Without any formal art education, I tend to come on new artists by chance or recommendation or perhaps from the media. Accordingly my knowledge of art and artists is patchy and variable. As an example I recently watched a documentary on TV about the artist Joan Mitchell, who was at the time unknown to me. Stimulated by that I have been looking, on the net only alas, at some of the work of her contemporaries. Like most people with a passing interest in the subject I knew of Pollock and Rothko, but beyond that people like Mitchell and de Kooning had passed me by.
One of the things that fascinates me about abstract art is the way in which a seemingly arbitrary arrangement of blocks of colour on a flat surface can still evoke a sense of 3D space. I found this in much of de Kooning's work. As an example, looking through a book about him, I came on two pictures - 'Palisade' from 1957 and 'September Morn' from 1958, both of which immediately made me think of the work of the Victorian artist John Martin, whose work I saw recently at the Tate Gallery in London. They had strong resonances with Martin's vast, storm swept landscapes, usually with a tiny human figure somewhere in the scene.
Similarly, 'Montauk Highway' conjures up a strong sense of movement through space which was apparent without knowing the title.
For me this goes to the point of my previous post about the difference between abstraction and abstract. De Kooning's paintings are fully abstract but still refer to and draw on landscape and 'real' space in their organisation and composition.
Edit: This is post 100 on this blog, which at one stage I thought I would never meet. To celebrate I am offering 10% of the first 10 orders from the shop received before the end of April. I'm going to be adding some new small prints in a day or so, so keep checking.
Howard Hodgkin is on record as saying that he has never painted an abstract in his life. This may seem surprising when when one looks at his work, but is explained by the fact that for Hodgkin all his work is about something specific - a place, an event or a person. Other abstract painters do not make this sort of claim, but nevertheless often seem to reference the world at large. Arshile Gorky's work for example often seems to include substantial figurative elements.
Joan Mitchell's paintings on the other hand have a strong landscape feel.
Despite these references, I still have problems when I see work being sold on Etsy or EBay described as 'abstract landscape'. This seems to me to be an oxymoron, but not one that is especially helpful. By definition surely, an abstract cannot simultaneously be a landscape. An abstract may reference landscape, but as a painting it cannot be both.
I think the use of these two terms in conjunction arises because of a confusion between the object - an abstract painting is after all an object - and the process of making it, the process of abstraction. It may be the writer in me, but I don't think this is mere wordplay. Too much of contemporary art is seen as at best remote from reality and at worst as meaningless and pretentious. Clarity of language is one way to challenge that view.
I went to Tate Modern in London a few weeks ago to see Panorama - works by Gerhard Richter (now closed). As I said in an earlier post, I was a little disappointed and overall had a mixed reaction to his work.
His approach appears very intellectual. Even his dependence on chance in his 'squeegee' paintings does not appear to be for any sensual reason but academic.
The show is arranged chronologically. Much of the early work left me cold, especially the grisaille paintings made from photographs. The exception was the series of paintings about the Baader-Meinhof group. Somehow - for me anyway - the slightly detached coldness of these paintings chimed with the nihilism and the essential empty destructiveness of the groups ideology. For the rest though, nothing...
He clearly has great technical ability. Paintings like The Reader (1994) for example are photographic in their rendering, but I wonder then, as I always do with super-realist work, "What's the point?" Painting, for me at least, is not about capturing a likeness, although that may be an element. It must offer more than that, something I certainly cannot get from a photograph. In the case of a painting like Folding Dryer (1962) I don't get anything. Perhaps for Richter, fresh from East Germany, the abundance of consumer goods available to him in the West perhaps triggered something that led to this image, but away from that context it has no wider, universal meaning. I actually preferred a series of linocuts, Elbe from 1957. Made while still in the East these have an atmospheric quality, a depth, that the later monochrome works lack.
He also changes his style quite regularly. His grey paintings were followed by a series of colour charts. These paintings, flat slabs of colour arranged at random almost deny painting. There is no sense of brushwork or texture, no pretence o meaning, just flat rectangles of colour. Comparisons might be drawn with the work of Bridget Riley, but Richter is not concerned with playing tricks with our visual cortex. He seems to be saying simply 'This is it, make of it what you like'.
