Week 23. 24/7 A Wake-Up Call for our Non-stop World. Exhibition.
I began my research at an exhibition at Somerset House; 24/7 A Wake-Up Call for our Non-stop World.
Standing watching this piece of work makes time pass very slowly, counting every second. It was the actual time, it just felt slow. it's amazing how, even though the hands on a clock are ever the same, the way you fill the time determines how it feels- fast or slow.
I took the time to drink in time, rather than the cup of tea. it was cozy, and I enjoyed drinking in the numbers of time.
I liked seeing how this artist had created movement in their work. The painting, (or lenticular print,) actually moved as you walk from side to side. Again capturing the ordinary movement of someone at work.
All of these works incorporated the ordinary, movement and time, which are territories of interest for me. It is helpful to observe how other artists are dealing with time and modern life. It is helpful to view these ideas through other people's lenses, not just relying on my own perspective. The range of ways these artists have portrayed their thoughts is helpful. Many of the works being interactive is food foe thought in how to engage an audience.
Week 23. Katie Paterson. 24/7 Exhibition.
I find Katie Paterson's work really thought provoking. Many of her works exceed any timescale that my head can understand. I have read about her Future Library project, and seen a necklace that has stones representing the geological journey of the world. I was lucky enough to see one of her pieces here in the 24/7 exhibition at Somerset House. This also was hard to grasp. Below is the description of the work.
To think that the turn table is synchronised with the earth feels incredible. The stretch of time feels unfathomable but it gives me a sense of challenge to think of how I should spend this time.
Week 23. Tiddy Rowan. Time
I picked this book up from the museum shop after the 24/7 exhibition. It has lots of helpful nuggets about people's perspectives on time. This has been helpful as I have not wanted to just rely on my own observations, but to hear how others feel about the topic too.
Week 24. Everyday Delight
This exhibition was hard to find because it was in a Health Centre. The display was on the walls of the hospital. This actually felt quite profound. Noticing the little things is a way to practice mindfulness, and is supposed to be good for us. These are glimpses of time standing still. I would like to capture these kinds of moments in my work.
Week 24. Maaike Schoorel
Article from the Saatchi Gallery website:
Though Schoorel’s paintings are developed from photographs, how she interprets these is very intuitive, as is the decision about what information to include or omit. Each brush mark and gesture is designed to refute concrete resolution; some appear as impalpable shadows or stains, while others have a slightly holographic effect. Schoorel drafts The Visit with an expert understanding of colour, and uses minute shifts in tone to magnify her painting’s ambience and evoke psychological reaction. “The colours come to you like music comes to you,” Schoorel explains. Her paintings are often initially ‘felt’ before they are ‘seen’; they provoke a subconscious recognition before they are understood visually.
Schoorel has commented that “we are used to looking at images in high or instantaneous speed. Media such as television and the Internet present everything in a disjointed way. My paintings reveal themselves in slow time. I try to make images that have a sense of connection. For these paintings I worked from family photographs, but I was specifically interested in scenes which relate to genre painting, such as landscapes or group portraits. We are used to seeing these types of images, and my work changes the order of how we view them: once you discover one detail it will link to another, creating a sense of movement and interconnectedness.”
Looking at Schoorel’s images one has the sensation of looking at a projected or hovering presence in an illusory space beyond the flat picture plane. Executed in micro-thin layers her mark-making has the effect of being indelibly penetrated or melded into the fabric of the canvas. Her paintings suggest something that is simultaneously there, but not there, and draw the viewer in as an active participant in interpreting and decoding the image.
Maaike Schoorel’s canvases are near invisible planes which invite sustained contemplation; from their soft, barely perceptible tones images will begin to appear, and eventually resolve as quite detailed scenes. Schoorel’s painterly apparitions are a result of the power of suggestion, her delicate gestures and subtly shifting hues provide only the scantest impressions, provoking the viewer’s subconscious to cogitate the visual cues. When looking at her paintings, not everyone sees the same things at first: your eye might catch a glimpse of a red apple which may lead you on to notice the shade of someone’s eye or hair, or vice versa. Schoorel sees her work as a way to explore the hierarchy of perception.
