Everyone's Got A Friend Called...

(Don't let 'em grind you down).

Completed 'Risk Assessment 6: Fill Your Lungs'

'Risk Assessment 6:  Fill Your Lungs', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper, 60 cm X 45 cm, 2013

Here’s the latest of my paper-based ‘Risk Assessment’ pieces, completed earlier this week.  It’s No.6 in this occasional series, begun at the start of the year, and utilises the same general format, hazard ‘candy stripe’ motifs and grungy text elements as the previous five.  As before, the text implies a potential hazard to life or wellbeing with the unwritten preamble, ‘They Will…’

I’ve already alluded to the way these visual outbursts tend to reflect my anger or frustration at human behaviour and the machinations of the powerful, as relayed to us via the news media.  Mostly, I suppose, they are a protest against the sense of powerlessness many of us habitually feel, and an attempt at some form of catharsis.  I’m sure it hardly needs spelling out that ‘Risk Assessment 6: Fill Your Lungs’ is another response to the routine atrocities being acted out in Syria of late.

Certainly, the ‘Risk Assessments’ are far more direct than anything else I do at the moment and pictorially, little more than simple carriers for text.  In that respect, I suppose they look toward the more polemical intent of an artist like Bob & Roberta Smith in his sign painting mode.  I wouldn’t want everything I do to be this politically, satirically or sociologically engaged but sometimes it is a relief to just get things off my chest, (and out of my head).  

The other thing about them is that, (by my standards), they are generally produced quite quickly.  In a frustrating year, when my artistic progress has been steady but a bit ponderous, it feels good to have just rattled out a couple of these in fairly short order.

Home Comforts

In every dream home...

...a heartache. [1.]



[1.]:  Roxy Music, 'In Every Dream Home A Heartache', (B. Ferry), BMG Songs Ltd., 1973

One Thing Leads To Another: The Paintings Of Stewart Geddes

Stewart Geddes, 'Vellanoweth', (Media & Date Unknown).

As I've remarked before, it's all about making connections.  A couple of posts back, I mentioned artist and writer Stewart Geddes in relation to an interview he conducted with painter Albert Irvin [1.].  I came across that, purely by accident, after an impulse purchase of 'Turps Banana' Magazine.  A little more research revealed that he is, indeed, the same Stewart Geddes who was in the year above me on the Fine Art course at Bristol Polytechnic, back in the 80s, and also turned up his website featuring his impressive paintings and photographs.

Stewart Geddes, 'Praa', (Media & Date Unknown).

Stewart was a cheerful presence and a positive influence around the studios at Bower Ashton and stood out as seriously committed to his work, at a time when some of us were mostly dithering about without much of a clue.  Thinking back, he was actually part of a fairly impressive year including several other students who were already producing much stronger, more ambitious work than I could aspire to just then.

Stewart Geddes, 'Cascade Of Dissolution', (Media & Date Unknown).

Stewart Geddes, 'Choone', (Media & Date Unknown).

I also remember that Stewart had already taken on a little teaching work, even at that early stage, and that he drove something, (possibly an old Austin 1300?), called ‘Ghengis Car’.  I spent an enjoyable Christmas Day in his shared Redland flat one year and was impressed to find that, when we returned on Boxing Day to finish off the leftovers, Stewart was already back at work with his painting.  At the time, he was producing pleasing, scrubby paintings of Bristol’s architecture and crazily angled streets.  They were primarily tonal but full of delightful nuance within their very muted palette.  The dry, broken brushwork felt redolent of aging masonry and crumbling render.

Stewart Geddes, 'Still', (Media & Date Unknown).

Reading his online C.V., it comes as little surprise that Stewart went on to carve out an impressive-sounding career as a painter, writer and educator and has exhibited on numerous occasions.  In contrast, I lost belief in any abilities I may have had, spending several years going nowhere slowly, before eventually finding some kind of ham-fisted outlet for my own creative impulses within a purely commercial arena.  Throughout that period, I always had the sense there was something I’d forgotten to do.  It’s something that, thankfully, is now being rectified as my own work has gradually achieved a renewed momentum albeit rather late in the day.  I now recognise that, (as Stewart probably knew all along), confidence, belief and a determination to stick in for the long haul, are the most valuable assets any artist can possess.

Stewart Geddes, Untitled Photograph, (Date Unknown).

Stewart Geddes, 'Circulation', (Media & Date Unknown).

So, it is pleasing to discover that there are some correspondences between the concerns in Stewart’s current paintings and photographs, and some of my own.  I won’t pretend my own work gets anywhere near the refinement and accomplishment of his but, clearly, we both share an enthusiasm for degraded surfaces, (both in paintings and the wider world), text fragments, graphic motifs and compositional geometry.  Like me, he is obviously also a connoisseur of tattered advertising hoardings.  Stewart’s work displays a sophisticated and highly seductive facility with colour and the kind of compositional courage that comes from years of diligent picture making.

Stewart Geddes, Untitled Photograph, (Date Unknown).

I take encouragement from his stated belief in the idea of 'simple and strongly designed paintings'.  I’m also interested to see that, after years of observing and responding to his surroundings directly, he has arrived at an essentially abstract place that still refers to them obliquely.

