Palimpsests or layers

I tried to put everything in and therefore failed

Partially to justify my teaching adults to paint watercolour, yet feeling like the emperor, I paint watercolours in South Bohemia, liking what I did and realise there were too many holes in my technique I return, we buy a small flat and can continue to paint from the same landscape each summer, Watercolour is then followed by ink, followed by acrylic, followed by oil. The subject matter varies from fields to farms to villages to trees, that being the last topic I attempted.

Put people in my paintings? Technically I am scared of painting people because of a lack of technique, whilst I know if I were to put aside another summer I could get that ability back, I would still be confronted by the context The only figures that have been in my paintings successfully have been nude and never in a stylised form. Nude but not naked; akin to the conception of a classical landscape out of time, clothes lock it to the now or are dressing up. Or they are icons without a justifiable stylisation, this is disconcerting as I can only make them fit in as a quotation,.

 

For the most part I attended to some notion of truth in respect of colour, that is to say I suppressed aesthetic ideas of colour harmony and balance and tried to find a truthful understanding (in itself a subjective concept) of the nature of the colour in front of me. During the course of a painting day, colour is subject to change, yet I attempt to extract a truth about its nature, an enterprise that is bound to fail. (How cultural and aesthetic are the ostensibly objective explorations of colour in the impressionist painters.) Maybe the most successful as paintings are those where I lacked stamina and chickened out to culturally bound gestures that make a good painting.

Product or process? I had inherited a concept as painting as process, partially from the modernist tradition that I tagged onto, but primarily from the composers who interested me. From 1975 to 1979 I took this to the extreme of rarely making a finished product. Without exiting process, gradually I learnt to consider my work as products, but products without much in the way of showroom appeal, for those who can still read a painting and unravel the route and intentions, but why should I make such an effort not to please people?

New sequences of paintings often arise at the point when I feel I will never paint again, they then slink into my life through a crack in the armour, often a trivial crack at that.

The Vodnaňy paintings were a response to one of these cracks, not having paintings in me I started from the given of an existing landscape, Enlarged a detail, overlaid it with supposition, luckily it was not long before the exploration of the material took on its own life. Many years ago my paintings were described as palimpsests, this referred to the constant erasure of layers of painting leaving its traces, now it could refer to the layers of meaning I attempt to abstract from the given material (then as paintings now as description.) Was it inherent in what I had always made? I think in clauses embedded in clauses, looking has become the dissecting of real or imaginary multiple meanings behind the immediate impression. The peeling stucco reveals the once present door that collectivisation blocked when the grand building was subdivided for the workers, then restituted to be further subdivided but now as a commercial commodity. The blandly perfect stucco covers its history whilst still revealing the changing value of energy, its inability to interact with light the presence of insulating foam board just beneath its surface.

Maybe I could find more paintings within this material, I don’t know.

I wanted a painting for a friends wedding, because of the multiple levels of their involvement with the Czech lands it seemed the most obvious step of taking a detail from one of these Vodnaňy paintings and exploring that. The second attempt was successful.

However after coming to a halt with further ideas I took the first of these paintings as the starting point for a new sequence. This time the connections with reality and history where long erased and it would become an exercise in aesthetic judgement. Soon I understood it was something akin to a set of Etudes in the Debussy tradition; exploring techniques in the context of polished self contained art pieces. To help me along and as the first painting had a lively rhythm I loosely related each painting to a dance form, an idea that was forgotten by the fifth painting.

I was doing an exploration of oil painting with my adult students, myself not having used oil paint for over 25 years and then only superficially, a moment similar to the taking up of landscape painting; I needed to get my hand in! It was the inability of getting a blue that I knew must exist and the realisation that only with oil could I find it that this sequence became my reintroduction to oil paint

 

Ossia for Dancing 2

Number 8 in the sequence, Oil

I am now working on the ninth painting in the series. This is also a development and continuation of the paintings in the Vodňany sequence, so we now have 15 paintings and still counting.

From the beginning this was a conscious attempt to get to  a painterly style, something I have always been very wary of. Criticised by another artist in the 70′s  I cynically knocked up something that was  “painterly” She was fulsome in her praise, but all I had done was to introduce some easily achieved tricks that made her think she was in touch with the soul of this artist.