Juliet smoking at window. Oil on canvas. 2014
The Picnic. Oil on Canvas 2004
https://www.wearepublic.nl/en/event/maaike-schoorel/
These paintings by Maaike Schoorel come to the eye gradually. In an interview in the link above she talks about colours being like music and how some sounds come quick to the ear and others more slowly. It's so clever how the longer you look at the work, the more the brain can register figures etc. I would like to play with white space and gradual, emerging colours.
Week 25. Giorgio Morandi
These ordinary pots and vases have taken on a beauty, as they are painted over and over again. Ori Gersht talks about these paintings as being like music variations. They have taken on a quality that is mesmerising and quiet and meditative. They feel timeless, and I think time can expand endlessly as you contemplate this painting. I would like to try and capture some of this atmosphere in my slow work.
Week 26. Michael Raedecker
As I have been painting my washing all week, this was my favourite painting by Michael Radecker! I love the way that he has captured a moment when the wind has blown the washing on the line; it's like a breath where space is expanded, just as our rib cage expands as we take a breath in. The movement of an everyday sight that could so easily be ignored because it is so ordinary, becomes mesmerising and beautiful.
I love the greys and whites and the delicacy that this brings.
Michael Raedecker. Acrylic paint, thread and charcoal on 3 canvases
Michael Raedecker. Spot. 1998.
I found the description of the process of this painting really interesting. I enjoy working with fabric and thread and find this a really fascinating way to combine thread and paint. This may be something that I can take further in my work.
From the"The image is created with acrylic and oil paint, and cotton and wool threads, although the precise order of execution of paint / thread application is not entirely clear. However, an overall 'imprimatura' layer of grey acrylic emulsion paint was probably first applied over the entire canvas. This is a thin pinkish grey colour and was probably watered down slightly before application. Further paint layers were then applied, interspersed with the positioning of some of the cotton threads. For example, the outline of the spot shape consists of threads that have been painted over with (and held in place by) the grey acrylic paint. Once the overall paint application had been completed, the two 'organic' grey / white forms along bottom and right edges were created with much thicker acrylic paint, which appears to have been poured onto the canvas with the painting in a horizontal position. The paint in these areas is very smooth and exhibits wet-in-wet blending and a few areas of bubbles. The 'spot' shape was then created with cotton thread in a range of blue hues and was presumably threaded through the canvas with a needle. The flowers in the foreground were probably the last feature to be added. The petals consist of oil paint that was squeezed directly from their tubes at the back of the canvas, through holes that were punctured in it. The paint has dried in twists and curls on the front. The green stems of wool were probably added last, once the oil paint had (at least partially) dried. The painting is not varnished." Tom Learner
June 2000. From the Tate website
Week 26. Futurism
Gaicomo Balla. Speeding Automobile (1912) Speed of car+Lights+Noise. 1913.
A Movement in a Moment: Futurism
I am looking at the futurists because of the speed that is captured in their paintings. Time passes in a flash. The futurists had a longing for progression and speed.
From the book 'Futurism' by Giovanni Lista
I want to explore the way the Futurists captured movement, and the sensations of speed. I particularly like Balla's work with the car, the dog and girl running. The fragmentation, repetition and colour all add to the effect. Many of the futurists were aided by the new photography techniques capturing movement.
We have reached a place where there is so much speed in our lives. Technology has advanced so much that our lives look very different from 100 years ago. Everything has become very accessible with knowledge and travel becoming so graspable, but have we got to a place where we cannot keep up with the speed of life? Is life so fast that we are missing things, and dropping the ball?
Umberto Boccioni. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, cast 1972
Umberto Boccioni. The city Rises, 1910. Oil on card
Week 27. Mark Beldan
I really like the colours that Mark Beldan uses. The exert from and interview below says that his subject often has a feeling of boredom or dislocation. I find it fascinating how he combines this with the kinds of colours that he uses. The colours play off of each other in a way that's quite hypnotising. I also like his experimentation with paper.
From an interview with Mark Beldan. https://www.warbling.co.uk/mark-beldan
COULD YOU PLEASE DESCRIBE SOME THEMES WHICH RUN THROUGH YOUR WORK.
