I’ve just had an interview with Robert Priseman for his site. I’m feeling very honoured and rather privileged. As it happens the interviews he has collated feature many fine painters so I’m thinking I’m rather fortunate to be included.
Hortus Conclusus Scetis #4, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 cms. 2024
As it happens this coincides with the first of my new body of work – Hortus Fabulus – leaving the studio to go to Assembly (see my last post). The painting is shown above and – in what I think is a first for Contemporary British Painting group – online for prospective purchasers!
As always working out what is (and isn’t) ready to go is causing me some issues…but the studio has rather a lot ‘on the go’!
Time’s Long Reach, 2023, Oil, distemper and charcoal on canvas, Rosey Prince
Polished, sophisticated and…well…sometimes perhaps (to my taste)a tad too slick. In some respects and oddly enough in our digital age, painting continues to have a significant hold on the aspirations of many young artists. Of course the attributes set out above may be predominate precisely because so many of us have so many of our visual inputs mediated by the black mirror nowadays.
Not that all or even the majority of the 16 painters selected for the 2023 Contemporary British Painting Prize competition/exhibition present work that smoothes out surfaces – indeed the prize winning paintings of Rich Jellyman have that Royal Academy tentative, wristy, sloshy quality much beloved of generations of their graduates now. The imagery was puzzling with characters that might have stepped out of a warped fable – though the fad for anthropomorphic figures was over a decade back… Nonetheless one could see why the judges were attracted to the works – like most, if not all, the finalists they were both impressive and consistent.
I first imagined I was looking into the Florida Everglades when looking at Rosey Prince’s highly accomplished pictures but the titles suggest we may be closer to home (do they have flytippers in the States – I’ve only ever heard of littering?). I loved pretty much everything about these works that melded a sensuous painterly intelligence with an intriguing and intense imagery that asked as many questions of the viewer as answers. For me she would have got the nod for the top prize.
Suzy Willey has squeezed out the oil like toothpaste and mushed it with the palette knife. A technique that I’ve mostly seen over the decades utilised by faux naive or ‘primitive’ painters (Joe Scarborough came immediately to mind) but the results were effective and intriguing. David Orme’s canvases are messy, muzzy grounds a cotton twill that might conceivably be simply decorators dust sheets over which fragments of canvas are glued on in a (I suspect) a rather lazy provisional manner. These elements have a mix of reconstituted parts from drawn or painted scraps of motifs, a leaf here, a pot there, another painting on Eighteen Solid Objects (1). Lee Maelzer’s figuration is sound with a fine regard for atmospherics, a kind of flat light and dingy environment…that created an ineffable sense of sadness. Not so with Benjamin Deakin’s resolutely upbeat, ‘homage to the Ski resort’ paintings with their bright colour and patterned cushions, tabletops and other interior impedimenti. Equally, if not more, sophisticated in the play of interior versus exterior these were fascinating works with equally (to me at least) puzzling titles. Foliage is Lee Johnson’s thing whilst Robbie Bushe’s honest and accomplished, not to say complex urban landscapes have a rich historical context in planning for Edinburgh. I think I recognised Twinkle Troughton’s inspiration for Enchantment Of England in the grounds of Elvaston Castle (only a few miles from where I’m writing this) though of course I’m conscious the shaping of topiary in the country’s grand properties is widely practised.
For a more muscular paint handling, in part the result of a jute support, Karolina Albright’s Downside Up presented some curious puzzles of its own. Whatever the genesis of the imagery it defeated me though I enjoyed inverting the image in my head to try and figure it out – no luck. However I rather enjoyed the clunky shapes and brushwork in both that picture and her other two.
Emma Tod and Marcus Jefferies both favour the flat, impenetrable glossy surface that is reminiscent of the photo-realists as does Melanie Miller, though I was personally more intrigued by the imagery she deploys, a mix of foliage and flower emerging out of a dark mysterious gloom. Jefferies has a more directly odd collection of forms, pipes springing out of a pool, a wooden ‘sculpture’ and another collection of complex pipes accompanied by an orange difficult if not impossible to make much sense of. Tod favours finely modulated grounds; indistinct fuzzy fragments floating in the equally unreadable space, with stylish frame surrounds. Capio is the oddest of them, not least with its Latin title?