Stewart Geddes, 'Balnoon', (Media & Date Unknown).

Who knows?  If I’m granted another twenty or thirty years, perhaps I’ll get somewhere near that level myself…

[1.]:  'Stewart Geddes In Conversation With Bert Irvin', London, 'Turps Banana', Issue 13, Spring 2013

In Nottamun Town

Nottingham, September 2013

After I’d finished viewing the ‘Aquatopia’ exhibition discussed in my recent post, I wandered out the back door of Nottingham Contemporary with my camera to explore views of the city’s adjacent transport infrastructure.

Looking Back Toward Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham, September 2013

Nottingham, September 2013

There’s a small pocket of territory just behind the gallery that represents exactly the kind of multi-layered city environment to which I’m habitually drawn and is dominated by the interaction between two busy road junctions and a major elevated section of Nottingham’s tram network.  I was drawn both to both the rather scruffy, interim world below the tramline and the complex of road signage, gantries, power lines and CCTV cameras on the upper level.  The views over the tramway towards the newish high-rise buildings beyond create exactly the kind of hard-edged, dynamic futurism beloved of planners and architects.

Beneath The Tramlines, Nottingham, September 2013

Back at lower ground level however, is a little zone of ramshackle small business and pre-war public housing that creates a completely different mood.  Inevitably, I’m now thinking about the photographs I didn’t take and contemplating repeat visits to document the juxtaposition of these different worlds in more detail. 

Broadmarsh Car Park, Nottingham, September 2013

Broadmarsh Car Park, Nottingham, September 2013

The third major strand running through all this is the way that the pedestrian routes are geared to direct foot traffic through the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre across the road.  I ended up taking an unwanted detour through this rather dated down-market mall (getting back almost to my starting point) just to get the view I wanted of hazard graphics around the car park entrance.  It seemed a perfect illustration of my developing ideas about how systems of movement and communication also become systems of control in the modern world.

Outbound Tram, Nottingham, September 2013

Inbound Tram, Nottingham, September 2013

I ended my little excursion by photographing the trams gliding in and out of their elevated tram stop.  It was another subject that cried out for moving imagery but, as I’ve just taken delivery of a half-decent video camera, that’s only a matter of time.  I just need to learn how to use the blinkin’ thing properly now.

Nottingham, September 2013

Completed 'Risk Assessment 5' / Masters Of War

'Risk Assessment 5: Bomb Your Town', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper,
60 cm X 45 cm,  2013.

Honestly, they never cease to amaze me.  In the three weeks since I completed my recent ‘Cave Wall' paintings, our own vainglorious leaders nearly plunged us into yet another war and the twisted games of psychotic geopolitical brinkmanship, centred on The Middle East, carry on apace.  Do these maniacs never get bored of all this murderous nonsense?  Depressingly, it all just seems to justify George Orwell’s dystopian vision of a state of perpetual foreign war maintaining the position of those in power at home [1.].

It seemed an obvious time to return to my paper-based ‘Risk Assessment’ pieces.  This occasional series forms a separate stream from the ongoing ‘Belgrave Gate Project’, on which I’ve largely focused of late.  Their texts tend to be more direct, fairly rapidly produced, and mostly an expression of the frustration and anger that generally overtake me whenever I listen to the radio news.  Like those that preceded it, it reflects my attraction to Health & Safety graphics and includes a text implying an existential hazard to which anyone might be subjected and that actually would benefit from a risk assessment.  Of course, they never do, despite the plethora of H&S legislation applied to almost every other aspect of modern life.  The implication is that each sentence might begin ‘They Will…’, with ‘They’ remaining undefined.

I think 'Risk Assessment 5: Bomb Your Town', speaks for itself but, just in case there’s any confusion, here’s a list of those for whom I have zero respect just now:

• Psychopaths who use chemical weapons of any sort, (including Sarin, Napalm and White Phosphorus).

• Sickos who think it’s OK to drop incendiary devices on schools.

• Hypocritical, self appointed, ‘global policemen’ who think the appropriate response to a war atrocity is to add their own bombs and missiles to an existing UNHOLY mess.

• Fanatical religionists who gleefully exploit regional conflict to pursue their own twisted sectarian agendas. 

• ‘Free World Democrats’ who bemoan foreign conflicts whilst relying on them to sustain the arms industry on which their own Capitalist economies rely.

• Morally vacuous politicians who indulge in war-mongering to improve their electoral chances.

• Cowards who speak of ‘surgical strikes’ but shelter in safety far from the ‘theatre of war’.

• Simpletons who believe that wars have goodies and baddies, or that ‘We’ must always be the good guys and can act autonomously without serious analysis of a situation.

• The constructors of a weird hierarchy of horror in which chemical weapons are somehow less noble than terrifying ‘conventional weapons’ (or, indeed, nuclear arms), when, for the victims, the ultimate result is generally the same.

'Art Everywhere No. 47 (Bob & Roberta Smith, 'Make Art Not War'), Poster,  Nottingham,
September 2013.

Frankly, they can all go to Hell in a handcart.  It’s just a shame they always try to take the rest of us with them.

(…Just saying).

[1.]:  George Orwell, ‘1984’, London, Secker & Warburg, 1949.