I keep returning to suburbs and small towns as a subject, often non-descript parks and houses. I guess there's a feeling of boredom or dislocation that I'm fascinated by. At the same time, if you live anywhere, you know there's a melodrama on every street. So that dissonance is interesting.
And maybe it's rooted in a feeling about history. The big arcs of politics and war are depressingly predictable. The things I want to know about from the past are small and particular. Where was the local punk club? Where was the lesbian bar? What did the wallpaper look like?
For a long time I've made small oil paintings on linen. They involve working out close colour harmonies on top of a bright base colour, so I often make a few versions in oil on primed paper first.
In 2017 and 2018 I travelled back to Canada for short residencies at Gibraltar Point on the Toronto Islands. I felt like it was problematic to travel with oil paints and solvents, so I started working with gouache. I also began painting on this amazing cotton rag paper from Papeterie Saint-Armand in Montreal. I had the opportunity to go to their factory over the summer. I brought back a stack of paper that I'm experimenting on.
Week 27. Uta Barth
I have really enjoyed discovering Uta Barth's work after my Tutor recommended her. I have been reading her writings about her thoughts and approach to her photography, and find them beautiful and fascinating. Much of her work is about time, and looking long and slow. I thought that this was really applicable to my project. A lot of her work is taken from her home, and what she writes about that is really interesting- the fact that we often don't notice what surrounds us in our home because we are so used to it.
"I would make photographs wherever I happened to be, in the environment most familiar to me – and that environment is my home. The home is so visually familiar that it has become almost invisible. One moves from room to room without any sense of scrutiny or discovery, almost blindly, navigating it at night, reaching for things without even looking. It is so well known that it becomes a blank slate in which nothing stands out. It is an ambient visual field we live in and has become the perfect location for me for a long time now. It is always at hand, it allows me to work with repetition and duration, as time has become one of the primary elements in my work. Slow time, uninterrupted time, time that traces no change, or only the slightest change that might occur in my vision while starting at something for so long."
Uta Barth.No title. 1995-7
Uta Barth. No title. 1995-7
"I start most discussions about my work by saying that I am interested in perception; in vision itself and in how we see, more than in what we see. I want to foreground this perceptual experience over anything we may think about whatever it is we may be looking at. I want to immerse myself in the visceral experience of looking at something, for prolonged periods of time. I do not want to be distracted from looking by getting lost in all of the thoughts and interpretations one’s mind will spill forth about subject matter. I simply want to learn how to see."
Uta Barth, “Learning How to Look,” Exit 26, Through the Window [Madrid], ed. Rosa Olivares (May–July 2007)
She captures ordinary moments yet the way she captures them through the lens make you want to stop and breath them in slow. I would like to try and capture these kinds of moments and this kind of feeling in my work.
Week 28. Peter Dreyer
I feel that Peter Dreyer's work is very applicable to our currant situation. Being isolated at home because of the cover 19 virus, our day after day look very similar. And the pace of life has slowed dramatically.
I have been painting my washing day after day, and that was sometimes boring, sometimes meditative. I wonder whether it was similar for Dreyer, whether sometimes he was bored or just found it meditative.
Peter Dreher’s “Nr. 44 (Day),” from 1982, in oil on burlap.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/arts/design/peter-dreher-day-by-day-good-day.html
Since 1974, the German artist Peter Dreher has painted nearly 5,000 versions of the same picture: a realistic, life-size image of a plain, cylindrical water glass centrally placed on a blank surface against a white wall. More than 130 of these paintings, dating from 1974 to 2013 — including the very first — are presented at Koenig & Clinton; 16 more are at Osmos Address, along with 10 paintings of a silver bowl.
Measuring 10 inches by 8 inches, the glass paintings all are similar, but each is singular. Moving from one to another, you notice differences of light, shadow, reflection, transparency and painterly touch. In most cases, Mr. Dreher inscribed into the paint near the picture’s upper edge its number in the series.
Week 28. Idris Khan
Idris Khan makes his work by layering 100's of photos one on top of the other to make one image. He has done this with industrial structures, the Qur'an, Musical manuscripts. The result is that the images become dark, meditative, deep, and something other worldly and mysterious.