Claude Temin-Vergez takes a very distinctive and quite thoughtful approach to the business of painting, pairing a rather quaint and meticulously plotted symmetry with ribbon like forms that hint at a polite version of Brice Marden. Whilst Ellen Ranson takes the brave route of total non-representation…or is it ? Untitled (Marcello) perhaps hints at a laurel garland (for a Roman senator perhaps) but the loops and blobs (in a variety of fetching media) are harder to see as anything than digital mark making of the kind favoured by c. 2010 Trudy Benson (albeit without the same level of bewildering complexity and a bit more conscious construction). I liked these a lot.
Allyson Keehan ventures even further into the unknown…or at least in the context of a Painting show. Not that the painted elements are at all ‘out there’ rather they are amongst the more traditional academic examples in the show – very competently painted drapery. Packaged (and that’s very much the right word as far as Pink Scenario No. 3 is concerned) with shelving and such like to point up representation in relation to the world of things.
So overall a very decent and fairly broad ranging selection from the dauntingly large submission (check out selector Gordon Dalton’s take on the process) suggesting that even as we accelerate through the 21st century painting is still in rude good health – thank goodness: an antidote to that ubiquitous ‘black mirror’ you’ve just spent several minutes looking at! Cut along to Huddersfield before Saturday evening or to South London from 2nd to 17th December to see it all ‘in the oil, acrylic, charcoal etc. etc.’.
Beuys In Grafenberger, (Landscape & Memory), acrylic, flashe & collage, 106 x 94 August 2016
It’s been a long day, a round trip of 336 miles to Newcastle and back, to collect one of the A Week Of A Day series that has been on show up there (see last post). A week of a day indeed! Earlier in the week I collected Beuys (see above) from the excellent Custom Frames in Bulwell and delivered it to the wonderful Rachael Pinks at The Old Lock-Up in Cromford. Rachael is one of those unsung heroes of the contemporary art world at the breathable level most of us operate at (not the Oligarch funded stratosphere of international art fairs, galleries and the ACE funded coat tail hangers on…) who at great cost to themselves sustain an ecosystem for us mere mortals. Her next show Dara is one I’m delighted to be giving one of my Landscape series an outing in. Here’s the poster for it.
Despite being a tad knackered (these trips haven’t been the only tasks recently) I shall be there for the opening – not one of the dreary bits of the ‘business” but a genuine pleasure…perhaps I’ll see you there!
I’ve been posting each work in my Weatherland series on Instagram on the first of the succeeding month as we go through 2023. But recently I’ve taken to pushing ahead with the completions so…
May (Weatherland), mixed media on paper, 84 x 114 cms. 2023
here’s May but I’m thinking June isn’t far off being finished so that will be posted in the next week or two so that – hopefully – I can have July ready for the first of that month. In case anyone is unawares of the genesis of this project it derives from the marvellous book Weatherland by Alexandra Harris. Like my Landscape & Memory series this takes a number of quotations from a book source (in that case the Simon Schama title) as a jumping off point. In this case one for each month of the year seemed appropriate.
Alongside Weatherland I’m also finishing off another smaller series of works, seven in all, titled A Week Of A Day. One of these – Thursday – has (and its a rarity these days) escaped the studio and is on display up in Newcastle in X, the Contemporary British Painting tenth anniversary show . As its ‘up north’ I’m imagining it may be hard to get to for some. So here it is, pretty much as you step off the street in the city centre.
third from the left…
A Week Of A Day has a rather more obscure titular genesis – coming from a song of that title, the b side of a 1970’s single (that’s a vinyl record for younger readers) by a much loved (by me at least) Birmingham based band called Slender Loris. You’ll struggle to find much about them online – other than link here though their (only) album is out there for download somewhere.
“I’ve had a day, I’ve had a week of a day…yes I have. Breathing bad air, doing my share of the road...”
Tuesday (A Week Of A Day), 114 x 84 cms. mixed media collage on paper
There was a time when the Tyne Bridge was the iconic image of the North East but then along came public art! So we had to stop off at the Gormley on our way to Newcastle Contemporary Art to deliver paintings for the upcoming Contemporary British Painting show.
