Bram Bogart At White Cube, Mason's Yard, London

Bram Bogart, 'Binche', Mixed Media, 1984

I found myself down in London, with my friend, Susie, recently, and managed to fit in a visit to White Cube's Mason's Yard enclave - where the work of Bram Bogart is currently on show.  Dutch-born, and Belgian by adoption - Bogart is an artist I only discovered last Summer, at the end of another long day of gallery-going in London.  Although tired, and about to depart for home, I found myself pausing for a minute or two before one of his heavily-built monochrome paintings in a room of similarly all-white works at Tate Modern (you know I can't resist a white painting).  There was enough in it to make me want to know more, and it's fortuitous that the chance should come around so soon.

'Bram Bogart', White Cube, Mason's Yard, London, February 2020

Bram Bogart, 'Blanc De Brabant', Mixed Media, 1977

Bram Bogart, 'Briques Blanches', Mixed Media, 1992 (Detail Below)

Bogart seems to fit into a loose affiliation of abstract artists, along with Robert Ryman, or certain American Minimalists, who sought to investigate the very limits of what a painting might actually be, in material (and philosophical) terms, in the post-Abstract Expressionist period.  It's a mode of work which could, I suppose, represent that outdated idea of 'the end of painting', or at very least - a logical culmination of high Modernism, in the Greenbergian sense.  Certainly, Bogart's mature work, in which 'paint' is so heavily built as to really resemble a construction material, could be said to exist at the point where painting crosses over into sculpture - and in which the behaviour and formal organisation of material is the only real subject.

Bram Bogart, 'Windzand', Mixed Media, 1963

Bram Bogart 'La Ferme', Mixed Media, 1978 (Detail Below)

Bram Bogart 'Donker En Grijs', Mixed Media, 1962

Of course, events have long-since discredited that old, Avant-Garde notion of linear, mono-directional progress towards some kind of artistic singularity.  Painting resolutely refused to die as a means of expression, and the kind of extreme abstraction that Bogart's work represents, has duly slid in and out of fashion in order for that to occur.  What we must now recognise is that this kind of stuff is really just one of the myriad things that painting can do - and thus, no more or less valid than any other.  If it represents a limit of some kind, it's surely a border we can enjoy crossing and recrossing as the mood takes us - rather than being one we must traverse only once, never to look back.

'Bram Bogart', White Cube, Mason's Yard, London, February 2020

Bram Bogart, 'Printemps Neerlandais', Mixed Media, 1959

Bram Bogart, 'Linaabelina', Mixed Media, 1960

Actually, the other artist that most readily came to mind as I browsed with pleasure amongst the Bogarts, is Antoni Tapies.  The Spaniard is renowned for his resolute exploration of the ways that base materials (often handled in a singularly crude manner), might be transmuted into something with an almost spiritual resonance.  He often spoke of his practice in terms of alchemy, or with a philosophical gravitas verging on the mystical.  But, whatever else it may or may not have signified - much of Tapies artistic vision originated in the walls and rugged masonry found in the Gothic Quarter of his native Barcelona.

Bram Bogart 'Yello Jubel', Mixed Media, 1980 (Detail Below)

I'm not sure you can necessarily equate Bogart's work with the solemn profundities of Tapies' immense oeuvre, and there is a sometimes a candy-coloured playfulness about the former, that is completely lacking in the latter.  But there is, I think, a similar relish for the physicality of material, and a desire to explore its intrinsic qualities and transformative potential.  It seems no coincidence that the Dutchman started out as that other (and equally noble) kind of painter - a painter and decorator.  Whether articulated or not, such an apprehension is surely intrinsic to that particular trade.

Bram Bogart, 'Rondwit', Mixed Media, 1975

By mixing his pigments with oil, cement, plaster, and other similar ingredients, Bogart was able to concoct self-coloured pastes of such density that the effects of weight and gravity become key factors. in the appearance of a given piece.  Indeed, one of the primary themes of all these works is what happens when an extremely viscous liquid becomes a solid.  Even more specifically - they seem to catalogue exactly how much a material might sag or spread, or how much a churned or tooled surface might finally settle and pucker, as that extended moment unfurls.
  

Bram Bogart, 'Cristal Baroque', Mixed Media, 1959

In that respect, the paintings contain the history of their own making in the most direct and substantial manner possible.  They are both process and action-driven.  It's certainly true that they may chart a certain art-historical moment when pictorial composition was most reductive, or when a form of pictorial architecture aimed above all, to emphasise the physical extent of the picture plane as object.  But more urgently, they reach toward something far more primal, and yet simultaneously timeless.  They are really memorials to what happens when you get down there in the mud, and squeeze, spread or simply chuck it around in great big dollops.  And that never goes out of fashion.

