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September 30, 2004
starting a new batch of work
This week has been a good solid week in the studio. I go for my swim, go for a coffee and look at the sea and then get down to the studio.
This week has been about planning and developing. And a little bit of printmaking as I am teaching print at Rochester. So, I did some colour mono prints and a reductive relief lino cut to make sure that I could teach it properly (for tomorrow). It was also a nice thing to do to get some of my ideas out of my sketchbook and into some kind of form. I have been a bit frustrated with how conventional my compositions have been, and they need to be more challenging and quirky. So the monoprints allowed me to take a few risks and gave me some new ideas.
I was also keen to get down some of the information I has sketched in my books from all the early morning train journeys: the dawn skies and mythical lanscapes flying past. And also the quirkyness of all those little provincial railway stations. So out came my watercolours for the first time since about March and I proceeded to produce about a dozen quite complex comps and studies. It was nice to see them emerge as I did not expect them to. It is lovely when that happens, especially whe you are not quite sure where they came from.
Another thing happened this week which was quite fortuitous. My Niece, Mae, (7 going on 16) is studying L S Lowry at school and was asked to find out something about him. I am afraid that dreadful 70’s song ‘matchstalk cats and dogs’ had marred my (and probabaly may others) interest in his work. But when I started to look up his work on the internet, I found work which I had forgotten about and saw what a sophisticated interpreter of human life he was. Wonderful paintings.
Talking of wonderful paintings, today I received an invite for a show of my good friend, Joe Fan’s paintings at the the Thackeray Gallery in London. Opening on the 12th October, running to the 29th. I have followed Joe’s work since we both started being lecturers together at Gray’s School of Art in the early 90s. You simply must go and see it. Here is an example:
Joe Fan Constrction for a Dream, Oil on Canvas, 44”×42”
Also, another wonderful figurative painter in Aberdeen, Barry McGlashan has just added new work on his web site, some of which you can see at his solo show at the John Martin Gallery next April. I especially love his new painting The Final Hours.
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September 26, 2004
Glenn Brown and Valie Export
Just a quickie to say that have spent the weekend in London to babysit my nephew Harper. Did manage to fit in a couple of shows:
Glenn Brown at the The Serpentine and Valie Export at Camden Arts Centre.
If you are in London you must go and see Glenn Brown. Extraordinary paintings, huge and all paintied with exacting precision with a small sable. Brown was a Turner Prize shortlister in 2000 and his work, for me, has given fresh imputus to contemporary painting.
Valie Export at Camden Arts Centre is an odd show. Apparently, she is a pioneer of performance and media art whose practice has exerted a considerable influence on a subsequent generation of artists. I love the Arts Centre and spent a considerable amount of time in the cafe and the bookshop, but not much looking at the work. oh well…
Bought a copy of Modern Painters and went to a noodle bar for lunch.
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September 23, 2004
Comings and goings
Well now I have got that Chichester thing off of my chest in my last blog, its back to a normal blog about what I have been up to.
This has been a week of yet more traveling on the train, two flights and another job interview.
I have been doing a number of days teaching at Kent Institute of Art and Design in Rochester. This has meant a 4.45am wake up call as it take 4-5 train connections to get there from Hastings. This despite Rochester only being about 48 miles away. I have so far had two days teaching drawing at
The Dockyard Museum on the Medway in Chatham. There are over 100 foundation art students and this was their first week, so it was intensive, but highly enjoyable. The students seem a great bunch and I love teaching at foundation level, because they are all so keen, ambitious and enthusiastic. I get home to Hastings at 8.00pm so it is a very long and tiring day. But, I must say it has been nice to do some teaching again and the staff there are a lovely bunch.
This week, I also got invited or a job interview for a part time painting lecturer at Ulster University in Belfast. I was undecided whether I should go as I was due to work in Rochester on that day (Wednesday 22nd) and I did not want to let them down. However, they were cool about it and I decided to go.
