Saturday 29 July 2017

Work In Progress: 'This S(c)epic Isle' . 'Fridge Door Paintings' 1




'Fridge Door Painting' (Work In Progress), Acrylics & Mixed Media On 
Salvaged Refrigerator Door, July 2017



I’ve all but given up hoping that 2017 will start feeling less like hard work.  For whatever reason - this year has so far been largely characterised by a lack of urgency and dynamism.  A suitable word to describe the overall sensation might be ‘lacklustre’.  Nevertheless, although my artwork might have slowed a bit, it has remained extant (and relatively steady).  The various ideas and nascent projects I identified at the start of the year all still feel more or less ‘live’ in my own mind, even if I’m forced to acknowledge that there’s only ever time (or energy) to address a small part of it all.  Anyway, the arrival of the blessed educational summer break helps a lot in that respect, so it feels like time for another work-in-progress post.



'Fridge Door Paintings' (Work In Progress), Acrylics & Mixed Media On 
Salvaged Refrigerator Doors, July 2017


As implied above, my current habit is to mentally organise my work (or projected work) into discrete projects, each with its own themes or implied agenda.  It may be an unnecessarily anal approach, but does allow me to prioritise without feeling overwhelmed by all the thought of all the stuff I might (but aren’t) doing at any given time.  For the time being, the main focus remains on my ‘This S(c)eptic Isle’ project [1.].





I’ve already shown some ofthe initial ‘Flag’ pieces belonging to it, and alluded to the extended found text piece which triggered it all in the first place.  Undoubtedly, the initial stimulus for the project was my feelings of disillusionment/bafflement/anger around the E.U. referendum, and the wider contexts of rising Nationalism, ignorance, division and misguided or pernicious agendas swirling around it.  However, whichever side of that particular fence one falls on, it feels more like a symptom of a much wider psycho-sociological situation, than just the single, identifiable cause of all our current ills.  In reality, technological acceleration, the joined-up nature of our digital age, the logics of Capitalism and trade, and an increasingly insecure environment, all make the fraught negotiation between the global and the parochial feel like an inescapable theme of the century.


'Fridge Door Painting' (Work In Progress), Acrylics & Mixed Media On 
Salvaged Refrigerator Door, July 2017


In my mind at least, ‘This S(c)eptic Isle’ is evolving into a kind of wider address on the current ‘state of things’, with a very clear parochial connect – but hopefully with a strand of implied self-critique of such localism built-in.  Perhaps a more apt descriptor would be ‘The State Of Things (Round Our Way)’ [2.].  With my local hat firmly screwed down, it’s perhaps worth noting that the neighbourhood I inhabit provides plenty of raw material for all this - being a once-productive tract of ‘working class’, inner city habitation.  It now presents as a relatively down-at-heel mélange, comprising lingering vestiges of that older population; immigrants from several continents; white-van tradesmen; gig-workers; low-paid carers and public sector workers; the opportunistic; the ‘Just About Managing’; and the Grimly Hanging On.  It’s neither wasteland or conflict zone as such, but is certainly sufficiently frayed and torn to reflect many of the societal tensions or challenges of 21st Century Britain.




It also provides the resonant motifs around which ‘TSI’ is increasingly coalescing.  If my early adoption of (and visual violence to) the flag motif is a pretty blunt, (and possibly trite) instrument, some of the others feel a little more potentially nuanced. It’s my hope that they might tend slightly more to the allusive than the merely polemical.  The current list would include: discarded white goods (particularly refrigerators), furnishings and household goods; abandoned children’s toys; cardboard boxes (and street trash generally), white vans (certain other colours are permissible); the empty silver capsules of laughing gas enthusiasts; and (a possible new addition, this -) mopeds.  Each is in plentiful supply, and a short walk round the block with the camera, on any given day, will generally throw up new examples.




Each category feels feels freighted with potential associations, and totemic of the way we live.  The common themes of refuse, ‘street-disposal’, and of stuff being discarded generally, can’t really be ignored.  Whether this reflects a sense of disenfranchised populations, lost generations, discarded values, voracious consumerism, or disposable and low-grade aspirations – I’ll leave open to interpretation.  More optimistic spectators might also see evidence of a still (partially) functioning society, in which the local council will (eventually) send a street sweeper or a truck to remove some of the pavement debris, or a scrap-merchant might do the same, in the hope of lucrative recycling (and with slightly greater alacrity).


West Leicester, July 2017


Most specifically, the images here all relate to discarded fridges, and the fact that photographing them quickly led to the realisation I might salvage their doors to act as actual painting supports.  If more interpretive clues where to be offered, they might include ideas about ‘preservation’ generally; about fluctuating occupancy and the provision of ‘mod cons’ and ‘affordable’ accommodation; reluctance or inability to pay the costs of appropriate disposal, insights into the way we eat (or ‘Just Eat’); or even some perceived ambiguity in the term, ‘White Goods’. 


