We’ve finally made it to France… This has been a dream of mine and Colleen’s for over a decade and it really is better than we thought it could be. We’ve been here a month now in a sixty year old house, in a small hamlet in the middle of the Monts d’Aree national park. The locals are friendlier and more open to a bald English artist and his wife than the English ever were – despite the tales to the contrary that we’ve been continually hearing over the years. We’re down the bar every Friday which is doing wonders for my French (and occasional Breton) language skills and the only problems we’ve encountered have been overcome by smiling, apologising and just continuing to butcher their lovely language in conversation. I’m learning more French like this than I ever could from a text book or audio tapes.
The painting is going extremely well; I’m now working all day, everyday – doing exactly what I’ve dreamed of. The demands of the two solo shows that are coming up at the art-file and Red Propeller galleries have been enormous but they’re now more or less dealt with. The art-file work was sent off last week and was on sale today I think. I haven’t finished all of the work for Red Propeller yet but most of it is well underway.
The ability to work this intensely on my painting has also strengthened it I think (mind you, I suppose others must be the judge of that really) and I’ve also been able to realise a project that’s been on the back burner for a few years now – the Petite Morte paintings. Of those that were started and came over with me I’ve been able to work through the problems they posed and I’ve only had top discard a couple. More importantly to me were two paintings of the world trade centre started five years ago. These have always been a real challenge but I think I can finally say that they are now in a position to be left alone.
Offers of other exhibitions are coming in for 2008 which is a really alien concept for me! It means I can concentrate on producing work and I don’t have the old worry of simultaneously trying to get the enthusiasm and money together carting work around on the hope of getting a gallery to say they’ll give it a go. I hope it continues; we’ll see. As it stands I’m pretty well committed through next year; one of the shows promises to put my work on the same walls as Harry Simmonds. He’s one of the neomodern group artists and he emailed me to let me know that he was showing work in the same exhibition as me. A coincidence and surprise to both of us, but it will be nice to catch up with him again. Mind you, the last time I met him it cost me a packet in couple of pieces that I bought! Never mind – money well spent! And to top it all Radiohead have just released a new album. Life’s good.

“Petit Morte” 2007

 

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Things are moving, in all departments. I’ve finally left the hospital job; Colleen will be finishing this week, we’ve bought the place in France in a lovely hamlet close to a small town called Huelgoat and the Bristol joint is on the market. Once it’s gone then we shall follow…
However, things have taken an unexpected turn art-wise. Every dealer and gallery that has a stock of my work have been watching it fly out their doors over the last couple of weeks. Because I’ve been dreaming of this kind of interest in my work over the last twenty years it now seems very strange and I’ve been trying to figure out where the sudden change occurred.
I was getting more mailing list requests from about the middle of June, then at the start of July Red Propeller gallery took away about two dozen pieces in preparation for an exhibition later this year.
The paintings were led against a wall and then the buying started. Apparently it has also been made clear that Antony Micallef recommended my work to Red Propeller… I have thanked him! I’ll stop analysing it, after all it could all be just a flash in the pan and be done and dusted in a month. I wasn’t expecting it (I’m not ungrateful) so perhaps it’s just best to run with it while the going’s good.
Mind you, I’ve had galleries, dealers and collectors from all over the world currently asking for a total of about 120 paintings by the end of 2008. I reckon they need to look at the web site and see just how many I generally get done in a year. They will either have to be a bit more patient or just go disappointed.

portrait of Antony Micallef

 

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If ever I was unsure that the impending move to France was the right thing to do, the thought was dispatched to the mental dustbin last night. It is now (finally) a fairly well known fact that 20% of the world’s CCTV surveillance cameras are installed in the UK, that Croydon has more CCTV watching its residents than New York City and that following Middlesbrough’s testing of ‘talking’ CCTV cameras the UK citizen will likely soon be watched and ordered in every city and town in the country.
But on the last night’s TV news it was announced that Merseyside police will soon be using radio-controlled drone surveillance vehicles. Actually this got out last October but the police spokesman said “The idea of the drone is a long way off, but it is about exploring all technological possibilities to support our war on crime and anti-social behaviour.”
Well he was right; it was a long way off – a whole seven months.
To be honest I don’t know why the government just doesn’t roll out their desired solution. Install subcutaneous RFID tags at birth and be done with it. The general population won’t care, as long as it doesn’t interfere with their bloody television reception.
I once wrote on a painting ‘When I was at school I used to laugh at the implausibility of Orwell’s 1984’. Now the degree to which we’re watched, whether guilty or innocent, has grown to ludicrous levels where even domestic monitoring seems only a small step away. It hasn’t reduced crime and to be honest I don’t think it was ever about reducing crime. It’s about political control of the population and I refuse to live under it.
Another scheme that has raised its very ugly head lately is the profiling of expectant mothers to identify those likely to give birth to children that may grow up to be socially ‘problematic’. So single mothers-to-be, or expectant parents living in areas of deprivation will receive prescribed social support measures to ensure that the children are raised in the manner that government agencies approve of. I don’t have a problem with state support for families that need it – what I object to is the identification of the wrong core problem as the issue that needs addressing. Rather than address poverty, social isolation or a lack of expectation of any personal aspiration, they are trying to target and identify ‘potential criminals’ before they act.
We’ve been here before, only recently, with the race riots that swept through urban Britain in the eighties. If you treat innocent people as potential criminals it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Thank god I’m off.

