Eek, that's it, my six months are up! Having time to concentrate on my art, for the first time since I graduated, and with the Reside blog as my focus, has been a brilliant experience. One which I am sad to see end. 

It has been fantastic to stumble across painters with similar intent, using destruction and repair as processes of creation, but with different forms of expression, from Berlin to Argentina. I have really enjoyed looking and writing about other artists' work. Putting my thoughts down in black and white somehow helps me to articulate them more clearly to myself, encouraging me to research rather than assume a superficial understanding. I want to keep this up: the first habit which I hope has stuck.  

I started this blog thinking it would be about exploring materiality, the simplicity of the canvas warp and weft. Instead it has become clear to me that my work is about subverting the traditional role of painting as a window on the world.  Using landscape, that rather cliched romantic genre, to present a recognisable image and then subverting or disrupting it through collage and re-sewing. The latter, a feminine, deliberate, methodical way of expression, and of destruction, and of repair. I know that my interlude in Italy into copying a section of Botticelli's Primavera was confusing; but trust me, it was about learning the technique of painting in tempera not an about turn, style-wise.

Over the past few weeks I have literally sweated over re-sewing a piece: a drawing of nettles made in Berlin which I abstracted with purple threads.  It generated a lot of intrigue as I worked on it in hostels and on bus journeys.  But somehow at Ezeiza airport on the way home I lost it and all I have left is a photo of the original untouched drawing, memories and lost hours. Perhaps making art and being transitory aren't such a good mix after all, at least not for someone as careless as I can be. This certainly wasn't the injection of art into real life I had in mind when I rambled back in September about how exciting it would be to present art somewhere unexpected. 

What I do have to show from the last few weeks is drawings of the landscape of Argentina.  Huge plains stretching for hundreds of kilometers, bordered by the Andes. In making them I focused on perspective to articulate the scale of the country: the near and the far which stretches hours beyond where the eye can see. 

Now I need to set aside space and time to work on them, and the drawings I made on canvas in Berlin, as I settle back into my everyday routine. I suppose I have used Reside as a process for contemplation and creation, and it is that process which I need to keep up after I pass it to the next artist.

Which brings me very neatly to introducing the next Reside artist: Claudia Boese! Having developed the language of abstraction within her painting,  Claudia would like to move towards a figuration of ideas. Her studio in a church tower in Ipswich and a new allotment may serve as inspiration. But perhaps it's best if I leave Claudia to explain things in her own words. I look forward to seeing where Reside takes her over the next six months.                                                                               

So, all there is left is for me to say goodbye. Thank you Michaela for choosing me and giving me this experience. And to everyone who has read, commented and retweeted my blogs. The immediate reaction, feedback on how my work is developing, has been so valuable to me.  I leave you in the hands of Claudia, and with the one word which has been common to everywhere I have been over the past six months: Ciao!

I find myself in Argentina, a destination I have to fess up I didn't choose purely for artistic reasons. But yesterday I came across two Argentinian artists whose work really excited me. They are part of the fourth Andreani Award exhibition, a biennial show of contemporary national visual artists which is touring the country, and is currently in Cordóba where, by happy coincidence, I found myself too. I am writing this from my phone for the first time so let's see how it works...

Though their exhibited work is distinct from each other both cover themes which I use. Max Gómez Cante, the first prize winner, questions the relationship of the pictorial object to the viewer in his winning work, ¿hmm?. While José Luis Landet uses destruction as a form of creation in his piece, Porosidad. It is his work which I found most provoking because he creates by unsentimentally destroying the paintings of others.

Landet describes his material as fragments of paintings from the 1940s and 50s. These he has slashed in seemingly random strips or cut out the motifs of the paintings, leaving only the background, and reassembled the fragments haphazardly. What was no doubt lovingly created works, of mountains, lakes, forests and sea, are now reduced to their material value. I find it sad that a once loved view, cherished by the artist or the owner of the work, can no longer be seen. And yet, I imagine Lancet picked up his source material from flea markets or junk shops. In the UK there are certainly many discarded paintings in charity shops and I have considered using them as a source material as well. If they have already been rejected, why not recycle and reuse? But I find the wanton destruction of other artists' work difficult to deal with because it could so easily be my work that shares a same fate, or that of Lancet.

