Key Points: David Auborn http://www.davidauborn.com/recent-paintings
Visit to see Guston at the Tate, Sarah's private view https://sarahwatsonfineart.com and Giles's open studio https://artcoreint.net/index.html
Further Research / exhibitions visited - Podcasts listening this week : Painters today: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/painters-today/id1438550153 - Simon Carter, Alex Hanna and Biggs and Collins
Simon carters work I find to be honest and direct, pure and industriously worked. In the podcast he talks about his practice - which involves extensive drawing from his local area, which is coastal. He talks about the practice of painting and that the paint has a life which he is part of when he is working. I love the way his paintings are made and there is such a pure expressive nature to them. The swimmers appeared to me after having made recent work from the starts of an open water event/ triathlon where their is a melee of arms and bodies - however SC's work is of the trepidation that one feels when stepping into the cold water and how he has painted them as lumps!
Collings & Biggs podcast was a fascinating insight into the dynamics of working together on their paintings and murals.
Gallery visit to Philip Guston TATE MODERN 7 Oct
Notes from sketchbook ;
"probably the only thing one can really learned the only take me to learn is the capacity to change
as I make my way through the exhibition, the paintings go from being fairly straightforward to them. When you get to room four, they start to become more abstract expressionist. Heck, he's mentioned that he likes pastrami and his paintings begin to start to look like red pastrami.
Hoods start to appear and he begins to make a narrative work about the horrors of the world. It is in the world that the evil of theKKK hood. He also starts to create work which is inspired partly by cartoons and so you have to be interesting polarity of such serious social issues against cartoons. He talks about suffering from night terrors due to the concerns and the worries she has about the unjust world such as the Holocaust influences on his work and the evil clearly in America. Butterbean cyclops is. I am struck by the purity & directness of his painting, and his use of imagery ( which I find slightly incongruous) but it seems to work somehow.
Capturing the moment exhibition TATE Modern
The other show that I found interesting was the Photography show Capturing the moment. This exhibition at the Tate explores the relationship between the paintbrush and lands, and how Artist returned to painting in photography, to capture moments in Time. The exhibition starts with responded to photography as it arrived on the scene and it moves through two questions about how photographs can be paintings and how they can be used as part of the process a picture making standout artist for me in this exhibition, where is Sugimoto Richter, gas obviously and most most exciting rooms for me where room five and six .
Studio Culture:
Fiona Rae presentation today with each of us having chosen an artist to make an investigation into the artists use of the studio and how they use the space. Rae's practice is a fairly contemporary affair, with her having a very large space which is divided into key areas for her to work, which include a large painting studio space, a digital and a collage space with a storage area. Key aspects of the research and what she says about her work: "21st Century painting – referencing the history of painting whilst embracing modern technologies such as Photoshop to aid the idea development "with her sampling modern imagery in her works - pandas, typographical elements and hong kong icons. Although she kinda gathers her sources everything is improvised, disruptive surfaces, use of rollers, calligraphic brushmarks and she talks of many failures and many paintings that haven't succeeded yet. Painting is a solitary practice with long hours and laborious time consuming sessions though she says "You get to invent a world and you get to be in charge of what happens in that world. And you don't really get to do that in life, do you?" Fiona's partner Dan Perfect also an artist, works in the same building and she talks about using him as a help with some of her painting decisions. Having met Rae in 2014 and seen the show with Perfect PainterPainter for this presentation I looked at several sources to understand her use of the studio. In the painters today podcast with Lucy Cox, Fiona talks about revisiting her practice and experimenting after that particular show where she had come to the end of something that she was exploring. She talks about going back to basics - charcoal drawing on paper, tustle between figurative and abstract, then leading into back and white paintings. She talks about trying to comprehend the world in her work, making paintings that are intriguing to others, and is contemporary. Her backrounds are built with swirling cloudy spaces, which she connects with the renaissance work such as Titian whre figures etc may appear out ofthe mist. Rae talks about wanting to add something new to painting, with the use of traditional oil painting, breaking rules and mixing up the digital contemporary and making work that is craft and hand made. Attention to the detail and the physical must be key to the work, as painting cant be weilding a blunt intrument. Reference to the loneliness of a painter, coming back to the studio alone, a laborious activity that requires attention and ... Regarding her practice she talks at length about improvising in front of the canvas, that she will have parameters to work within - such as black and white and then she steps off into the unknown with the process of making and not knowing everything about what you are doing - Picasso sates" What is the point of doing something if yu know exactly what you are going to do". High failure rate, havent succeded yet - in teaching we used to say developing nicely, working towards or on the way... Using paper allows her to work things out quickly, pinning them up on walls whilst she is working on canvases, they become like spirit guides.. which she will look at sometimes, but wont necessarily be copied into her work.
Sources for Fiona Rae studio study : Lucy Cox painters today podcast, Lisson gallery youtube interview, painterpainter catalogue, Sanctuary,
David Auburn visiting artist http://www.davidauborn.com/recent-paintings
Very different to he previous artist, in that he has a painting space which is within Manchester University on studio fellowship. He is a kind of artist in residence. David's presentation was deep and dark and inspiring. His painting style has notably changed and most noted was the change in scale. His work has a surreal and organic quality, where one cannot work out what is being depicted, but know it's something we can recognise. The smaller work has been replaced with large scale ambitions paintings of bright and loud colours, with their subtleties, quite different to the previous work above. earlier paintings in the lecture I would describe as being subtle, surreal and abstract, images which were haunting and unclear as to what they actually were of. They had an organic feel, with subtle brushwork and overpainting and ambiguous. His most recent work, in great contrast to this were on a very large scale and were bright and very loud with strong colour clashes ( shown in pics). Spoke with David, when he came to the studio. We discussed paint surfaces, scale and using the images/ source materials in a range of ways. His work has gone from being relatively small scale works to large painting recently. His work too, has gone from muted and low key colours to now much louder and vibrant colours. Colour and using limited colour palettes were in our conversation and the prospect of painting figures life size.
At the end of play we then went up to the General practice studio in Lincoln - giving an insight into a real studio, after exploring Sanctuary studios of British artists. Andrews studio is here. Th practicalities of having a joint studio have been discussed within the discourse sessions but become very real when we visit GP. Heating, electrics, spaces, open studios are all discussed at length and are key considerations for an artist.
Martin Lang Facts and Feelings talk - Universal human emotion and existence in the work of Zarina Bhimji -
My work and anything inspiring....
Started work on risographs, kinda interested in separating the shapes from the line - through the process. Exploring layers and colour combinations. Starting with the charcoal drawing, i cleaned up the image in photoshop and this became the line element of the riso. The shape aspect I used was the image that I have been using with my painting in the studio, so has been through some bad printing and also some photoshop adjustments. Lining up the 2 image and cropping them into 2 seperate pdfs as preparation, with some experiments and changes to order and colour ended up with some exciting and successful images from the starting points.
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