In the interview below Idris Khan talks about his upbringing and the rhythms of repetitive, daily rituals that he and his family went through. He talks about this past experiences of repetitive behaviour coming through in his work. This is something that I am hugely interested in and shines a light on my thoughts about the repetitive, everyday mundane activities that are embedded in our lives.
https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/idris-khan-sean-kelly-overture
I am interested in his thoughts on the compression of time in his images. Below is a link to a recent interview that he did talking about his blue work, and the meditative quality of it.
https://ocula.com/artists/idris-khan/video-audio/2019/10/idris-khan-quartet/
Week 29. Frank Selby
Week 29. Etienne-Jules Marey
Etienne-Jules Marey, Descent of Inclined Plane, c. 1882, Chronophotograph
Week 30. Hannah Arendt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5DOoW_XjqQ
Above is the link to another of Radio 4's Melvyn Bragg, "In our Time." The guests are Lyndsey Stonebridge, Professor of Modern Literature and History at the University of East Anglia; Frisbee Sheffield, Lecturer in Philosophy at Girton College, University of Cambridge; and Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University London. The Producer is Simon Tillotson.
I have been trying to read Hannah Arendt's book, The Human Condition. I have found it so helpful to listen to experts who can bring out the main points in her thinking, and help me to understand.
I am particularly interested at the moment in her thoughts on Labour, Work and Action. Labour being the necessary activities such as eating and washing etc. And that there is no freedom from these tasks that we need to live.
Week 23. 24/7 A Wake- Up Call for a Non-Stop World.
I found Erica Scourti's work interesting as it was the mapping and recording of thoughts and memories and information. I like how it tells a personal story of time, and how time is spent, and the confusion and chaos that is sometimes caused by too many demands on our time.
Below is Katerina Seda's work which I thought was so, extremely clever. I found it fascinating how the everyday, ordinary activities have been taken out of context and moved to a different place and time. How they have become a job to be advertised. Life as we used to know has disappeared. Doing life as a community, together has been lost and has instead become hidden and only done behind closed doors, as if we are ashamed of people seeing us hang out our washing or cleaning our house..
Katerina Seda
https://www.sfmoma.org/read/project-los-altos-katerina-seda/
Born in Brno, Czech Republic, 1977; lives and works in Brno
Interested in furthering communication through shared experience, Kateřina Šedá creates collaborative actions that center on the daily lives of ordinary people. In an attempt to break down physical or psychological boundaries, she often organizes games, activities, or competitions that address social issues. Whether she is synchronizing the routines of people in a village or holding a contest that asks neighbors to draw the views from their respective front doors, Šedá’s meaningful interventions alter relationships and our perceived definition of normalcy. She explains, “My work is meant to blend in with normal things, with ordinary life…What I’m trying for is so that anyone can repeat what I’ve done; I’m trying to find the simplest solution possible.”
Everything Is Perfect evolved from conversations that Šedá had with people who live and work in Los Altos and Los Altos Hills. Curious about the ways individuals within those communities measure success, she has formulated a project that celebrates their ordinary characteristics and talents. Although Everything Is Perfect is based on The Guinness Book of World Records, here Šedá focuses not on feats of strength or skill, but on the everyday attributes that make a person unique — the bluest eyes, the largest collection of salt and pepper shakers. The call for participation begins on the opening day of Project Los Altos, and over the course of several weeks visitors will be able to access the dedicated website for the project (www.everythingisperfect.org) and submit applications at Šedá’s area within the main exhibition space (located at 359 State Street). Šedá will select and meet with “ordinary talent winners,” whose images will be displayed on the walls of the gallery as part of her work.
Jenny Gheith
Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture
https://www.sfmoma.org/read/project-los-altos-katerina-seda/
Press release for La Biennale di Venezia.
Week 24.Folds of Time inspired by Ori Gersht
I have been looking at some of Ori Gersht's work, and listening to some of his interviews. One thing that he said has stuck with me and become really important ; he talks about capturing moments in the folds of time. The pictures that he captures could not be seen with the naked eye. We would never be able to see these moments. He likened it to time before telescopes and microscopes, where we were naive to bacteria and cells and galaxies. I find these folds of time fascinating, and I would like to explore this train of thought further.
