Essay by Paul Brandford

There is far too much to look at. Too much online content, too much reality, too much mainstream media coverage. Chances are that we could easily spend most of the rest of our lives casually glancing, scrolling, liking or muting. We will have precious little time for looking or even seeing let alone reflecting upon whatever our reactions were to our experience. It comes as little surprise to me that artworks struggle for this diminished attention.

Paul Brandford- Different Bottle Same Piss

Artists either by choice or by chance have developed strategies to counter this dilemma. Paintings and drawings quite recently seem to have become less troublesome, less irritating, less demanding and more pleasingly likeable and over eager to entertain. You might ask yourself what an artwork is actually representing, what it might be about. You might ask yourself this before attempting to read the label or before getting lost in some convoluted essay about what the artist claims to be exploring through this work.  Art when created or purchased as a fashion accessory or a branding exercise becomes swallowed by that context. Works knowingly following the money provide surface not depth, simplicity rather than contradiction, sterility rather than exuberance.

Swamp Life By Broughton and Birnie

Seventy years ago artists working in the aftermath of the Second World War and the shadow of the Cold War were associated with an existential imperative which to the artists chosen for this exhibition appears to be a common interest– an acknowledgement that the artwork whilst being made hangs in the balance and might end in failure or even destruction. This attitude seeped into their working arrangements, risk taking, living upon one’s instincts and the cycles of making and remaking through which a work might emerge as if purely by chance. These quirky hand made things created to their own requirements are intrinsically human, intrinsically humane.

Today we find ourselves in the midst of great uncertainty. What can now be taken as given; the value of culture, the ability of our politicians, the health of our economy, the defeat of our enemies? On our screens we view the movement of people, the uprooted, the oppressed and the opportunistic. If it can happen to them might it not one day happen to us? We see

attack after attack on innocent civilians the world over.  This very real sense of unease pervades our daily lives You Are Here i
s not an escape but a reflection.

On Going Out or ‘Hello Boys’

The majority of artists within this exhibition do not directly describe or even refer to political events but within their work in general one might detect that same dark thread of anxiety which runs through what can be seen in the world today. This is primarily an exhibition about people. These people might never have been real – summoned, instead, from an imagined past or contorted into being from a range of internet sources, others may have begun life as printed material found by chance alone.  In the
studio faces are filtered, corrupted, misquoted and modified. Subjects haven’t sat for hours awaiting an acceptable likeness. What they all might have in common is that they arrived through a marriage of technology and tradition, seriousness and absurdity, technique and cackhandedness.

Charlotte Steel- Some mums…

The artists themselves come from roughly the same generation most attending art schools in the late eighties and early nineties, sharing not only a similar set of cultural references but a certain kind of art school background where an understanding of context and process were important but an artwork’s existence as a physical and visual entity was never secondary to its function as an intellectual trigger. Collectively the works call for some kind of instinctive reaction, surfaces are there to be scratched beneath, uncomfortable truths are inadequately glossed over, masks allowed to slip. The public persona and the private self are at war with one another. Clues pieced together will not necessarily reveal an answer but might deepen the question.

Something fleeting, something fugitive somehow arrested just prior to its escape or disintegration. Images unearthed, discovered, images on the cusp of being wiped out, wiped away. Time is always present on both sides of the picture. In the studio where the imagination transforms years of practice, years of wandering up blind alleys and barking up wrong trees.                                              This time is as invisible to you as the studio itself. The passage of time is also frozen within the image. Like fruit a picture germinates, matures and then rots; layer upon layer – additions and subtractions, comings and goings, collisions and near misses, changes of direction.                                                     The artist trusting in some kind of obscure understanding knows when enough is enough and stands back leaving some kind of meaning hanging there within the image– suspended just, but only just, out of reach.

Jeanette Barnes Mono Prints

These artworks attempt to speak of our time and of our predicament. Why they were made in the way that they were but they might somehow hint at what we have become and what, if anything, might lie ahead.

