ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [21 November 2009]

EXPERIMENT

I am nearly two months into my MA at Wimbledon. Three weeks ago during my first tutorial I was encouraged to experiment more. I gave myself a task - i bought a new sketch book and told myself to make one new drawing everyday, allowing myself one double page only. This was to allow myself time to experiment, look for new ideas, without being precious about my work or ideas. I am now 25 days into my sketch book and really enjoying the freedom to draw anything at all, links are definitely appearing and some not so good stuff too (I thought i'd see if I had any Edward Gorey type animals in me and have discovered that unfortunately I definitely don't). This change in practice has also freed me from worrying about my research question for my disertation. I have also discovered that I don't know much about anything.

# 2 [22 November 2009]

STARTING POINTS

initial ideas as starting points are 

Emotions that compelled me:

stunned hummingbird - I once held a stunned hummingbird whilst travelling;

whirling dermish - the energy from that controlled religeous whirling is very interesting;

Birds - terror, hitchcock.

Control/Formations:

synchronised swimming;

red arrows;

soldiers.

I'm hoping to combine these ideas - possibly the terror of the everyday. 

Even within the most beautiful landscape, in the trees, under the leaves the insects are eating each other.....Fransis Bacon

The folded raven is an idea that I had whilst doing a drawing workshop with Rupert Hartley on space and architecture in the centre for drawing. The fold is an architectural theory. The abstract grass folds onto the next page and I was also thinking about the tyranny of the page.

# 3 [25 November 2009]

ABSURD

I've been thinking about the dadaists all week, since our last lecture. My understanding of them is that they produced absurd art as a reaction to the absurdity of the war. I've been wondering why there is no movement as strong as this around at the moment, as there are many absurd global practices going on. Someone asked after the lecture whether we have all been neutralised and it seems that we have. I saw a trailer to the film 'the age of stupid' yesterday. This film is set in 2055 and the main protagonist wonders why we didn't try to stop global warming now.

I'm wondering whether I should only make absurd art.

Here is a dada poem discovered on my foundation course which has been on my studio wall for many years.

Kurt Schwitters

To Anna Blume

You, oh you, beloved of my twenty-seven senses, I love ya! - You thine thou yours, I you, you me. - Us? This (incidentally) does not belong here. Who are you, countless woman? You are 
- are you? - People say you are - let 
them say it, they don't know where the steeple is. 
You wear a hat on your feet and stand 
on your hands, on your hands you walk. 
Hello, your red clothes, sawed into white pleats.
Red I love, Anna Blume, red I love ya! - You 
thine thou yours, I you, you me. - Us?
That (incidentally) belongs in the cold embers.
Red flower, red Anna Blume, what are people saying?
Prize question: 1. Anna Blume has a bird.
 2. Anna Blume is red.
   3. What color is the bird?
Blue is the color of your yellow hair.
Red is the cooing of your green bird.
You plain girl in an everyday dress, you dear 
green animal, I love ya! - You thine thou yours, I 
you, you me - us?
That (incidentally) belongs in the ember box.
Anna Blume! Anna, a-n-n-a, I am dripping your 
name. Your name drips like soft suet.
Do you know, Anna, do you know yet?
You can also be read from back to front, and you, you 
most marvelous creature of them all, you are from the back 
as you are from the front: »a-n-n-a.«
Suet drips caress my back.
Anna Blume, you droppy animal, I love ya!

An Anna Blume

# 4 [4 December 2009]

RESEARCH

The internet is a wonderful place. I am finding the most amazing imagery, as well as using things I see daily. My starting points are expanding. I have thought it might be time to leave my sketch book and start on some real work, this prospect seems a bit daunting, I feel safe in the starting point/experimenting zone. I have decided to continue through to the end of my sketch book as first planned, I dont want to spoil the process by rushing. 

LESS IS MORE

I saw a magpie out of my window the other day, perched on the top of a tree swaying in the wind -

One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl, Four for a boy, Five for silver, Six for gold, Seven for a secret never to be told.

# 5 [4 December 2009]

MICHAEL BORREMANS

I have re-discovered the Belgian artist Michael Borremans. He is dealing with similar concerns and juxtapositions as me, he represents disquiet in the everyday using odd juxtapositions, scale and repetition. He is so good that I have artist block. 

His biography from zeno x gallery reads

Michaël Borremans paintings are dream-like and haunting, their highly suggestive atmosphere lingering long in the mind of the viewer. He is a painter of psychic states – scenes full of introspection and narrative disjunction. In an atmosphere akin to the unreality of a film set, he chooses the unnoticed, the detail or the scene away from centre-stage, and transforms it, charging it with new meaning. 
His brushwork and definition shorthand Manet, the forms themselves occasionally echoing Goya, but his paintings seem arrested in a particular moment in time – that of the 1950s and early 1960s, a post-war world, pre-sexual revolution, devoid of bright colour, where pragmatism and stoicism ruled over beauty and luxury. His palette is full of subtle, often gloomy hues, but their juxtaposition creates a jewel-like composition whose power can quietly dominate an entire wall. 
Borremans deliberately plays down the potential drama in his scenes. Instead his work is infused with an atmosphere which is both gentle and sinister.

http://www.zeno-x.com/artists/michael_borremans.ht...

# 6 [4 December 2009]

MARIELE NEUDECKER

I went to Mariele Neudecker's show at Room last weekend. She makes amazing landscapes - diminishing the human element, thereby directing the viewer towards the metaphysical dimension. She explores Romanticism and its elevation of nature and landscape as vehicles for transcendence, contemplation and identity.

# 7 [13 December 2009]

CASPER DAVID FREIDRICH

I have had a look at the Artist Casper David Freidrich 1774-1840, a german painter from the romantic period. The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage. What I like about his work apart from the mist, the mood and the melancholy, is the symmetry.

# 8 [13 December 2009]

MORE STARTING POINTS

Driving home the other day I heard that the MOD had shut the UFO phone line that had been in operation for 50 years. An MoD statement on the matter says: "The MoD has no opinion on the existence or otherwise of extra-terrestrial life. However, in over 50 years, no UFO report has revealed any evidence of a potential threat to the United Kingdom."

Also recently whilst sorting out my fathers flat I found some interesting photos.

# 9 [16 December 2009]

One of the main things that has been emerging from my collection of images is formations - synchronised swimming, red arrows, soldiers, circles of people.......... using the formation out of context makes an interesting slightly sinister image, possibly an ideal way to represent the human condition in the 21 century.

# 10 [23 December 2009]

NEW CONTEMPORARIES

I went to the new contemporaries show at the weekend and saw a few artists who seem to be dealing with what I think I might be dealing with.

Adam Bainbridge  "I make drawings of places and objects from my past, often from memory, or referencing exisiting pieces of art or abstracted forms to create uncertain, psychological spaces"

Andrew Curtis "I make images of suburban dissonance by blurring physical and psychological reality. I want to question contemporary notions of anomie, the abject and the exotic".

Bee Emmott "This work is created by both a conceptual and literal folding of space, that takes the form of a subject repeatedly handled until it gains a solidity of its own".