Below is part of an interview with Ori Gersht. There is a contrast in the time element of the work above. Two of the works are capturing a ten-thousandth of a second, whist the landscape photo has a very long exposure.
"Throughout my work, there is an element that I’m trying to explore, and it is very much to do with the relationship between the camera, the way photography is recording the world, turning moments that are unattainable into tangible experiences, and how they are affecting our relationship with the world, our understanding of truth, our understanding of history, and our perception of reality.
My work is often connected to painting, which is a very visceral medium. The still life series was formally an antithesis to White Noise, and some of the earlier landscape work that I produced, although I see them as very closely related. Many of my landscape photographs were taken over a long period of time. So there is this long exposure, where the image seems to somehow melt down and almost disappear. In the still lifes, the images are more concrete, and the exposure is very, very short. But nevertheless, those short exposures are also capturing something happening at one ten-thousandth of a second that is impossible for the naked eye or our brain to process. So these moments are also sort of metaphysical moments, moments that are ephemeral, too, moments that only exist because the technology allows them to turn into visual, tangible moments."
Week 24. Thinking Fast and Slow.
I have been reading this book by Daniel Kahneman to see if it would help me while thinking about time passing fast and slow. He talks about 2 systems that help us to make our decisions. The first system, system , is our quick reactions, our instincts, our gut feelings. System 2 is more thought through decision making, based on knowledge that we have, and deeper understanding.
Because I have been exploring work that comes to the eye slowly, like Maaike Schoorel's work, and work that comes to the eye quickly, this has been interesting. I am trying to work out how we engage with theses paintings. We would need our system 2 to piece together our thoughts of the paintings, but I feel instinct and gut feeling plays a big part.
I want to play with painting trying to only engage one of the systems and see how this affects the work.
Week 25. Mark Rothko. Tate Modern.
As I sit engulfed in one of Mark Rothko's paintings I am trying to work out why the painting moves so much. I try to imagine the layers of colour underneath and think about the brush stokes and fuzzy edges. I am trying to understand how the painting is sucking me in, and how this is a moment where time stretches and bulges. I am thinking about layers in my own work, and trying to think about how to make a space that draws you in.
Week 25. Dora Maurer. Tate
The subject of Dora Maurer's work here could be seen as quite boring; just two people taking photos across from each other on opposite balconies. But I find the work really intriguing, trying to fit the photos together like a game, or a puzzle. It also draws me into the world of the photograph, and because I have put effort into joining the photos, I have imagined being in that place.
I would like to use this idea of overlapping work in my one project. My topic can be really mundane and boring as I am thinking about the ordinary, but as I use the movement of time, and overlapping techniques I would like to try and achieve a similar effect of drawing a person into imaging the time and space.
Week 26. Agnes Martin
I came across Agnes Martin as I wondered around the Tate. I kept coming back to her work as I found it so mesmerising. I found the big canvas, 'Morning' really captivating with the faint, regular pencil lines. I have been reading more about Agnes Martin's work in a book by Briony Fer called 'infinite line.'
Things that I want to bring into my work- I want to try using repetition and regularity. I'd like to try and capture some of the meditative elements by using pencil and faint line.
"ink on paper, or pencil, or crayon, or watercolour. Ephemeral, fragile, habitual, disposable."
Judd talks about her work as 'the field is woven,' which is another concept I'd like to bring in to add to my thoughts on time being like fabric. woven, folding, and layered.
Agnes Martin. Morning. 1965
Infinite Line by Briony Fer
Week 27. Mike Silva
I've enjoyed looking at Mike Silva's work. Much of his work is of the ordinary, day to day, a view you wouldn't think twice to look at. Yet I find his paintings addictive, and want to see more. I have been taking pictures of my washing up etc, and hope to have the time to try to paint them in a similar style. I found it interesting that Silva says he adds white to his paint to give it a subtle quality of haziness, and times gone past.
"These are quietly celebratory paintings. Paintings of love, light, time, memory, place. I have loved these men. I am here. The light coming through my bathroom window is beautiful today. I am alive. Like a contemporary Hammershøi enjoying dust motes floating in the sunlight." Mike Silva press release Place to be. Portraits and Interiors. David Risley Gallery.
https://theapproach.co.uk/exhibitions/mike-silva/press-release/
Mike Silva in conversation with Jo Harrison
Jo Harrison: You paint from photographs and you’ve mentioned before about how they are helpful in slowing time down, particularly in a world where we are so increasingly time-poor and have an attention deficit. You describe it as a discipline of looking or focusing.