YOU ARE HERE Exhibition

4th March-6th April 2018

Stockport War Memorial Art Gallery

Exhibitors:Jeanette Barnes, Paul Brandford,

Broughton and Birnie, Vanessa Mitter,

Charlotte Steel, Corina Spencer,Tom Walker

While waiting to buy tickets in the Punta della Dogana at the mouth of the Grand Canal you can watch the Jacques Cousteau like videos of Damien’s divers discovering ‘artefacts’ in turquoise waters. A taster of what’s to come within the gallery.

Damien HirstTreasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable

The first couple of rooms contain large, coral covered bronzes. At first I thought that the coral on the pieces had been grown artificially on their surfaces, in fact the coral is bronze too. A huge bear then a nude with arms out stretched who’s coral growths are equally as large as her breasts. The anatomical detail of these sculptures is created with a modern eye.

The works are ambitious and impressive, in-dispersed  with fabulous underwater photos.

Definitely tongue in cheek. Large marble carvings and gigantic bronze figures are super real in their execution. One female figure fights with a vast seven headed serpent. The pair are so enormous that you can examine them over two floors of the gallery.

Damien Hirst Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable Venice

Later small pieces are displayed as artefacts in vitrines. Gold jewels and objects possessing the sumptuous bling-like qualities that Damien is so good at.

The story of ‘Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable’ begins in 2008 with the discovery of the wreck of an imagined treasure ship called the Apistos (the unbelievable) found off the coast of East Africa. It supposedly contained the belongings of Cif Amotan II (a freed slave made good.) it sank approx 2,000 years ago. Damien’s role is to finance and orchestrate the recovery of the booty.

This show reminded me of the ‘Bronze’ exhibition at the RA (2012). It too was an eclectic collection of artefacts from around the world dating back to 3700BCE. It had mythical beasts (eg.Chimera of Arezzo), historical figures and little trinkets like in the Hurst show. One true story in particular springs to mind. A majestic dancing Satyr (aprox 400BCE) full of pagan energy (possibly the work of Praxiteles) was discovered near the coast of Sicily 1998.

‘Dancing Satyr’ (Greece, third or second century BCE)

Gaiseric, King of the Vandals had stolen it during his sack of Rome (455AD). He got ship wrecked (possibly attacked) on his journey home loosing the satyr to the bottom of the sea.

Hirst’s show is a parallel universe to these real sinarios. Like a ‘Game of Thrones’ museum.

Is it a little hollow as art? Is something missing in all the awesomeness?

Could it be the finish of the large figurative works? Is there a lack of soul?

Real artefacts embody much more than the things themselves- history and beliefs.

Who made these sculptures? The same questions occurred to me as when looking at things like the Madonna in the British Museum.

The Hirst show is fantastic entertainment well worth a visit. You can smell the money.

He’s produced a mass of artworks for the global rich. Good luck to him!

Showing at: PALAZZO GRASSI and PUNTA DELLA DOGANA, Venice  04/09 – 12/03/2017

Giacometti working in his hotel room at the Hotel de Rive, Geneva(1944)

First off, a room full of heads. At the front we encounter early naturalistic heads. Towards the back we move through time. Like a well ordered crowd the sculptures vary in scale and form. We compare the flattened with the surrealist, the minuscule and the bold which take us through to the recognisably ‘Giacometti’ heads. Which are scrutinised and condensed. All these manifestations in the persuit of truth.

Alberto-Giacometti-at-the-Tate-Modern

It’s like being in Giacometti’s brain. You see nuances along the journey of his creativity and he shows us the potential within things.

He’s obsessed with finding some sort of truth in his work- that’s fascinating.

Alberto Giacometti was born in Switzerland in1901, the eldest son of a well know post impressionist painter. From an early age Alberto was drawing and copying images from books (a habit he never lost).

Having an artist father could be seen as a disadvantage but one wonders if being exposed to a ‘point of view’ from childhood might prove a head start in finding and accepting new approaches.

Making money is often an issue for artists and Giacometti was happy to work on useful and beautiful objects alongside his art, making lamps, vases and jewellery.