I tried to reconcile the layers of landscape into something recognisable as a whole. Did the strips of plywood collected together at the bottom and jutting into the mid-ground signify a jetty of some kind, the rest a lake? We're perhaps the strips ordered thematically which is why canvas edges are collected together in the centre of the piece? Instead, the details remaining from each picture drew me in: a bird sitting on a branch, a flock flying into the sunset, a fisherman by a lake. Details I might not have chosen to look at given the whole picture but revealed by the absence of the rest. Maybe this destruction isn't unsympathetic yo the original material afterall.

The work of the prize winner, Max Gómez Cante's ¿hmm? was two beautifully crafted frames through which he literally pushed his paintings to the edge, leaving the viewer with an expanse of white wall at the centre of the works. The order of frame and picture are reversed, when looking from outside in. If my translation from the spanish is correct, he describes this as posing a question for the observer about the relationship of the pictorial object and it's history. The paintings themselves, what I could glimpse of them, we're romanticised landscapes. Fields turning into hills into mountains as the eye moves from fore to mid to background. The hues changing from brown and green to purple to blue. They were similar to the landscapes destroyed by José Luis Landet and, as in his work, I found them captivating because I was not presented with the whole image.

This is probably my penultimate post before I have to hand over the Reside Residency baton to the next artist. If you'd like it to be you, you have until Sunday 26 January, 5 pm UK time to apply. Please take a look at the application information and send your submission via the contact form on this site.

I'll announce the next artist in my last post on the 31 January.

Here we are already: 2014, and the final month of my Reside Residency. Soon it will be time for someone else to take up writing here. I am both excited and a little nervous about finding the next artist. Excited to see who will apply from the diversity of artistic practice out there. The nervousness comes from wanting to find someone who will enjoy this space as I have done. I’ve really appreciated the chance to think out loud, experiment and see how my ideas have developed from post to post. Because I haven’t felt the need to be too precious Reside has given me the opportunity to be freer, to try things out and just see what happens.

Now, I think it is time for me to move from exploration to consolidation. I mentioned in my last post that I hoped to finish a work in which I was melding a painted canvas drawing I did in Berlin with another piece of fabric, abstracting the painted image.  I finished the re-sewn section before New Year, so here it is: a painting of weeds on elderberry-dyed canvas, with a section of saffron-dyed linen sewn into it (the same linen fabric which I was working with when I started this blog back in August).  Then I was sewing it into unprimed cotton duck and was concerned with how the formal qualities of the two fabrics would change on being fused. Here I am interested in that, but also in how the original image fragments, breaks down and diffuses as it is first disrupted and then repaired. 

I could, of course, have gone further; unpicking and re-sewing the majority or whole of the painted image, shifting the work further into abstract territory. I think there will always be a balance to be struck with how far to destroy, something I think all artists working in this area have to contend with. By nature I lean towards caution, so in the next piece I shall try to be bold, and take it right up to the edge of destruction before starting the process of repairing, to see what happens. While I was re-sewing this work I was also concerned that the traces of image weren’t strong enough in the section that has been unpicked - I think they come out stronger in the photographs than in reality - and I would like to unpick an image with a more developed initial painting using the tempera technique I learnt in Florence. I am also not sure how to frame or otherwise present the canvases; I see the embroidery hoop as something temporary which I will one day replace. The one thing I am sure about, is that this really isn’t where I saw my work going when I started in August, but I am pleased with where I have got to and excited about where I might end up. January will be a month spent needle in hand, reweaving canvas threads. Happy New Year!

Early on in this blog I wrote The art of repair: responding to the Neues Museum, about a museum in Berlin which has been painstakingly repaired so that the original bomb-damaged building and new repairs are distinct yet harmonious. Looking at frescoes in Italy over the past few weeks and the various ways in which they have been conserved or restored, has prompted me to return to the theme of repair. A theme which is relevant to my works on canvas, in which I resew their threads, using the act of repair to make something new. And now, in the aftermath of Christmas, seems as appropriate a time as any to post pictures of religious paintings, which dominated my Italian trip.  

I have been fascinated by the diversity of ways in which frescoes have been repaired and individual conservators have sought to preserve the original authenticity of the work, while presenting as complete an image as possible for visitors to enjoy. Of course, there are many, many frescoes where the repair is so complete that it is indistinguishable from the original. And those frescoes which have been recently conserved so that new and old are distinct, are more than likely to have had older repairs which were done with less transparency. As with any painting of a certain age, it is hard to know whether what one sees now is as the original artist intended it five hundred and more years ago.  