Bram Bogart, 'Binche', Mixed Media, 1984 (Detail)

'Bram Bogart' continues until 7 March, at: White Cube, 25 - 26 Mason's Yard, London SW1Y 6BU

R.I.P. Andrew Weatherall

Andrew Weatherall, 1963 - 2020

And so, we lose another of the greats - far too early.  It is with sorrow I must mark the passing of DJ, musician, producer, and all-round Dance Music eccentric, Andrew Weatherall, who recently  died from a pulmonary embolism, at the age of 56 (56 - for crying out loud!).

Weatherall's work has been an important part of my own consciousness since I first became engaged by the layered productions, polyrhythms, repetitive beats, and overall sonic experimentation of 'Dance Music', back at the turn of the 1990s.  He seemed to have been there, as one of that scene's pillars of wisdom, from very early on, coming through the Punk and Post-Punk years as a youth, before involving himself in the new emerging forms in the best way possible - as an enthusiastic record collector.

If an element of vaguely punk-ish contrarianism hung about everything Weatherall would go on to do, his real guiding principle was the impulse to dismantle and fearlessly experiment with sounds that came from the great Jamaican Dub producers.  For many, that was first encountered via his reinvention, as a producer, on Primal Scream's 'Screamadelica' Album, in 1992.  It was a record that, I recall, seemed to get played everywhere that year.  It also  turned an under-achieving Indie guitar band into the epitome of what might happen when sullen white boys discover MDMA, stop just staring at the floor (or their guitar frets), and dare to dance.

With all due respect to 'The Scream', that album sits in Weatherall's discography, far more comfortably than in theirs, and kick-started a fruitful career as the go-to, cutting edge producer/remixer of the day.  Nonetheless, it's to Weatherall's credit that he eschewed the course of easy wealth and fame for diminishing returns that might have resulted - just as he would decline the equally available option of becoming an increasingly predictable 'superstar DJ'.  Instead, he went on to chart a far less orthodox, and far more creative, zig-zag path through Dub, House, Techno, and even a bizarre kind of Rockabilly/Dance hybrid thang (in which he even, gasp - sang!).  Above all, everything he turned his hand to, seemed to be done for the best of reasons, namely - that it interested him at the time, despite what anybody else thought.

As a result, exploring the best of his deeper cuts can lead to a slightly arduous search for deleted gems and over-priced rarities, albeit one that consistently repays the effort.  For what it's worth, my own personal favourites would be the two albums, 'Haunted Dancehall' (the pinnacle of his work with The Sabres of Paradise), and 'Stockwell Steppas' (with Keith Tenniswood, as Two Lone Swordsmen).  The first is a loosely conceptual, and often eerie, melange of sounds and references that other producers might only dream of.  It's also a perfect example of that rare beast - a great Dance album that actually hangs together as such.  The second is a wonderfully dry, endlessly satisfying, collision of Dub,Techno and  Deep House, that has rarely been far from my CD player - both at home and in the car, for decades now.

Search those two out, if nothing else - to know why Andrew Weatherall will be missed by everyone in the know, and why so many called him 'The Guv'nor'.  Trust me - you'll wish you'd heard them sooner.

John Walker: 'New Paintings' At Ikon, Birmingham

John Walker, 'Still Life I', Oil on Canvas, 2018

I was over in Birmingham recently, visiting my friend Andrew Smith, and found myself at Ikon, reacquainting myself with the paintings of John Walker, after nearly four decades.

Birmingham-born Walker seemed to have garnered quite a lot of favourable attention, around the time I was studying Fine Art, in the early 1980s.  And yet, as an abstract painter -  and one whose work was largely landscape-derived, it also felt like artistic fashion was fast leaving him behind.  Behind his roughly scumbled brushwork and clotted surfaces, and despite the suggestion of recessive or theatrical illusionistic space, in his work - the fact remained that Walker was rooted in the essential language of formal abstraction.  In 1982, when I was hesitantly moving in a similar direction, that could often feel like the increasingly obsolete language of a previous generation.

