Islington Green

Been drawing - at last! I've been thinking about the spaces that people occupy together, I sketched this image quickly trying to get a sense of people in transit.

Dan Hays Talk

Harmony in Green, 1997

Dan Hays gave a presentation about his work and ongoing practice based PhD. I was intrigued by the idea of an arts based PhD... His thesis will take the form of an exhibition plus a relatively short written component. He received funding for 3.5 years to do it; of course with the cuts now I bet the money for this kind of thing is gone.

Colorado impression 11b (after Dan Hays), 2002

Hays works using pixelated video stills and a projector, and low resolution imagery sourced from the internet. The imagery for this painting was sourced from a photograph on a website of another man named Dan Hays who lives in Colorado. Hays the painter mentioned formal links with landscape artists and tapestry, where images are also created using a pixel system. The irony is that these oil paintings take Hays hundreds of hours to make, and they are based on an image that was made in a fraction of a second.

Colorado Impression 16d (after Dan Hays, Colorado), 2007

There were certainly aspects of this talk that interested me more then others. For example the painting above was created with a single continuous snaking line, a technique Hays refers to as "the Caterpillar technique", it gives the affect of tiles or hidden depth.

Colorado Impression 12b

The colours of this image have been inverted and the image has been flipped vertically.. you can see traces of the original source material in the shape of trees in the top left hand corner. I was interested in the idea of landscapes that make sense visually when upside down.

I find it hard to engage with these paintings. I think the choice of source material is a little strange.. Dan Hays has never been to Colorado, and the only link between himself and the source material is this other man that shares his name. It almost seems like Hays is removing his own interest from his work by letting someone else produce the source imagery. I also find it hard to engage with what Hays referred to as 'the pixel club', artists such as Susan Collins who works from a live video feed, and Christiane Baumgartner, who creates the most incredible large scale woodcuts from video stills. Hays said that "screens are disappearing landscapes" - and this is an interesting idea, but I feel saturated. After being bombarded with screens all day the last thing I want to do is look at paintings of nature through a screen.

Gauguin at Tate Modern

The Ancestors of Tehamana or Tehamana has many Parents

Went to see the Gauguin exhibition at Tate Modern. My favourite part was his drawings, which were rounded and heavy with simplified forms, bold line and smooth faces with an emphasis on contour. I really like his sure of colour to describe space.

When Gauguin moved to Tahiti and was disappointed at how Westernised it was. As a result, Gauguin invented a lot of the narratives and beliefs that he used as inspiration in his paintings. I had not known that before seeing this exhibition, and after I found out, I wasn't sure how I felt about it. On the one hand he seems to present life and belief and stories side by side, and I enjoy that, but on the other hand, who knows how much of it is false?

Miro at Tate Modern

The Farm, 1921-22

I wrote a long piece about the Miro exhibition only to have it disappear when Blogger closed down for routine maintenance... but never mind. I will write the gist of it again. I'm not a huge fan of surrealism in general but I did enjoy this exhibition. I do love Miro's colour schemes and the symbols he used in his work. I was surprised by how quickly his surrealist style developed, the first image I saw in the exhibition was quite literal and not abstracted much at all. In the space of a couple years Miro's painting radically altered. Miro lived through turbulent times and kept returning to themes of his Catalan identity, using imagery such as his family farm and Catalan peasants in his work. He considered his painting The Farm to be a breakthrough in his work, calling it 'a resume of my entire life in the country.'

The Head of a Catalan Peasant, 1924

The exhibition guide informed me that this piece can be seen as a displaced self-portrait, and an act of defiance against Miguel Primo de Rivera who staged a military coup in Spain and proceeded to suppress Catalan identity, even forcing limitations on the use of the Catalan language.

The Conductor, 1976, Intaglio print on paper

My favourite parts of the exhibition were (not too surprisingly) the prints. In them Miro's work becomes very pictoral, with large fields of colour and simplified forms.

The Barcelona Series, 1944

The most impressive part of the exhibition in my mind was the Barcelona Series, a collection of over 50 lithographs spanning the adjoining wall of two gallery spaces. Although only printed in 1944 they were initially created in 1939 against the backdrop of Hitler's invasion of Poland and the escalating conflict in Europe. Miro was living in France at this time. These lithographs show an array of ogres and dictators as well as the victims of conflict.