“Objects interest me hardly any less than sculpture and there is a point at which the two touch.”

I find this standpoint completely believable. The modern distinction between object and art is, in my opinion, driven by those with an eye on profit and status.

During Giacometti’s surrealist period he created some strange and disturbing things. One piece from 1931 ‘Objet désagréable à jeter [Disagreeable Object to be thrown away …’  is particularly nasty and a year later his ‘Woman with her throat cut’ is a disturbing poisonous praying mantis type form that preempts the creatures from sci-fi movies made later in the twentieth century.

Giacommeti Woman with her Throat Cut

Of course not all Giacometti’s sculptures of women are violent and dangerous but one can’t help asking where such work came from. Having contracted mumps as a teenager he became infertile. It may also be true that he also suffered from impotency.

Alberto Giacometti’s most beautiful female forms are shown here majestically. Eight out of the nine ‘Women of Venice’ have been dutifully collected together for the exhibition.  The nine original standing nudes were Giacometti’s exhibit, when representing France at the1956 Venice Biennale. Tall, and slender they feel just out of reach.

Giacometti-Tate-Modern Women of Venice

Scale

Giacometti was happy to create the tiniest most unassuming works. During the war, after a trip to visit his mother he was unable to re-enter France. For the remainder of the war he lived and worked in an hotel room in Geneva. Here he made some tiny sculptures. One gallery in the show contains these minute pieces in large cabinets. Rendered to perfection with just as much care and focus as the larger works, perhaps even more.

‘By doing something a half a centimetre high” he said ” you are more likely to get a sense of the universe than if you try to do the whole sky’.

The paintings (flanking the sculptures in the later galleries) leave evidence of Giacometti’s search for truth and scale. As he paints his sitter you can see how they diminish, recede into the canvas leaving shadows of their previous size in their wake.

This is a show to wander around. The galleries feel open and free.You can enjoy the work from a distance and the space accommodates the people as well as the art. Sit and look and be amongst something tangible and real.

Madonna and Child carving British Museum

This lovely Madonna and child was carved in the midlands of England back in medieval times.

According to the experts at the British Museum, who acquired the statue, it was carved in the 1350’s. The stone was quarried nearby in Staffordshire or possibly Derbyshire.

We are lucky to have the Madonna. Many like her were destroyed as idolatrous following injunctions issued by Henry VIII and then Edward VI during the Reformation.

To create a Madonna like this would require great skill and sensitivity.

Carving is a difficult thing to do. It is fundamentally different from 2 dimensional drawing. One extra dimension adds infinitely more possibilities. The stone can be cut in any direction. Finding the right direction is tricky.

Another problem faced when carving (rather than modelling clay) is that the the artist can only remove material. No addition is possible. As he/she carves they must not to remove what will be needed later!

These restrictions demand huge imaginative insight.

Some people possess a natural capacity to see into the block. They form a picture within it. Many others would struggle even to envisage such complexity in a lump of rock.

Michelangelo said;

“An artist draws with his brain and not his hand.”

Surely he was referring equally to carving, He himself drew astoundingly fluently in both 2 and 3 dimensions. His Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica, below carved in marble is an incredible example of his mastery of the medium.

You don’t need to go all the way to Rome to see the little medieval Virgin and Child. It’s one of a huge number of fantastic carved pieces that the British Museum holds. Next time you visit the museum make sure you find your way to see the lovely carving in room 40. Its small pure and full of love.

The Pietà by Michelangelo (1498–99), St Peter’s Basilica,

What are these things in the painting?  They move with agility like sharks swimming through the gold background.

Uncomfortably constructed from human parts they seem to stretch, break apart and reform on the golden surface.

Black charcoal lines incised over the oil paint separate the forms and define the space around them.

The title of the work is ‘Pink Angels’  however, the painting is almost certainly inspired  by Titian’s painting ‘Diana and Actaeon’ (National Gallery).  Where Actaeon discovers the stunning, naked, Goddess Diana at her ‘toilette’.

