Gallery Visits 21 September continued

National Portrait Gallery – Jonathan Yeo

I picked up on this exhibition after watching a BBC2 Culture Show programme (not on iplayer but clips below):

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03bgb77

As always, it is fascinating to get a glimpse into artist’s studios and to actually see them working and seeing the process of a portrait in the making.  It was also interesting to see how worried all the sitters were about how they would be portrayed!  While we did not get to see a complete “start to finish” of the portrait he was making (actor Tom Hollander), we did get an insight into how he approaches his work.  He also discussed how some of his famous sitters wanted to be portrayed (such as fellow artists Damian Hirst and Grayson Perry (as his alter ego Claire)). 

The exhibition itself is in two rooms of the NPG.  I did not make any notes at the exhibition itself as it was very busy and while some of the larger portraits were more widely spaced in the first room, the second (smaller) room had all the portraits grouped together on one wall.  While this is very effective in terms of the display, it is not so easy to be able to have a good look at each portrait!

The portrait which has probably got the most interest in the press was the painting of Malala Yousafzai.  Personally, I liked the way he portrayed her; a neutral background, a very realistic, soft face and loosely painted headscarf with the ground and gridding shown.  However, a lot of the press reports (Telegraph and Metro below) reported this image and other images as being too saccharine and not inquiring of the subject enough. 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/10298388/Malala-Yousafzai-Jonathan-Yeo-Portraits-National-Portrait-Gallery-review.html

http://metro.co.uk/2013/09/13/the-jonathan-yeo-portraits-exhibition-plays-safe-with-family-friendly-content-3986359/

Mark Hudson from the Telegraph writes: “These are strangely quaint images, not so much in their technique, which varies from image to image, as in their apparently artless flattering idealisation of their subjects. Nowadays we expect portraits to dig a bit deeper, to act out a kind of confrontation with the sitter. Yeo doesn’t do that. His large portraits are reminiscent of Annie Leibovitz’s super-glossy photographic portraits for Vanity Fair, images that exist in a slightly queasy middle ground between portraiture and fashion photography, with the sitter’s ‘attributes’ lending a narrative dimension in a way a Renaissance portrait painter would readily have understood.”

The quote that stood out for me there was “we expect portraits to dig a bit deeper, to act out a kind of confrontation with the sitter” which I don’t necessarily agree with.  While it may not be hugely fashionable to say so in the contemporary art world, most people do actually want a portrait that looks like them! And I would imagine it would be quite difficult to get famous sitters (who, after all, depend on their image for their livelihood), or even your average person on the street, if the artist were trying to show a confrontational image.  Throughout history, portrait subjects have, to a greater or lesser degree, had a level of control over their own image for their own purposes, whether that be flattery, political power or a sense of superiority.

In the case of Malala, I don’t think you need anything else to understand the image and the reason her portrait is important.  Everyone knows about her shooting by the Taliban just because she wanted to get an education, thus becoming the symbol for young muslim girls under repressive regimes.

My other favourite portrait was of Helena Bonham Carter, the actress, portrayed in one of her very eccentric outfits in front of a house.  The whole portrait is comprised of pink shades, with the background and her outfit very loosely underpainted, leaving the textures and drips of the ground showing through.  The link above shows the painting in the making, and the photograph which he partly used in its making.  You can clearly see from this how much he has taken from personal sittings, and the overall feel of the portrait captured from the photograph.

Many of Yeo’s portraits have an unfinished element to them; sometimes being a blank canvas (as in Erin O’Connor / Sienna Miller), or allowing the ground and the underpainting to show through (Malala / Helena Bonham Carter).  When I was in the NPG gallery, I was listening to a conversation behind me pointing out the unfinished nature of many of the works and why an artist chooses to do this. 

I considered this further.  From my point of view, especially in portraiture, having the contrast between a very polished, finished face (and sometimes hands/arms) and a very sketchy, painterly background really does focus the view onto the face of the sitter.  And from a student’s point of view, seeing how an artist has constructed his work is very interesting; Yeo’s backgrounds are often gridded, with a very loose, sketchy coat of paint which often looks as if it’s pearlescent. 

May have to revisit this exhibition to have a closer look (but not on a Saturday afternoon – far too busy!)

Gallery Visits - 21 September 2013

Mall Gallery

Still Alive – an exhibition of contemporary still life painters by members of the Federation of British Artists.  (catalogue) 

As my series painting is of still life, I was particularly interested in the artists’ statements and why they chose this particular genre:

Lucy McKie “appreciate ordinary objects and realise the beauty that surrounds us all the time, yet can seem too subtle to merit our attention”.