West Leicester, May 2017

West Leicester, July 2017


Anyway, If Jasper Johns is a pretty obvious influence on the early flags, and Robert Rauschenberg – on the idea of street trash, generally, Richard Prince’s repurposed car hoods body panels and van doors should be acknowledged in connection with the fridge doors.  The obvious difference however, is that I choose to treat them more as image-carriers, rather than as wholly sculptural entities - as he has.  Either way, the last few weeks have seen me periodically amassing a small collection of them, before stripping away the unwanted interior elements, and renovating/prepping/priming the exterior surfaces.  With the arrival of the school holidays, I’m finally able to get on with resolving the actual imagery they will carry.




Sketchbook Pages, May - June 2017

Have I been unconsciously delaying the arrival of this stage? – I now ask myself.  It’s noticable that my recent return to working fairly diligently in a sketchbook (something I’d essentially ignored for a couple of years, of late) has somewhat slowed my progress – even as it proves invaluable in ordering my thoughts and considering my options.  It is, I’m convinced, a ‘grown-up’ way to develop ideas and imagery.  However, I also realise that using it to generate well-resolved images, for faithful transcription as larger, final pieces, is no longer really the most rewarding way to work.  If the sketchbook documents my internal monologue, the actual work flows better when many of the final judgments are reserved.  These days, the most meaningful resolutions feel like they’re achieved through chance events and the accumulation of happy accidents, and within the arena of an actual piece [3.].  Those breakthroughs feel more exciting – and are definitely stumbled upon more spontaneously (and rapidly).



Sketchbook Pages, June 2017


Could all this also be why many artists remain taciturn when asked what their work is about, or what it ‘means’?  Regardless of the interpretive hints above, it’s often all this procedural stuff that really comes to fill our heads.  Sometimes it simply means, “Finally, I’ve managed to arrive at something I could bear to stick on the wall – I wonder how, exactly”.  I’m not even at that stage with these.  For now it’s simply a case of , “Oh, these feel reasonably encouraging – I think I can imagine what I might do to complete them.”  We’ll see…


West Leicester, May 2017




[1.]:  This whole internal wrangle over how to word/spell this title continues, even though I thought I’d sorted it in my own mind. (Told you nothing feels easy this year).  Spotting the difference between British and American spellings of ‘Sceptic’/’Skeptic’ is all well and good, but doesn’t excuse the illiterate assumption that ‘Sceptic’ and ‘Septic’ are both spelled the same way.  So, the brackets are back, and now it’s ‘S(c)eptic’.  Am I just trying too hard with all these word games?

[2.]:  Again with the blinkin’ brackets!

[3.]:  And so - despite any professed aspirations to a greater element of conceptualism in my work, it seems that, in this respect, my natural inclination is more towards the organic, intuitive approach of painting.  You can drive yourself mad debating such stuff.  In the end, it’s better to just get on with being whatever kind of artist you can be – instead of mithering about what you think you should be. 



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Sunday 23 July 2017

Couched 11



West Leicester, April 2017


Tubers are long to long-oval and have good skin finish.  In the final of the competition, the contestants must negotiate a demanding navigation test, and to add to the pressure, their driving skills are under scrutiny.  It has good chipping potential particularly early in the season.  However, the road restrictions and ban on Sat Navs quickly take their toll.  Next, the camping enthusiasts take on the hospitality challenge to common scab, powdery scab, spraing, mild mosaic virus and slugs, with Caravan Club Chairman Grenville Chamberlain, motorhome journalist Andy Harris, and guest judge Martin Dorey appraising their efforts before selecting the winner.







Wednesday 19 July 2017

Tempus Fidget




Pink Floyd, 'Time'.  From The Album: 'The Dark Side Of The Moon', Harvest, 1973




Seaford Mods, 'Time Sands' (Live).  From The Album: 'English Tapas', Rough Trade, 2017



Charles Baudelaire, 'The Clock'


"The Clock! a sinister, impassive god
Whose threatening finger says to us: 'Remember!
Soon in your anguished heart, as in a target,
Quivering shafts of Grief will plant themselves;

Vaporous Joy glides over the horizon
The way a sylphid flits into the wings;
Each instant eats a piece of the delight
A man is granted for his earthly season.

Three thousand and six hundred times an hour
The Second sighs, Remember! Suddenly
That droning insect Now says: I am Past
And I have sucked your life into my nostril!

Esto memor! Remember! Souviens-toi!
(My metal throat speaks out in a every language)
Don't let the minutes, prodigal, be wasted
They are the ore you must refine for gold!

Remember, Time is greedy at the game
And wins on every roll! perfectly legal.
The day runs down; the night comes on; remember!
The water-clock bleeds into the abyss.