Actaeon, a young prince, has finished a successful hunt in the forest when he wanders alone through the trees. He catches the sound of female laughter mingled with the tinkling of falling water. Drawn by an overwhelming sense of curiosity he struggles through the undergrowth. Pushing through ferns Actaeon catches sight of Diana’s immortal beauty, instantly insuring his hideous demise.

All the efforts of Diana’s nymphs to cover her nakedness are just too late. It’s done, he”s seen her!

In the next moment the goddess scoops up a handful of water from the stream that she’s bathing in and throws it over Acteon’s head.

”Tell, if you can, how you saw me naked!”

As the water seeps through his hair, panic flashes through to his body. Instantly a rack of antlers cracks from of Actaeon’s skull. His arms stretch and legs elongate into the long slender legs of a dear.  Actaeon rushes from the cave not sure where to go. With a mind that is still human he’s unsure what to do! Should he hide in the forest or rush back to the palace? As he dashes in terror through the forest, his dogs catch his animal scent. They descend upon him (not knowing it’s their master) and they tear him apart.

Willem de Kooning had had a formal art education in Holland before he famously stowed away on a ship bound for America. He was certainly aware of Titian’s painting. Pink Angels uses the left hand part of Titians work as a starting point. If you look closely at the de Kooning’s piece you can find two eyes in the bottom righthand corner, surely indicating Actaeon’s presence. This work hovers at the edges of abstraction, a metamorphosis that will gradually engulf Willem de Kooning along with the other Abstract Expressionists.

Pink Angels is at “Abstract Expressionism” at the Royal Academy till 2nd January 2017

When Arshile arrived in America, at just 16 years of age, he was at liberty to reinvent himself. He did this with little reference to the truth and why not?

The real Gorky was born in a village on the shores of Lake Van (currently Turkey) his family was Armenian. When he was a child of 4 years old his father left, emigrated to America, thus avoiding the draft. Later during the Armenian Genocide (Ottoman Turk campaign) Gorky, his mother, and his younger sister all survived a death march, but his mother never really recovered. She took the family to a Russian controlled area for safety where she died of starvation. At this point Arshile left for America himself.

The Artist and His Mother
1926-c. 1936
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
Overall: 60 × 50 1/4 in. (152.4 × 127.6 cm)

It was some years after his enrolment in the ‘New School of Design’ in Boston USA that Gorky began his picture ‘Artist and his Mother.’ The painting has a still, calmness about it which detaches from time. His young mother looks straight into us and Arshile stares vaguely past. You can see the influence of both Picasso and Cezanne in the painting. The serenity and order are reminiscent of Piero della Francesca. His mothers demeanour and attire connect, in my mind, with the current tragedies of many families in the near east, bringing the painting into the here and now with a tide of sadness and loss. There are two versions of the painting both appear unfinished.

”When something is finished, that means it’s dead, doesn’t it? I believe in everlastingness. I never finish a painting – I just stop working on it for a while.” AG

Around this time Gorky got work as a part time instructor at the Boston School and later at the Grand Central School of Art in New York. He was one of the first artists to enrol on the Federal Art Project (1935-43)  which gave a salary to artists in exchange for easel paintings or public art. Other artists who later became known as the Abstract Expressionists also enrolled in the project during the Great Depression. The project provided valuable financial support and also helped forge some of the artistic bonds that fed into the birth of Abstract Expressionism movement.

De Kooning said: “I met a lot of artists — but then I met Gorky… He had an extraordinary gift for hitting the nail on the head; remarkable. So I immediately attached myself to him and we became very good friends. It was nice to be foreigners meeting in some new place.”

The exact route that Gorky took to his later paintings was convoluted and experimental. His strong belief in the fundamentals persisted.

“Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint.”

The drawing is evident in all his work. The Liver is the Cock’s Comb (1944)

Oil on canvas, 186 x 249 cm. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Gorky was one of the first artists to give his abstract work objective titles enabling the art work to ruminate and flower somewhere in our brains.