Paul Gildea “what it has is itself and the thoughts of the artist … not like traffic, horses, children or other animals”

Lilias August “Humble objects are evocative.  Still life will always be alive because there is more to it than meets the eye – it is intimate yet wordly, simple yet powerful”.

Also, in the essay accompanying the exhibition by Professor Anthony Savile, King’s College London, he says (albeit somewhat pretentiously, as he himself acknowledges!) “When we set aside our practical concerns, we always experience our surroundings in a certain light.  We find them now comforting, now menacing; sometimes puzzling, sometimes refractory and so on.  One remarkable talent of the artist is to be able to show us the light in which we experience our world and its contents, so that the very way in which we view them (generally unconsciously) is itself something that we are consciously brought to see by and in the image.  That is what makes the painting expressive, where its subject matter is not.”

In different ways, the quotes above seem to sum up my feelings about why I want to create art in general (and not just still life, although the comments are about this genre).  It is a way of looking at things that a non-artist would not – in my case (for the series), seeing a bag of shopping as interesting in itself; the way the colours contrast, the way the packaging changes the shape and colour of its contents, seeing the plastic and paper as interesting in themselves and not just a covering; the textures of each object.

Anyway, back to the exhibition!

Having reviewed many of the works in this exhibition online before attending, one thing that (although obvious) really caught my attention was the scale of the individual paintings.  Viewing images digitally, they are all roughly the same size which they are not in real life and they does impact on your viewing experience.

One artist in particular whose work was much smaller than I anticipated was Barbara Richardson; her paintings are between 25 – 40cm, yet from the catalogue they appear much larger.  These smaller images draw you in, inviting you into their “personal space” to look more closely at the detail, the forms and the colours.  While in the past (in my own work) I favoured a larger scale of painting, it was quite a surprise to me (again, thought not sure why when you think about it in more detail) that I was very drawn to these much smaller paintings.

Lucy McKie’s paintings use very traditional objects (glass, fruit, cloth, ceramics) to display her skill at depicting textures, but her work is so subtle with very soft textures and colour, it is almost as if viewed with a very slight filter with the diffused light and (close up) soft edges, even to the man-made objects.  Her neutral colours are so rich and smooth, they set off the relatively small amounts of more saturated colour without needing stronger contrasts.

Paul Gildea’s “Propped Cloths – Study in Blue” is a much larger painting and catches your eye as soon as you walk into the gallery.  While obviously a staged arrangement (as are most still lifes, but this one more obviously especially created just to paint) it has a freshness, to me, created by the simple use of colour and the close attention paid to the way different types of cloth fold, bend and crease.  While it may have been more dramatic to have a different colour background, the artist has chosen a mid to light-toned different shade of blue to contrast against the richer blues of the cloth.  The background itself is quite roughly painted but uses the addition of faint black and white lines to add a spatial depth and sense of space to give additional form to the sinuous curves of the fabric sculpture.

Lilias August had four watercolour paintings – again small in scale – of working objects (brushes, chisel, hinges) realistically depicted against painted backgrounds of folded paper and cardboard.  She states that she began painting objects when working as a project artist during the building of a Cathedral tower because she could see the significance of the individual components in the general scheme of things.  Again, the objects that she paints are everyday but the arrangement is not just one of “found” objects but carefully arranged (sometimes in rows) from an overhead viewpoint to show each object’s individual form and qualities.

The Sunday Times Watercolour Exhibition

As all the paintings in this exhibition are shown together on the four walls of the largest gallery here, you can see every painting from the centre of the room.  Still thinking about the impact size, tone, colour, etc, has from a distance, and when included in a room full of other paintings, I sat down on the bench in the centre of the room and just looked round the exhibits.

From this view, I thought about which paintings I wanted to have a closer look at.  Some with most impact from a distance were those with strong tonal / colour contrasts and more basic forms, but when viewed close up, there was nothing else to keep my attention.  Also those that were more abstract from a distance – what is it that is painted?  Is the painting an abstraction or investigation?  Those I felt I wanted to explore more – I wanted to get close to see the texture, detail, and to see if I could work out how they had achieved an effect or finish.

