NUCA (Norwich University College of the Arts) was the last stop on the travelling roadshow of the Jerwood Painters exhibition - NUCA (previously the Norwich Gallery) also annually hosts the established EAST International.Last week I went to see 'Jerwood Painters 2009' in spite of the fact that the 2010 shortlist was recently announced - but this show was all new work to me. The selectors, all of whom are practising painters, and are or have been, visiting lecturers at some of London's art colleges, were: Mali Morris, Alexis Harding and Phillip Allen. Their selection criteria focused only on recent art graduates, of the significant 'emerging artist' mould. A scan through the JP catalogue showed that most of the twenty six selected artists had both studied and now work in London. With these simple facts in both mind and hand, my thoughts were racing - I see where it's coming from, but where is painting intellectually headed in the UK?I was pleased, if not surprised, that I had the exhibition all to myself (aside from one 'student' invigilator) - this show was not curated to be a crowd-pleaser. It is clear from the selectors' foreword that they were responding to contradiction and controversy to further the debate or critique on contemporary painting. As Alexis Harding said: In their own specific and personal way these artists extend and corrupt a particular investigation into painting. NUCA was not the best of spaces to view these selected paintings; some works were in the direct glare of the long window, whereas a temporary partition wall created dark corners with some works seemingly wedged into them, deliberately so in the case of Michael Cassidy's offering, as seen below, Single sparks are spectral fires.
Left to right are: Andrew Graves Vitamin; Jamie Partridge Glamour, Oliver Perkins Sickle and Michael Cassidy Single sparks are spectral firesIt was refreshing to see many smaller works on show (when the history of painting is saturated with monumental works) but these three small paintings, when hung together in a row, were quite indistinguishable from one another - they could have been painted by the same hand. It is very difficult to make a value judgement on contemporary painting based on a single piece of work; they either instantly succeed or fail miserably.There is clearly a methodology at work in Cassidy's corner piece, a Rorschach style test of a painting in two halves, each playing off each other in two different scales- which invites an interesting debate on the apparent chance and serendipity of the painting process. Here is a painting that meticulously mirrors and yet seems to mock its own conception, the only child that supersedes its doting smaller parent. Such ideas are liable to burn-out in their reason for making - there has to be more to it than a process about process.... so, moving swiftly on...
From left to right: Alistair Frost PALM/9; David Webb Monarch (for E.M.S); Paul John Taylor Bombed Beirut and Lee Broughall 163 (Do not obstruct)Of these four paintings, Paul John Taylor's 'Bombed Beirut' invites the most scrutiny - clearly the appropriation of a documentary news image, looking decidedly 'photoshopped' then blown-up in scale . The jagged, cut-out, posterised edges of the grey monochrome paint render a scene of utter devastation into a surface of pure pattern. It echoes the the camouflage of combat fatigues, and it also emphasises the explosive shards of metal, concrete and glass. I was reminded of Andy Warhol and his de-sensitising of shocking media images, such as the Car Crash series. You can view Taylor's 'Bombed Beirut' painting on Saatchi, where you will find that appropriating and reworking media images is a key theme in his work.Bombed Beirut is a painting of considerable skill but I couldn't let go of the prior knowledge that I brought into my immediate reading of it. There have been many instances of news photographs being manipulated to question or change their meaning and I wasn't sure how much this painting added to the current debate surrounding the role and influence of the (twenty-four hour) news media. As a formally abstracted, fractured image, it is a fascinating composition (in the structured patterning and carefully applied tones of grey), and I sensed he wanted the viewer to question this moral juxtaposition, of a surface aesthetic versus a pictorial horror.
Aleana Egan, Interior and Ellen Stanford The First MarriageEgan's work, Interior is a construction of cardboard, tape, paint, varnish and copper nails. In truth, I didn't get it. I thought that maybe it was referencing an architectural model or a floor plan, but it looked like it might have been rescued from a skip - a reject, an abandoned idea, a project shelved. Was this the decline of modern architecture, or was it just the interior of some packaging? It was empty, lifeless, but perhaps that was the point. Ellen Stanford's painting The first marriage, is art that needs a big white wall in a big white space. It was visually tantalising in its carefully constructed geometric abstraction, in the play of flatness with perspective, pattern with solid, interior with exterior and vibrant interactions of colour. It also had an odd familiarity about it, in that you think you've seen it before - a melding of lots of influences from Bauhaus to Op art. The title, for me, was humorous, absurd, but in the end irrelevant - I didn't see any need for an implied narrative or reference to bring it to life. This painting was a visual feast for starving eyes.