In a museum in Scotland many years ago I saw an ordinary army issued footwear with a label “the actual boot worn by a local man at the battle of Omdurman 1898.” Like the exorbitant prices paid for guitars, possibly, played by pop stars the imprimatur of authenticity whiffs of the fag end of religion, and I accept no part of it. Therefor I have always purged  “the artists touch” It is a painting you look at not me.

I like the astringency of Poussin’s paintings of the 1630s but as I am also aware of the gently crafted personal drawings that were concurrent with the public output. The drawings show the presence of a rich facture, its absence in the paintings forces us to engage with the meaning and content. In the late landscapes he gives an exquisite surface patina: Nothing tempts me into enquiring into the nature of the man.

My paintings are open to reading as a sequence of events that correspond to the chronology of the painting, but then I play with this, whilst they are built in layers I do not work from deepest/earliest to topmost/most recent. However you can ascertain the joy I take in the creation of each image, and perhaps in the recent paintings done in oil, more than a trace of my discovery of that image.

I have always avoided oil for the twentieth century baggage it came with, perverse in that my chosen medium, acrylic, comes with as much if not more!

In transferring to a different medium I need to understand the new possibilities and limitations, Thus these paintings will become studies in my technical progress as well!

Four and five have intricate surface texture, the latter with those acid colours that are particular to acrylic paint, whilst number six uses a colour range not available to acrylic, it’s painting style somehow akin to early Italian primitives. Seven is an acrylic wearing the clothes of an oil painting. In the vigorous eighth the intension was to use sand for texture in the pale yellow, maybe this idea will return.

Matala

The beach with Taverna in middle

The inhabitants of the caves, on right I think is the visiting english writer

I recently heard on the radio a reference to the Canadian folk singer Joni Mitchell’s experiences with the Matala hippies who I gathered had  “immortalised”  in her 1971 song Carey. having never heard of the song or knowing little of Ms. Mitchell I wondered if I was anything to do with the hippy connection.  I was there in 1966 so thought I would put down my memories, which are far from complete, but this is what I have so far been able to piece together.

I had crossed the island from Heraklion. I had a copy of Arthur Miller’s ‘Colossus of Marousi’ with me, and so wanted to visit Agia Triada the Cretan archaeological site mentioned in that book. I didn’t get there to late in the afternoon so the custodian told me of nearby Matala where I would be able to stay for the night.

It was winter so perhaps in summer there would have been more visitors but when I arrived, there were about 14 people at the most: 2 right wing Germans, one more extreme that the other, who had come to re-live their Zorba the Greek moments (when on the north of the island I had met people who had got bit parts in the film); a couple of lads from the east end of London who were the only ones I remember smoking; and I seem to remember a couple of Danes; the rest were from America, and of those 4 or 5 were very middle class Jewish teenagers somehow on their way to Israel. I remember Matala consisting of maybe 8 small houses but the photos I took at the time tell of many more, maybe 30 house clustered along the beach and at the south end of the bay.

The Germans had rented a room up the hill to the South of the bay, separate from the caves. I do remember walking up to where they stayed but otherwise have no recollection of exploring the village. Our evening haunt was a rudimentary bar near the beach run by a wily old man, who I learnt last year had only died 3 years ago. This knowledge came from an accidental encounter with a greek selling olive oil in Leeds, who owns olive groves a few kilometres from Matala, and whose family’s oil I  purchased when in Matala all those years ago.

In the summer the old man would put some tables outside. Inside, the hut had an earthen floor where we clustered around his stove whilst he would cook potato omelettes, pungent with the very coarse local oil, or occasionally fry some fish. We could drink Raki, coffee and wine when he had some.

The Americans were obsessed by hygiene. Eating an orange the juice squirted onto the rock and the girl scuttled into the cave in order to get some disinfectant. Travelling light with a rucksack and a bottle of disinfectant!

I arrived knowing of hippies, were these the hippies of Matala? or did that happen later on? for my part I had little empathy with most of them, and they little with me. One who was more interesting was somewhat older. He had set out around europe to spend his time writing his great american novel. His journey had not treated him well. He had started with cases of books and luggage but was now down to a typewriter. I read some sections of the manuscript describing his time as a clown on a side show at a fair ground, you threw wet bundles of cloth at him or maybe it was balls and he ended up in water.