I’ve a painting in the show (though the other 79 plus exhibitors may make a visit more worthwhile!) – one of a series that takes it’s name from a song by Slender Loris, a much loved band from my days knocking around Birmingham in the late 70’s – A Week Of A Day (if you check them out beware of the Canadian band of the same name!). It’s Thursday, but the painting below is my favourite of those completed so far – Sunday.
So it’s likely to be the largest contemporary snapshot of what UK based painters are up to nowadays – so cut along there if you can…details below…
I’m currently ‘minding the shop’ for the above…but if you want to say hello you’ll need to get yer skates on. I’m here from 10 to 5 today and tomorrow (3rd September) and from 11 to 4 on Sunday (4th). But the show then leaves town.
Meanwhile another one is opening up many miles away…and I’m pleased one of my text framed works is included. On the Margin uses a fragment of text from the poem of the same title by David Wright. This show is a CBP initiative (originated by Judy Tucker) and runs roughly in parallel with the CBP competition show that’s running in Huddersfield from 17 September. I’m hoping to be at both events (the prize is a good way of catching up on new painters and work) as there is going to be a day event up at the Ropewalk on October 15th as well as the one below. So again if you’d like to say hello come along on one of those dates.
Being involved with the Contemporary British Paintingsetup has been a delight. Not least for the opportunities that it has afforded. I owe it a vote of thanks and also that terrific painter Terry Greene for the introduction.
I don’t often ‘cross the streams’ in this blog…some time back I decided it would only focus on painting rather than veer into other topics. But although this isn’t especially about my painting it is about painting more generally. Occasionally I dip my toes into the wider art world and – curation. Actually I’m not entirely convinced that’s what I’m up to. Curation for me is a far more nuanced and complex activity. What I do, and what mostly happens in the art world generally nowadays, is selection. We (and that includes virtually everyone out there) select a group of artists (that admittedly we have given some thought to their suitability to be shown together) and put on an exhibition. And so it was here.
John Rimmer
This group included artists from as far afield as London & the North East, Leicester, Lincoln & Nottingham. The show I titled ‘A Riotous Assembly’ and it took place in Derby at the excellent Dance based Arts Centre Deda. The brief intro says:
Letting go, running riot, it has to be admitted, is very liberating – and often a lot of fun.Then of course comes a reckoning, a sense of order being re-established if not completely restored. A lot of abstract painting practice runs on such principles.When you confront the blank sheet of paper or canvas it can be the best way of getting going…don’t agonise but dive in.Put a bit of stick (brush, roller etc.) about and just see how it goes for a bit.Luxuriate in the gloopy, resinous or wishy washy qualities of the paint, gorge yourself on the intensity of the hues, and delight in the chance elements of the collision of colour, form and facture that result.Yes, it may be a tad messy but trusting your instincts is an exhilarating ride and what comes through often surprises you with a fresh take on what you thought you might want to achieve. A new direction or approach to image making and, if you’re lucky something new in your work.
In this riotous assembly though (and whisper it in terms of whats just been said) there may be far more considered initial moves than might be supposed from a first casual look.For some of those present here neither want, nor one supposes could, let go with such abandon.Their first marks are deliberated, even agonised over.And those manoeuvres that follow are equally premeditated.Its simply part of their artifice that to the viewer comes an initial sensation of liberation, an easy, relaxed and reckless pleasure in the pure act of painting.And colour too can seem in some pictures to be be jostling and jockeying for position in random fashion when in truth there is a deal of experience at play, much of it hard-won over years of trial and error, with carefully controlled and thoughtful weighing up of what will ‘work’ with what to achieve a satisfactory and often thrilling outcome.
Here then is a show of seven artists who run the gamut of what’s possible for painting now.They span several generations and cover a fair bit of the country from the North East to London by way of parts of the East Midlands.They share no common agenda and have only been connected here through an invitation from myself.But there are connections and reflections aplenty if you look hard enough.Enjoy!