Later he reverted to monochrome with among others, a series of Townscape paintings. These are Impressionist in technique, blobs of paint in shades of grey that only resolve into an image as you stand back.
By the 90s he is back working in colour again. Some of these involve over-painting of photographs - seemingly arbitrary blotches of colour ignoring, even destroying, the image beneath. He also begins to produce a series of Abstract Paintings, experimenting with the use of squeegees and building images through a process of adding and removing layers of paint. Most successful of these I think are a set of four, Forest from 1990, where the title is post hoc, based on the impression created by the paintings, rather than any prior intent.
By now his obsession with chance appears to be coming to the fore. Many paintings from this period include large areas where a layer of paint has been physically peeled off to reveal what is underneath in ways that can only be arbitrary. Others involve applying paint at random to paper then photographing it, selecting details and then painting at large scale those semi-random (in the sense that they were not planned, only selected) details. The technique adopted is however flat and soft, removing any sense of texture or impasto from the image, so that the final painting looks like nothing more than an brutally over enlarged digital image, albeit without the characteristic qualities of digital.
Finally, in this review at least, we come to the last pieces, a set of 6 paintings called Cage, so-named because they were painted while listening to the music of John Cage. These huge works, each 10 feet by 10 feet are wholly abstract, made by a process of layering over a period of weeks. Paint was added using huge squeegees. The monograph on the series shows a unique set of work in progress photos, that vividly demonstrates the way in which they changed and developed over time. I'm reserving judgement on these. Clearly they are a major piece of work, and in fact they have been acquired as a part of the Tate Permanent Collection. I'm unsure however whether there impact comes from any innate aesthetic quality as 'art' and how much comes from their sheer scale.
However, I am reminded of this quote from Sir Terry Frost, which I have used before in relation to the work of Mark Rothko.
"To look at a painting which gives you the opportunity to have solitude, to be yourself and to be able to wander into reverie, is more than hedonistic, it's spiritual".
Perhaps this quality of reverie will emerge the next time I see these paintings.
When my press arrived, I started by taking some impressions from existing plates. After that I started playing around with papers, pressures and colours to make some very small monotypes. None of these are much bigger than about 4" on a side. They were fun to make and when I get going will make a nice set of small pieces at lower price points in the shop. In the meantime here they are on Flickr.
A short post this time after the last two rather long ones. The picture below shows one of the screen prints so far.
There are five layers in this image.
The first is the 'line' texture
The second and third are based on a texture file from the internet based on rust. I converted this to a monochrome image using the 'threshold' command in Paint Shop Pro. The third has been rotated by about 180° and printed in a different shade.
The fourth and fifth layers use the same screen, again rotated through about 180° but printed using the same translucent blue with lots of medium added to the paint (I use acrylic paints with silk screen medium added).
Later layers may involve more texture screens plus several more layers in blues. The final layer will be based on a scanned pastel sketch much like those that triggered this work, but constructed to fit the image as it evolves.
I finished the last post on this subject with a link to a flickr slide show of my pastel sketches.
The next step in the process was to try some digital manipulation of these sketches to see how they might be used. At the time I only had the vaguest idea of print medium I would eventually be using, so I tried several options, sometimes combining the sketches with landscape photographs, sometimes combining more than one sketch. Because the original rock carvings are set in such a dramatic landscape, I was particularly keen to get some sort of landscape 'feel' to the prints.
I ended up with about a dozen digital sketches, included in the flickr slideshow above. Some of these might well work as prints in their own right, but I'm not sure that they work as 'rock art' images. For most of them the shapes and patterns have become simply a basis for more elaborate workings of the basic forms. Some kept a landscape feel, and I may well come back to them, but for the first screen print I selected this one to be used as a starting point.
I called this one 'figure study' - the shapes and curves of the two pastel sketches when combined suggesting multiple renderings of a female figure.
To turn this into a screen print would require several stencils - I thought at least 6 or 7. I started therefore by trying to reduce the image to a series of discrete layers by tracing the outline of the digital print and then inking in the shapes. The inked drawing was then used to create a screen with photo emulsion.