I slept in one of the caves and had little connection with the americans but did get to know some Scandinavians, one of who I would eventually leave with and go round the coast to  Agia Galini to stay with an english writer who had briefly passed through Matala. It must have been after this that I moved to the airfield at Timbaki.

Here is a link to a 1968 article in Life magazine that may have cemented the Matala myth

http://www.elzosmid.nl/matala/1.html

Ossias for dancing

The first 6 Ossias

I painted a wedding present for some friends; the painting came out well but it had not the celebratory air I wanted; so I did  a second version or ossia, to use the term from music when the composer includes an alternative version of a line of music, this is the second painting in the sequence.

I had been wanting to do something akin to a set of studies as developed by Debussy or Ligeti, where the pieces would stand on their own but could also be seen as a set of studies in technical matters. My material is separated into 6 layers, I can change the order of the layers and rotate or otherwise transform the material in each layer. I can also leave layers out. I want each painting to be lively and celebratory. I hold a wonderful image of William Christie soberly dress in a suite dancing at the curtain call for Rameau’s Les Indes Galantes amidst the spectacularly costumed performers. I thought I might relate each painting to a renaissance or baroque dance form but am not so sure that will be a good idea, apart from any other aspect painting will have to remain as my ossia for dancing as I have two very left feet, an expert on dance I am definitely not! I cannot imagine Rameau as a dancer but that did not stop him writing the most joyful dance music.

The sixth painting went well then I realised I wanted a clarity in the colour akin to an early Dutch painting, so the solution was obvious, after wavering I have now repainted it in oil. It looks little different in a photograph but has a far greater depth of colour.

The seventh painting is already finished, I also thought of using oil paint for this but instead played with the tension between its “painterly” style and the flat surface of the acrylic. Therefore I have a painting that looks like acrylic but done in oil and an acrylic that looks like oil!

Artist as Spy

On the old airforce base at Timbaki

I had taken to the post office a small parcel of drawings that I had made in the previous weeks.  I filled in an elaborate customs declaration in old-fashioned diplomatic French and handed over my parcel.

Walking back from the Post Office a Jeep came to a sudden halt and 2 Greek soldiers in scruffy airforce uniforms grabbed me  and stuffed me in the back of the open Jeep. With the two soldiers and a driver, we bounced with much dust up into the hills until we came to a derelict  looking base. A guard let us through the perimeter fence. I was taken to one of the prefabricated huts where in a small room was a rather surprised American Intelligence Officer, Intelligence being a relative word. He had the packet – had it come with us or had it arrived before? I explained and he had some idea but no experience of modern art. He seemed to accept my explanation but was uncomfortable with the situation. On my part I was already aware, from a conversation with a Greek tug captain and my fanciful imagination, that something was “going on” to the south of us. I knew the tug and building work in a small cove on the southern tip of the island was also involved; I had read The Riddle of the Sands so was fully informed!  I was not handed back my drawings neither were they ever sent on. I thought of Baden-Powell’s secret plans disguised as drawings of butterflies. At the time I was living on the old German airforce base at Tymbaki and working as a shepherd along with two ex-murderers who now worked for the enigmatic Jannis. It was through his Dutch girlfriend that I had acquired the job when I had been living in a cave at Matala a little further down the coast.

I had thought of the idea behind the drawings before I went to Crete: If I took two different linear marks made of a single or pair of lines I could find the intermediate marks that would develop one into the other, like the game that transforms one word into another via an intermediary word, If I had 4  intermediate marks then I could assign a number from 1 to 6 and then I could numerically manipulate a series of marks. It was all very rudimentary.  I found my marks by rubbing out all but small areas on drawings I did of the southern coast line. When I eventually got back to England I did work out how I could get the marks to occupy a two dimensional space and make them revolve, cluster and vary in scale, and that to manipulate them with any facility a simple computer programme could be written. But of course this being 1966 I had no access to a computer so I could not be the pioneer of Computer art: instead I calculated by hand with the addition of a large book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates that was published by the Rand corporation, which I got from the American Embassy.

