Snaps…

I’ve long since realised that few visitors to this page read much of the text…so I’ll cut to the chase first and then come back to it further on!  Get in touch with TOM HILL and get a copy of The Cobbler’s Children Were the Worst Shod and make a donation to the BHF.  Now read on…

Print 3 from OUT OF THE WOODS – A PAINTER’S VIEW My submission for the Masters in Photography at De Montfort University 2010

Well yes…usually I reserve commentary just to Painting.  But the exception proves the rule.  And so it is that I’m posting, just the once, some of the many ‘snaps’ I’ve taken over the past 50 plus years.  I’ve never claimed to be a photographer, despite a decade or so back being awarded a Masters degree in the medium.   Oddly enough the two years on that course was populated by Visiting Lecturers, quite a few of whom told us they had started out as Fine Art students!  Nonetheless photography has simply been for me most of the time a tool rather than a medium for personal expression.

That said I’ve exhibited a few photographs over the years, either inserted into multimedia pieces or just occasionally (and almost exclusively) outside the UK. The most substantive show – Fotografische Werk – was one I organised at Harrington Mill (where I rented a studio for several years).  Besides myself I showed work by Eva Bergenwall (a marvellous painter from Sweden), Anibal Lemos (a leading photographer from Portugal I met whilst he was a PG and then PhD candidate at Derby), Adela Miencilova from Czechia (a fellow student at De Montfort on the Masters course) and Eric Tistounet (who I came across the Web and turned out to be a big shot, no really a big shot UN guy, French but resident in Geneva).  It’s worth repeating here (see below) the Intro panel I made for this exhibition.  Little did I know how much self-harm we would do only a few years later – bloody Brexit!

Walking The Windy City, a banner work for Art on Armitage Chicago 2011

A student work, part performance documentation – couldn’t do it now…Health & Safety gone mad!

My early encounter with Photography came through the fantastic Darkroom at Falmouth School of Art, perched in the Attic of the old Kerris Vean building.  John Wilkinson who ran it was incredibly generous and indulgent of us and let us play about, learning a little about the processes along the way.  My experiments with multiple exposures and overlaying of negs and so on got me into the medium and encouraged me to see it as a valuable part of the tyro artist’s armoury.

SeaSides, one of the composite photos of seaweed made in the first week of my Diploma course at Falmouth – never figured a way to translate it onto canvas…

All the above comments bring me to the purpose of this post. A shameless plug for my friend and ex-colleague Tom Hill. A year or so back Tom posted 365 images with short texts online and has now produced a fantastic book collating forty of them (the ones that got the best feedback apparently though I recall plenty of others that were just as good).  Although Tom is wizard at all the technical stuff I’ve no idea about and has a great eye for an image he also happens to be a really good writer(amongst other talents and vices!).  The combination is compelling and the book a beauty.  Get a copy and donate to the British Heart Foundation, a cause that both he and I have a reason to care greatly about.

Stroll On, a show I curated at Harrington Mill on the topic of walking with work by (far left) Ingrid Newton (a fellow student on my MA course) and (far right) Glen Stoker (from Airspace in Stoke) with my postcards and photo collages in between from the series Ex Terra Opes.

Below the text referred to above…

FOTOGRAFISCHE

This exhibition began life as the first of five group shows in the 2013 programme at Harrington Mill Studios, an artists studio collective in Long Eaton, near Nottingham in the Midlands of the United Kingdom. In these exhibitions I chose to place an aspect of my working practice into the wider context of activity in that medium or discipline.  In thinking of my photographic pieces I was struck by the fact of most of them only being exhibited outside of the UK – most of them in other various parts of Europe.  

The European dimension seemed important back in the winter when I began planning…now it seems to be everywhere.  Indeed the whole European project is on fire, not only here in the UK (where it seems to have become quite unhinged) but across the continent as a whole.  By bringing together artists from far flung parts of it I hoped to show a certain kind of solidarity, a sense of camaraderie and collective aspiration that had, one believed, become a solid and enduring feature of current art activity.  Now maybe we cannot be so sure, and it’s not too fanciful to see this show as a defiant gesture, a stubborn refusal to accept a gathering orthodoxy.  

We forget how far we’ve come – when I first took work to Germany back in the late 1970s we filled out nine separate pieces of triplicate paperwork and had the consignment custom sealed four times!  Now I simply load up the boot and turn on the ignition – and needn’t stop till I reach Stockholm, Porto or Prague.  That’s the practical aspect but it’s the connectivity and shared interests and aspirations that I find most inspirational.  In my adult lifetime I have been privileged to experience and understand how much we have in common with one another right across our continent and to share ideas about art and life with people that a generation or two ago most likely I would never have met.

And yet, there are questions a plenty in the work on show about where Europe is and what it means to be a part of it.  This is a group only in the sense that I am connected, in one way or another, to each of the participants.  But all the work shown here has, I think, shared particularities.  Firstly there is a definite and abiding passion for individuality, our own place in time and space, and secondly oblique references abound to environment concerns.  Other than that I leave you to decide on meanings.

