After my recent walks through the snow-white landscape, as documented in some of my sketchbook drawings and photographs, and the readymade art of paint colour charts, it caused me to recall a few artists who have conceptually explored the non-colour white. There is Malevich, Newman, Ryman, and even Rauschenberg, better known for his mixed media paintings or combines...I once saw one of Rauschenberg's white panel paintings in an exhibition on Black Mountain College, and felt sure that it had been touched-up or re-painted, infuriated as I was by its purist abstract minimalism - it both denied and transcended the object of painting.
Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition: White on White 1918
Barnett Newman, The Voice 1950
Robert Ryman, No Title Required 2006The artist David Batchelor (who I know more for his assemblage colour works, and he also wrote an interesting book on colour, Chromophobia) has been documenting in photographs the white blanks of papered-over billboards and erased signage in the streets of London since 1997 - found monochomes, which I find most interesting in regard to my own humble found paintings (which perhaps I should now categorise by colour...).He calls this ongoing series of photographs Monochromes of Modern Life, a reference to Baudelaire's 'The Painter of Modern Life'. Their central void as he calls them, brings into sharp view the multi-layered patina of history surrounding them, and of the transient nature of modern life in the city, both of the buildings and their inhabitants.
David Batchelor, Monochrome #17As painters, we can have an ambivalence with white; the absence of colour is proof of our non-doing or un-doing, of erasure or covering up. Nearly all of my paintings are constructed first in monochrome, working layers of texture without any use of colour, with colour applied later in thin, scrubby layers, echoing the manner of the slow deposits and gradual erosion of weathering and decay.It is a very printmakerly methodology too; as a printmaker you plan, prepare and plot out the topography, creating a map or receptacle for colour, before it actually comes into physical existence in the final artwork. Back in 2004, when I first started building the large panels for what were to become my 'edgescape' paintings I documented them in the very first stages and called these images my lost paintings. Here is one of them (100cm square), from July of that year.
lost painting, 2004And here, seen in January 2009, the beginnings of my farmscapes in the studio...
...From white to red; a little pluglet for my inclusion in the upcoming Elements: Man and the Environment art exhibition, 26 January to 15 February 2010, at the Forum, Norwich. I was rather surprised to see, when receiving some information about the exhibition, that they have used the image of my painting on the exhibition preview invite...and then I found my work again on the website...
Edgescape : Rost mixed media on canvas, 95cm x 95cmOn some days I think it is a violent painting, full of fury and rage, restless, volcanic, caustic; on other days it glows with a passion, a visual feast of ripened fruit and dark wine, a spirit for life, hedonistic and undefeatable...(read more about this red abstract painting...)And lastly, as a footnote, it occured to me that as an artist, if one were to go down a purely conceptual route there is the high possibility that someone has thought of the idea before, as ideas are often generated by sociological or cultural influences; whereas when pursuing a more process-oriented route, then in the making of art, whether highly-crafted or poorly rendered, it will always be a one-of-a-kind.
about a cube and square
I was delighted to read today that one winner of my recent Art Giveaway square collage postcards has very generously blogged about my artwork in his own art and drawing blog - I do not feel worthy of such praise, but the kindness of his acknowledgement is most flattering. I urge anyone passing by to read his blog for the wealth of art-historical references and for the attention given to the process of drawing as both creative practice and theoretical discourse.
collage postcards, 2009On another note, here is another of my intaglio collagraphs on canvas, titled according to my colour value rules (although i decided to add the 'red' afterwards).
havana [red], intaglio collagraph on canvas, 5" x 5" x 1.5"I was inspired to pay a short visit to the website flickr to view some photographs of the crumbling decay of the city of havana - a place that I can only dream of visiting - but another example of how some rules of chance can lead us to see new things.
Lastly, I am endeavouring to be more rigorous with using the appropriate capitalisation and punctuation from now on......Edit: If you want to support, through charitable gift aid, the first aid and recovery effort after the shocking devastation and loss of lives in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, please see this page on the BBC news website for ways to donate...
colour values
looking at the paint colour cards in a diy hardware store always leads me to think how paint manufacturers attach emotional, subjective meanings to their palettes of colours (whose job is it? do they sit around a table and say yes, that shade of blue speaks crete? or we like the sound of tuscan sunset, let's mix the colour to match). perusing the diy store's colour charts i felt i was on a virtual holiday as i came across coral canyon, niagara blues, delhi bazaar, celtic moor, sicilian summer, himalayan musk - the last confering bohemian values, artistic, refined, culturally aware, spiritually enlightened.. but i preferred the single word descriptions from another paint manufacturer: smoulder, wildwood, snowfall...so my thoughts naturally led to the colour chart works of gerhard richter, who, in around 1966 saw some colour charts in a hardware store and thought they made the perfect found or readymade abstract paintings, colour separated from any narrative or symbolic meaning (although as mentioned above, colour is marketed by its emotional association). as with much of his work, there are themes or concepts to which he periodically returns. from his first colour chart paintings of the 1960's he revisited a systematic approach to colour once again in the 1970's, this time using formulas to first mix and then arrange the placement of the colours, made more interesting in that the colours were mixed and graded very methodically but the placement of colours in a grid format were organised by chance, selecting numbers at random (much like the lottery draw).in 2008 he returned once more to the colour chart theme, creating his most ambitious colour chart to date, 4900 Colours - 196 panels made up of 25 coloured painted squares each, which can be arranged or grouped in any sequence, from one very large-scale work to any permutation of small scale works (but any resemblance to lego would be unkind).
gerhard richter, 256 colours, 222 cm x 414 cm, oil on canvas, 1974i wonder if there is any logical or mathematical connection to the 256 colour system developed for early computer monitors?grids and squares, order and arrangement have been some of my artistic preoccupations over the years.. so, when thinking of some possible titles for the first few of these little experimental canvased collagraph prints, whilst adjusting the images in photoshop, i thought about the numerical values that are returned by the color picker tool, the combination of letters and/or numbers (hex, rgb) matched to a print swatch colour (such as pantone)...a little time spent googling and i set about creating my own color code rule... sushi was returned as a first title, and it seemed quite suitable; a reference to nori (on reflection a better title), of japanese ceremony and etiquette.. curious as to how reliable this rule or the code would be, i tried it once more with another print/painting and it returned fjord, immediately conjuring up images of glacial paths and crisp norwegian landscapes (as with the colour swatches from the diy store)...
sushi, 2010
fjord, 2010so i'll be playing by the rules for a change...