Standpoint Futures Residency Programme

Decamped studio

Part 2

I was at the doors of Haunch of Venison as they opened this morning to see the Frank Stella show. He was a college favorite, but i have seen so few of his works in the flesh. This was a real treat, to be able to go back and forth between paintings and periods in his career and piece it together; and also in complete peace, with only one other person in attendance for the whole of my visit. Like so much painting (and very very obviously) the surface completely changes when you get up close. The bleed and pencil marks and even colour differentiation in the surface of the older compass and concentric squares work made the work so much more human. There is a great room with three relief works that are exactly the same in structure and completely different in colour, material and direction of the planes. This is something I have been attempting to do with focusing on the Virgin at the Rocks by Da Vinci in two paintings I have done at Standpoint (one more to go). Each one takes the same section of the painting to paint over and each one creates a different feel by the difference in composition of triangles and more tellingly the colour.

However it was with two later huge canvases that Stella truly stopped me in my tracks. I am not sure if these are not his best paintings that I have seen, they are certainly close. They feel a little like an artist, who has become an old man and who no longer gives a fuck what others think, but is going to do what he wants to do (like Sigrid talked of Titian in the National gallery last week). These are enormous surfaces of perhaps twelve feet square and covered with an extrodinarily complex system of marks, both flat and raised and of a huge amount of colours, textures and depths. These paintings truly zing, always an excellent mark of a god painting. The most odd thing about them is that despite the chaos of the imagery clashes, they are true moments of calm once you focus, the eye in the storm and this, to me, is an excellent analogy of our contemporary life.

Between time in my new studio in the gallery i have also popped out to see some shows in the surrounding area whilst I decide what to do next with the composition I am working on. I went to Kenny Schachter’s Rove where he has photos by Bill Wyman ( some moments of a good photogrpaher, usually when he is not trying to be one like in his portrait of Marc and Vava Chaagall, he is a better bass player though!) and Dan Rees at Jonathan Viner gallery, which I just did not get. Then on to the excellent John Smith show at Peer, his reworking of the iconic Girl Chewing Gum in both the film and ebay trail is superb in it’s attention to detail, truly a gem. I then went to see the Oliver Laric show at Seventeen, including an amazing frame made out of the board used to cover broken windows, perfectly in keeping with the delicacy of the orchid photograph it housed.

Now back to the studio, I am trying to get the painting I am working on up onto the walls by tonight, hum ho.

Decamped studio

Part 1

So the show is now up in the gallery space, i say show, but it more like a halfway point between showing stuff I have been making since i arrived and an exhibition. To combat the feeling of it being too much of an exhibition i have decamped the studio upstairs to the small ex-secretary’s office at the front of the gallery, where passers by can look in on me painting (or drinking cups of tea). I decided to do this early on after comments from the directors of Standpoint that it was nice to see an artist in residence not having their head in a laptop. I think this comment cursed me and my laptop as it entered it’s coma soon after, still more time to paint.

I managed to edit the film i was making down from fifteen minutes to just under one and a half minutes and i feel much happier with it. I think before i just had raw footage and it now feels like i a have started to do something with it. Surprisingly the work which i am most interested in now the work is up is the smaller postcard pieces, that are propped on a shelf, with thick impasto paint. They are nowhere near there, but certainly have potential to take back to Manchester. Matilda has often said during the residency that is funny how the work that is produced in an almost offhand way can become the more successful work.

I spoke with Peter who I shall be in conversation with tonight about our respective work (he is in the gallery next week so it will be interested to compare our shows, we are certainly different painters). I am looking forward to our conversation, he purposely stopped our conversation short yesterday, so that we did not deaden it too much for tonight. I believe he is someone who will give a very honest critical response to the work, and like Sacha and Dave will pull out new things for me to consider.

My laptop is still in a coma, i hope not a terminal one, so the entry from the second week still remains in limbo. I have been based in the studio lots, time is passing too quickly, and I want to have something worthwhile to show to people on Thursday. I have been completing a second version of Leonardo’s Virgin on the Rocks, started painting on the acetate for a lithograph print and started some more thickly painted pieces. I have also been in the gallery office grappling with final-cut to create a new film piece. Some interesting things are happening as a result of my time here that I can take back to Manchester and build upon, whilst some will remain in London.

I have just had a studio visit from Sacha Craddock and am currently digesting the dense conversation. Early on she asked why I asked to talk with her, I replied for two major reasons. i knew i would get a completely honest view of my work from her, one that you all too rarely get outside of art college. Secondly when I first met her (in her capacity as my MA external) she spent one minute looking at the work, before proceeding to pull out everything I had not considered/taken for granted, and thus all that was missing within my work. I believe she is such an incredibly astute person that the same would happen again 10 years on.