Lois Gardner Sabet
The show is now sadly over but as always its been hard work but really enjoyable. My thanks go to all the artists for their participation and to Deda, and especially their departing Director (off to a new challenge) and Technical Manager Geoff Harcula as well as the rest of the staff team for their assistance.
I Give You The Morning, Oil on linen, 15 x 15 cm., Nov. 2018
Nothing concentrates my mind like the impending end of the year.I know its foolish of me but the wholly artificial milestone of the 31st December tipping into January 1st has me frantically endeavouring to tidy up production of work. Given my equally absurd penchant for multiple objectives for my work in the form of various ‘series’ or ‘projects’ this is, as one might imagine, something of a tyranny.So I have three more of the Coastal Banners to complete – will they get resolved?I’m revisiting a host of the Playground Of The Midlands canvases to see if I can put more of them properly to bed.A number of Very Like Jazz follow ups are assuming a more prominent place in the pantheon of T2R2(those that require resolution) not least because Better Git It In Your Soul is, courtesy of the energetic and exceptionally talented and generous Robert Priseman (who has done so much for Contemporary British Painting) is on tour again in 2019.So I’m thinking this strand of my work that has been quietly bubbling under for the past year needs more of an outing.
And of course I’m heavily into part three of the Landscape & Memory project – Rock – that I’d dearly like to have fully completed by the time the clock ticks over again into 2020 but at my rate of prevarication means quite a lot of cogitation as well as more painting (though mercifully all of them are in play now).Of course I have all those small things that bump along more or less all the time.The Wonky Geo series, now heading north of 60 in total, a set of little abstract landscapy things as yet untitled (and unseen) and two more tiny boxes full of half baked and half realised workouts…oh…and the glacial progress of the i series as above. And just to top it off there’s a host of Paintings Standing Up, experiments in three dimensions, that I cannot for the life of me decide are worthwhile pursuing or not.Yep nothing fogs the mind like the impending Year End!
The Sense Of Sight, Christopher Le Brun, 197 x 193.5 cm., oil on canvas
Mai Dolgok (Current Affairs), opening at MOMA, Oxford in March 1987, curated by David Elliot and Lewis Biggs for the British Council and toured to Hungary is a good bell weather show for what might be considered the ‘gold standard’ in British contemporary work by the second half of the decade. It ranged widely over practice of all kinds but of the twenty six selected artists barely four might be called ‘abstract’ painters. For although Gillian Ayres and Howard Hodgkin can be counted fairly squarely Ian McKeever and Christopher Le Brun occupy a more ambiguous space. It is a measure of where things had moved by that time that Art & Language (Baldwin and Ramsden) exhibited canvases that were more overly ‘abstract’ than either of the foregoing under their post-modern conceptual and political riffing – in this case on the work of Jackson Pollock.
Cry, Jennifer Durrant, 265 x 288 cm., acrylic on canvas, 1985
In the Spring of 1987 Jennifer Durrant’s solo show opened at The Serpentine.This was a tour de force, work of astonishing ambition and scale.Michael Harrison’s eloquent eulogy to Cry, painted in 1985 (and exhibited at the John Moores) suggested its complexity and vast depth.
But then…less than twelve months later comes Freeze in 1988…akin to the advent of punk in the music of the seventies, sweeping all before it, drowning out other voices and creating a false sense of redundancy rather than welcoming the plurality that characterises the art of this century.Of course some quality emerged from it…Fiona Raefor one, who went on in the 1990’s to make intelligent and original paintings.
Towards the end of the decade re-affirmations of the continued vigour of abstraction came from a less likely source, and, one suspects, was less visible to many (most) in the metropolis.In a relatively new initiative to re-engage with municipal galleries around the country the Arts Council worked with enterprising curators to mount significant touring shows.One of the fruits of this wasThe Presence Of Painting, curated by Mike Tooby and mounted first at the Mappin in Sheffield.Billed by Mike as “Aspects of British Abstraction 1957 -1988” it featured many of those mentioned hitherto in its 43 selected painters, and over half the works featured had been painted over the decade in discussion. At the heart of his argument was a passionate belief that such work had struggled through the late sixties and seventies to be thoroughly appreciated, even especially visible and that certain modes of making dominated by process had rather buried a more plural and inclusive notion of what abstraction could be.For audiences in Sheffield, Newcastle and Birmingham it made for compelling viewing.I recall being pulled up short by an astonishingly austere but exceptionally beautiful painting made in 1987 by Peter Joseph, a painter I’d quite forgotten at that time (although he had shown up in BAS 2).An artist not previously known to me also made quite an impact – Yuko Shiraishi whose quiet, completive paintings showed a deft and lyrical understanding of colour.Shiraishi continues to this day to be woefully under appreciated (her show earlier this year at Annely Juda was a beauty).