“Cyclops says”

 

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It’s been a while since I’ve been on here and it’s been quite an interesting and busy ‘while’. I’ve finally got married to the wonderful and beautiful Colleen who I’ve been living with for the last dozen or so years (basically in preparation for our plans to run away forever to France), I’ve spent two weeks in Brittany trying to figure out what sort of house we want to live in and trying to establish where we want that house to be and I’ve been painting my arse off getting work ready for the new year’s art fair season.
I think we’ve settled on the Finistere region of Brittany as being the ‘place to be’ for all kinds of reasons. These include the fantastic church architecture, the beautiful wooded landscape, the lovely open towns and villages and nothing at all to do with wine at less than two euros a bottle. Honest. The final excuse came today where, in a small town (and I mean small), I went into an ordinary newsagent to try and pick up an English newspaper and was confronted with a magazine selection that offered me twelve arts magazine choices. There and then, without having to order specially or in advance; without having to go to an ‘arts’ venue that happened to sell arts magazines. I managed to leave with only two, which Colleen probably thought was quite a good result. Admittedly, if they’d been in English I would probably have taken the lot. One magazine in particular (AZART) had some incredibly strong work throughout – painting is still valued seriously outside of London. Thank god.
On the art front, things have also been quite chirpy this year, so far at least. Art-file of Bicester sold a fair bit of work at the London Affordable Art Fair and both they and Morgan Boyce Gallery of Marlborough are threatening to take my work to the Islington Art Fair next January. The Rostra Gallery in Bath have taken some of the new work for a joint show starting this May and I’ve also got to finish some more pieces for the Bristol Affordable Art Fair later this year.
Last week we were in Brighton and finally arranged successfully to meet up with Antony Micallef. We’ve been promising to meet up ever since the neomodern site has been running, but circumstance and distance have always prevented it to date. We had an entertaining evening in a Brighton hostelry talking art bollocks all night. Which is nice – if you like talking art bollocks… His career has really rocketed lately and we talked about the benefits and the lunacy associated with such a sharp step upwards in the art job stakes. People start digging up every old bit of work that you’d done your best to forget and plonk it up on ebay. The secondary market goes ballistic and though the artist doesn’t benefit financially you have to put up with endless criticism of ‘selling out’.
Banksy is the victim of the same problem. The work develops a market away from the established fine art gallery circuit, the secondary market puts prices beyond anybody but the investment collector and the sniping starts – with Banksy the most regular and vociferous attacks seem to come from the Guardian art blog pages. Now that the ‘secret’ is out he’s no longer the darling of the media trendies.
Linking Micallef and Banksy is the Lazarides gallery in London. I saw the Faile Collective show there recently and was astounded at the quality of the work. It was another one of those clichéd art moments… Don’t rely on a photograph to show the work at its best. I’ve seen a fair bit of the Faile Collective ‘torn fly-poster’ assemblage pieces online and in photographs from friends but they really don’t do the real work justice. If you get the opportunity to see their painting make sure you take it. There was a real love for the medium they used as well as for the medium of the subject they were depicting. The compositional value of the paintings were in the tradition of the Modernist abstract aesthetic and not through any reference to a ‘real’ wall of torn fly-posters and old advertising hoardings. There was a very careful and measured use of colour, method and subject within each piece too. It restores your faith in painting as a vital medium that can still stand tall in the current heady heights of a conceptual and video art obsessed art planet.

working

 