From 1946 further traumatic events befell Gorky in his personal life- cancer, a fire where his studio burned down, his neck being broken and his painting arm temporarily paralyzed in a car accident and also his wife’s affair and subsequent departure in 1948 with their children.

The same year Gorky hanged himself at the age of 44.

There will be an opportunity to see some of his work at the Abstract Expressionist show at the RA 24 September 2016 — 2 January 2017

Here are two almost identical details of Isack van Ostade’s “A Village Fair” 1643

Can you spot any significant differences between them?

Look carefully at the dog at the bottom of the painting. What’s he so interested in?

The dog is reacting to nothing in the first version on the left. In the second version (right) we find a peasant relieving himself by the wall. The dog is watching and interested by such things, as dogs are! Isack van Ostade knows this and uses the dog to direct our attention to the crouching peasant.

This painting was recently given a complete and thorough restoration. While layers of varnish and overpainting were removed this figure was revealed!

It’s thought that during the last restoration, which took place in 1903, the peasant was painted out. No doubt he was thought to be too lavatorial of us viewers or our Edwardian counterparts.

Observations like this in a genre painting, for me, bring the thing to life. Our imagination is fired by what we discover in such details. Here Isack van Ostade is reeling us in to his rural scene guiding us around the everyday moments from a 17 century dutch world.

A Village Fair, with a Church behind (Full Painting)

The painting is on show at Masters of the Everyday, Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer,  The Queen’s Gallery, Palace of Holyroodhouse Edinburgh till the 26th July 2016.

A talk on this specific painting on Tuesday the 19th July.

https://www.royalcollection.org.uk/collection/conservation/treatment-of-ostades-a-village-fair

Painters’ Paintings’ at the National Gallery utalises familiar gems from the permanent collection set alongside rare treats from elsewhere. This exhibition re-assembles artist’s own art collections and there are many discoveries to be made. One such discovery is in Matisse’s collection, a finely observed portrait by Gauguin. It was probably painted during ’s Gauguin’s first trip to Tahiti (1891-93). The portrait depicts his handsome friend Jotepha.

Gauguin has created exquisite colour combinations. Distinctive patches of Cobalt verging on Prussian blue build up the background, carefully matched against the warm tones of the face and dark hair matched with a funky a pink shirt below!

The head is rendered in precise richly coloured planes with edges sharply defined. It is tactile and sculptural and doesn’t take much to imagine putting ones hand on the face as it turns round into the back of the painting. Gauguin gives us quick shifting tiny facets around the mouth and then larger almost geometric areas which together create this tangible young man.

Gauguin’s work is distinctive. This portrait has the Gauguin “look” to it but it also reveals the analytical side to his painting, something that pre-empts Euan Uglows’ much later works and is reminiscent of Paul Cezannes’ paintings.

Indeed, Gauguin collected a number of Cezannes’ paintings when he was in Europe and the two artists were friends.

Matisse who bought this painting by Gauguin in 1900, also owned Cezannes’ ‘Three bathers’ which is exhibited close by. He bought it at great expense, at a time in his career when he could barely afford it. Matisse later said of the work

“…it sustained me morally in the critical moments of my venture as an artist. I have drawn from it my faith and my perseverance”.

What this show reveals is an endless web of influences, ideas and connections that run through artists and their works of which I have chosen a tiny snippet.

As Lucian Freud once admitted  “I ignored the fact that art, derives from art. Now I realise that this is the case”.

Paul Cezanne,Three Bathers, Petit Palais, City of Paris Fine Arts Museum

Paul Gauguin,Young man with a flower behind his ear, Long Museum, Shanghai.

Paul Brandford, alerted me to a talk a friend of his was giving at the National Gallery.  He explained that she had written a book about a missing Velazquez portrait of Charles the 1st. So on Friday night we went to ‘The Vanishing Man: In pursuit of Velazquez’.