Exhibition curated by David Manley   * fotografische werk – german meaning ‘photographic factory’  The exhibition was first exhibited at the Harrington Mill Studios, an artists space set up by Jackie & Jem Burridge in 2008, in an old textiles factory in Long Eaton, Nottingham, UK

Enough Already…

As we start to whoosh through 2019 (I can’t quite believe we’re in February already) I realise that my way of making work makes for an uncomfortable feeling of dread…

The endless prevarications could see me shuffling off this mortal coil without completing some of my many projects unless I get my digit extracted!  For a while, 2 or 3 years back, I instigated a schedule for the year ahead to be sure of getting through work with some discipline, and it worked to a degree though inevitably crumbling a bit at the back end of each year.  

And then the unexpected comes up to further disrupt things.  Of course one can (and occasionally does) turn them aside.  But some are just too intriguing to disregard.  So it was with Enough is Definitely Enough another fascinating and compelling project from Andrew Bracey.

I’ll let him explain: 

Over 40 contemporary artists have made new artworks in response to a postcard version of Velázquez’s masterpiece, Las Meninas for an exhibition at General Practice in Lincoln. ‘Enough is Definitely Enough’ which opens on 30 March and runs to 13 April, features a huge variety of different artistic responses to the Spanish painter’s masterpiece – arguably the most widely interpreted of all paintings.

Art Historian Daniel Arasse reflected many people’s view that everything, or perhaps even nothing, has been said about Las Meninas -“what’s the difference, enough is definitely enough!”. The artists in the exhibition build upon previous interpretations by renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso, Richard Hamilton, Francesco Goya and Eve Sussman. Artists have long been actively influenced by the centuries old painting by Velázquez; with their responses, in turn, offering influence back to Las Meninas to enable new readings. With the artworks made for ‘Enough is Definitely Enough’ there is potential for new relationships with Velasquez’s original painting to open up.

The exhibition is curated by Andrew Bracey and forms part of his PhD research at the University of Lincoln. He is exploring how contemporary artists have used and appropriated existing paintings by other artists, through a position of using the metaphor of the parasite and symbiosis in connection with painting.

Whether or not my contribution is parasitical, symbiotic or just plain daft you’ll have to pop along to Lincoln to judge…

And it isn’t just requests for contributions to projects that pop up.  As part of the Priseman-Seabrook Collection initiative another show of selected works including my own opens in the Polish city of Gdansk in mid March with the title of Made In Britain.  It seemed too good a opportunity not to visit for the opening, not least as Poland is a country I’ve never visited.  So its off to one of the seminal sites in the resistance to communist rule in Eastern Europe.

People; What Are They Like?

The ‘Exhibition’ series, digital drawings by Paul Warren

I’ve been rather busy putting this together – an exhibition of the work of six artists focussed on the observation of folks as they go about their day to day lives.  It opens on Thursday (2nd November, 2017) at Déda, the dance dedicated arts centre in Derby from 18:30 – if you can come along we would love to see you.   Its been a voyage of discovery for me personally, not least as figuration is very much not my usual turf, and four of the six artists I’ve chosen were not known to me before I started to put it together. Of the two I did know its been a real pleasure to be able to share some of their work with new audiences as it is my view that they deserve to be admired widely.

detail from Tiny Screamers by Ellie Young

Ellie Young from Cardiff is one of those I found out about as I searched for painters whose work is firmly focussed on observation.  In her case it can be very direct (she has undertaken a project making 15 minute portraits at a local centre) but also from photos and film, indeed film is a great love of hers and though there are elements of caricature in her work it is fleeting impressions and glimpsed moments that seem to especially inform her work.

The Unknown Statistic by Sue Stone

Sue Stone (based in Grimsby, Lincs.) is another whose work makes extensive use of photographic sources though these are often wrestled into fresh configurations in her beautifully constructed pieces that combine exceptional qualities as a ‘textile artist’ with painted elements.  Her interests are in the wider realm of how memory plays such a vital part in our reading of images of people.

Arches by Helen Latham

An element of nostalgia might be read into the paintings of Helen Latham from Cambridge and they certainly have a very particular mood but often the subjects are very much of our time, and there are, to my eye at least, disturbing undercurrents in several of the images.  Taking us, quite literally, to another place is the work of the painter, Anna Pinkster, whose acute observations of people going about their daily lives in Vietnam are imbued with a freshness that belies their carefully considered realisation in her studio in rural Somerset.  And their marvellous vitality leads back into those artists who work I did know.

Pineapples by Anna Pinkster

Firstly Jackie Berridge from Southwell, Notts. is an artist I’ve known for many years but over the past decade she has become both the exceptional draughtswoman she always was but also a painter of rare distinction.  In her work a highly original cosmology exists in which episodes from childhood are interspersed with mature reflections on the human condition in paintings or, as here, drawings that are, on another level, simply lovely to look at.

Leash by Jackie Berridge

So back where we began the drawings of Paul Warren take us into yet another personal universe.  And this is where my quest started because my whole impetus for the show came from wanting to see more of Paul’s work in the public realm.  His particular – and peculiar – vision is something he shares with the artist Ian Breakwell & the artist/musician Kevin Coyne, both school friends back in the 1950’s at the Joseph Wright School of Art in Derby.  In their world view they forensically examine the human condition, all its foibles and frailties, but with a certain affection and – most crucially – a wicked and delicious sense of humour.  And if this show does nothing else it will expose and celebrate Paul’s contribution to this remarkable triumvirate of artists that came out of this city in the 1950’s.