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According to Alan Yentob in the Guardian today, those great current saviours of British art (now that the YBAs have lost their once urgent appeal) Gilbert and George are ploughing the latest technological furrow in democratising art. Apparently they have produced an art piece that is freely available for download online from the BBC web site. “This sort of thing has never been done before,” said Yentob,”
Ermm – sorry to disappoint you old bean but it does have precedents. In fact, even I’ve done it before, and I wouldn’t like to lay claim to being ‘first’ (which as we know is all important in the art world). I wouldn’t expect Mr Yentob to have checked out my site print from three years ago but I would have thought it was an obviously dangerous, dodgy journalistic line to anybody with half an ounce of common sense and an awareness of the nature of both artists and the internet.
The Guardian are a little more circumspect, “It will be the first time that artists of this stature have made work available in this way.”
Get out a bit Alan. Or at least kick your researcher up the arse.

free print “Art is the hammer” from 2001

 

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I learnt something today. In fact I learnt a lot… about painting. A friend works in the local Holburne Museum in Bath and she reminded me of an exhibition that I’d noted down to see but almost forgot. Well the show finished on Sunday so I popped down to have a look this afternoon. I can remember seeing Euan Uglow’s work pop up regularly in the glossy art press ads of the nineties. I can’t remember which gallery was pushing the work, but I can always remember thinking that his work was interesting. The paintings collected there, with only a couple of exceptions, were in my opinion excellent. I’ve never seen a collection of his work together so it was an interesting and new experience, and I damn happy that I managed to get my arse in gear to see them.
I can’t paint like Uglow; I don’t have the self-discipline. I may start with all intention of staying calm, cold and analytical but it all goes out of the window. At some point I’ll get a loaded brush and fling the paint at the canvas. Or I’ll get the palette knife out and scratch and stab furiously at a painting that’s annoying me through frustration. I couldn’t see any of that in Uglow’s work. Just a delightful, deliberate, measured care in every mark made. I got the feeling that these were paintings where every mark was considered, calculated and placed with absolute certain accuracy. It was beautiful; I was grinning like an idiot almost feeing the enjoyment and satisfaction that I’m sure he must have felt at the marks he made.
Though he’s not often defined as such the man was a brilliant colourist. Not in the manner of Matisse with singular primaries or clashing complementaries, but in the careful use of pastels and hued greys. I knew, from the paintings I’d seen reproduced in those old adverts in Modern Painters, that there was no doubt of Uglow’s credentials as a draughtsman. That was why I wanted to see this exhibition – like many others I consider drawing to be one of the fundamentals to great visual art and I knew his work would deliver on that front. But the show surprised me, and made me realise how much of a beginner I am in the field of painting. This man was a master painter; perhaps even the greatest painter this country has had in the last thirty years.
If the opportunity arises make sure you seek out any display of his work. Forget the subject of the painting – just ignore it. Get up close and look how he used paint. Study the very careful layering, and the deliberate variety of qualities and textures of paint used. Look at the inscribing and the spaces left unpainted, the under-painting and drawing. Look at his use of colour – and I mean REALLY look at it – I’ve never seen anything like this before.
Like I said, I can’t paint like Uglow. And if I could, it would be because I wanted to paint like Uglow – and that is not the right reason to attempt a ‘serious’ career in painting.

“Girl’s head in profile with cap” (detail) by Euan Uglow

 

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I’m coming to the end of a raft of paintings that will hopefully mark the end (for the immediate time at least) of the Icarus series. The reason behind the Icarus theme was tied to the UK and US illegal intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq; it seemed an appropriate allegorical reference for the hubristic aspirations of George Bush and Tony Blair in their deranged hopes to rewrite Middle East politics in the fashion of western sensibilities. These last paintings have been a long time finishing and a lot have been discarded or painted over on the journey but now they seem to be approaching their natural end.
As I’m writing this the news stations are declaring that tomorrow Bush will probably announce an increase of perhaps twenty thousand extra troops to perform, on his behalf, some bizarre final curtain call prior to an eventual withdrawal. The American Democrats are calling for the withdrawal, as are the American electorate – but this warmonger’s arrogance will probably not allow him to accept the ‘will of the people’. Like Tony Blair he is obsessed with his historical legacy. Well it doesn’t take a huge capacity for depth of political and historical analysis to know that their legacy will eventually (because God knows there are enough media apologists for this fiasco and blood-bath) be that they took two nations into an illegal war with the expectation of installing a government that would support western economic oil greed.
As well as this I’ve read today in the New Statesman that the UK and US military are putting money into constructing ‘ecologically sound’ weaponry. Bullets without lead – because it’s potentially bad for the water table when the rounds settle in the dirt after they’ve blown off the limb of the soldier they’ve killed, and rockets that launch with less smoke – to reduce any contribution to air pollution after they’ve blown the crap out of an innocent family’s home (acceptable collateral losses).
It’s not even April 1st, the world is fucked up and we’re all probably going to hell in the proverbial hand cart. And people have the nerve to accuse artists of talking irrelevant nonsense.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again. Tony Blair stated that God would be his judge – well if that’s what you honestly believe and you honestly have faith, then be careful what you wish for you mad bastard.