Introducing us to the outline of Laura’s Cumming’s true tale, Letizia Treves, described how a nineteenth century book seller had discovered a blackened painting at a country house sale. Realising it was a Velazquez portrait he bought it. She went on to expand the devistating story, both of the painting and the bookseller himself as the tale unfolded. At this point Laura protested that her talk was being pre-empted and she then took to the lectern!

There was really nothing for her to worry about as she embarked on a different tack.  Mentioning the Diego Velázquez paintings in the building, of which there are several, (including the ‘The Rokeby Venus and Philip IV of Spain) she encouraged the audience to look at them later in the evening. Also she showed ‘The Water Carrier’ from Apsley House, Wellington’s house at Hyde Park Corner. An absolute master piece that many people are unaware of.

Doubtful like a diligent parent, Laura Cumming raised a question ‘Should art critic’s have favourite artists and paintings?’ (Of course they do, I thought. They must and should.)

An artist’s daughter herself, Laura Cumming experienced the death of her (obviously beloved) father whilst in her early 20’s. Hugely affected, she vowed never to look at art again! A vow that was impossible to keep. Astoundingly she maintained it for almost a year when she found herself staying in the centre of Madrid. Each day she passed by the Prado Museum and each day temptation grew, until overwhelmed the young Laura Cumming entered the building and whilst wondering about encountered  ‘Las Meninas’ by Velazquez, a painting she did not even know was there.

We, that evening, beheld the painting from the projector to a gasp from the audience. (I’m sure that most people at the talk would knew this painting but it is huge and  breath taking… )

Laura’s description of it was deep and powerful as she interwove the raw emotion of loss and grieving with the mastery of the painting. She described the pool of light with the little princess and her servants, “Like fireflies beneath a tomb of darkness.” Velazquez himself stands back to catch himself in the mirror and in doing, looks straight at us. He is attractive and tall.  The King and Queen look on from another mirror, or is it a painting at the back of the room. The Queen’s chancellor departs in a rectangle of light in the back of the painting. “Our arrival at the painting keeps them alive.” she said. “They wait for us in an instant of time.” implying that our looking re-animates these characters from 1656.  One wonders if looking at painting also keeps Laura’s father alive for her too in a “Chamber of the mind where people never die”.

I like the way she talked about the actual paint, more like a painter than a critic, she was bowled over by how the image is “vividly present and spellbinding.” yet dissolves as you go forward towards it.  That intangibility in painting, something Rembrandt shares with Velazquez, is possibly part of what makes some works so compelling and emotional.

Laura confessed to weeping in front of the painting which I think is a natural response.  Great works of art are there to communicate with us, not to be judged, not to intellectualise about but for us feel and identify with.

I would agree with her ”Art is not only for the eyes.”

There was so much more to the talk that I am not able to describe.

I will certainly be buying “Vanishing Man-In pursuit of Velazquez, for Laura Cumming’s compassionate rendering of the artist Velazquez, her observation of the democratic and modest humanity that he bestowed brilliantly on all his sitters high or low.

National Gallery’s ‘The Rokeby Venus’.

Why was this Delacroix painting overlooked?

This fabulous little painting was not included in ‘Delacroix and The Rise of Modern Art” exhibition at the National Gallery.
There weren’t a large number of Delacroix paintings in the exhibition so it seems strange not to include this one.

The Victoria and Albert Museum, where this painting belongs, is only down the road from the National Gallery.

Could the painting be too fragile to go on show?

Possibly this picture was neglected by curators because it’s kept in storage at the V+A. So perhaps it was merely forgotten?

Delacroix has the capacity  to draw us into the drama of a tale. He focuses our attention at the action here with the vermillion red of the Samaritan’s clothing. The light falls subtly on the victims face and body.

All you have to do is look into the painting and you’re there. No explanations are needed. It’s simple and direct. Delacroix transports us with ease.  We sense the compassion of the ‘Good Samaritan’ and feel the air in the gusty brush strokes.

Another Delacroix painting,The Crucifixion (below), was in the show. Now it should be back in the main galleries at the NG. If you missed  “Delacroix and The Rise of Modern Art” this is a treat you can see it anytime for free.