From left to right: Robert Rush, Symposium, Idealism and Crisis; William Monk Untitled IWilliam Monk's Untitled I is another of the large paintings on show, and, with its reference to the environment, most appealed to my own artistic sensibilities. The deepest viridian green-black swamps a seemingly magical forest below - or is it a coastline, a small tropical island - I couldn't be sure. Untitled I doesn't give me the key that I need into unlocking any deeper understanding of this painting. It could be alluding to global warming, it could be an undiscovered paradise island, or it could be a Ballardian nightmare.Yet again, more questions than answers - but there again, that is the point of this exhibition. Matthew Musgrave, Scott O’ Rourke, Paul Doran and Aidan Doherty deserve a quick mention with their small-scale works, easily overlooked and crowded out by the bigger paintings in the show. In the more figurative works in the exhibition there seemed to be an undercurrent of bad painting being offered up as good painting, challenging the aesthetic - Hartley, Stanners and Busuttil all got messy with the paints just like Georg Baselitz or Stella Vine. Two exceptions would be Matthew Weir's macabre Serenade melancolique and Ryan Moseley's pop-surreal Psycho Cubist Picnic. Other works just failed to register - not one thing or the other, gestures in paint on canvas that never asked for more than a passing glance. There were twenty-six painters and thus twenty six paintings in this exhibition, with a good mix of small works in with more monumental pieces - and nearly all are on canvas, either oil or acrylic. It was disappointing that they seemed not to look (with a few exceptions) much further than London art school graduates to select their emerging new painters.Barry Schwabsky, in his catalogue essay, The contradictions of Art, writes that if you have to ask the question, what is the 'state, condition, prospects, future, or situation of painting', then his first reply would be: who’s asking? - that only those who are worried about painting or feel inferior as painters would need to ask the question. But painting, if seen as the overlooked, undervalued, underfed underdog in contemporary art, will breed a fiercely competitive animal. He contends that tension and contradiction is a requirement in art, that one type of art needs another type of art, they may clash or oppose one another but they will co-exist, are made stronger by their struggle or differences.I have focused here on the paintings that provoked the most thought; it would be very time-consuming to critique here each one in turn. There was good painting and bad painting, high ideas and low ideas, large scale and small scale, pop and politics, the macabre and the mundane. On the slim evidence of these twenty-six paintings, I was not entirely convinced by the Jerwood judgement - that this exhibition reflected the next generation in painting. I was still asking the question, what is the state, condition, prospects, future or situation of painting - and I am a painter - but if the answer is controversy and contradiction then this exhibition justly delivered.
notes from an exhibition
As I was passing through the marketplace towards the forum building in Norwich, to revisit the exhibition Elements: Man and the Environment on its final day, I passed by a secondhand book stall, and, after a few minutes browsing the shelves, came across the novel Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale - perhaps, with a sense of deja-vous or subliminal or tacit knowing, I instantly conjured up what this story might reveal... when one door closes another door opens... the end of an art exhibition is a good time for some reflection.This is a self-portrait taken in the seductive, highly-polished surface of Andrew Campbell's bronze sculpture, 'I remember' at the exhibition Elements. There is always something narcissistic in the allure of the mirrored surface - less about the physical form of an object reflecting its environs, and more about how it plays with our own self-perception...
It appeared to be a direct cast of an inflated balloon, and as a bronze it looked like a majestic orb on its plinth, the sophisticated, beautiful cousin of the ill-fated lead balloon (but even bronze will sink), and also (in my eyes), recalled memories of childhood, of releasing fairground helium balloons high into the sky, with a mixture of uncertainty and excitement - never quite knowing how high or how far they would travel, and where they would eventually land. This bronze balloon was grounded but would, at the very least, avert an instant death by pin... I found by chance (googling bronze balloon) more of Andrew Campbell's work on flickr...Nearby were two mixed media sculptural works by the Norwich-based artist Louise Richardson, pieces which were imbued with a simultaneously poetic and macabre narrative in their dichotomy of materials - dresses made of concrete and bronze, dresses stained and tainted by the earth, left to nature and the elements, enchanting in their suggestion of ancient myths or fairy tales, of the craftsmanship in their delicate making, and yet sinister and haunting in what we see in the casket-like frames, the relics or remains of a past event, of mortality, death or ghosts...
Louise Richardson, 'Being' left and 'Host' right; concrete, cold cast bronze, mixed mediaVeronica Grassi's Decaying Vessels have a simliar, delicate resonance - of fragility and strength, the remains of nests, shells or cocoons, and all exquisitely made with the finest of threads and paper pulp.
