I sat in my studio yesterday afternoon and took a clean sheet of paper and a black marker and wrote words and drew arrows; a kind of map. Thoughts, questions, people, art seen, books to read, ideas. It feels good that the six months residency in my place and my mind is now closed. I have loved the frame of this project, thank you to Claudia Boese who invited me in and to Karl England for launching Reside Residency. Thank you too to the readers, and visitors to my studio, for your interest and comments.
Here is a one-take phone film of my open studio.

I am so pleased to hand on the Reside Residency to Kate Beck for the next six months. Kate works from her studio in Maine, U.S.A. I am excited to read how this residency period, in her own context, will draw the outside in and connect. Best wishes Kate!

I walk out front, fast stepping. I peer inside.

I enter the presentation. I look. I read, I meet. I experience. I change. 
Familiarity brings access to behind the scenes; behind the screens. With the storage, the waiting, the discarded. The in-betweeness of dimly lit transition.

Look this way, then that. 
Announce and meld.
Blurr and merge. 

The residency will be over in a couple of days. I have found a few things have moved during this time, the paint has slipped and melted, the grid is flexing, the stretcher hasn't always been required.The primer is currently redundant.  
The 'common reader' approach to reading has become a relief.and will continue.
I really do have the urge to paint out the blue wall, pack up the work and drive away somewhere. Leave no trace. But this is my space, I get to stay, and move on.

Let’s say it’s not possible to keep any of the work? that would be fine too. Just turn around there will be more. But only what is essential.

The next and final post from me will be on Saturday 31st January when I will announce the next Reside Residency artist.

A place. 
I regularly return to in the National Gallery, to think. I make my way to this bench opposite Ucello’s, Battle of San Romano, in Room 54. Here I jot geometric drawings in my small notebook.

Sitting here I am far enough away from the paintings so as not to see them well and this lack of focus helps me.Visitors and viewers enter and exit the space. My thoughts crisscross the room. As in the paintings, they are of a private and public nature, large and small in scale. 

A multiplex of issues. I am still thinking about this room as I pace along Charing Cross Road and cut across Leicester Square on the way to meet up with my artist friend at a show. Language, composition, and colour pass by me on every side as I think about the immense history of painting that is catalogued behind me. About the narrative threads in that room: life and death, grief and triumph, battle and imprisonment, saints, sinners; a wolf and a dragon.* 

A meeting and a viewing. The drawings of Linda Karshan quietly draw me in. At first they appear as something they are not. 
Lines and grids are made with graphite. Repetition, no rulers. They are soft and light and open. They quiver.

This work is unknown to me, the artist is present and introduces herself to us. She reveals her approach, her movement; her self-portraits. She has listened to what her drawing practice has revealed. she is both artist and tool.

 *http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/visiting/floorplans/level-2/room-54
http://www.redfern-gallery.com/exhibitions.asp
**http://www.annelyjudafineart.co.uk/artists/alan-reynolds

If you are interested in applying for the next residency please read here http://resideresidency.weebly.com/apply.html 
Deadline for applications is 6pm on 24th January 2015

'Was it the light of that stormy afternoon or the fortuitous loneliness of the spot, or the silence after the tumult of the streets and squares? I felt I was on the threshold of a new country whose name figured in no book and where everything we think of as belonging to the material world was by some elusive mechanism becoming, as it were, the tangible aspect of the inner world; or rather I had a feeling of suddenly slipping behind the scenes of reality and coming upon a secret, except what secret could be more futile than the one whose meaning escapes you … I was advancing not so much in space as in memory, and not so much in the memory of my own life as in the scattered recollections of a whole race of men… soon I was the only one left observing the inky clouds as they unfurled above the rooftops amid the solemn murmur of the wind…suddenly in that moment that precedes the first clap of thunder… I was taken out of myself, as it were and handed over to an invisible crowd… violent tenderness … the soul of a whole city entered the cries of the storm … listening motionless … restoring me to myself.'

 Julian Green, Paris, (The Palais Royal, p.43, 1983)

On his recent visit, my father brought a few packages from his collection of… ‘things that will come in handy’, from his shed. These are for my perusal and for my studio partner Gill, who sometimes incorporates elements from old tools, in to her practice. One of these packages was wrapped in blue polythene and tied up with one of Dad’s magic slip knots. The sensation of looking at this connected directly standing in front of my blue wall. The cord, drawn around waiting to be opened. Inside were a few of my old drawings and lino cuts. 

Covered.

Held.

Revealed.

Draped.

Taut.


The objects and contents were not the thing. The looking was. 
Briony Fer quoting Agnes Martin in, The Infinite Line * said that looking at art was like, 'a simple direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean'. Fer continues, 'Vision is evoked as a kind of crossing. It is not simply a matter of looking at the vista before us, but of entering into and moving across a field of vision. Distance the kind of distance that - maintains the horizon in its proper place is collapsed as a kind of limitless depth that engulfs us. The horizon cuts the sky and but is not fixed and is always relative to the moving spectator.' for Fer the 'ocean' is, sea,land, city or memory. Looking for me, not only at art, is this experience. The crossing of a layered depth, with access to the depth through points where the material and object and illusion become indistinguishable, indefinable, indisputable.  

Moonlight white.

Slicked oil.

Carried.

Reflect black.

Drafted weave.

Lifted.

 M.P. September 2014

'The Luxembourg Gardens in the cold. Trees studded with white and yellow buds beneath a pale-grey sky. The long parallel lines of the terraces, the fat black lines made by the rows of trees, all as if in a design etched by memory for ever and ever.'

Paris, Julien Green, 1983. Penguin, P 91.

