Berlin Residency Journal

Coming home to the studio last night the road was blocked off by the police and fire engines. Trams were piled up, about half a dozen both ways waiting in a jam. Apparently a large tree had just fallen right across the Kastanienallee stopping all traffic. When I went back the next day to view the scene there was no trace of it. Everything had been tidied up without a trace.

Last night I went to a B&W German film (with English sub-titles) at the St. George English Bookshop. Under the DDR, it had been banned for being critical of the judicial system. Filmed and set in the late sixties and early seventies it showed the drabness of East Berlin at that time.

There must have been a few Germans in the audience, as during some scenes that talk about terrorists sabotaging the safety of the East there were loud barracking shouts heckling the screen characters. This was an authentic banned film made at the time. The current film "Life of Others" that has won Oscars, also shown here in this Berlin bookshop, is a glamorised version, but both are riveting.

Several more artists came by my studio including Ingrid Gillain who is French but lives in Berlin. There was a very rosy feeling to the day with the pressure off.

At 7pm I met the Landscape Architect and others at the pv of a Berlin-based duo of artists who paint pictures together, Maike Abetz and Oliver Drescher. The Opening was fun but none of us thought much of the sort of confronting global politics using Pop culture linked to Hieronymous Bosch. To recover we went up the Berg to the Swiss Chalet and ate heartily even if not condemned men. They came to the studio afterwards so that we could have peppermint tea and another private view.

George Pusenkoff the Russian artist who lives in Köln came for the Opening, arriving at 1pm. This allowed us to have a catching up chat and serious art discussion before I got into a skirt and boots. When people came in they signed my exhibition book before being photographed in a close-up paparazzi way by me. Lots of people came and it was fun. Also the German artists were very serious and analysed their reactions to my work saying what they liked about them and how they responded, which I appreciated. It is marvellous to get feedback.

Much huffing and puffing as I tidy up the studio and do trips to Kaiser to buy nibbles for the Opening of my Exhibition, ‘Consolation For Our Mortality'. Borrowing a sort of baby buggy from Marcus in the cellar, Tom helps me trundle back the cases of beer. The show looks good and I'm both relieved and excited.

In the evening I went to meet up with Carla and Tom for the Opening of Daniel Biesold's paintings at the Koal gallery. His work interests me as he uses acrylic mediums in a layered semi-transparent way, as I too have been experimenting with for years. The monochromatic, white with hints of black or colour, paintings looked elegantly calm. However well achieved, there is still the hurdle here that I face too, of the finishing areas at the edges causing happenstance to predominate.

Going on from there to the DNA gallery where a Japanese artist had his Opening, showing colouring book cartoon drawings of the lives of the people where his installation had just been exhibited in Singapore. Downstairs there was a painting by Clemence Krauss, for whom Tom works as a studio assistant. The work is figurative and uses excessive build-ups of oil paint with fast drying mediums to make figures that are then cut out and glued to the canvas along with words that are made by squeezing directly from the tube. As if Auerbach or Kossuth went Pop. Not my thing, but I can see how people who rave about the sensuousness of oil paint and who like, for example, Therese Oulton's work could like these. He sells well especially in Brazil.