Soon sounds the hour when Chance the heavenly,
When Virtue the august, eternal virgin,
When even (oh! your last retreat) Repentance,
Will tell you: Die old coward! it's too late!'"


Charles Baudelaire, 'The Clock', From: 'Les Fleures Du Mal ('The Flowers Of Evil'), First Published: Paris, 1855-57, Trans. James McGowan, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993



Happy Birthday to me...



Tuesday 18 July 2017

Elided Views 3: Strategic Report




Central Nottingham, April 2017


Myth is a story that can be retold by anyone, with infinite variation, and still be recognisable as itself. The outline of surviving myth is re-recognised in the lives of each generation, in a parade of receding illumination.  The Board remains focused on ensuring that the Group’s risk management and internal control systems are effective in underpinning robust decision-making on major activities, but the odds against winning are incredible.  It’s not a fairy story or a religious myth; it has no monsters, gods or wizards in it, only human beings. It’s not a parable. In place of a moral, it has a plan of action (the stillage of suffocating membranes).  The Board has continued to debate and develop its understanding of risk, risk appetite and tolerance, risk testing and how we can maximise our opportunities. (It Could Be You).  As we move forward, the Board’s challenge will be to oversee the integration of these systems with the Group’s strategic priorities as they continue to evolve.

The entry level for national myth is high. It’s not that the mythical hero must have some basis in historical fact: that might actually be an obstacle. It’s that any individual must be able to interrogate their own memory to assemble their own version of the myth.  Transparency is compromised, apparency - wrinkled.  The vast majority of our UK retail colleagues are already realising the opportunity to earn top quartile reward (Semi-Skimmed) with over 88% of the Executive Committee and UK retail colleagues at Work Levels 1–5 having the potential to earn upper quartile reward (2.272L).  A crazed starburst of damage emerges - A Little Better Everyday.  Rather than, as in the past, repairing the damage by some combination of tax increases and public spending - we are being prescribed cuts, cuts, cuts.  Fracturing is checked in plain sight.  Behind the twisted rhetoric of a hardworking majority oppressed by a welfare-mad government, a modern version of the medieval world has been constructed, one where the real poor are taxed more heavily than the rich (The Bagging Area).  This was a strong performance in a deflationary retail market and against a background of intense competition.

There is a cynical view which says that as long as the majority of the population feel they’re doing all right, a democratically elected government is safe to squeeze the poor and pamper the rich.  Every Little Helps.  If those who attempt to interpret the world do so only through the prism of professional thinkers, and ignore the persistence of myth in everyday thought and speech, the interpretations will be deficient. There is a shedding of skin and a caging of waste.  Three scenarios have been modelled, considered severe but plausible, that encompass these identified risks. None of these scenarios individually threaten the viability of the Company, therefore the compound impact of these scenarios has been evaluated as the most severe stress scenario.  Insofar as bandits have a ‘programme’, it is the defence or restoration of the traditional order of things ‘as it should be’ (which in traditional societies means as it is believed to have been in some real or mythical past).  Various contra-indicators point the way.




Sunday 16 July 2017

Elided Views 2: Cloud Of Unknowing




All Images:  Digbeth, Birmingham, June 2017

We are pleased to be returning in April for the next session of our working group on further and higher education.  Distant bulbs glow inside a tank of Information, whilst a floating lock secures the truncated Entrance.  We do a lot of work for some of the UK’s biggest digital, marketing and advertising agencies under a white label basis, so most of this we can’t disclose.  There is a small Push against translucency, and a mocking reversal floats beyond.  We urge all those working within the creative sector to join the Federation and support their superb work.





The VR market is going to grow at a rapid rate and it is estimated that by 2020 there will be some sort of VR device in most homes.  An apparition has materialised amidst leather seating and designer lighting, and high-quality hardwood flooring is employed throughout.  Inside Out tracking will get rid of the reliance on a hefty PC and the sensors as it will all be contained within the VR headset itself – nobody wants to accidently kick the cat/dog or trip over anything while doing this! This should also keep the cost down for anyone wanting to get the full Room Scale experience.






An anchor-point rises amidst curls of tape and the detritus of vacation.  The new studio is due to open in September, with the fit-out of the office space currently underway.  Also, an empty space is required to safely navigate the VR world.  The Fragile contents are boxed up beneath the desk.  If you wanted to duck under a table in a VR world then the user simply ducks with their own body and the VR sensors will pick up the movement and replicate it in the VR world.





Traditional leaded panes can be protected behind sheets of clear acrylic, but it is still necessary to highlight stray bullet holes.  This is fine as gamers are often the adopters of early technology and games are perfect for a platform like VR.  Augmented Reality is also looking very promising and I believe the mix of both VR and AR will be built into most new headsets over the next few years.  Elliptical balconies hover over the façade - like a retro-futurist mirage.  It’s kind of tricky to explain fully, but take a look at this video to see the full potential of Mixed Reality…