*The Infinite Line, Briony Fer, Yale University Press, 2004. P57.

If you are interested in applying for the next residency please read here http://resideresidency.weebly.com/apply.html 
Deadline for applications is 6pm on 24th January 2015

Outside in the corridor the autumnal late afternoon sun, has given a shifting light grid to work alongside  and against. Starting this week with three vertical ruled lines; the rest freehand.

Inside the studio I ‘m working on canvas, drawn lines softening into the weave. Less paint on the surface than usual, drawing, painting, drawing painting; increasingly, wanting to meld these activities. The pieces are either very light or very dark, these seem to be two emerging positions, which I’m finding intriguing.

 During the residency my aim is not to analyse what is happening in the work, but observe, and wait. As I paint and unexpected things occur, I find that a word seems to present itself, in the space between me and the surface. A single word that approaches, up through the activity. Clearly the word is coming from my mind but, yet feels, directionally, as if I am reading it? 
I am noting these for later.

The Modernist Coin Wash has been in session this week, This is an ongoing collaboration between artist Lindall Pearce* and myself. Our seventh session, ‘Format’, included 6 artists who responded to five envelopes that we posted daily to them for one week, each containing an item, to use to spark ideas for a piece of work to be brought to a studio discussion a week later. We met last Saturday at the studio. The piece I made, freehand painted lines on vinyl and canvas, pinned to the wall, is another note.

I have picked up The Infinite Line * again, and have a new waiting in the car book, Truth*.  
December approaches, I intend to make a further set of papers in December, with different rules and perhaps a new wall.

If you are interested in applying for the next residency please read here http://resideresidency.weebly.com/apply.html 
Deadline for applications is 6pm on 24th January 2015

A new stick of chalk has a clean sharp edge for ruling lines, this soon wears down, becomes thick and the eye kicks in to justify the grid. This is good and how I like it; the grid begins to quiver.

Am I locking in to a space or locking out? Am I applying a net to the world, am I constructing, or locating in the world? 
Not exclusively referencing the surface, the grids allude and invite in to a space. The drawn grids are suspended, a drift-net perhaps. The structure bringing attention to the drawn line, the blurr, the melt. the movement.

 

The impact of wall drawing is felt in my body as I stretch and climb the ladder and pull the line down to the base of the space. Reminded of the Yvonne Rainer show at Raven Row I’ve been thinking about the choreographer’s drawings on display and the planning and notation of moves. 

Paint, grid, body, I keep moving.

http://www.ravenrow.org/exhibition/yvonne_rainer/
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/grid-checkpoint-modernity
http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic1050153.files/Grids_Rosalind%20Krauss.pdf

I find the implausible architecture in these paintings hard to resist, the flatness and fantasy of the inside out platforms connect me to the Lego buildings I used to make with a very limited kit as a child, and they lead me to the buildings visualized in Italo Calvino’s, Invisible Cities.[1]

Georges Perec writes in Species of Spaces, ‘This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space is to name it, to trace it.’ [2]

Spaces conceived in the imagination invite activity, define time; pigeon hole possibilities. The geometric structures in these paintings ground elements of the here and now, the real and virtual, the present, future and the past. They play host to movement. Enter stage right, announcement. Stage left, the response. 

In describing Botticelli’s Annunciation, Joseph D. Parry defines it, ’as everything is happening at once, the delivery of the message, the response to the message’.[3] Between the messenger and respondent, a continuous loop. No words here , the dialogue, proposal and acceptance are depicted bodily, though curve and expression.


[1] Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, Vintage 1997.

[2] Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin 1993, P.13.

[3] Joseph D. Parry, Art and Phenomenology, Routledge 2011, P.186.    

'Virtual space, a simple pretext for a nomenclature. But you don't even need to close your eyes for the space evoked by these words, a dictionary space only, a paper space, to become alive, to be populated, to be filled...'

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, Penguin 1993, P.13.

So, I have taken to this residency. 
With its defined time period, bequeathed as a virtual boundary, it has become not only as a state of mind, but also a physical reality.

The studio[1] is a familiar and productive place and after a summer break I have been approaching the space as if it were temporary location. I’ve been looking differently, working differently. Six months of experimentation, and release from personal expectation. Permission to follow the tangential line, to embrace the studio freedom one already possesses but that is unknowingly kept at length, sometimes perhaps in deference to the ongoing practice.

For the last couple of years I have been working on canvas and good drawing paper, for the residency I am primarily working on surfaces that have been found or donated and that exist within the building. I have selected a section of wall in the corridor that runs behind our main door, passed my room,[2] on the way to the shared spaces. I have literally rubbed shoulders with this wall for three years. Now it has become a space. A drawing space.


[1] Angelika Studios, High Wycombe, an artist led space with individual studio spaces for six artists and a shared project space.

[2] I share a room with artist Gill Gregory.http://www.gillgegory.com 

Taking hold of rhythm that is close. Resonance. 

To see through it. My scale; shared scale. Measure.

So through the rhythm, position and fix a point of view, both forward and back.

I have been drawing in books, on paper and on maps.

Starting on the grid, sometimes ending with the grid. Meshed.

I have been writing, and deleting. Remove.

In the studio thinking about Paris. Walking.

My summer thoughts and practice have floated freely, just out of reach. Retrieve.

Studio reading  - Art and Phenomenology, edited by Joseph Parry.

‘…she does not simply look for a pattern, much less the pattern, but rather for “ a certain way of patterning the world,” that she recognises as such, and in recognising it, simultaneously recognises that her ability to recognise a pattern originates in the structures of her own being in the world.’ *

*Art and Phenomenology, edited by Joseph D. Parry. Routledge, 2011, Page 172.