Mike Silva: Yes, I’ve even stopped projecting images, I’ve started gridding up, which slows the process down even more. It’s an old traditional form of ‘blowing-up’ an image. When I used to project, not only was I saving time, I was also controlling the image more, by cropping it, for example. But taking the time to draw the image onto the canvas square-by-square, the focus is on the whole image. The gridding part is almost the most enjoyable aspect of the painting process because keeps me in a suspension with the work.
At some point in time you have taken these photographs of people and places. Was it always with the intention of painting the images at a later date, or was it more about capturing a moment?
The latter. It’s always been about capturing the spirit of a moment. All of these photos have been taken pre-mobile phone and it was more about recording my friends, my lovers, my environment. Not as a conscious biography or visual diary but it’s just always been something I’ve done since I was a kid; as a way of remembering. I moved around a lot when I was young. So, it became about a way of anchoring where I was at a particular time.
How do you decide which photographs become paintings?
I sit with them for a long time. Some of those images are 15 years old, but in a way, you can give them a present tense cohesion. Looking at an old photograph, it’s rooted in nostalgia, and it can be potentially quite sentimental, but I think when you paint it, you’re giving it a ‘here and now’ feeling that everyone can lock into or relate to.
There is something extraordinarily tender about the way you paint, and you approach your canvas with a lovingness and warmth. But you are always working from both a combination of a photograph, as well as your memory of the moment the photograph was taken, and the person or place captured within.
When I was at college, I did all these portraits of my partner and my friends and I was kind of embarrassed about the intimacy and the tenderness of them – cos the music I listen to is quite harsh, quite aggressive, quite ‘fuck you’, and I always wanted to make work like that too. But looking back, some of that ‘fuck you’ music is just concealing something quite soft and tender anyway. I’d go to these hardcore punk shows in the ‘90s and everyone was always really up front and there was always this feeling of togetherness and affection, but then I would go to gay clubs and it would be the opposite. You’d have Sister Sledge full volume live on stage and yet it would be very malevolent. I was speaking to some friends about this recently, and they said, “yeah, well, it’s that gay rage”. On the outset, stereotypically, gay people are seen as being ‘soft’, but what they project is tough. So, you’re seeing this unexpected inversion of two ostensibly opposing cultures; and I think I was battling with that dichotomy a lot in my practice.
You’ve spoken before about anonymity vs. intimacy, in terms of meeting people, but the photograph-turned-painting makes an otherwise fleeting encounter become more significant.
The painting is also just like a mask because you’re experience of someone when you only meet them in a park or in a sauna, for example, remains surface-level. Some of these guys I photographed because I liked the way they looked, their clothes, their style. I used to carry this clunky Pentax K1000 as a kind of surrogate weapon – in case I got attacked – but also if there was the right opportunity or the light looked amazing, I would ask them if I could take their photo, and they’d always say yes. It used to be an event to photograph someone. And I still use my camera today to take photos instead of my phone, it’s a different experience and creates a much better editing process that I prefer; one which feels more personal.
Earlier you used the words ‘nostalgic’ and ‘sentimental’ to describe your work. Most artists would avoid those terms but you seem quite comfortable thinking of your work like that.
I think it’s something that is very personal to me. But hopefully, when other people look at my paintings, they have a different experience of the work. A photographic image always holds a kind of sadness about it, because it is taken in a moment that doesn’t exist anymore. Years ago, I was wanting to pursue a much more abstract language, but it felt too forced. And now I’ve come full circle, and returned to a practice that feels more truthful. Even if it’s taken a major life event for me to be confident – or at least comfortable – enough to show my vulnerability. When I was making those abstract paintings, I thought I was being really expressive and not at all self-conscious, but looking back, they are soself-conscious; and in fact, I’m making the same decisions with the photo-like paintings but being much less aware of them. There are painterly elements in the clothing, or the foliage – it’s all there – but I have the construct of a photograph to forget about those images being too forced.