“Our leaders lie”

 

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Though I am fascinated with many aspects of art history and practice, I try to restrict as best I can my enquiries into the portrait as a subject, other art forms as a referential subject in these portraits, the journey to understand and explore the physical media I use and the social relevance of art to a contemporary audience. When I start new work, though I initially plan to follow a course that I hope will progress a straight path, I may be diverted down avenues that were unplanned; this is the nature of painting, whether the audience and galleries like it or not.
Because I rarely paint sequentially, one work at a time (I have even occasionally returned to a painting after a five year hiatus), they feed off of each other stylistically and technically. If I found a manner of painting that I was happy to progress until the end of my career after only twenty years of experimenting, I would consider my work short of effort and application. To me painting is not a means to bread and wine. It is an exploration of my means to express myself in a manner I consider honest and meaningful. My work’s first audience is myself; any audience after that is secondary. To some it might seem selfish, pompous, undemocratic and self-righteous, but I consider it a strength. My work finds new methods that occasionally even surprise me. The huge varieties of finish and appearance that oil paint can take on, dependent on the vagaries of the oils and pigments within the paint, the coarseness of the canvas, the softness of the brush or the atmosphere and temperature of the studio cannot be learnt by book. You have to get up close and study the surfaces of the work of other painters and attempt to interpret their alchemical processes. You have to attempt to establish what was a fortunate accident and what was a moment of inspired intention. And most importantly, you have to know and understand the difference.
I did not go to art college, and so missed the opportunity to study painting for three years with the aspiration to a gallery career afterwards. Instead I left school, went to work, started a family and painted at home with far more commitment than most of my college friends. This is not an accusation of them or a defence of myself. They were obviously not as obsessively driven in progressing a personal understanding of painting. I am in my forties now and I am still studying. I am still looking for that mysterious formula that will allow me to leave the study of the medium so that I can apply it reliably and safely to any subject I choose to tackle.
I have mad aspirations to be the master of my medium. I delude myself that perhaps one day I will be able to conceive a painting in my imagination that I can transfer into the real world with sure and reliable accuracy through a process of mark making and medium manipulation that does not rely on any aspect of chance.
So I must learn what the materials do in as many circumstances and combinations as possible.
To this end I sketch, draw from life and work from photographic reference because it hones the ability to be sure that I am putting the mark in the right place on the finished work. If I am satisfied with my ability to coordinate hand and eye then I have one thing less to concern myself with. I have the satisfaction that if I distort the apparent ‘reality’ of my subject then I am doing it with purpose and not by accident.
But the medium is wholly different and unpredictable animal. I have woken in the morning to work that has changed overnight as the turpentine, linseed oils and pigments have continued their own avenues of experimentation in my absence.
Certainly I could avoid these occurrences by slavishly maintaining a fixed palette of very stable pigments, always using the same grades of oil and thinners, maintaining a consistent humidity and temperature in the studio and following safely worn tracks of drawing, priming, painting and varnishing process. But where would the opportunity of the fortunate accident be? It would be in another painter’s studio, and I want that magic for myself. I will not be left painting the same painting over and over until it is ‘right’.
So this is why my work sometimes revisits previous ideas and techniques, and why its technique sometimes radically changes from one finished piece to the next.
The one constant that I continually struggle with is to define the subject being painted without losing the wonderful physicality of its medium. To show the viewer that it is, after all, only paint on canvas – and that sometimes it can even be huge swathes of plain, gaudy, unmixed paint – paint that is knifed on so forcibly that the canvas rips and has to be stitched together. The audience need to see that it is just carefully arranged, artificially manufactured synthetic dirt on a portable cave wall.
Sometimes the mark I want can only be made by throwing the paint onto the canvas or squeezing it directly from the tube; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.
When these applications of technique work, the sense of satisfaction is almost tangible. I assume it must be a similar feeling that an athlete gets from a good result in a race. Once I actually felt like a winner of the race when I finished one piece of work, but that has only ever happened with one painting that I can think of, ten years ago.
When I’m not satisfied with the results, particularly after working for weeks or months on a painting, the sense of failure is just as significant and equally affecting. If this seems melodramatic or extreme, then just return again to the sporting allusion. How is failure in sport taken by not only the practitioners, but the supporters too?
Imagine painting over a failed attempt or scraping the wet paint from the canvas that has been worked over so carefully and solitarily.
Now imagine having the obsessive drive to return the next day and face another canvas that you might ruin. Or worse still, a blank canvas. After a recently failed painting, a new blank canvas is like a school-yard bully – goading you to recognise the inevitability of your next quixotic failure and forcing you to acknowledge inadequacy in the arena you’ve chosen to compete.

