After my recent walks through the snow-white landscape, as documented in some of my sketchbook drawings and photographs, and the readymade art of paint colour charts, it caused me to recall a few artists who have conceptually explored the non-colour white. There is Malevich, Newman, Ryman, and even Rauschenberg, better known for his mixed media paintings or combines...I once saw one of Rauschenberg's white panel paintings in an exhibition on Black Mountain College, and felt sure that it had been touched-up or re-painted, infuriated as I was by its purist abstract minimalism - it both denied and transcended the object of painting.
Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White 1918
Barnett Newman, The Voice 1950
Robert Ryman, No Title Required 2006The artist David Batchelor (who I know more for his assemblage colour works, and he also wrote an interesting book on colour, Chromophobia) has been documenting in photographs the white blanks of papered-over billboards and erased signage in the streets of London since 1997 - found monochomes, which I find most interesting in regard to my own humble found paintings (which perhaps I should now categorise by colour...).He calls this ongoing series of photographs Monochromes of Modern Life, a reference to Baudelaire's 'The Painter of Modern Life'. Their central void as he calls them, brings into sharp view the multi-layered patina of history surrounding them, and of the transient nature of modern life in the city, both of the buildings and their inhabitants.
David Batchelor, Monochrome #17As painters, we can have an ambivalence with white; the absence of colour is proof of our non-doing or un-doing, of erasure or covering up. Nearly all of my paintings are constructed first in monochrome, working layers of texture without any use of colour, with colour applied later in thin, scrubby layers, echoing the manner of the slow deposits and gradual erosion of weathering and decay.It is a very printmakerly methodology too; as a printmaker you plan, prepare and plot out the topography, creating a map or receptacle for colour, before it actually comes into physical existence in the final artwork. Back in 2004, when I first started building the large panels for what were to become my 'edgescape' paintings I documented them in the very first stages and called these images my lost paintings. Here is one of them (100cm square), from July of that year.
lost painting, 2004And here, seen in January 2009, the beginnings of my farmscapes in the studio...
...From white to red; a little pluglet for my inclusion in the upcoming Elements: Man and the Environment art exhibition, 26 January to 15 February 2010, at the Forum, Norwich. I was rather surprised to see, when receiving some information about the exhibition, that they have used the image of my painting on the exhibition preview invite...and then I found my work again on the website...
Edgescape : Rost mixed media on canvas, 95cm x 95cmOn some days I think it is a violent painting, full of fury and rage, restless, volcanic, caustic; on other days it glows with a passion, a visual feast of ripened fruit and dark wine, a spirit for life, hedonistic and undefeatable...(read more about this red abstract painting...)And lastly, as a footnote, it occured to me that as an artist, if one were to go down a purely conceptual route there is the high possibility that someone has thought of the idea before, as ideas are often generated by sociological or cultural influences; whereas when pursuing a more process-oriented route, then in the making of art, whether highly-crafted or poorly rendered, it will always be a one-of-a-kind.
solitude and other brief encounters
It has been some time since I updated my artist journal due in part to the commitment of other work (the day job). I feel that the artwork I am currently developing is born out of an dissatisfaction with the way are (or appear to be), and I can't quite reconcile what I want to say with what I am able to do. Browns, greys and the associated metallic hues of bronze and pewter repeatedly invite me into an emotional state of raw clarity, as night invites dark contemplation. I also like the contrast with white - its ability to provide a frame and a focus to everything it surrounds - a soft, chalky white which does not startle but gently illuminates. I am currently working on a series of small works out of some of these ideas using reclaimed wood panels - incorporating plaster, paint and metallic leaf. Since I am working on these at odd times their development is sporadic and very slow - I feel I am suffering in their intolerable silence to provide any substantial meaning or purpose.I recently acquired a new gadget which makes me feel quite emboldened in this solitary journey - a mobile phone with a multitude of functions in the most compact of designs. I can add notes to a calendar (view it as a memo/diary), record transient sounds and voice memos, shoot clips of video, even take photographs. The fact that I can also make and receive telephone calls seems almost inconsequential. I feel a little guilty that I have succumbed to the allure of the technology when what I am striving for is a purity of experience. Below is a selection of still images taken with the new phone - yet more found paintings, discovered in the daily walks required of the day job...
A close up of an oil tank.. it reminded me of the paintings of Robert Motherwell or Barnett Newman. Taken (along with the others shown here) at around midday between late May to early June 2007.
Looking down onto the base of a metal structure, must be drainage holes - how very banal!
The side of another oil tank! Wish I could remember exactly where...
An overpass, and a walk beneath it, a wall, an urban abstract...
More urban traces, another abstract discovered on concrete...
This is the inside of the wall of another overpass, under which I pass almost daily. On this particular day it had been raining heavily and the residual seepage was glistening with a mix of oil, concrete sediment and rainwater. The relentless noise of overhead traffic was unsettling to say the least...
A close-up of the aforementioned wall; I liked the near symmetry in its composition.
An even closer-up of the previously referred to wall... my enduring fascination with these traces of detrital seepage needs to be addressed...I had the idea that i might incorporate these images into an imovie or flash format with some overlaid text - the silent life of a wall or something similar. I feel that my 2D works sometimes do not engage at deeper levels, since there is no clear narrative or starting point (other than documented visual references) - they are just material suffusions of the senses based on the relatively silent space of solitude. Quiet moments (of thought or experience) within the bigger noise of human life seem to provide a deeper awareness of oneself in the contrast. As I have written before, I also like the slow unfolding of my own work over time, their meaning only revealed by the subsequent, repeated visual engagements with them as material objects. Am I making any sense at all today? Probably not, but this journal is turning out to be more and more of a philosophical retreat (rather than the geographical one that I might wish for) by each entry, and in that sense it cannot be any more clearly mapped until the final destination has been arrived at.