You’ve found your groove. There’s an element of decision making involved in your painting process, but a huge part is also just trusting your instinct, and believing in what you know you’re good at and what you enjoy doing.
Using a photograph means that you are always remembering, but through the process of painting, you are also just forgetting and focussing on the practical task at hand, you’re doing what you’re good at.
There’s a vulnerability to your work that happens twofold: the first is that you, as an artist, are exposing your life to your audience, because everyone in these paintings are people that you have known, whether as friends, lovers or in fleeting moments. Secondly, there is the vulnerability of the person you’ve photographed and painted, as your subjects, these men – and their masculinity – are being exposed.
But they are also gay, black men, so this is amplified. Robert Mapplethorpe was huge in the ‘80s for his images of, primarily black, men. There was so much objectification going on there, but they were also incredibly beautiful, formal, photographs. The men that I paint are always known to me, but as someone who is mixed-race, I’ve always grown up being aware of otherness. The mixed-race experience is a very strange one, I almost feeling like I’m floating between identities. And friends who I have spoken to, whether from West Indian or Asian heritage, have also expressed this conflict, of feeling simultaneously very British but also not British at all.
Besides painting people who you know, a large number of your works are actually of interiors or domestic spaces – places that you’ve either lived at some point or that has a personal relevance to you.
Well I’m still part of that Short Life Housing Co-op, so we used to get moved around a lot. We lived all over Westminster for nothing. But I always had my camera on me, so if the light was right or the environment just looked a particular way, I would document it. I still photograph the washing up, or my kitchen, the bedroom, it’s just a sort of ongoing project.
I lived in Canada until I was 6, and me and my brother used to play in this ravine near the house, and I remember my mother always taking photos of the area because it was under development, and it used to make me so sad, even as a kid looking at these pictures. And now, it still makes me feel sad, because she captured this moment and you know that it’s all changed. Jon Savage perfectly encapsulated this in his photos of London in the ‘70s, the empty streets and corrugated fencing: they’re deeply melancholic. Sometimes I would return to places that were interesting to me, for example, Finsbury Park cruising grounds, because I would often take pictures when I wasn’t meeting guys. But whenever I went back solely to take photographs it was never quite the same.
What’s the difference between taking and looking at photographs as a way to remember or record a particular moment and your specific memory of that moment? Because memory is fallible, so even if we think we remember an event or a person accurately, a photographic image – being more objective – could undermine that memory.
Memory and longing is something we project onto an image. The photographic image is rooted in the time and place that it was taken – it is fixed to that specific moment. Whereas a painting can appear to always seem in the present, because it’s been divorced from the exact point in time it originally refers to; it has a more universal quality. I paint wet into wet, and although I love colour, sometimes it can be too attention-grabbing, so I like to keep it subtle by adding white to all the colours I work with. This creates a milky or hazy quality to the surface, which perhaps reveals that I’m paintings from the past, even if I’m not intentionally trying to make the image look worn out.
It’s not healthy always looking back to the past, but we have a strong desire to remember. I don’t know exactly who said it, but I read this quote in Fugitive Daysby Bill Ayres where someone said that “remembering is a way of forgetting”. It’s a very romantic book even though he’s recounting some quite horrific events. That quote has always stuck in my head, because it’s definitely possible to use remembering as a way of working through things, as a cathartic process, as a way of letting go.
Mike Silva was born in Sandviken, Sweden in 1970. He lives and works in London.
Week 28. Henri Bergson. Time
I came across Henri Bergson from the book "Time," Edited by Amelia Groom. Documents of Contemporary Art. I am fascinated by the way that Begson looks at time, and his disagreements with Newton. From what I understand he sees time as movement through space, and that it can't be broken up into segments of seconds, minutes hours.
Trying to gain more understanding about what Bergson thought about time, I found a discussion about him from Radio 4. This was hugely helpful, as his thinking seems quite complicated.
