But still amateurish.

So in all I found the whole show depressing. In previous years there have been some talented artists nominated for the Tate Prize. None of the artists in this exhibition showed any talent I could admire or enjoy. It reminded me of going to a very bad art-school degree show - one where nobody got anything better than a 2:2. So what does this say about the "art world"? (Apologies for over-use of inverted commas and italics). Take a look at the American TV Show - "The next great artist" or whatever it's called - on Sky Arts. This tells you all you need to know. Because it isn't about the artists - it's about galleries and curators (and critics) who are so much up their own arses they wouldn't know a piece of decent art if they were bashed over the head with it. This is about fashion, not art, about power in the art world, and about, as usual, money. The artists are nominated by the galleries who represent them, and are shortlisted by a committee of judges - all from private galleries, except the director of the Tate.

Speaking of money, there's £10 I'll never see again. I wish I'd given it to the guy who sold me the big issue, rather than encourage the poverty of creation I'd seen here.


So to cheer myself up, I went upstairs at the Tate Modern and looked at the Howard Hodgkin retrospective. Unfortunately a very small exhibition - but some damn nice paintings. And free to view.

Howard Hodgkin

Tuesday

When I was young we had a cat called Tuesday. He was called Tuesday because that was the day he arrived. Originally my dad wanted to call him Jimmy Greaves, but my mum over-ruled him. Tuesday was a big tabby tom cat. My love of cats generally stems from him. Tuesday died when i was about 10, run over in the street. I remember writing about him in a story or essay in class, and describing him as "purple and yellow". I know what I meant - he was a reddy brown and cream tabby cat. Purple and yellow in my head seemed about right - and in some ways it still does. But I was laughed at by my teacher who thought it was very amusing to have a purple and yellow cat. Silly cow. There's a line in an Elvis Costello song - "Deep Dark Truthful Mirror" that always reminds me of him:

You're spell-bound baby, there's no doubting that 

Did you ever see a stare like a Persian cat?

Obviously, though, I have always heard "purple cat". Anyway, here's some drawings I've done of Tuesday.

Rain, Paintings, Don Bessant and Brushes

The rain is coming down hard. Today is particularly bad, but it has rained a lot recently. Although that's not entirely true - two days ago I was driving around with the roof down on my car, the sun was shining and the temperature recorded outside the pharmacy was 30°c. But summer is well and truly over. When I take the dog out at 7am I have to take a torch, and am disturbed to find the ground where we play frisbee has been dug up by wild boar. This morning though we couldn't even get to the field - the river Derridière was running and no hope of crossing it for me. The dog didn't mind - we played in the river instead.

This means that I am not out drawing, and actually am finding it hard to motivate myself out of my nice warm bed. It usually takes a ginger cat miaowing in my ear to get me up.

I have found some time to do some painting, and some iPad pics, some of which I will share with you here.

Black Flag

Red Flag

Red Flag and Black Flag - communism and anarchism. But in many ways these are paintings about painting. I have reverted to using entirely acrylic paints. It's much easier in the small space I am painting ion now. I like the textures I have made by using different palette knives. Scraping paint off gives different effects, and using masking tape to create geometrical-type shapes gives an impression of layers I like. Lots of things inspired me whilst painting. I spent some time looking at other painters' work, including Hodgkin and Hoyland, and Jim Dine. Which made me think of one of my old printmaking tutors at college, Don Bessant, who died young in the 1990s - as did two other of my printmaking tutors, Geoff Smith and Jim Chappin - very sad, and reminds me that painting with water soluble stuff is good health and safety practice - and reminds me of how sensible I was to give up smoking 8 years ago. So I googled Don and found galleries selling his prints - which is nice, and found that Wolverhampton had opened a gallery in his name, which is also nice. And found loads of pictures of him as a young man with Julie Christie - whom he dated in the 60s. Down the pub, fag in the corner of his mouth, Don would reminisce about those days over a pint. Now I'm reminiscing about him.

So after such serious research it's nice to pick up the iPad and do some more silly drawings. I usually use "Brushes" for these, and  recently was pleased to learn that a new version - Brushes 3 (what happened to Brushes 2 is a mystery) - is out. Unfortunately it has mutated into something that doesn't interest me. An iPad app aimed at people who want to produce iPad paintings that look like they have been done on paper or canvas - in other words that don't look like they were done on an iPad. I love the simplicity of the original Brushes, and don't really see the point of the new app - there are already similar apps out there - the best of which (if you're interested) is "Procreate". To show you what I mean, here are two recent Brushes pictures:

Long-horned sheep

Puffins

And here's one I made with Procreate:

Horse

 Nothing wrong with it - it looks like an ink drawing of a horse. But you know what? I think I prefer to do ink drawings of horses on paper - with a pen and ink, like this:

Gump

It's somehow more alive.

Music while you work/Expression/Self Indulgence/A new car

I like having music on while I paint. I choose different playlists depending on my mood. I'm sure this has in influence on what I paint. It certainly influences the titles I choose for the paintings created whilst listening. So here are four new paintings. They have been painted simultaneously, all with acrylics only - oils are too difficult in my current space, and I can't use spray paints. Actually not entirely true - one of them has some oil stick on it.

They are all "15F" 54x65cm - which feels like a good size to be working on in the space I'm in. I could probably go a bit larger. When I've finished with this job-lot of canvases I bought at this size I may have a go at something bigger. I'll have to see what's on offer. Am getting low on red paint, which could be disastrous.

 This group of abstracts have been influenced by a number of things (apart from the music). I'm still very interested in the golden ratio/Phi, as well as the physical environment outside my window, which mainly consists of amazing medieval stone buildings.

I'm still fascinated by expressing concepts of identity within paintings too. I find it interesting that when painting you are expressing yourself: but each painting isn't the same, because you are never the same. And it's not entirely caused by a change of track from Public Image Limited to Prince Buster.

The act of painting is interesting in itself too. It is easy to get dragged in by different marks. I like the textures caused by using different brushes, paints and palette knives (and fingers too). But I am controlling things a bit more simply because of the lack of space.

And yet all of this seems quite self-indulgent - which I guess it is - I suppose all painting is to some extent self-indulgent and this is kind of necessary to the process.

Meanwhile my lovely Barchetta appears to be dead - or at least badly injured;. And it seems sensible to be looking for a new car, which I am doing. Am contemplating driving a Right Hand car in france simply because the cost is so much lower. Dammit I need to sell some of these paintings to pay for a new car!!