Sequel

The American embassy was one of many embassies I visited at that time: German, French but more significantly the Polish embassy, just off Harley Street, where I would be ushered in to a gloomy oak panelled room and kept waiting for a very long while, then an enigmatic but beautiful woman would appear and loan me 10″ recordings of the Warsaw Autumn Festival and give me beautifully designed magazines all of which I have subsequently lost. Whilst returning from one of these escapades I was stopped on Petts Wood Station: A robbery in a large house nearby had required the police to round me up as a suspect, I was whisked off to the scene of the crime where a lady emphatically shook her head and an Inspector explained that I had nothing in common with the burglar, however the contents of the Cretan nose bag, an object that I had borrowed from “My” donkey did arouse their suspicions. Why was there material from the Polish Embassy along with a gold watch? the latter a cheap Smiths watch I had been given for the 11+ and always carried and never wore.

First encounter with Rivette

For the first time I watched a film by Rivette, It was Va savoir : I remember I watched a film. Was there direction or camera or cutting? Disappointment at first and wanting ‘astonish me’, instead I got Film; pure perfect film. By the end I felt very grown up. At the end I wished it had been somewhat longer: The first half hour took an hour the subsequent two hours took half that time! Certain to be watching more of his films. The next evening it was Tokyo Story which has been sitting waiting to be watched for over a year. Now suffering somewhat from the mild hype of a rerelease, why rerelease the print that exists is fine? It is a wonderful film but my preference would be for Floating Weeds, , with just 2 of his films watched I am in no real position to judge.

As I am a beginner at this should I mention the Goose I cooked, the Borsch I made, that has more artistry than the latest painting in its current state!

Have started on the fourth of the Ossia sequence, that was a hopeless name for this group but I was scared to zoom in tighter! In the last few weeks Agon by Stravinsky has been playing in my head. His models were the classic french dances as in Rameau opera-ballet that delight me. When I am low it is a choice between two great dancers, Rameau  and  Fred Astaire. I want to make dances for a resolute non dancer. We now have Ossias for dancing as the name of the group and each one with an appropriate dance; The one in the previous post being Rigaudon. The current one which is hopelessly bogged down, I will keep to myself for good luck or maybe because the escape strategy will completely alter its appearance and manner. My time is mainly taken up with making new frames and mounting, not an imposition as I always enjoy the practical skills involved in this craft, but not conducive to concentrating on a painting.

Ossias

I now know the Vodňany sequence will be 7 paintings although they are not complete yet. Four of them are in the Czech Republic so will not know if I have second thoughts on those until the summer, but was without doubts when I last saw them.

Now I can concentrate on the next group of paintings. I started these nearly a year ago, when I tried to paint a wedding present for some friends. I abandoned the first version and went with the second version. Whist the first painting worked well it did not meet the occasion for what it was conceived, a perfect term for the second version would thus be a Ossia, but not a good description of what I think I have in mind.

The original idea was using little balloons of DNA sequences, plus the material derived, amongst other things, from paintings done in South Bohemia. Piano study as exemplified in late Debussy or Ligeti perhaps come towards a model.

The structure is simple, 4 or 5 layers that are cut to reveal the layer below with conventional shadows to emphasise the separate layers. Hoping this simple devise will give enough space to understand some ideas I can otherwise not voice, so far the omen seems good. I have been working on number 3 for the last 3 days and apart from a little tightening here and there it should stand.

Film as comfort blanket, High on my list is Amarcord by Fellini. However I am not as comfortable with his other films, I watched Orchestral Rehersal recently and just at the point I was going to abandon I kept looking and was glad I did, so on to Ginger and Fred wholly delightful but also pertinent and moving, then  And the ship sailed on (1983), something I know I will come back to again and again, I have found yet another comfort blanket!

Harold Cohen: Artist’s Talk

He is obscure for most people interested in the (don’t forget it’s commercial) visual arts but perhaps he did some of the most important thinking of the last 30 years. Love to know how his thinking has developed since this was recorded in 2004. Most stuff on the web about Harold is from some years ago, this is for rather complex reasons. At 90″ this is by far the longest exposition of his ideas available.

via Harold Cohen: Artist’s Talk.

1 Film 1+ painting

Watched Delta a recent Hungarian film. Having difficulty understanding how other reviewers, including major film critics,  description  the film as about incest. The central sexual encounter is a violent rape by the stepfather that happens in the distance. I think at no point do we see any incest or I would suggest any hint of incest, but many images that have an ambiguity if you do not know the context, hence you may well encounter incest if it’s in the mind. As  the incest that is in the eyes of  the peasants, but did they tolerate the rape?  A perfect image of misreading occurs when we have silhouettes behind a sheet, cleverly implying a sexual reading only for us to be brought short when we realise it is the pegging out of the washing.

