From there to here
I like this time of the year because it is a chance to start again, or re-invent, finish the old and start the new.
I am beginning to look for inspiration from new subject matter; turning from newspapers to contemporary literature, moving from fact to fiction, and thinking of new ways of making work.
And of course, new ways to emerge?
Following the crit I had three weeks ago with, artist, Graham Crowley. Two things have stayed with me since then: the observation [made about my drawings] that ‘you hold our attention with something fragile and sensitive,’ and the simple phrase: ‘move closer to home’.
fade away
Yesterday I saw fade away at Transition Gallery, curated by Alli Sharma. Very much a show about painting today, and subtitled: ‘painting between representation and abstraction’. A carefully chosen cluster of new, emerging and emerged artists, and hung in a charming sing-song, up and down motion, that leads one eye from work to work, giving them space and rythm. I enjoyed Kaye Donachie’s ‘Under my hand the moonlight lay’, Jo Wilmot’s ‘Burn’, and Mahali O’Hare’s ‘Mickey’. As well as Clem Crosby’s glorious, ‘Picabia’.
So much of the works here, and later, at the Crash Open salon show at the Charlie Dutton Gallery were ambiguous. Seeing the two genres together was helpful, suddenly there seemed less distance between these two opposing positions, making one see new connections, and possibilities.
The idea that this new generation of paintings could be meditations on an uneasy world, might seem rather trite. However, coming in the wake of this summer’s Jerwood painting show, which similarly presented the ambiguous, and the un-obvious, the purposefully ugly and uninhibitedly grim for us to puzzle over, it would seem there is something in the air and leads one to consider if, and how, this work might reflect the uncertain times we live in?
Saturday
On that theme, I have been re-reading Ian McEwan’s prophetic and quite brilliant [if one is interested in the universal] 2005 novel Saturday. Set in February 2003, it tells the story of one day in the life of Henry Perowne, a mid-forties, well-off, happily married neurosurgeon who lives in central London. When, in the early hours of one Saturday morning, he thinks he sees a burning plane flying over London, it sets off a series of thoughts and feelings about the times he is living through. From the safety of his Georgian home, in an affluent London Square, Henry Perowne stares out from his bedroom window, and thinks:
‘And now, what days are these?’
Reading those words in 2005, when the novel was first published, was for the reader, an instant and recognisable reference to a post 9/11 society, and the global fear of terrorism. The War on Terror was at its height etc, and 7/7 was still to happen – yet the novel, highly prophetic in this respect – still acknowledges the daily fear city-dwellers felt, then, about the threat of a terrorist attack.
However, today, in the wake of a new global crisis and one that is financial, on reading those words: ‘And now, what days are these?’ It seems our anxieties have moved closer to home, and, quite literally, as cut-backs, retrenchment and the age of austerity take hold, people fear losing their jobs and their homes, and with it, a life-style that they have become used to.
If Ian McEwan were to continue the story of Henry Perowne and he was to stand him once more at that tall sash window overlooking Fitzroy Square, that John Adam designed in the eighteenth century, the question could be the same:
‘And, now, what days are these?’
but rhetorical it wouldn’t be, because five years later, Perowne would conclude that as a nation we have moved closer to home, and from the global to the personal – global anxiety to personal fear – from abstract worries about terrorist attacks to doubts about financial security, and the future of home.
annabeltilley.moonfruit.com