Following hot on the heels of this show came The Experience Of Painting, another AC initiative but this time working with Mike Collier at the Laing in Newcastle and bringing Mel Gooding to the party to write the catalogue introduction.In this show eight abstract artists were brought together in a more in depth exploration of their craft rather than the larger survey format.All but one, Francis Davison were in the earlier show and all still working at the time of the exhibition (sadly Davison had died back in 1984).Although opportunities to view a significant grouping of works by Bridget Riley, Jennifer Durrant, Gillian Ayres, Albert Irvin and Kenneth Martin had been evident over the decade it was good to see more of James Hugonin’s and especially Edwina Leapman’s canvases.Together the eight of them were properly represented (and it was a revelation to see Davison’s late collages) as well as enjoying the catalogue where Mel Gooding’s introduction was coupled with his interviews with the artists to great affect – giving voice to them and their ideas and working methods and providing me at least with material I still quote to this day.
It’s worth noting that in addition to these shows both Tooby and Collier had presented opportunities to significant abstract painters over the same period.I recall a large exhibition of Brian Fielding in Sheffield around the time of his premature death that revealed his emergence as a significant figure and suggested that more was to come from him.In 1989 in Newcastle Collier championed a show by Liverpool based Terry Duffy. Although uneven in quality it revealed him to be a lyrical and intelligent painter
The John Moores Liverpool Exhibition was something of a barometer for what had happened in painting though it seemed often to lag slightly behind rather than ahead of prevailing trends.Hoyland had taken first prize in 1982, just as the figuration craze following on from the ‘new Spirit’ was really getting into gear.In 85 Bruce McLean surfing the semi figuration wave took the prize with an enormous canvas that aped the fluid, one touch, abstract gestural approach but with overt figural elements.In 1987 Tim Head, an artist whose career had hitherto shown a remarkable diversity (encompassing installation, projection, print, photography and painting) won with Cow Mutations a painting as much conceptual and procedural and far removed from the concerns of most ‘abstract painters’.By the end of the decade the figuration craze reached its apogee with Lisa Milroy’s Handles though it is interesting to note that quite a few abstract artists were pushing their way back into the show as a whole.Jeff Dellow, Michael Bennett, Madelaine Strindberg, all showed tough, vigorous and intelligent canvases
As the decade drew to a close I had less opportunity to see work particularly in the capital.Two shows stick in my mind however.At Nottingham’s Castle Museum David Austen showed small canvases that, as has become increasingly apparent over subsequent decades, were hardly abstract though its easy to assume that Man without Skin could be a non figurative image.Back in London at The Serpentine Susan Bonvin’s Colour In Context provided an opportunity for her to present complex structures that showed a really confident exploration of colour relationships in space.
So by the beginning of the nineties what might be said about abstract painting?We were moving inexorably towards the market completely defining the public discourse and a concomitant disinterest by it in “abstract’ painting as other than what Graham Crowley calls ‘wall furniture’. There was a gathering consensus towards a complete detachment from any demarcation between figuration and abstraction, that has flourished in the present century. And a climate developing in which painting generally has to take its place alongside other media (that for the most part doesn’t yet include the digital in 1990). Everything goes in phases so it was only really in the early nineties that Feminist perspectives re-emerged overtly in exhibitions such as(dis) parities at the Mappin in Sheffield and despite many advances, including ever larger cohorts of female students dominating degree courses, women artists are still underrepresented in most contexts.
Perhaps most significantly slowly and surely abstraction in painting was taking its cues more from academia than from the market and more opportunities to view it and promote discourse around it have almost certainly led us to the place we see it in today.
Plainly Painting - David Manley 