For me, the different fresco repairs which I came across seemed to split into acts of stabilization or conservation, and acts of recreation or restoration. In the first, which I came across a lot, the original is preserved but there is minimal attempt to recreate parts of the missing image. I saw only one clear example of the second, in which the restored fresco presented a complete image but on close inspection, one could see where additions have been made.

This small Madonna and Child, in the house where Raphael was born and lived as a child, is claimed to be one of Raphael’s earliest works, painted under the supervision of his father, Giovanni Santi, who died when Raphael was eleven. Alternatively it has been attributed to his father, and interpreted as showing the newly born Raphael in the arms of his mother. Regardless of the original painter, parts of the Madonna or mother’s blue gown on her right shoulder and arm have been restored. The short fine, linear brush strokes that create the repair are different from the planes of colour, delicately blended together, in the remainder of the fresco. This is a work in a domestic setting, which meant that I could get close to it and see the different painting styles. Other frescoes in grander settings, the Sistine Chapel being the most obvious that comes to my mind, where one is kept at a distance are also repaired in this way. But one does not get close enough for the optical illusion to start to breakdown in the way it did here for me, my eye oscillating between the whole picture and the differences in painting style.    

Much easier to discern are the disruptions left in images when no attempt at restoration has been made. So, in Santa Croce in Florence, the face of a figure in a crowd has been left as blank plaster, its shape forming a silhouette of forehead, nose and beard, between a faded frescoed red cap and cloak, painted by Giotto. While, multi-coloured cross-hatching cuts across the face and body of a figure at the edge of Domenica Ghirlandio’s Madonna della Misericordia e la Pietà in Ognisanti in the same city. There has been no attempt to blend with the colours of the skin, hair and clothes which remain. Rather than complete the picture, the newly-painted addition sits as an amorphous, abstract shape contrasting with the modeled eye, shoulder and hand of the original, drawing attention to the skilled way in which they have been painted. Finally, below the foot of St John the Evangelist a drawn head from an earlier image has been revealed through the fragmenting of the image which sits on top. It disrupts the decorative border of the fresco in the Oratorio di San Giovanni Battista in Urbino. 

I am drawn to these disruptions and unexpected disturbances. For me, they make the history of the images more transparent and have more integrity than restorations in which the original is re-rendered as complete. Through their modern interventions they clearly demarcate old and new, bringing authenticity to what remains of the former. I also like the unexpectedness of the resulting whole image, original and repair jostling for attention.

Of course, the images I have shown just have small fragments missing from a larger scene which is still largely visible and decipherable. I saw older frescoes in Pompeii and Herculaneum, used to decorate the interior of houses, which were far more damaged. Criss-crossed with cracks and patches of plaster, I couldn’t picture the whole decorative effect but the fresco fragments which remained were enough: snatches of bright colours, intricate detail and trompe l’oeil illusion. In some rooms, the design had been continued beyond the fragments, scratched into fresh plaster, to give an idea of the complete composition.  

In my earlier blog post I wrote that my experience of the Neues Museum brought “me back to the possibility that I need to use materials with a richer narrative than new raw canvas”.  At the time I did not know what those materials should be. I am currently working on a canvas in which I have unpicked my own painting, so that traces of the original painting remain but are abstracted by the act of unpicking and resewing. For me this creates a richer narrative than the blank canvas I had previously used and also the painted images before they are disrupted, acting in a similar way to the conserved rather than restored frescoes. I hope to finish and post a picture of it in a few days; a good way for me to start 2014. 

In the meantime, I wish you all a fabulous festive period, for what remains of it, and a Happy New Year!

So this is where I have got to after two weeks – fortyish hours– of learning to paint in tempera. For most of the image I have completed two of a minimum of three layers. The first layer thin, the consistency of watercolour.  The second, thicker, more like gouache, so that the light, mid and dark tones are set out. For the next stage, if I decide to finish the painting, I am on my own. This is, I think, where hours and days can be lost blending different tones together, using opaque but tiny almost invisible brushstrokes. There is such detail in the original to recreate. In particular, the hair of Chloris has individual strands of hair picked out as they flow over locks twisting in other directions. 