What we do see is male violence to women. We learn that the half-brother is much affected by nursing a girl who had got pregnant   ”I had to nurse her, the baby was stillborn, But she disappeared”

Owes a bit too much to Bela Tarr and Agnes Hranitzky, and these bit come over as mannered. Given better fortunes in the making of the film the pacing may well have been better considered. and the overly beautiful camera better integrated into the story, a story which looks as if it was rescued in the making.

Still trying to resolve the last of the Vodňany sequence, I want it to be open ended but I had closed it off in a lazy pat way, maybe I now have got to a more edgy, open and mysterious feel. I think that what I was after was similar to the atmosphere of opus 16, that would be my ideal! Not Vorgefühle, remember now that I added that word at some stage to the bottom of Song to the Dancer 2 which I struggled over from 1981 until 1991 ( it was after all a portrait of Schoenberg). I have in mind more the second movement The past. Also painted a small view of  Třebon, out of desperation as much as anything else, used a drawing I did on an Easter visit to the place. Like many things I throw of in a hurry it came out well.

Diotima Quartet played at HCMF in November, they were stunning, so looking out for recordings I found they have released performances of the new Bärenreiter edition of Janaček 2. Performances, because Garth Knox joins them for the original version with a Viola d’amour. Either way a revelation but with the Viola d’amour the music gains a hidden harmonic sense.  I have always sensed a hole in the middle of the writing, now filled.The first quartet is perhaps even more of a surprise, it now shows its bones through the skin as never before.

Vodňany resurrected

The state before I roughed up Vodňany 7

I was not happy with the 4th painting in the Vodňany sequence, It did not work as a painting, too many clichéd short cuts and didn’t express the constellation of ideas that I had in mind: Then I started painting again,  after a fallow couple of months without using a brush,  and it pulled together. In the interim I had been working up the material for a forthcoming sequence but that was also an excuse for the terror of starting work again! It is a better painting now and it tells the correct story back to myself. Now I start on reformatting the 7th painting, which formally was perhaps the best of the sequence but it did not tell me anything. It is now formally lousy but from the mess I should perhaps be able to find a direction.

Schnittke is the composer of the week on Radio 3. I have always found much of his music powerful and perhaps the only polystilistic composer who more or less avoids cheap tricks. (can you call other composers such? In Schnittke it is a principle in others a supermarket view of composing. The only piece of his I listen to consistently is the Concerto for mixed chorus that overwhelmed me at the Union Chapel, Islington. I cannot remember when but I think it was not a lot later than it being written in 1985.

My own language often uses conflicting codes; The Vodnany sequence being a good example of this, but often the different “languages” I invoke can look to an outsider as a change of direction; Please look beneath the labels!

Dim Sum and Opera

Dim Sum for lunch, the joys of being not far from Manchester.
and Zoroastre for the evening. In the summer we saw inside the Baroque theatre in Česky Krumlov, to see inside is the most you can do but that includes going beneath the stage. Untouched for 200 years and preserved in perfection, a memorable encounter. This production is from Drottingholm the other baroque theatre not quite as original but it is still a working theatre.
The gestures of Amir Hosseinpour’s dance language is reigned in and perfectly blended into baroque dance forms, in touch with the genies of this theatre, fitted onto the small performing space and necessary simplicity of lighting.
I loved the formality of this; very different from the rumbustiousness of the opéra-ballet.
This is the second tragédie en musique by Rameau I have seen on DVD, the other being  Les Boréades which must be far outside the accepted form. A mission now to find others.

We start

Was given “The Glass Building” to read. It was not just that it was badly written but that the background knowledge that had been so assiduously Googled showed its paste too readily:- I quote
“The car – a Tatra, she had been told – drew in at the kerb and stopped”.
She is supposed to be blind so Simon Mawer couldn’t resist telling us he had researched that taxis when the book was supposed to be set were Tatras but this totally irrelevant to the thoughts of a blind old lady . By page 37 I was heartily sick of these gobbits of ill digested research and closed the book. I then started reading again Thomas Berhard: sort of a cold shower! After “Concrete” then “Extinction” now on “Corrections”. The connection with the Mawer is that the catalysts is a famous Central European modernist building. Even when a lot must be lost in translation it’s such fun to read language used with a purpose.