This involved going up to London for the night on Tuesday where I spent the night at billy’s, then I got a flight from Gatwick to Belfast at some ridiculous hour in the morning. When I got to Belfast it was cold, drizzly and dull. I had not been there for over ten years and it was nice to see the there was no presence of the military police in the city centre as there used to be when I visted it before. I had a wander about the centre as I had some time to kill and to see if it was somewhere I could move to. Which I think I could.
The interview itself was a very formal affair with 5 on the interview panel who were very thorough in their questioning and gave very little away about how they were responding to me, which was good. I think I interviewed ok, but fell down on my record on academic research, which plays a big part at the University. So, therefore, I think I am unlikely to get the job. I had a look around the painting studios and there was little to see as the students have just started this week. The place was a nice big art school in what looked liked an old department store and the painting area was set in what looked like an old ballroom. Fantastic.
Got back about 8 last night to Hastings and today I am a fairly spent force as just went down the studio just to stare into space for half and hour and then leave defeated. I am off again to Rochester tomorrow and then London at the weekend, so I think I should cut my losses this week and start afresh in the studio next.
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September 18, 2004
The Battle for Chichester Cross is over...
But the war has only begun.
Well that is it. All I can do. For now. It is far from perfect and far from what I wanted. But I have been working it to death and today I am calling it a day. Well. until I can think of something else to do to it.
Above are four images of Battle for Chichester Cross from original thunbnail sketch to three stages through the painting to completion. It was devised as a deeply personal picture as cathartic way of dealing with the four and a half years I lived in Chichester in East Sussex, England. I said on my first ever blog that I might write a bit about my time in Chichester and with the completion of this painting, I feel it is appropriate now to talk about this part of my life.
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Final Painting with Details
My main mission since I have been in Hastings is to get my painting career back on track and to make my life as simple as I can. I knew that I would have to start all over again and that I would have to make a lot of work over months, perhaps years, to reach standards and the resonance I desired for my work. So, I have been patiently drawing around my environment, and mostly going back to basics with my painting, which, for the most part, has so far been quite pedestrian and conservative. But, the very fact, I could do it, and do it every day, was what has become the most importnt thing to me.
Because I could not do it Chichester. My job and the kind of environment that exisited in the town made it extraordinarily hard for me to make any meaningful work. However, all through my time in Chichester, lurking away in the recesses of my thoughts were visual ideas which were mainly spiteful, full of bitterness and at times violent, towards the good people of this very small market Cathedral city.
The place engenders it.
I came to Chichester in 1999, with no preconceptions as I had never heard of it before. It looked lovely on my visit to interview and on the surface, the people seemed freindly and pleasant. Of course I had been living in Aberdeen for the previous 7 years, where I had become acustomed to constant sardonic wit, banter and put downs from friends and foes alike.
I wont bore you with the internal politics of my job in Chichester, but needless to say, as head of fine art, very little of my life was my own and everyday I was constantly fretting about whether this would be the day I would be ‘found out’ for being totally useless at the job. I think the only thing that saved me from this was that everyone else was so grateful that someone else was doing the job and not them.
But it is the town itself, which ate away at my soul. A very wealthy town, with a north, a south, an east and a west street which all met at the monument at Chichester Cross. And a whopping big Cathedral.
During the day it was inhabited by wealthy, elderly upper middle classes pottering about, shopping and taking tea in the numerous little coffee shops. At night it was inhabited by lairy men and women trying to squeeze out a normal night out in the local pubs. Somewhere inbetween these groups were, huddled way, an absurdly earnest bunch of arty, hippy christian types who do not know how to laugh at themselves.
And never the twain should meet.
The rich elderly spent most of there time (when they weren’t scootering about in their luxury mobility buggies) campaigning against anything that changed Chichester. The were against a new wing for the local art gallery, against the setting up of the city’s first night club, against housing association houses being built, against a free music festival, against wheelie bins, recyling bins, cycle paths, etc, etc.
The lairy men and women of the night had not much interest in anything and were neither for or against most things.