To be honest, I am not sure if I will finish it. I wanted to learn the technique so that that I can be more confident when I use tempera in my own work. I may keep it as a place where I can return when I feel the need to refine my technique, a sort of test bed. For now, I have a half-finished section of a Botticelli, that looks to me a little like an Art Nouveau poster, getting somewhat battered and bashed as I travel south down Italy.

I have finished my first week of two learning traditional tempera painting, and yesterday was the first day that I actually started to paint on my panel. It has been a lesson in patience for me, in taking time to prepare things properly. In not trying to rush to finish things. Two weeks won’t be nearly long enough to learn the technique, but it will be a start.

I am copying a section of Botticelli’s Primavera, from the far right-hand side of the painting. The description accompanying the picture in the Uffizi Gallery says that it shows the nymph of nature, Chloris, turning towards Zephyrus, the Spring wind, who is pursuing her. I am one of many in the school attempting to copy Botticelli’s delicate colouring and line. For someone taught in a British art school, where my own ideas, rather than technical mastery, were paramount, the process has been at times frustrating, but mostly it has been a lesson in enjoying the journey. I am trying to learn from the process of copying a masterpiece rather than focusing on the end result of what I actually produce, which will be, at very best, half finished by the end of next week.

The first day started with drawing, measuring the relative proportions to recreate the composition. I could have traced the picture, but chose to do things the harder way so I could get the exact section I wanted. Right from that first day I knew that my picture won’t be an accurate copy, some of the relationships are wrong when comparing my drawing to a photograph of the original. Then came punching small holes along the lines of the drawing so that I could transfer it on to my panel once prepared.

This next stage, though, did not go so well. Preparing panels in winter, with limited time, is not such a great idea. The first five coats of gesso and rabbit skin glue I put on during the third day had not dried overnight, and when put in front of a heater they dried unevenly. Another couple of coats to cover the patches worked, after a further 24 hours drying time, and on Friday I spent the first two hours of my day sanding the surface to smooth it down.

In between I have mixed colours. I have to admit that I am a little disappointed the school uses a ready-made egg tempera medium.  However, it is much more practical than going through the ritual of extracting egg yolk from the its sac, so perhaps this is another example of where I try to do things a harder way than it needs to be. I ground six basic colours into the tempera mix, and from these have mixed different shades and tones according to the picture, matching them up with the colours reproduced on the photograph of the work I am using. 

The drawing transferred, using burnt sienna pigment, and lines redefined with a pencil, I was finally able to start painting yesterday afternoon. The first layer looks a mess, like a drawing in felt tip, where every stroke and join is visible. Having spoken to other students further along in the process I will need between three and seven layers of tempera on each part of the composition, to build up the right depth of colour.  

Now it is prepared, the surface is an absolute pleasure to work on, silky and smooth, it takes the paint really easily. I intend to use tempera directly on unprimed canvas in my work, as this allows me to unpick and resew painted images. However I think that gesso panels made this way would be really nice to draw on, and so my mind is busy whirling away, dreaming of pencil drawings from nature that I can do when spring returns, my own interpretation of la primavera. And I have the whole of winter to develop the patience to prepare more gesso panels, plus plenty of drying time.  

This post serves, I hope, as a good bridge between my time in Berlin and the next few weeks that I will spend in Italy. I am writing it in Bologna about an Italian artist, Nicola Samorì, who studied here and whose work I saw the day before I left Berlin.  His show, Guarigione Dell’Ossesso at Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, was described to me as perfect baroque-style paintings that the artist then destroys so it naturally piqued my interest.

And what destruction! The paintings are gouged, pierced, flecked, scratched, scrunched, shrouded and pummeled. The act of their destruction being all the more perverse because it is carried out on paintings which have been carefully rendered with art historical references and technique. I imagine the artist labouriously painting for weeks or maybe months, building up layer upon layer of paint, and then one day turning around and destroying these creations in which he has invested so much. The gallery’s press release states that Samorì examines obsession, one aspect of which is the obsession of the artist with his own work. Yet he is neither an artist who is precious about his paintings, nor a Victor Frankenstein, who seeks to destroy because he is horrified by what he has created. Far from it, he then puts his destroyed masterpieces on display. His paintings both refer to the past through their subject matter and the manner in which they are depicted, and are rooted in the contemporary, by their very recent act of destruction.