John Walker, 'Recent Paintings', January 2020

John Walker, (R) 'Passage', 2015 & (L) 'Ripple', 2017, Oil On Canvas

John Walker, (R) 'Nomad II', 2018 & (L) 'Looking In', 2017, Oil On Canvas 

A year earlier, Norman Rosenthal's massive 'A New Spirit In Painting' survey at The Royal Academy had laid down a pretty unmissable marker.  It covered a wide gamut of styles, and included not a few established names.  However, the message was still pretty clear: if painting was to contradict the 'painting is dead' brigade, in a world where photography and Conceptualism had apparently claimed the future - it wouldn't be by extending the legacy of Modernist abstraction, apparently.  I remember trudging round the Academy, wanting to be pleased by the sheer quantity of painting on offer, and yet simultaneously perplexed that there was so little of kind of stuff I had begun to identify with.  Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Delaunay, and assorted Cubists and colour-field painters, were my newly-found heroes -  but now, no one else seemed particularly interested in them.  Expressionism was definitely a thing, but it was the figurative, German kind - not the American abstract variety.  The figure definitely trumped landscape, where subject or sources were concerned.

John Walker, 'St John's Bay Red, Yellow, Blue', Oil On Canvas, 2011-18 (Detail Below)

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it's now possible to see how I was there, just as painting had taken an official right-turn into what became labelled Post Modernism.  At the age of 19, however, I rather lacked the perspective to appreciate that - taking it all rather too personally, instead - I fear.   When I discovered Walker, in the library of Bristol Polytechnic's Arts Campus, shortly afterwards, I was pleased to find a contemporary abstractionist of the kind I wanted to affirm, but equally disappointed to note he was already resorting to depicting skulls alongside his trademark folded planes.  They felt like corny shorthand for some synthetic, non-specific angst - and like he was suddenly trying to play catch-up, with a spot of fashionable cartoon voodoo.   And that was pretty much the last time I thought much about him - until I walked into Ikon, with Andrew, 38 years later.  

John Walker, 'Fishing With Tom And Les', Oil On Canvas, 2017

John Walker, 'Lowe Lode', Oil On Canvas, 2019

Well, the good news is, the skulls are gone (although replaced by the occasional cut-out fish), the language is once more, resolutely abstract, and the overall context - clearly landscape derived.  Ironically, though, it's now me that has come to accept that the natural landscape (be it Cornish coastline, or American desert), isn't really my subject at all - and that painting in its pure sense, isn't even really my first language any more.  But, enough about me - this is supposed to be about John Walker's painting.  This deep into his career (and indeed - his life) there seems to be some vindication, in this late work, of the idea of sticking to one's guns, or at least reconnecting with one's original motivations.

John Walker, (R) 'John's Bay Pollution', 2017 & (L) 'Ripple', 2017, Oil On Canvas 

As for the paintings themselves, there's clearly no lack of confidence or assertion there.  Walker evokes his current adopted home environment, on the New England coast, with a vocabulary of crudely-daubed  angular waveforms, parallel bands, wonky chequerboard grids, truncated ellipses, and those occasional dangling fish motifs.  Although distinctly maritime, the palette is bold and direct, sometimes reverting to a monochrome (or something close-to) scheme of largely unmixed colour - often contrasting with clean whites, and with an impact that might be described as emblematic.  There's a distinct echo of Jasper Johns or even Frank Stella in all those repeating rhythms of lines and alternating stripes - although they're being employed here for far more imitative, and far less conceptual reasons, it should be recognised.

John Walker, 'Tidal Change', Oil On Canvas, 2017

John Walker, 'Place', Oil On Canvas, 2018

For, what Walker is actually doing, is to both distill and compile his landscape experience into a collision of separate glimpses and impressions.  This is the kind of simultaneity first devised by Cezanne, before being fully capitalised upon by Braque, Picasso, and the subsequent waves of Cubists, who followed them.  It also feels related in some way (albeit - with far less west coast shimmer, or refined elegance) to Diebenkorn's distillations of a coastal landscape.  Actually, a more apposite connection might be with a painter like Peter Lanyon, whose synthesis of the Cornish landscape famously came from swooping over it in gliders, and whose energetic, looping calligraphy and sweeping painterly gestures captured, within them, both time and motion.  Like Lanyon, Walker eschews the horizontal skyline (the portrait orientation of these canvases is no accident), and all those repeating stripes and zig-zags must surely chart the endless rhythm of waves, possibly observed on separate tides, and subject to varying marine temperaments. 

However, whilst Lanyon's best work appears to soar above his coast in a vortex of light, weather, and free movement, these paintings by Walker describe a far more rugged, and possibly constrained, situation.  The geometry may be wonky, but it's structural nonetheless - suggesting perhaps the funnelling of ocean tides between harbour walls, jetties or quaysides.  Walker may evoke the sea, but he appears to do so with his feet firmly on dry land.