But, the worst, the worst of all, were the earnest hippy arty folk. The very folk that I should have been mingling with and finding peers and friends. I would go to parties, go to dinners (at least in my first months) and try to engage. Was it me, but why could I not stop these great desires to be unplesant and confrontational with them? Empty social consciouses, dull political correctness, bland feminism, pseudo conceptualists - few with real passion and energy.
And I saw all this living in a flat on the edge of Chichester Cross. I became reclusive and numb outside my work environment. I eventually had to get out I as I shudder to think where I was heading.
So, that is where the bones of the idea for the painting comes from. A psuedo apocalyptic battle between the various factions of Chichester. Who cares? I really had to make the painting to ease the pain of not painting in Chichester for the four and a half years I lived there.
It is a wholly flawed painting, overworked and under planned. But, it needed to be painted by me.
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September 15, 2004
Just a quick update:
I was hoping to have new pictures of recent paintings up by now, but over the last few days I have couragously struggled on with the Battle for Chichester Cross painting. It went from bad to worse as it got more a more confused in colour and tone. However, today, and with the help of rather a lot of warm greys (hurray for warm grey), I think I have finally cracked it. It has started to look like I had imagined it at the start. I had quite forgotten how much emotional energy big paintings take out of you. It does now look extremely overworked, but I guess I had to do that to get the measure of what is required, since it is the first big painting I have done in a number of years.
I am off to Rochester off and on for the next week or so. Teaching on the Foundation Art at Kent Institute of Art and Design. It is only about 45 miles away, but once again I have to take a number of train conections to get there. I am sure all this train hopping will come out somewhere in the art..
So, probably wont be doing much painting over the next week, but I will try to get some images of my recent work up on the site soon.
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September 9, 2004
Back to the old routine
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SO after all the excitement of the last week or so, its now back to my normal humdrum existence; swimming, walking, sketching and painting down the studio. I have taken a break from my big Chichester painting as I had lost my way with a bit and want to go back to it not trying to protect it. We are having a last gasp of summer this week in Hastings, so I have been keen to go out and draw as much as I can before the rain starts… I am getting clearer about the kind of paintings I want to do now but further away from how I should go about it… A wee look at my Ben Shahn always reminds me why I want to paint. Revealing the figure within a social context and sense of time and place…. we shall see.
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September 7, 2004
Frames, Trains: Part 2
Who would have thought I could get 9 paintings from Hastings to London for a mere £17 on the train and taxi. I was so relieved to get them there safely to the John Martin Gallery in one piece. John Martin seemed pleased with the work, but we shall see if they sell at the art fair next month in New York. Pity I wont be able to go over myself to see…
While I was in the area, I had a look around some of the commercial galleries in the Cork Street area. Three shows caught my fancy: Chris Gollon at the Arndean Gallery, Mauro Perucchetti at Beaux Arts and Patrick Hughes at Flowers. I had not come across Chris Gollon before, but his work is rich, brutal and with deeply loaded images painted in a robust, but ham fisted manner, very suitable for his subject matter. The Mauro Perucchetti was a joy - jelly babies encased in a clear plastic cross and other exquisite objects. Now, Patrick Hughes is one of those artists I love and hate. He is famous for creating 3D optical perspective by painting onto carefully measured and built angles. But, there was one lovely work, With Gusto, where he had painted all of Philip Guston’s major works in Gallery space, with his trademark optical device. Marvelous.
Didn’t spend too long in London as I had only a cheap day return and wanted to get back to the studio before the day was out to give it a little tidy and think about the next paintings I will do. I am now quite glad I did not take the Job in Lancaster, as I so want to continue my progess with the painting. Despite being rather poor…
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September 6, 2004
Frames, Trains and Lancaster
Well - quite a week. Getting all my work framed and also getting up to Lancaster for my interview at the University - it is almost like having a full time job again.