Veronica Grassi, 'Decaying Vessels', stitched thread and paperJamie Andrews sculpture, 10,000 Men was the centrepiece of the exhibition, having won the £1000 Bayer Prize. It is made up of 10,000 toy soldiers, coagulated into a resinous, bloodied funereal pile, with a clear message that war is both messy and futile - it made me think of the collective will in the construction of ant-hills too, that even in a situation such as war the soldiers (or workers) just get on with the job ...
Jamie Andrews, '10,000 Men', mixed mediaThese are just a selection of the many artworks in Elements:Man and the Environment, ones which resonated with myself, in a very mixed, curated exhibition. These works were the more inspiring ones, ones which at their core, had materials and craftsmanship as integral to the concepts of the finished work. I may not have earned the grand but I am proud that I was selected, and pleased that my work received such good exposure and some recognition in the process. I will look into that occasional mirror of doubt and see that I am still an artist - it may not be the all-day-every-day occupation that myself and many other artists aspire to, but it is, in the end, my one-and-only vocation...
Jazz Green, 'Rost', mixed media on canvas
here, there and everywhere [drawing]
I had some free time this week to get out sketching for an hour or so, here and there......
These are small sketches, about 14cm square (travelling light again, with a new sketchbook that just about fits in my bag), finding odd moments of calm and contemplation, experiencing some cool blustery breezes and light rain showers, a sprinkling of frost and a little sunshine too...
[looking north east, rain clouds ahead]
[view over brow of a hill in field]
[open fields, hedgerows and big sky, early afternoon]I made a trip to the fine city of Norwich (that's their promising tagline, Norwich, a fine city) to see a few exhibitions this week (and to pick up my artwork from the Forum)...One of the exhibitions I went to see was Watercolour in Britain at Norwich Castle (part of the Great British Art Debate, on until 18 April 2010). However, before I went in to see the main exhibition, I perused the rotunda of the Cotman Art Gallery. Here, you can see (in a somewhat subdued and yellow light) the watercolours and drawings of John Sell Cotman and his contemporaries. There is permission to take photographs (without a flash), and so with a lens pressed against the glass I tried to analyse this particular drawing. I felt a little touristy in this regard, but wanted something I could look at again and again.
John Sell Cotman, Irmingland (trees and vale)black and white chalk drawing on grey paper, 1841 (with an unintentional self-portrait)
[left hand side of drawing]
[right side of drawing]This one was apparently drawn over two days, 10th-11th October 1841, and Cotman had briefly returned to his native Norfolk in the autumn (from London, where he was working as a drawing tutor) due to ill health (he died the following year, aged 60). He said in a letter 'judge for yourself my happiness on finding your flints capable of once more creating a blaze in my heart'. One can assume that these drawings were preparatory studies for paintings that he did not live to complete.Firstly, it's interesting that he added an extra piece of paper to the right-hand side to make the scene more panoramic (on the second day?). I like how the foreground although roughly sketched out in hatched shading, creates angles of interest before one's eyes find the cluster of trees in the middle. It is difficult to know what this foreground vegetation might have been, but as an autumnal landscape, I could conjecture that its texture and colour would have been pivotal to the overall composition. I've often felt that Cotman's Norfolk landscapes are too sentimental, at times over-embellished and exaggerated, but this drawing has a truthful, wind-swept bleakness about it. Irmingland no longer exists as a true village, having been effectively consumed into a larger parish by the Enclosure Acts of the 1800's (an act of parliament in which previously common or grazing land was passed over into private hands) - and perhaps by the sprawling estates acquired by the many country manors - forcing the locals to live and work elsewhere - often migrating to the cities. According to Oulton Parish Council, in 1845 Irmingland had only 13 residents, by 1881 it had dropped to only 5.The landscape of East Anglia, broadly-speaking, with its patchwork pattern of arable fields and reclaimed fenland, especially when seen from above, has all the obvious markings of a rural landscape shaped by man - a factory without a roof - it can be just as polluted as the city, and its green-edged agricultural roads are often noisier than the average suburban avenue. I have no romance with it, but I want to explore my relationship with it, none the less - and drawing has been a means of doing this in a more immersive and emotionally direct way.I have been preparing some box frames for four of my farmscapes this week..
These are looking like they will have the colours of spring, I think... (but no daffodils)...
and this one, with a cooler palette of metallic greys, bronzes and blues, of autumn perhaps... agriculture depends upon the seasons, and nature through its cyclical changes imparts its identity on an otherwise structured landscape.Too many words already; I will have to continue with my thoughts on the the intriguing side exhibit Drawing on Cotman, and the main exhibition at Norwich Castle Watercolour in Britain tomorrow... and what I saw and made of the other two current exhibitions, The Artist's Studio at the SCVA and The Jerwood Contemporary Painters show at NUCA...