Here is a one-take phone film of my open studio.
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!
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Grid Draw Move Melt. This has been the rhythm. To search, find, and hold on to what needs to be seen and shown. The net is catching patterns that perpetually surround; lifting and shifting. Encompassing the movement of inner and outer, the merging of these two: a sway. 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. ‘We are all aware that most of life escapes our senses: a most powerful explanation of the various arts is that they talk of patterns which we can only begin to recognize when they manifest themselves as rhythms or shapes. We observe that the behaviour of people, of crowds, of history, obeys such recurrent patterns.’ Peter Brook, The Empty Space, 1968 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.* In the square, a triangle of freshly raked soil is cordoned by a blue nylon rope. I see ahead, a building façade held in place by an imposing steel grid work, hollowed out; ready for repurpose. 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. A walk, via the circus, during that early evening change over in the city, when the sky light goes down and street stage lights come up. We stand amongst a show of white reliefs and graphite drawings of form, rhythm, structure and equilibrium**. A memorial event show, full of artists and collectors who have seen much, lived much and know much. This artist is not present, his work is. ‘It is about the pacing; nine steps one way, nine steps the other.The fall of feet. The sound of feet… the words are less important, but they are essential.’ Conversations with and about Beckett, as quoted in the catalogue to Linda Karshan, Signs of Men and Footfalls exhibition at The Redfern Gallery, Jan 2015. *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 Drawing is different. I cannot describe it clearly yet. The setting of rules, or 'minimum moves', seems to have released me into an activity which has become a 'situation' of drawing, a holding back which is enabling less to achieve more. The event is happening from within the drawing rather than being imposed from outside. I have worked in a serial way before but now the decisions and rhythms are flowing intuitively from the drawing, they may not appear any different to the observer but I recognise the shift as a good one. The familiar lines and forms are at hand and still affective. For every project is a contexture of images and thoughts that suppose a grasp of reality. We need not consider it, consequently, in a doctrine of pure imagination. It is even useless to continue an image or maintain it. All we wait for is for it to exist.' Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, (The dialectics of outside and inside. P. 225) Space and shape, and time. A long look. I have spent two lengthy sessions in Fiona Banner's selection of works from the V-A-C collection at Whitechapel Gallery. The installation of paintings and photographs require time especially with Banner's staging. The changing light levels and the CMYK light that floods the room, change the viewing, the action of the works, I have looked at each piece throughout the lighting cycle, the proposition, although it has a sideshow appeal, is demanding and compelling. 'Rather than conventional gallery lighting, Banner instead uses coloured light which flows gently through Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black in a direct reference to the CMYK system commonly used for printing images. She says, ‘I want to make a theatre for the works to act in. It is a play on the act of looking, on our perception. The works that I was drawn to are self reflective, they challenge their own medium: paintings that discuss themselves as reproduction; photographs that deny the image or perform some kind of act of self portraiture; sculpture that declares the impossibility of its own authenticity.' http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/exhibitions/fiona-banner-selects-v-c-collection/ A4 Black Papers January 2015 - Home studioIf you are interested in applying for the next residency please read here http://resideresidency.weebly.com/apply.html |
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