For various reasons, this approach was not very successful. Some of these were down to my indifferent technique, but a significant problem was that the large area of colour to my eye was simply too flat. I attempted to introduce some variation by using different shades of ink, but nothing seemed to work.
Looking at the digital print, it is possible to see a line texture underlying the rest of the image. I created this by drawing lines on tracing paper while resting on a rough surface and without paying too much attention to accurate spacing or alignment. I scanned this in and made a screen from it.
It doesn't look much here but it printed very well in a warm coppery brown colour. It was still too even though, so I decided to break it up digitally.
Seeing how well this worked, I decided to 'distress' the scanned versions images I had created by hand with indian ink in a similar fashion. You can see the effect in the two images below
Plain image
Layer image digitally 'distressed'
I'll come back to how this was done another time, but the effect when printed was much more subtle that the slabs of even colour created by the first version.
So, this is where I am up to now.
Base layer - 'broken up' line texture
Layer two - based on a rust texture
Layer three - variations on the base layer in another colour and rotated about 180°.
I'll scan in a copy of the print so far and pick up the story in a later post.
I have to accept, that without any formal art training my knowledge of the work of other artists is patchy at best. I tend to see a piece I like, or someone mentions an artist in a discussion forum somewhere and follow them up. Sometimes the effect of this work comes through unconsciously, sometimes I deliberately set out to explore their work by recreating it in my own way - as in these two paintings in the shop.
These explorations are usually expressed across the range of media in which I work. As an example take this digital print, (which has just been in the Royal West of England Academy Open Photography show). It started life as two separate photographs, combined digitally and then further manipulated. At the time I made it, my understanding and control of the digital process was much less than now. The affinity between the shapes and colours in this print and Matisse's cut-outs was thus in part serendipity.
The effect was realised by chance, but once achieved I recognised the relationship, especially to this.
A couple of years later I made more specific references in these two collage (both available in the shop here.)
Building on Matisses's use of prepared paper, these cut-outs were made from the sort of monoprint I described in this post. The background was an acrylic wash prepared for use under a linocut but never used. In this case the reference is quite explicit, but the use of paper prepared in a different way over an acrylic wash, moves these pictures I believe beyond simple mimicry.
The final piece I want to refer to is a monoprint made last year using a combination of ink rolled out and blended on an acrylic plate, with small pre-inked cut out pieces overlaid on the plate. Again the Matisse reference is explicit, but the image itself has moved even further away from the crisp monochromatic elements of Matisse's own work.
My aim in making these pieces is in part to explore the work of these artists, but also to filter them through my own thought processes so that when the work is made it is not a copy, but a reworking and reinterpretation in my own way - a visual art equivalent of the classical 'variations on a theme'
How do you handle influences in your own work? Do you consciously work them out or do you simply let them permeate through?
This post is the first in a blow by blow account of work on a new screen print I am making. It may be tempting fate to write about a print that isn't finished yet, but one of the aims of this blog is to write about my own development as an artist. It my be a cliche, but we learn from our mistakes as much as from our successes. So, here goes...
The idea for this print has been around for a while. I discovered, by chance, on Flickr some images of neolithic rock art on Fylingdale moor in North Yorkshire and went on to discover many more. The picture below gives a good indication of how these ancient carvings often sit in a dramatic landscape.
Reading a bit more on the internet I discovered that the rock art of the North of England is, to us anyway, almost entirely abstract. (This web site is a good starting place, as are the books by Stan Beckensall, such as Prehistoric Rock Art of Northumberland. )
Living as I do near the World Heritage monuments of Avebury and Stonehenge, these had inevitably crept into my work. This for example was one of the first collagraph prints I ever made.
This isn't in the shop yet, so the link is to Flickr, but an example soon will be.
Given my existing interest in the period, in landscape and in abstract art, it isn't surprising that I started using some of these images in my prints.
This small embellished monoprint actually predates my conscious discovery of this ancient art form, but some of the forms used - spirals, circles etc are probably deeply rooted in our psychology.
Inspired by the images I found, by the websites and by other books (this one - Ancient British Rock Art: A Guide to Indigenous Stone Carvings
The next step was to make some digital prints using these sketches as a basis, but that will be covered in part 2.