I was first drawn to Vomere, a copper-surfaced diptych, peppered by oval forms, the heads of an audience who are looking at a painted figure forming a table in front of them. This life-size figure is in the process of being physically dissected, a process we may have interrupted. The skin of paint has been half pushed and pulled away, echoing the fragile surface covering our bodies. But rather than revealing bones, muscles and tendons, we see a black and blank undersurface. Pulling the surface away hides rather than enlightens and we, like the unseen copper-covered faces of the curious in the diptych, are left un-seeing. 

Sotto gli occhi la forma stanca, 2013, repeats the act of dissection, scrunching up the surface of a Christ-like portrait. Displayed horizontally we look down upon to it, as though in a coffin, invoking pity for the recent fate it has suffered at the hands of the artist. If google is right, the title translates into English as ‘under the eyes of the tired form’ suggesting a rebellious compulsion from the artist rather than a desire to revere the tradition and history in which he works. For me this painting makes reference to formal qualities, to the deception of real life that paintings seek to invoke, when in reality they are pigment, medium and supporting surface. In the past, paintings were commissioned to invoke devotion, loyalty and awe. Something which they achieved more or less successfully through their ability to deceive, allowing the viewer to forget the reality of what was before their eyes. And so Samorì’s destruction is like a magician revealing his tricks, destroying the illusion. 

A group of four small portraits seem to me to reveal a different intent in their destruction. These faces sit on surfaces of paint inches thick, built up over time, then distorted by gouging, scrunching or shriveled from the weight of drying oil paint. Those surfaces where the paint has been infiltrated reveal bright colours which do not feature on the austere restrained final portraits. Where do these colours come from? Were the portraits painted in a lighter style; beneath the surface do they show the sitter in different times, styles or a completely different image? In this the traces that are shown are like the compositional changes which X-rays of masterpieces expose, changes which those artists wanted to hide but which Samorì hints at. It is as though the paintings have started to reveal the history of either their sitter, beneath their formal pose, or of their making.  Samorì’s exhibition title translates as ‘healing the obsessed’ but these paintings generated more obsession for me through the intrigue the under-layers create in my mind, the potential histories which lie beneath the surface. 

I wonder what constitutes a good act of destruction for Samorì? The act of destruction that he carries out is full of conviction. They feel like singular actions: actions that cannot be repeated or remediated, although they may be pondered and plotted by the artist long before they are carried out. At art school I remember a tutor telling me that the artist Angela De La Cruz, who similarly disrupts her paintings, at times felt she had gone too far and she would then try to bring her paintings back from the brink of destruction. In her case this may be easier as she focuses on destroying the support for her paintings, which reference minimalist and colour-field painting, the canvas stretcher. Maybe Samorì’s destruction is closer to the tense balance that Alexis Harding seeks to create in his paintings where colour and form slide, sometimes hanging precariously from the support but never quite slipping off.

It may seem strange to link these painters together as their work references very different eras and, so, outwardly appears entirely distinct. However, I think they have commonalities in their underlying intent, and in the use of destruction as part of their creative process. By grounding his work in a more distant art historical past, Samorì displays a technical virtuoso that the other artists do not. For me, this adds a rich drama to his work and makes the final act of destruction all the more powerful.  


Guarigione Dell’Ossesso by Nicola Samorì is at Galerie Christian Ehrentraut, Berlin, from 25 October to 7 December. With thanks to the gallery for providing me with photographs from the exhibition to use in this blog.

After years of making stark, minimalist work I have become an unashamed romantic. So I have spent time these past few months looking at the work of Caspar David Friedrich, taking advantage of the fact that so many of his paintings are here in Germany. I have been to Greifswald, a small town on the Baltic coast to see where he was born, and I have travelled to Dresden where he lived for most of his life. I have attempted to read – in German - about his life and his work. My practice is very different to his on many fundamental levels: in its appearance, method and motivation. Yet there are, I feel, similarities of intent and, more importantly, things that I would like to learn from his paintings to enrich what I do.