The three I liked the most were:

David Poxon – Thames Van in a Wood

This was a representational piece packed with colour, texture and detail.  The strong colour attracts you first – the strong rusty-reds contrasted with peeling blue and green paint.  The next thing you see if the negative space – the very dark shadow of the inside structure of the rusting van creates strong lines against the background, especially the “nibbled” section of the roofline in the top left.  Looking more closely, the texture is so interesting – sections of splattered paint, layers of colour and effective backwashes, granulation and white spots (possibly bleach? – too diffuse to be gum arabic).  Very delicate and spidery lines have been added to create the sharp edges of rusting metal.  The last thing I thought about was the colour consonance – repetition of the blues and greens of the metal in the ground and the rusting red used to create the loose forms of the shrubs.

Next to this painting on the wall was Luke Elwes “Glitter”, and abstract painting which immediately reminded me of leaves on water, or glints of light on water.  Looking more closely, the background is created of a variegated wash of neutral grays with hints of blue and pink wash. Different colours and textures have been added to the seemingly random shapes and ripples.  I could not find a replication of this painting online but http://www.lukeelwes.com/paintings/recent-work/on-paper/ is a very similar concept.  I was considering how the artist had constructed this piece and I think he may have painted different colours and forms onto paper, tore it up and then created a collage which he then recreated in watercolour.

My final favourite was David Firmstone’s “ Fire marked the land like a language” (prize winner – Vintage Classics Prize for Cover Art).  This really ticked all the boxes of an interesting painting; from a distance the visual impact is very arresting because of the strong, simple forms, tonal contrast and limited palette (black/grey shades, buttery cream/yellow and bold orange “fire” up the middle of a stylised, domed hill, and the simplified/symbolised undulations of land with striations of colour.

This artist exhibited great skill in his treatment of the washes – the colour swirls round in the ground like ink on water contrasted by the visible brush strokes to give the land its form.

The final interest was the symbolic nature of the painting – although I am not sure what it represents in the artist’ mind; two friesan cows on the top of the hill, with the flock of birds seemingly exploding from the hill swirling around and the line of fire and smoke.  It really made me think and I stood in front of it for quite some time (probably to the annoyance of others!).

Derwent Art Prize – the inaugural show for works created in pencil.

This exhibition was in the three smaller rooms of the gallery and again, thinking of impact in a gallery, this does force you to explore more.  Because you can’t see everything at once, and so just view your favourites, you are forced to explore each painting more.

There was a lot of work here I found very interesting; the range of techniques, sizes and mark-making were incredible:

Borislav Varadinov - Chain of memory nests  (graphite on gesso covered corrugated cardboard).  This was one of the larger works – although I had nothing to measure with, I estimated the piece was approximately 5 feet wide by 18” high (actually 180 x 50 so not far out!).  The work is a sinuous string of different types of nests, some empty, some containing eggs/apple cores, etc, with interconnecting branches and vines leading through the drawing with different types of leaves.  I wondered about the symbolism which, to me, brought to mind new life and the passage of time over the seasons.  The combination of detailed drawing over the textured card and gesso produced an additional layer of interest to the pencil work which, combined with the unusual, and unfinished, rough-edged cardboard ground produced a truly stunning artwork.

While researching further, this painting is one of a series (of eight) entitled “unpacked thoughts” completed this year – all pencil on corrugated cardboard.  I found this series so interesting with its themes of trees, branches and nests and wanted to understand the artist’s motivation for this series.  While on his website, I came across this statement from him:

Dear friends,

I told you before about a drawing that I uploaded to the Derwent Artprize contest. The drawing is currently exhibited in the Mall Galleries in London, and I feel very proud about having a piece of mine at this place. I couldn't be more happy when I received some feedback about it today. A spectator sent me a picture of "Chain of memory nests" and commented 'hi, i recently visited the mall Gallery, and saw your stunning 'chain of memory nests', and after visiting your website saw that it was part of the 'unpacked thoughts' series. I wanted to use your collection as inspiration for one of my University projects. I was wondering if you could tell me the inspiration behind the series and what the overall message of the pieces is. Thanks a lot.' I feel blessed to inspire other artists and I am grateful for the feedback. As an artist, life can be lonely and tiresome. And often I wonder if what I do really matters. To receive feedback like this is a true blessing.

With gratitude, Borislav

While this doesn’t actually tell me his thoughts behind the series, it made me think about the feedback you receive as an artist.  As Borislav said, life can be lonely (especially as a long distance student!) and I suppose once you have put your work out in a gallery, you very rarely get to know what people think about your piece.  There was a discussion on the OCA student site recently about contacting artists, and seeing this artist’s reaction to feedback made me think we should probably do it more often.

