Project Me

A good day at the end of a good week.

I was looking for a box of pastels that I am sure that I have somewhere, I didn’t find the pastels, or rather – before I found the pastels – I found several bags of glass seed beads that I had forgotten about. I spent the rest of the day playing with them.

It was a very fitting end to a week where I continue(d) to think through how to be less prescriptive.

I really do want to make some abstract things and see if they satisfy me. Finding a starting point has been stumbling block. Stumbling upon the beads and a roll of wire thread seems to have unblocked me. I enjoyed making two small abstract forms: the first black, the second blue.

Earlier in the week I spoke with Elena Thomas, she had asked me to look at a draft of a funding application. It’s something that she has asked me to do before but this time we spoke with each other rather than just sending emails and attachments – over the recent months speaking on Skype or Zoom has shifted from being a way of keeping in touch with friends and family in the UK to being part of my working process. The discussion that we had was so much richer than it could have been had we stuck to written communication. In addition to specific points in Elena’s draft we spoke about the importance of talking things over and through with other artists. Chatting with other artists is definitely something that I miss. The lack of it is, I am sure, what has led me to sit on so many committees and participate in so many artists’ projects. It did not matter that we were talking about Elena’s project rather than mine, the discussion give me a great deal to think. While speaking about another of Elena’s projects – The Drawbridge – I made an almost throw away comment that I find drawing difficult (I don’t want to draw real things and don’t know how to draw abstractly). Elena’s immediate reply was to get a roll of steal wire – a material that she is using to create wonderful three-dimensional drawing.

All week I continued to ponder how I could start to work more abstractly. Conscious that I didn’t want to copy her I rejected the idea of steal wire. I looked at the materials that I had in the studio and realised that nothing suggested ’drawing’. I wanted a material that would do something else … a material that would take me somewhere else … a material that was somehow abstract.

That is why I was looking for the pastels this morning. I thought that working large with them might satisfy my craving. What I found instead were tiny beads and (funnily enough) thin steal wire .. and my craving has been more than satisfied.

Having now completed a ’test piece’ inspired by heraldic flags, family crests, and military standards, produced in careful and diligent applique I wonder if I am not on the wrong track.

It is the technique(s) rather than the references that I find myself questioning. And perhaps even the materials … I seem to be having an artistential crisis – what am I doing and who am I as an artist.

Uptightness has long been a part of my technical process irrespective of material. I freely admit that I rarely achieve the precis and skilful finish that I aim for, however a certain competence with the predominantly crafty techniques is evident in my sewn, cast, and constructed works. Now and for the first time I am questioning the relevance of striving for neatness and precision, and I am wondering if I dare do otherwise. Do I dare to make a mess?

Is this the shadow of Covid-19? It might equally be an artistic coming of (middle) age!

The question remains: do I dare?

Alongside seemingly cool and clean artist such as Felix Gonzales-Torres* I have always admired artists who lay bare the raw mess of life. Cy Twombly’s show at Tate Modern (2008) made me cry. There on the canvas in the gestures, in the scrawls, in the material was a man expressing himself. What do I give of myself in my work?

I give my desire to please, to do good work, to be neat and presentable. I give my desire to be thought of as clever, and my desire to be in control.
I am not sure that those things are either relevant, interesting or appropriate at the moment.

Do I dare let go of those things, let go of half-mastered skills and let the artist play wild? The few occasions when I have done this (play wild) the work that I have produced has always been well received – probably more so than for any of my uptight offerings (save perhaps the patchwork punchbag).

In the coming weeks I will put aside the rules that I set myself in advance of starting that ’test piece’: only second-hand clothes, neat stitching, durability, order, precision. I will instead play and be led by my feelings … the result I hope will be things unimaginable and unspeakable – which certainly sounds like things a bit further a long the road towards art.

*Gonzales-Torres’ visual language is perhaps so very tailored precisely because its subject is so very very raw. I do not think of his work as either cool or clean despite any initial impression that it might give of being so. It is so full of love and anger and sorrow and intelligence and frustration and hope and longing and joy.  It is so very full of him. It pained me when a visiting artist at the Slade casually dismissed an artist who ’just put heaps of sweets on the floor’ … needless to say I found the (middle-aged, white, male) visiting artist’s practice tedious and egotistic in the extreme. The man was after all designing machines to make paintings – his goal seemed to be the erasure of humanness … ’cool clean’ art indeed!