I think I have got too used to my casual lifestyle in Hastings as, as soon as I have real stuff to do - I panic. I had to get up to Lancaster for Friday morning, so (as I think I complained in my last blog), I had to take several trains to get there. Hastings - Charing Cross, Charing Cross - Paddington, Paddington - Reading, Reading - Wolverhampton, Wolverhamton - Preston, Preston - Lancaster. Phew… There were easier routes, but I didn’t want to get stuck on a a busy Manchester train. I quite enjoyed it really. And those lovely Virgin trains have sockets - so I could plug my iPod in.
Well, I arrived in Lancaster about 8 at night and got a taxi to the campus, which is a strange concrete village a bit like the Barbican Centre in London. It was sooo quiet and eerie, with the nose of the nearby M6 the only thing I could hear. I was to stay in a halls room, but I had to find the porters lodge first…. it was all badly lit and a bit confusing to find anything… Finally I got into my room, which was too hot and I wanted to find out if there was a bar open. After following the campus map, I eventually discovered a rather empty bar, with only ‘They Think its All Over’ on the TV for company. One pint of lager and a packet of crisps later, I headed for my room. Which was STILL far too hot!!, And as I was on the ground floor and right next the entrance to the building, I didn’t fancy having the window open all night.
My interview was set for ten, so I got up early and had a better explore of the campus in daylight. There were bars, bookshops, cafes, building societies all around this concrete campus - and at last I found a coffee shop.
My interview itself went as well as it could have, but I was not sure if it was a job I wanted. I know no one in Lancaster and I would have to move all over again. I thought that I probably wouldn’t get it and, after a wee look around Lancaster itself, I got on the train home. ( I won’t bore you with the details of my connections this time).
Well no sooner had I settled into a train slumber listening to music, than my mobile went and it was Lancaster University offering me the job. I could not belieive it. I did not say yes as I was not at all sure if I wanted it, or whether, I could afford to go and live up in Lancaster, even it is for only six months… I would phone back over the weekend.
I then spend a very agitated journey back to Hastings.
Saturday morning and I had to pick up my frames for the work going to New York. I still had to stain, wax and put in the pictures. It had to be just about the hottest day we have had all summer on Saturday in Hastings and my studio was unbearable. But I got them done, but was still pondering about the job. All through Sunday I was taking the Job and then today I was not taking it. I could put it off no longer and finally phoned and declined the job this afternoon. I feel it is the right decision, but I also would have liked to have done it, as you never know how things might turn out… but now I have to live with it.
Oh and my frames make my work look so much better… (see picture above). Now all I have to do is drag them onto yet another train tomorrow and taxi them to Picadilly…. what fun!!!
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September 1, 2004
some sketches around hastings
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| Just a few of yesterday’s and todays sketches after getting too hot a bothered in the studio. Sorry about the quality of the pictures. |
Posted by robbie at 9:50 PM | Comments (0)
a quick blog
Have not blogged for a week or so. No need to feel guilty. Honest. Its not like I have a following who simply must hear about what I am up to.
Have had a fairly mixed week since I got back from Scotland. Not got back into any real rythym in the studio, mostly due to trying to get stuff framed for John Martin at the New York Affordable Art Fair. Also, I’m getting organised for the job interview in Lancaster University this Friday. Can you believe it takes 7 and a half hours and FOUR changes on the train to get from Hastings to Lancaster. Looking forward to the jaunt however - a chance to sit back and listen to my iPod. (except that my 2nd generation iPod does not play for more than 4 hours without a recharge…. So will have to be choosy about when to listen to music. (Like when the family from hell sit down all around you).
Plugging away at my big ‘Chichester’ painting - but it is getting bogged down and the original spirit is becoming blurred as I try to formalise it to much. Will have to start another series of pictures soon, so as I can jump from one to the other without too much fear of a ruined day. Will post new images of it soon.
Hopefully I’ll get back into my mindless routine next week - swimming, painting, walking, looking for jobs, cooking and helping out with my sister Claire’s kids.
We shall see.
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