Danny Lyon – Animal Skull Life Study 

This large study attracted me mainly because of the way the artist had treated the paper.  The image itself is detailed charcoal and white pastel but what interested me more, and is probably not visible in the link above, is how the artist has distressed the paper in the bottom right between the image and the edge of the paper.  It has either been peeled, or really heavily erased, to destroy the surface texture, giving a juxtaposition between the detailed, realistic surface texture of the skull and the paper texture.

Chrys Allen: two works “Walk in Progress”  (first prize winner) and “Life Drawing Continued” 

Walk in Progress is a graphite drawing on one side of a very long roll of paper.  In the gallery, it was displayed differently to that shown on the website, and I sat for a while and sketched the arrangement in my notebook:

The roll of paper is textured, almost like watercolour paper in a off-white colour.  At first I thought it was charcoal but it is actually graphite images of landscapes – some simply linear while others are tonal, some appear linked, others random with one section merging into the next.  This is such a three-dimensional piece, exhibited on a low (12”?) plinth in the centre of the gallery, that it is really a cross between a sculpture and a drawing, displayed in sweeping curves held together with simply bulldog clips.  You need to take a “walk in progress” around the work just to see it all, and took at, in and around it from all angles.  Although the drawing is just on one side of the paper, as some sections when displayed appear on the inside of the sculptural form, nothing can be seen on one plane and the whole image is fragmented (would be interesting to see how the drawing appears differently when seen as a continuous whole).

After looking at this for some considerable time, it reminded me of Chinese works on a scroll, and the face that the perspective is all on one plane.  My one negative thought on this was, although it is a great exhibition piece, the market must be limited for such works, purely because of the space taken up!

The second of Chrys Allen’s works, Life Drawing Continued’ is along the  same vein as Walk in Progress, but this time comprises life drawing studies of both men and women on both sides of the paper.  The images here are much lighter in tone, drawn with spidery, wandering lines, with some images overlapping the others. 

Also included amongst the figure drawings are other studies: I think anatomical studies as well as animal skulls.  These are darker in tone and are numbered (eg P256/251/250/252) – I wondered where these studies/numbers correlated with a publication such as Grey’s Anatomy (although I don’t believe this includes animal studies).

This exhibit was shown on a much higher plinth (approx hip height) and so gave a completely different viewpoint to the previous work.  I found the angle of view changes the images completely, as do the curves of the paper, shadow areas and highlights from gallery lights.  This image is also more tightly coiled, and I wonder whether it was the artist or the curator of the exhibition who chose where to clip the paper and how it was displayed.

After visiting, I read Katherine Tyrrell’s review of these exhibitions on her “making a mark”  blog and have to agree how impressed I was with the quality of work on display at these three exhibitions. 

Abstraction from study of natural forms

For this exercise, I wandered around my garden to find natural forms that interested me. 

My original sketch was a very brief line drawing of an area comprising an arrow-leafed plant with pink flower and grasses in the foreground.  I was attracted to this mainly because of the combination of the lines of the grasses diverging across the picture plain.  

The second sketch I simplified slightly, just picking out some of the lines of the grasses and simplifying (and repeating) the shape of the leaves.

The third sketch I began to experiment with further simplification (just picking out some lines and ignoring others) and colour (pastel pencils).  I firstly used more earthy, neutral hues of brown, yellow and orange (autumnal colours) and then moved towards the blue end of the spectrum. Originally, this was as a contrast, but then I felt that a more monochrome approach may work well, especially if concentrating on the linear aspects of the study.  I felt the left-hand side of the sketch was more interesting (see the line down the centre of the sketch), particularly the bottom corner with the jagged blue and white colouring, which I felt could possibly be expressed by texture or impasto/textured paint.

I was originally going to create a new canvas with texture gel, but when in my studio, saw one of the canvases I had created from a previous exercise (dripping/pouring), which already had a raised, linear texture and so decided to use this as the base to my abstraction.  The pink/red raised globules also reminded me of the flowers of the plant I had originally sketched.

I began adding broad strokes of blue and white to the canvas (landscape orientation) and then progressed just by adding colour, scumbling over the previous layers, sometimes working with the raised layer of thicker paint.  At this point, I decided I didn’t particularly like the white over the textured ground – it was too harsh and removed most of the interest in the canvas and so I decided to work on the opposite side.  As I had already used masking tape down the canvas to hold it to the board, I decided to leave this on to see what the effect would be when removed.  Once the tape was removed, I added further paint to this area but still leaving the harsh lines as a contrast to the swirls and more organic forms.