His work is easily identifiable, as popular images used to represent the Romantic era.  But my observation, as I have sat in museums and sketched or written, is that people don’t spend very long looking at them once they have linked image and artist. This may be because many people don’t actually spend very long looking at any art, but perhaps it is also because his paintings are too earnest and sentimental for our contemporary eyes, the colours, particularly of sunrise and sunset, now too clichéd and cloying. Looking past the vivid orange sky and contrasting lilac mountains I have found these seemingly straightforward paintings are created from complex compositions and unusual perspectives which hide as much as they reveal.

Going to Greifswald was surprising. I was expecting a grand landscape to have inspired the painter to his life’s work (although he did some interior and street scenes the majority of his paintings are land and seascapes). Instead it was a pretty mix of fields and ditches interspersed with small copses and villages; in other words, nothing spectacular. My train ride home was accompanied by a Friedrich-esque sunset, below, which brought some of the motifs he used to life and asserted the dominance of the sky. In this we share a similar influence, as I grew up near the Cambridgeshire Fens where the land is flat and the skies wide open. I am drawn to similar open views and since 2011 have been drawing them, repeating landscape forms until the image becomes abstracted. 

For Friedrich, as for other Romantics of his era, the beauty of nature represented the power and benevolence of God. There is a real tenderness in his paintings evokes this sentiment and which I feel comes from his focus on detail throughout the image - lovingly recreating each leaf on a tree as in Gartenterrasse at the Neuer Pavillion in Berlin or branch on a tree as in Gebüsch im Schnee (probably my favourite of all the Friedrich paintings I have seen, for its very simple subject matter) in the Albertinum in Dresden - and a sense that they have been produced under quiet contemplation. While I do not see nature in this way I can still appreciate the awe of nature, the power of God having been replaced in my eyes by the wonder of the forces of evolution and erosion. In choosing to draw landscapes, from the detail of weeds to distant views of mountains, I am also retreating from the encroaching urbanisation of contemporary life in much the same way that the Romantics turned their backs on the first signs of the industrial revolution infiltrating into nature. Look carefully at a Friedrich landscape and you will see signs of life - figures in the shade of trees as in Der einsame Baum, below, houses clinging to the hillside – but these people do not belong to the giddy rush of civilising progress that was happening at the time. 

Friedrich believed that a painter should paint not only what they see in front of them but what they feel within, and if they feel nothing then they shouldn’t paint at all[1]. He sketched a lot in the open and then waited until a composition came to him, collaged together from his observations of nature, before putting it down on canvas, methodically in his studio. Das brennende Neubrandenburg, below, shows the clear, confident ink drawing to which Friedrich started adding glazes of oil paint but never finished. The atmospheric effects in his work may have come from memory, or an oil sketch of clouds attributed to him in the Pommersches Landesmusuem implies he also captured weather effects to use later. While I draw from nature, I work very differently, allowing an image to evolve from sketches I make from nature, not always knowing what the next step will be and never having a final composition in mind. However, I am drawn to the idea of collaging together sketches to form an ideal landscape and can imagine that this would be a good strategy for creating, now as I travel and also when I return to juggling art and paid work. I would like these sketches to invoke some of the tender detail of Friedrich’s work.

The thing that draws me to seek out Friedrich’s paintings again and again, and above other landscape painters, is the drama and inventiveness of their composition. They seem so simple, but from attempting to sketch them I now know what I must have instinctively perceived, their skillful complexity. 

I feel that they really play with me, as a viewer. In some cases frustrating my view, hiding as much as they reveal. Rocks rise up in the centre of the picture, as in Das Kreuz im Gebirge, The effects of light or weather are employed to obscure the view. The landscapes of Ziehende Wolken, above, and Nebel im Elbtal are partially shrouded in mist, with the viewer receiving only fleeting glimpses of the valley below in the latter painting. In some pictures the foreground is cast into gloom making it difficult to discern any detail.  With this latter obstructing effect, however, I am unclear whether Friedrich intended it to act as strongly as it does or whether it is the combined effect of the museum lighting, glazing and darkening varnish on the works. 

The composition directs the way in which we navigate through the elements of the painting. A path or river directing the way in which we move from fore to mid to background. Strong vertical, horizontal or diagonals attracting our attention at the expense of small details such as the shepherd tending his flock in Der einsame Baum, as I mentioned before (above), or a sailing boat about to ground itself in the shallow river in Das Grosse Gehege bei Dresden. These details only revealed themselves to me as I stopped and really contemplated the pictures. 

