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.
In black and white: the making of grey
The more you look at things the more new things seem to appear, and the more you try to unpack art the more complex it becomes... I've never consciously referenced other artists' methodologies in the making of my work but recently my new paintings were described as Rothkoic... maybe my work does resonate on the scale of objective, non-representational painting, somewhere between the sombre hues of late Rothko and Robert Ryman's squares.In an interview on Color, Surface and Meaning Ryman describes the neutrality of white being reactive to the surroundings, unrestrained by a deliberate narrative, the viewer making the physical connections within the space.
Robert Ryman, No Title Required 2006; Jasper Johns, Flag 1958; Mark Rothko, Untitled (black on grey), 1970.The square is the perfect embodiment of a neutral starting space which brings physical emphasis to the juxtaposition and pairing of surfaces. I too work within a square for its impartiality, with only a rough idea of an image, and of the colours I want to use, the reaction of materials creating the ensuing narrative or symbolism; quoting directly from Ryman, it's not representing anything else [it is what it is], that is, we will either see something in it or see nothing at all. Ryman is reticent, ambiguous (like his work), revealing very little beyond the basic premise of his work, he leaves it to us to formalise the ideas and create deeper meaning from their context.Another artist who comes to mind when thinking of objectivity is Jasper Johns and his use of the non-colour grey, as a recent retrospective of his monochromatic works called simply Gray was shown at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. In an interview, he said that the absence of color made the work more physical, the paring down of painting to its substance, a real object. All artists feel a particular intensity about things, such as a colour, texture or form, but not everyone will share this personal vision. However, Rothko, wrongly defined as a colour field painter, remarked that he was not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else, only in expressing basic human emotions, something akin to a religious or revelatory experience. In his later works 1969-70 a profusion of browns,violets, blacks and greys dominated his paintings, all containing horizontal bands of colour within a portrait format. The painting Untitled (Black on Grey) in the Guggenheim collection, seems one of many with sombre dark, grey tones, and similar to these two works on paper which were up for auction in late 2007 (subsequently selling for $10.75 and $9.5 million).I've heard that painting is dead in the water, very old school, worn down by its shiny new rivals, installation and new media art. I've been contemplating of late what justification I can give to pursuing painting in a post-modern art world. In the end, it's about resonance and connectedness within the work, the visceral as opposed to the political. Yes, contemporary artist, we depend on our senses, and we breathe, communicate and think, and either explicitly (as through video or performance art) or perhaps more subtly through the mediums of painting or sculpture we explore the most fundamental existential themes of life and death... as an artist, it is those grey areas that I find most interesting...