This painting is more abstract than I was planning originally, but I think that when you decide to use a highly textured and abstract background, you do need to explore and investigate the marks that are already on your canvas, rather than working against them.

Research Point – Abstract Expressionism

We are asked to research Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting (or Tachisme) and those artists who developed this style of spontaneous, expressive painting.

Abstract Expressionism was an art form centred in America, and more specifically in New York, from the early 1940s to the 1960s, and was the first time the focus of the art world had shifted from Europe.  During the Second World War, many intellectuals and artists fled the destruction and persecution to the US and most settled in New York.  The style of painting they took with them was split into two distinct groups: the purist abstract styles of Mondrian, Leger and the Bauhas; and the expressive, emotional styles of the Surrealists (Ernst, Dali and Breton). 

Two particular artists can be seen to have been the catalyst between the original abstract artists, such as Kandinsky, and the action painters of the 40s and 50s.  Hans Hofmann had lived in both Paris and Munich, and so had in-depth knowledge of cubism, fauvism, abstraction and expressionism.  He created an art school in New York where, in the early 40s, he experimented with drip techniques and mixed media (The Wind  1942). The other artist was Arshile Gorky who died at the age of 43 in 1948.  He has been described both as the last Surrealist and the first Abstract Expressionist, blending the abstract painterly techniques favoured by Hoffman with the surreal imagery ( Virginia Landscape 1944).

American artists were receptive to all these styles, and, as there had been an American move towards abstraction since the beginning of the century, individual artists (they were never a coherent group despite their names being linked) began developing artistic styles wholly their own.

Abstract Expressionism can broadly be split into two groups: the action painters (Jackson Pollock being the most famous but also including Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline) and the colour-field painters (Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman).

One critic, Harold Rosenberg, stated “... the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyse or “express” an object, actual or imagined.  What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.  The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him.  The image would be the result of that encounter.”  He went on to say “In this gesturing with materials the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated.  Form, colour, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which – or practically all, as has been attempted logically, with unpainted canvas – can be dispensed with.  What matters always is the revelation contained in the act.”[1]

Jackson Pollock is probably the most famous of the action painters – his huge canvases covered for which he is most famous, covered in drips, spatters and dribbles, were mainly painted in a brief phase between 1947 and 1951.  He stated in ‘My Painting’ in Possibilities I, 1947/8 “I hardly ever stretch my canvas before painting.  I prefer to take the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor.  I need the resistance of a hard surface.  On the floor I am more at ease.  I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting. ... I have no fears about making changes, destroying the image, etc, because the painting has a life of its own.  I try to let it come through”.[2] (No 1, 1948, 1948).

Willem de Kooning’s work, while being classed under the heading of Abstract Expressionism, is the only one whose work remained, to some degree, representational.  Many of his works contain clearly identifiable forms, frequently those of the human figures, such as Attic, 1949, which gives the impression of a mass of human flesh, tangled together and pressing down upon one another.

The other branch of Abstract Expressionism – colour-field painting – is most closely linked with the artist Mark Rothko.  Rothko’s art at first appears very simple; large canvases painted with a small number of coloured panels.  However, as Rothko is reported as saying (S Rodman, Conversations with Artists, New York 1957) “I am interested only in expressing the basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom and so on – and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions.  The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.  And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point.”  Rothko’s painting style is more that of staining rather than the visible application of paint.  The first layer of colour is soaked into the canvas, with subsequent layers being applied thinly; scumbled over the surface to show the underlayers of paint, achieving a subtle effect which almost glows[3]. Red, Orange, Orange on Red (1962)

Another proponent of large-scale canvases was Clyfford Still, who, like Rothko, generally worked with a limited palette of colour, but unlike Rothko, Still’s work appears much more solid due to the thickly applied paint and defined edges of his forms.  Still applied his colour in large, jagged shapes which have been described as akin to peeling billboards, or animal hides.  Along with Rothko and Adolph Gotlieb, Still wrote a letter to the New York Times in 1943 to explain the Abstract Expressionist point of view, stating “We favour the simply expression of the complex thought.  We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal.  We wish to reassert the picture plane”[4].  1964, 1964)

 

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[1] A World History of Art (Honour, H and Fleming J), Laurence King Publishing Ltd 2005, page 834

[2] A World History of Art (Honour, H and Fleming J), Laurence King Publishing Ltd 2005, page 835

[3] A World History of Art (Honour, H and Fleming J), Laurence King Publishing Ltd 2005, page 838

[4] A World History of Art (Honour, H and Fleming J), Laurence King Publishing Ltd 2005, page 836