Eugène Jansson, 18 March 1862 – 15 June 1915

Eugène Jansson, self portrait, 201 x 109 cm, 1910

Eugène Jansson, I, 101 x 14 cm, 1901

Eugène Jansson, self portrait, 32.5 x 32.5 cm, c.1880

I am enjoying re-engaging with this man and his legacy … still following, still learning, still curious …

I let my mind wander and fantasise about Eugène’s Naked Youth (1907). How much can (or should) I read into the painting? The man stands in a doorway – on a threshold. This is not merely a conceit for a pose with raised arms – that could have been achieved by providing him with a barbell or similar equipment. Neither the pose nor the environment are particularly athletic. The man’s physique is muscular but perhaps not more so than any working young man’s physique would have been at the turn of the century. Is he perhaps purposely blocking the doorway – an action that at once both prevents entry and arouses curiosity as to what lies in the room that we are barred from.

Looking beyond the man we can see three of Eugène’s blue landscapes.* At the time of Eugène painting Knut – his Naked Youth – in that doorway these paintings were all unsold. From this can we deduce that the paintings were in Eugène’s studio, and that the room that we see beyond the naked youth is a part of the studio too?
Can I read the man with the raised and wide spread arms as symbolically blocking the way back to landscape painting?

• * Top left, top right, bottom right: Mille reflets [A Thousand Reflections] 1903, this canvas was unsold at the time of Eugène’s death. Motiv från Timmermansgatan/Trapparna på Timmersmansgatan [Motif from Timmermansgatan/The steps on Timmermansgatan] 1899, was purchased by the National Museum directly from the studio in 1910. Soluppgång över taken/Solnedgång [Sunrise Over the Roofs/Sunset] 1903, was given to the National Museum by a group of ’art friends’ (konstvänner) in 1915. I found different titles for the same paintings in different books/catalogues. The most intriguing is sunrise/sunset – such different times of the day. Surely sunrise is out of keeping with the Eugène’s preference for evening scenes … ?
• The painting I have been referring to as simply Naked Youth is titled Naked Youth in Doorway [Naken yngling vid dörrpost] in Nils G Wallin’s 1920 publication on Jansson’s paintings for Sweden’s Public Art Association [Sveriges Allmänna Konstförening: SAK].

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Naked Youth was exhibited at Verdandi in Uppsala. Verdandi is one of many student associations in the university town of Uppsala. The association was founded in 1882.  The association is still active and is interested in ideas around radical humanism. Have I perhaps found a group who I could involve in a discussion/event in conjunction with my show at the Artists’ Club next year?  I wonder if Verdandi is in the same building as it was in 1907?  Do they have an archive?

There appears to be an exhibition catalogue registered at the Royal Library in Stockholm.

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I was accurate in my prediction that I would not make it to the studio this week.

Sunday afternoon and while making some museli for the coming weeks’ breakfasts I find myself recalling bits of the conversation that I had with Pavel yesterday evening. He has been looking at the Following Eugène blog. With the museli baking I log in to my own blog and am soon absorbed in reading what I wrote five years ago. Chronological and geographic distance is a gift. I find it interesting to read the entries – it is almost, though not quite, as though they are written by someone else.

I did not make it to the studio last week, nor do I expect to be there this coming week. My paid employment is keeping me busy with preparations for the ’digital summer holiday programme’ – Swedish school break on Tuesday. I have four weeks holiday from late June to late July. I had intended to travel around Sweden and even though travel restrictions have been lifted here I am not so keen to be too far from home while the coronavirus continues to be rife. I imagine now that much of that time will be spent at the studio. The trial ’heraldic flag’ that I am making is almost complete. It has only just dawned on me that despite my visual references for it being the flags and insignia hanging in churches and grand halls, there is a painting by Eugène that features flags hanging in a not too dissimilar way.

Eugène Jansson, Österlånggatan, oil on canvas, 168 x 112 cm,1904, Thielska Gallery, Stockholm

Österlånggatan is acknowledged as Eugéne’s last ’blue painting’ – the last of the series that brought him (with the support of Thiel) to public prominence. It is at this point with economic security and his studio on Glasbruksgatan that Eugène immerses himself in the world of athletes and athleticism. It is three years before he exhibits the first this new body of work – Naked Youth. The naked man in question is Knut Nyman – Eugène’s lover.

Eugène Jansson, Naken yngling, oil on canvas, 1907, 143 x 89, Prins Eugens Waldemarsudde, Stockholm

The painting is exhibited in Uppsala (1907). Five years ago I am sure that I did not pay so much attention to where the painting was shown. Today as I develop my own artistic relation with the city it feels vital that I find where the work was exhibited. And I want to know more about what the exhibition was. I assume it was a group show, perhaps something mounted by the opponents groups to which he belonged (the group formed by artists in opposition to the authority and dominance of the Fine Arts Academy).

In discussing ways to mark the opening of the Uppsala Artists’ Club’s new premises one of the committee members suggested that artists not only bear an artwork over the threshold before installing it in a group show but that we walk through the city bearing the piece. It immediately seemed an ideal way for me to re-engage with the performative Mr Dandy Blue and to create an event that brings together various strands of my current practice in a specific historic and geographic context. It would be a very real intersection.