Tools of the trade

 

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It’s that time of year again – the time when we feel the need to suddenly find empathy with our fellow planet travellers when usually we do our best to ignore them. My credit card has been cancelled by my bank because some local fraudster has got hold of the details and has been busy booking foreign air trips and North African hotel stays without actually feeling the need to invite me, the bastard. So we’ve stocked up on red wine and the time away from the nine to five mental grind at the hospital has been spent (between the obligatory family visits) painting. And I think I can say that at last I feel I’m finally getting somewhere. This may prove to be the famous last words before the creative juices go the way of the desiccated turkey left-overs, and this entry might be the excessive results of too many paintings sent on their way with one or two, or three… bottles of Merlot.
I gave up painting abstracts in 1996 because the joy had gone out of the painting of them; I was almost painting to order. I had always wanted to paint people, it seemed the natural extension from drawing them – which had never been a problem – but I wanted to paint them in a certain way. I think now I am getting towards that initial idea of how I wanted my work to start looking, after ten years. Bloody hell – that’s some wait. I’ll see what happens…

detail of painting from 2006

 

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The last few days have been quite interesting. Colleen has not been well – so I’ve had problems sleeping through worry. Three and four hour sessions of sleep a day, over a period of weeks, does interesting things to your head. I’ve found myself lately just mentally shutting down mid conversation with people, which I presume is why we’re not built for that kind of lifestyle. Or perhaps we are and that’s why the great one in the heavens also created coffee and nicotine. Fantastic – what a bloke/woman/tree/flying spaghetti monster… whatever.
Anyway, I’ve been incredibly productive the last month or so – probably because of the bizarre sleep patterns. A large raft of canvases that have been lying around unfinished for ages, as well as those that were coming to their natural end through process, and some new pieces have all been completed. I honestly don’t know where these drives come from; if I did I’d ask them to pace themselves thank you very much.
Well today I’ve been forced into a break. I’m out of canvas that has paint dry enough to continue on top of so I thought I’d take up the invitation from Motorboy to check out a show in Centrespace, Bristol that he’s got some work in. I couldn’t really say no could I? It was a chance to catch up with Motorboy before he moves to Berlin. It was a chance to see the first show of his work put together in an environment that it could be appreciated properly. It was a chance to get out and away from the frustration of smelling turpentine but not being able to do anything constructive with it. It was a good afternoon, so good that I think Colleen and I put our names down for a piece by Cyclops, one by Ghostboy and two by Motorboy. So everyone that wants presents from us this Christmas will just have to do without…
We had a brief bite to eat and said goodbye, and considering that we were only a few minutes away popped into the Arnolfini to see what was nailed to the walls in Bristol’s alleged high temple of contemporary cultural edification. You can already tell where this is going can’t you…
I’ll be fair – the Albert Oehlen show ‘I Will Always Champion Bad Painting’ wasn’t the blood pressure raiser that I thought it would be. There was one painting in there that stood out over the rest, but it was away in the smaller room of the gallery, so I suspect that perhaps I was reading more formalist strength into the piece than the creator or curator, but then perhaps its positioning was a deliberate irony. Or not. Perhaps it was all deliberate, perhaps it was all accidental. Perhaps it was good art because it seemed in general to be championing bad painting – and that was its stated aim. Perhaps it was just bad art because it was bad painting. Perhaps it wasn’t bad painting, but just painting that didn’t match my taste (or the taste of many other punters in there by the sound of things).
You know – most of them don’t understand what they’re looking at, despite desperately wanting to. It’s like an uncommitted agnostic checking church every week, desperately seeking out a security blanket of faith. This was a Sunday afternoon…

“A Private View at the Royal Academy ” (detail) by William Powell Frith

 

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