In Our Time: S21/34 Bergson and Time (May 9 2019) Radio 4 with Melvin Bragg. Discussion with With Keith Ansell-Pearson, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Emily Thomas, Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Durham University; and Mark Sinclair, Reader in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton. Producer: Simon Tillotson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pK8N47RFRd8
Week 28. Virginia Woolf
I have found Virginia Woolf’s work really insightful in the way that she deals with time. In “A Room of One’s Own,” Virginia Woolf talks about the women poets and writers gone before, paving the way for the women after. But it’s more than that, it’s like the past melts into the future and is still part of the future. “Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote…She lives in you and me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences…” For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking of the body of people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice. This has been helpful whilst I mull over my thoughts about the layering of time.
Week 29. Caroline Walker
Taken from and interview by Alisei Apollonio.
https://www.artuner.com/insight/an-interview-with-caroline-walker/
Caroline Walker: "I’ve always been interested in the performance of identity, in particular that of femininity, both in the roles that women occupy within society, and more recently in the labour market. Housekeeping is a profession dominated by women and there is certainly something performative in the repetitive routine of cleaning, changing bed sheets and removing all traces of human presence from each room, ready for the next inhabitant. It’s largely an invisible performance though as the very nature of the job is that they are designed to be unseen. The maid spends time carefully cleaning around the possessions of the hotel guest in the space of their temporary home, but the two are destined never to meet.
Photography allows me to record information in environments which wouldn’t allow painting or drawing from life. It also creates distance between my subjects and I, and allows me to frame the experience. The hundreds of photographs take on a life of their own back in the studio with the resulting paintings generated through a mixture of this record of time spent in another’s company, my memory and the process and materiality of paint itself. It is in this materiality that the paintings have the ability to make the inconsequential fleeting moment in the daily routine of cleaning in to something more significant. The process of painting, with its inherent labour and investment of time, can take the snapshot and extend it, slowing down our encounter and imbuing it with meaning.
Floors Room 324. Caroline Walker. 2018.
Tarh 11am cropped. Caroline Walker
These two paintings feel very different to me. The first painting makes me feel as if I am spying, and the second as if I am more of a guest and that I am invited in. I think it has to do with the point at which I am standing as the viewer. This is helpful to think about in my own work- where do I want people to join with my painting?
https://vimeo.com/72667937 Here Caroline Walker talks about her work for an exhibition, "In every Dream Home."
What I found interesting was that she had brought historical references into her painting, and references to the building it was displayed in. There is far more going on than just copying a photo. I also found it interesting that she let the viewer bring his or her own explanation to it, and the meaning could change depending on who was looking at the painting. Was it Banal? Was it sexual? Was it sinister?
In her latest series of paintings, Janet, Caroline Walker focuses on her mother, as she goes about her daily tasks; cooking, cleaning, tidying and tending the garden of the Fife home where the Scottish artist spent her childhood.
Despite the mundane activities of her subject, the artworks are tender, moving and force us to consider our own mothers; the sacrifices they've made and how they won't be around forever, for those of us still lucky to have them in our lives.
Born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1982, Walker has become known for her striking canvases of women, specifically of women at work. These fragmented narratives, glimpses of women going about their lives in both public and private environments, begin as photographic snaps (often taken covertly) which are later worked up into lustrous, luminous oil paintings. They are sometimes playful, but can also be challenging, documenting the myriad social, cultural, economic, racial and political factors that affect women's lives today.
Walker's paintings offer both an intimate insight and a voyeuristic vantage point. As art historian and curator, Marco Livingstone puts it "much of the effectiveness of Walker's paintings arises from the fact that as a spectator one is simultaneously looking into other people's lives and putting oneself in their place".
On show at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh this June, a book illustrating all the works in this series (with an introduction by the critic Hettie Judah) will also be published to coincide with the exhibition. Janet by Caroline Walker, runs from 13 June until 12 September 2020.
I find it interesting that even though this is the artist's mother and home, the paintings still feel very voyeristic, and as if you are spying. It feels intrusive to be looking at these scenes and not easy and comforting.
Week 30. David Hockney
I have love watching interviews with David Hockney about his recent portraits. It has tied in with my thoughts on humans being all the same, yet all different. He painted all his portraits from real life in 3 days.
https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/david-hockney-portraits
Week 30. Mark Entwisle
I have been looking at Mark Entwisle's website. I am particularly interested in his drawings from life.