Friedrich also used changes in perspective to direct attention to particular elements of the composition. In some cases the picture is uniformly detailed, performing a feat the eye cannot manage, of presenting the background to the same level of detail as the foreground, flattening away pictorial illusion. A picture such as Eichbaum im Schnee, below, focuses on a single tree, obscuring anything but the foreground. While the composition and detail of Wiesen bei Greifswald focuses on the background of the town of Greifswald, with the foreground of bushes and mid-ground of horses and geese in a meadow, seemingly incidental, decorative elements for the main image. Copses or rock formations serve as formal markers between fore, mid and background, setting the scene out as though in a theatre-set stage. 

I mentioned at the start of this post that romantic influences have crept into my own work recently. I hope that you can see from previous posts that both my subject matter of recent months, landscape and particularly, weeds, and the heightened colouring I use reference the romantic. I would also like to learn from Friedrich’s compositions. I have no doubt that he carefully thought through the complexity of his paintings, either as he constructed them in his mind or as he put them down on canvas. I don’t want to directly reference his work and I will have to achieve this in a different way as I work more directly. I plan to directly collage together different sketches to create a complex composition and play with perspective. The act of looking at Friedrich’s paintings, sketching from them and now writing about them has been very useful in giving me ideas as to how to add complexity to my work. I will know when I have mastered this when I can also make my work appear as deceptively simple as his paintings do.  

[1] The Abstract Sublime, Robert Rosenblum, Arts News, February 1961

It has been a busy week for me. On Monday I presented some of my work to a group of artists at Werkstadt in Neukölln.  It was a really useful exercise, allowing me to take stock of what I have done over the past three months and to see how people responded to my new work. I showed works on paper, which I have posted on this blog, and also three recently finished canvas pieces, which are below. It has been freeing for me to work on paper for a while, but ultimately my interest lies in the materiality of canvas and therefore this is the direction I want to take forward. 

We discussed how the choice of frame affects my work, making the canvas image secondary to the formal framing devices of painting. Rejecting the frame completely, as in Untitled (dandelions), brings the canvas and drawing centre stage. The work becomes a unique object rather than a framed picture. We also talked about the effect of unpicking and resewing a painted work, as shown in the details of the works below. I am drawn to this destruction of a carefully prepared image, because traces of the original remain in the resewn canvas, but are abstracted in a way which is largely out of my control. This has opened a new path for me, which I expect will see me, needle in hand for the next few months, methodically destroying canvas drawings I have recently made. 

All photographs: Bridget H Jackson

Other artists presenting that evening were Héctor Prats, who creates intriguing surreal drawings echoing themes from the Enlightenment, and Jonatan Nilsson, who draws from small zine-style drawings to paste-ups.  

I am now half-way through my time on Reside. It has gone so quickly. And, yet, I feel I have made some real progress since I started three months ago thinking that I would focus on experimenting with materials. Instead, I have rediscovered the simple pleasure of drawing tiny details of life, and then disrupting the resulting images using collage or sewing. As I prepare to reluctantly leave Berlin next week, ending my self-created residency, I am packing up a body of 20 collages on paper and 10 or so canvas drawings. I understand more clearly what I am trying to achieve through my work, partly through the process of writing it down here, and I have had some really positive feedback via this blog and from visitors. On Monday evening I will be presenting my work at an art critique at Werkstadt which will give me another opportunity to see how people respond to my work - old and new. I am spending a rainy Saturday afternoon preparing for it: taking photos in less than ideal circumstances, retaking them, and ordering my thoughts. 

I am not sure whether and what kind of work I will be able to make over the next couple of months. For the next few weeks I will be travelling through Germany, before a pitstop in the UK to pick up more winter clothes, and then onwards to Italy. I am going to spend two weeks in Florence on a traditional painting course where I am hoping to improve my technique (although, as we learn by copying old masters, I am not expecting to really make my own work). This blog may focus more on my response to the art that I see and read about.  I hope to write about Caspar David Friedrich, whose work I have seen a lot of over the past few months; Morandi, as my first stop in Italy is Bologna; and who and whatever catches my eye in Florence. I have small scraps on canvas and a sketchbook so I will post pictures of new drawings as I make them.