John Walker, 'Nomad I', Oil On Canvas, 2018

Another feature which strikes me is his almost wilfully careless approach to paint application, along with the stark economy of much of this work.  In Lanyon, there is often a veiling of colours, or a kind of overwriting of marks, however rapidly they may have been laid down.  However, in many cases, Walker's marks appear to be the first and only thing he put down, before simply moving on to the next, equally slapdash statement.  In this situation, it's the accumulation, and the method in which those marks are all packed into the overall composition, which give the painting its sense of gravity.  In this respect, the paintings remind me of the way Patrick Heron's late garden paintings became comprised of hastily-sketched, and increasingly insubstantial, notations for the plants he wanted to describe - whereas he might have once immersed the viewer in lush fields of unbroken colour.

John Walker, 'Nomad II', Oil On Canvas, 2018

Is this something that happens to certain painters as they work on into old age - I wonder?  Does the urgency to still make paintings press up against the dwindling away of the time remaining in which to do so?  If I'm honest, the lack of tension in so many of Walker's marks, or concern over their perceived 'quality', disappointed me rather on first viewing.  First impressions can, of course be deceptive, but even now, I find these canvases far more pleasing when viewed across the room, or even - as here, in miniature reproduction.  In either case, a degree of internal tension returns as the image becomes more condensed upon the retina.  If his direct, unmodulated attack, represents a thoroughly courageous, and unselfconscious method of painting (as it certainly does), my own, rather more weaselly sensibilities are still drawn more towards those canvases upon  which a degree of layering, modulation, or visible over-painting has occurred.

John Walker, 'Stern View', 2017, Oil on Canvas

John Walker, 'Black Paint', Oil On Canvas, 2015 (Detail Below)

John Walker, 'John's Bay Pollution', Oil On Canvas, 2017 (Detail Below)

Perhaps then, John Walker is one of those artists with whose work I'm destined to always have a slightly strained relationship, (despite approving of it whole-heartedly, in principle).  Perhaps it's just a question of commitment.  Walker seemingly wields his brush with the minimum of hesitation or concern for the crippling niceties of painting.  He also pushed on through the vicissitudes of fashion, and inconvenient Art History, to pursue his core vision, regardless.  I, on the other hand, gave up even trying to be anything as noble or straightforward as a pure painter, some years ago.


John Walker: 'Recent Paintings', continues until 23 February, at Ikon, 1 Oozells Square, Birmingham, B1 2HS

'A New Spirit In Painting', ran from 15 January - 18 March 1981, at: The Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1S 3ET

'Constructed City' 11: C

All Images: 'Constructed City' Screen Prints (Work In progress), Leicester Print Workshop,
February, 2020

...And the Cyan layer goes on to the first of my CMYK separated photographic 'Fragments'.  The aim is to print a small edition of these as straight as possible, with the occurring at a later collage stage.  Inevitably though, a few minor accidents, and a few deliberate experiments have crept in along the way too.  I'll see exactly what I've actually got, once the black goes on.  With valuable Half Term hours on the horizon - that should be achieved by the end of this month.

Deconstructed City (See - I've avoided titling this, 'On Reflection')

All Images: West Leicester, February 2020

...Because sometimes it's difficult to avoid the old cliches.  It can be a real drawback of maintaining a 'visual stimuli first' approach to one's art, I suppose.  I've thought (and written) quite a bit about the matter in recent times, as I've reflected on how I most successfully operate creatively.  It's pretty indisputable, at this stage, that whatever possible readings or theoretic/conceptual subtexts, I might aspire to in my work, it always feels more convincing when they are filtered through something I've seen (or picked up) out there in my immediate environment.  For me, the spontaneous thrill of recognising something via the senses (and therefore, a millisecond or two faster than the brain can process it), is always a slightly more vivid thrill than can be gained through research or the piecing together of ideas and narratives.  That stuff's all important, and hopefully integral to the final outcome - but the fact remains that evolution put my eyes just in front of my brain, looking outwards.

The drawback, of course, is that such unfiltered visual thrill-seeking can sometimes lead one to the kind of unquestioning eye-candy, that might have once graced the pages of something like 'Amateur Photographer' magazine, sometime back in the 1970s.  The danger is only amplified on a rare January day of crystalline sunlight, vivid blue skies, and a pleasingly undulating river surface - as happened here.

I suppose I could tell you these images constitute a knowing variant on my routine documentation of major construction projects - or that they subvert all that systematic constructivism, and are critiquing the expedient redevelopment of my already highly-structured environment.  I could even pretend it really is a retro-savvy appropriation of a bygone photographic trope.  But, if I'm honest - these are nothing more than a pleasurable diversion, and will likely play no actual part in the 'Constructed City' project at all.  I took them simply because, in the moment, it all just looked bloody lovely.

Sometimes - perhaps that's still enough.  You know - it's that really obvious kind of beauty.