Rebirth: An ancient culture and philosophy revisited; rediscovered; revitalised; readdressed and remade.Rebirth, curated by Lorraine Cooke, is an exhibition of Contemporary Japanese Art inspired by Ancient Jomon culture and Japanese aesthetic, in collaboration with the Unearthed exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.
The Rebirth exhibition features artworks by Sahoko Aki, Megumi Baba, Shaun Caton, Veronica Grassi, Jazz Green, Tsunaki Kuwashima, Barbara Leaney and Keika Sako. Rebirth, the exhibition, at gallery Art 1821, runs from 29th July to 8 September 2010.The gallery Art 1821 has a strong curatorial ethos and shows contemporary art by established and emerging artists. Together with exhibitions of new work, the gallery has works for sale by established artists from previous generations. Works by Piranesi, Fernand Leger, Prunella Clough, William Scott and Jamini Roy sit alongside works by established living artists such as Maurice Cockerill, Eric Fischl, Laxma Goud and Colin Self....i like the linking curatorial concepts behind unearthed and rebirth - as something re-discovered, re-visited, re-contextualised, re-vitalised... i have three large paintings in this exhibition.i have also been pondering on (the year) 1821 - it was the year Baudelaire was born, and also the year that Keats died...UPDATE: see some gallery pictures of the rebirth exhibition here......last chance to see... the NCA 2010 (Norfolk Contemporary Art) exhibition closes at 6pm 21 July 2010
on achieving a perfect lichen-ness [part three]
the current state of play, the ongoing engagement with the surface, shown here in the sixth (current) state...
the lichens have landed (but are likely to populate still further)...there have been many, many states in this particular painting but i only have six full-on shots (some of the work is done in the horizontal)...
strangely, have not really referred to any particular photograph - perhaps this is wise; i do not want to end up with a botanical illustration...given that the above images do not adequately portray the finer workings of the surface - my primary concern - that of the layering process, of embedding a pictorial history of its making... i have taken these detailed images today, a made-to-measure, ground survey...
[the yellow tape measure is in cms]
[myriad colours from grey green, bisque to violet, prussian blue, a ruddish brown]
[splatterings of ochre yellow, mustard, showing the textural quality of the surface]no-one looks at paintings this closely, so not sure why i do - i suppose i like the painting within a painting...like something unearthed, buried deep within the layers, the rebirth of a painting within a painting - which leads nicely onto my next exhibition news (which, to make things a tad more organised around here, i will put into a new post)...
is my shoe art?
[new boots]is my shoe art? it is most certainly a design classic, with the tough, trademark yellow stitching and the air cushion soles, on which it reassuringly says 'made in england'... these boots are not just made for walking anywhere, they are built for the road... there is something so very uplifting to the spirit when one acquires a new pair of boots...
these dr martens airwair boots were a delightful, serendipitous find in a charity shop yesterday - brand new, never worn dm's in just my size (gasp!), in a beautiful pewter leather, my favourite (non) colour - and only £7!the bargain purchase (and subsequent formal analysis as evidenced in the above photographs) of some shiny new dm boots instantly recalled memories of charles thomson's (of the stuckists) appearance on bbc's newsnight, of the perennial debate that always surrounds the turner art prize, the is it art? and of the classic moment in the discussion, is my shoe art..?...charles thomson debating the merits (or not) of the turner prize 1999thomson need not have been so indignant; it spawned a new painting, one with more than a satirical nod to ex-friend tracey emin...
charles thomson, is my shoe art? oil on canvasbut, what about van gogh's still life of boots? a painting which i fondly remember first seeing whilst on a college field trip to amsterdam. i am sure charles thomson would agree that these shoes are art...
vincent van gogh, a pair of shoes, 1886but, what if one forgets for a moment that this is a van gogh painting - what then? the visual recording or transcription, using oil on canvas, of a pair of boots does not make it (yet) a notable work of art. however, these boots, looking very worn and placed as if they have just been taken off might reveal a back story - one of a hard day's labour or ongoing financial hardship - there is no money for new shoes. furthermore, if one imagines what might have been going through the mind of the maker of the painting (the artist), then the story unravels still further - the boots are perhaps now discarded, worthless, they signify poverty and perhaps misery in the mind of the artist. if these boots were van gogh's own then this painting is not just a still life, but a poignant self-portrait, one embued with the struggle of one man's existence......these thoughts led to a nostalgic trip down memory lane... to an old drawing of a boot that signifies my beginning as an fledgling artist...
pencil drawing of a monkey booti did this drawing of a monkey boot when i was about fifteen or sixteen years old. i remember well those monkey boots, they were in an ox-blood leather and i recall polishing them with a matching ox-blood boot polish. i remember too that it was a drawing study that i started at home (probably homework) and clearly (as was my bad habit then) i didn't complete it. looking at the drawing now, i am wondering why (or, in fact if) i did just draw the one boot and not actually draw the pair? the drawing, which is interestingly much larger than 'life size' has been cropped and stuck to an A2 sheet of paper with another drawing of a sheep's skull. i have deduced that the art teacher must have guillotined off the unfinished part of the drawing to make a more interesting worksheet for the exam portfolio - the exam work, as i recall, was sent off to the examination board in those days...these monkey boots remind me of my adolsecence, in the making of my identity, not as an artist but as an individual. every crease in the leather is a silent witness to my 'growing up' - of trying (and failing) to be different, pretending to be a rebel who really wanted to be accepted, of the self-consciousness and the wanting, the wanting-to-be an artist, but not knowing then what art really was...so, was my shoe art? back in those days i thought it was...