The Barcelona Series, 1944

Individually these lithographs are not particularly large but the collective effect of 50 of them shown together is overwhelming. The individual images are full of turmoil and confusion but the pieces are hung in an ordered grid shape.

Blue triptych, 1961-62

A lot of this exhibition was devoted to Miro's ceramics and sculptural pieces which I will not write about here. This triptych had an entire room to itself and was quite an experience! It was like swimming in colour. I found it very relaxing to sit there surrounded by blue. There was another triptych that was white, that I was less interested in because it seemed to fade into the walls which were also white.

In what ways are artists working with both the concept and the reality of the crowd, and what does this mean for the plight of the individual?

Antony Gormley, Domain Field, 2003

Productivity in the print rooms ground to a halt in March as we were writing our main essays for the course. I have been looking at identity and the crowd but feeling a bit all over the place, its hard to know what research is relevant until you have the benefit of hindsight. This essay was a chance to collect and review ideas in depth as well as maybe gain some kind of order in my work, which I feel has been a little chaotic. I have been reading books such as After Identity by Jonathan Rutherford, and I am finding it very difficult to link the academic and the visual aspects of my research. I suppose this is the most basic problem faced by every visual communicator responding to a brief (even if they set the brief themselves, as is the case here).

Antony Gormley, American Field, 1991

For my essay I looked at 3 case contemporary artists, Antony Gormley, Ai Weiwei and Spencer Tunick. They each explore the themes of identity and crowds in their work, although their starting points and ambitions are very different. One of my tutors also pointed out that each of these artists rely on other people to produce their artwork, so the identity of the makers is sacrificed in a way the identity of the artist never is. For example, American Field by Antony Gormley was created by an extended family of bricklayers in Mexico. There are around 40,000 clay figures, each one unique. In earlier versions of Field Antony Gormley 'finished' the figures by poking the eyes himself. American Field relied on collective making by individuals responding to a set of basic instructions provided by the artist.

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds, Tate Modern Turbine Hall, 2010-2011

Ai Weiwei's work has many layers. I'm not going to rehash my entire essay but one thing I did find interesting was in an interview for the exhibition catalog Ai talks about the idea that in China objects are mass produced for the west without an understanding of the context for what these objects are intended.

Spencer Tunick at Newcastle Gateshead 2005

Spencer Tunick creates large installations of naked figures. His work explores our relationship with our surroundings. His installations take place in cities such as in the image above, which was for his 2005 exhibition. Tunick states that the intended audience for his work is the participant. All films and photos documenting the installations and shown in galleries after the event are a by product of the actual artwork. He aims to create ties in communities. Personally I find this image and the others on his website (http://www.spencertunick.com/) both amazing and disturbing. There is something vulnerable about mass nudity, and especially when the individuals are lying down or are piled up on each other. In the documentary for this event you see the odd clothed individual with a megaphone herding the participants. There is a certain tension there which is a little uncomfortable.

Mezzotint Cloth Studies

Cloth 1, March 2011

Cloth 2, March 2011
Cloth 3, March 2011

I have been making these mezzotints throughout march, they are very, very small and its difficult to see what you're doing. I love the moment after I've inked the plate, when I gently wipe away the excess ink and the image is revealed to me for the first time.

I have been working with themes of identity and the crowd, and after my mid term review I decided I needed to take a bit of a break from working on images of people, and do something a little bit more intimate. I showed these in a crit recently, and it was commented that they seem to have little relationship to the ideas and research I've been working on up to now - quite true! I think sometimes its healthy to take a bit of a break. I probably will not return to mezzotint this year, although I find it a very calming and beautiful medium, I just can't see it fitting in with what I'm doing at this stage.

Tate Modern: Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds

Ai Weiwei exhibited Sunflower Seeds as part of the Unilever Series in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Ai deals with the theme of individualism in society, particularly in the context of modern China. I found this work interesting for a number of reasons. Firstly, because it was created by several families in a village in China renowned for its porcelain making. It made me think about skills that have been useful in the past but maybe now are less in demand, or have perhaps been replaced by machinery. Secondly this work was intended to be viewed in two ways, up close or from the Turbine Hall bridge. By the time I saw the exhibition people were no longer allowed to walk on top of the installation due to health concerns about the porcelain dust. I thought that was pretty interesting... the intention to have the public interact with the artwork, but to be censored in the end by safety regulations.