[three pebbles, ink pen on watercolour paper, 29.5cm x 15cm]
my pebbles display cabinet - it used to be a coffee table, that i made myself - it's a picture frame on legs.
i will draw every single one of these pebbles eventually, in different permutations, but i'm not counting, just yet...
painting by numbers
Another hand-coloured, intaglio collagraph print on paper, mounted on canvas... titled according to my colour value rules (read about that here..).. and this one is called... Nepal
Nepal 2010, intaglio and painting on canvaswhich called for a quick visit to the encyclopedia for the casually-minded, wikipedia... shown below, is a topographical map of the country, bordered by India to the south, and China to the north.
There is a rich and diverse geography to Nepal, with tropical low-lying plains in the south, rising up through verdant foothills up to the mountainous peaks of the Himalayas. Curiously, the country has five distinct seasons - spring, summer, the monsoon season, then autumn and winter. When I think of Nepal, I think immediately of tea, and of the very abstract agricultural patterns of the steep hillside plantations. So, it seems not so far-fetched to see similar striations echoed in my own work - however unintentional.
...Thinking more about painting by numbers (after Gerhard Richter and his colour chart paintings) leads one to the master of appropriation, Andy Warhol..
Andy Warhol, Do It Yourself (Landscape) 1962...and then, Damien Hirst (all three artists were featured in the recent Colour Chart exhibition)..
Damien Hirst, 2-Methylbenzimidazole 2008/09Hirst inherits the concept of art as a mass-produced brand from Warhol, using assistants for his chemical spot paintings, and then later manufacturing 'spot painting kits' with strict instructions as to the completion of the artwork for the new owners. Rules for these spotted works included the spacing beween the dots and that a single colour appears only once in the final composition. Many of the titles (and the ideas) for Hirst's work are appropriated from medical textbooks and technical manuals - inspired by his idol Francis Bacon, who found inspiration in many a documentary or medical image.Artistic appropriation is good; it's about finding something interesting and then applying it to something else, for a different purpose - whether it's conceptually based or process-related.Thinking back to the paint colour charts and the assignment of names to certain colours (and my reuse of them), these branded (sometimes trademarked) names are yet another type of appropriation, taking words out of their original context (or putting them in a new context) - their minimal poetry promises a piece of paradise, a taste of the exotic, in harmony with the natural world - less about colour meanings or symbology, but more about instilling ideas and aspirations in the potential buyer.
all white and well red
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.