She said incredibly obvious things about my work, things so obvious i have not considered them and are, as such, not obvious at all. Firstly and perhaps most importantly is the fact that at present i am only ever considering the reproduction of the painting and ignoring everything beyond the frame. She felt, rightly, that i am too respectful of the edge and that this creates too strong of a (tonal) difference between the border and the picture itself. This is something I should not ignore. I have to acknowledge this space and maybe this will create the ‘other’ that I am after.

At present I am ignoring too much the context of where i am getting the work from – the book, print or poster – and for the paintings to succeed i have to bring this into the work.She talked of an early Wallinger work where a night light lies underneath a propped page of a book. We talked of how this creates a tension between the two sides of the page (and the images on each respective side) and also the acknowledgment of the three dimensionality of the book. I show her some of the transitory paintings I made last year where i cut away aspects of the reproductions of paintings in auction catalogues. Quite often in these there is a tension created between the two sides, either from a translucency of the paper revealing the ‘hidden’ other image or how more directly one cut figure form one painting interacting with the painting on the other side of the paper. She appeared to react positively to this work and i think here lies the tension that the recent work needs.

We looked about earlier moving image work. In The Jump she felt I was being too referential to the source and by extension the photograph. When i let the paint do the talking (she suggested a relationship to Munch) it was all the more successful. UnMasterclass was too much of an aside for her and not concideredenough (why is the book in shot?, why is everything so wrong?, why so small?). I was interested to get her view on this work as this was what Dave Hoyland responded most warmly to.

The film I am editing at the moment she was also not so convinced by. She suggested i need to fuck about with the footage more, break it up, more like the cubist-esque triangulation i am dealing with in the painting. I should use time in film like i use surface in paintings to a far greater extent.

I have got so much from this visit, the sort of comments and insight that will linger when i am back in Manchester.

So this is a little funny for me to write/you to read as my second blog entry on my laptop, which has decided not to work since Thursday. Lots has happened since I last wrote my last blog entry, but we shall assume that you shall read this, if interested, when my laptop is fixed and I can upload.So skipping nearly a fortnight of activity…..

On Friday I spoke to Fiona MacDonald. via skype. She is currently on a British School in Rome residency, which sounds as incredible as I have imagined. We caught up with our respective residencies and she was a good sounding board for my experience so far. I do not believe i was the same for her, as i had a couple of glasses of wine too many at the book launch of a friends graphic novel. Nicola Streeten’s ‘Billy, Me & You’ is an incredible achievement and well worth reading. Find out more here http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/oct/15…

After too small of an amount of time in studio I went to meet Cathy Lomax and Ali Sharma at Transition Gallery. We had a fantastic conversation, primarily about our respective views on painting, both other peoples and our own studio activity. This is one of the most eye opening things about being in London. I have probably had more conversations in a fortnight in the big smoke about painting, than several years in Manchester. I shall have to think about why this is when I return and make efforts to do something about it, as the conversations I am having are proving fruitful. Our conversation focused at the start (after talking bout Sluice art fair) with a discussion about Richter. We had a good debate over our difference in opinion of his abstracts (mine-what is not to like!; Cathy-he stops being interesting with them!).

This carried on to question whether Richter is a good colourist or not. There was something interesting that was raised in the Buchloch talk I went to early in the residency where he responded to a question by T.J. Clark over whether Richter’s abstracts are not more associated with American rather than German culture, a central construct to Buchloch’s argument. He said no (after a pause), that they could only be produced by and in German(y), primarily because of their colour, which he believes is very German. This was something I had in mind when viewing the show and later talked about with Cathy and Ali. There is something in Richter’s use of colour in his abstract works, which is akin to the shell-suit one often sees in Berlin or the Burossia Dortmund football kit, but whether this cultural or not I still am not convinced by. The conversation continued in this vein, but focusing more on my own work. A lot was discussed about generosity within my work, something Dave Hoyland felt there was a lack of, which Cathy and Ali disagreed with. This finally led to a discussion of a conceptual approach to painting, I wonder if this is something that painters and non-painters both find equally baffling and is something I find intriguing.

I left Transition to meet my partner and two year old son from the train to show them London, as this is the first time for Ben in London. Over the weekend there have been visits to Coram fields, The Natural History Museum, The V&A, The Museum of Childhood and The Serpentine. Anri Sala is really worth seeing, a magical coming together of video, with associated live sound in the gallery. A saxophonist duets with a film or a self-playing snare drum bangs quietly with it’s film twin. My little boy particularly liked a musical box, both live in the gallery and in the hands of a man wandering the streets).

I am now back in the studio, editing a film I plan to show on Thursday and working on top of three postcards, with a far more impasto application of paint than before. I have also just seen Mike and will have to modify my idea for the print. I think this is probably for the best and will hopefully create a more successful and surprising piece.

Next week!

Andrew Bracey in discussion with Peter Ashton Jones, artist and co-founding editor of painting magazine Turps Banana

Thursday October 27th

6.30-8pm

Andrew will also be presenting work in progress at Standpoint Gallery over Thursday 27th and Friday 28th October, 12-6pm.