Let's make it a bit more transparent,

non?!

Ok - the white room is history now. A funny, very present and very, very good place to have been for two months. To sort out far more things than I thought I could, hoped I would or even knew they needed sorting.

So, we got on pretty well with each other, I soaked up some past, memories and generally a lot of empty white space. And thus offloaded some of my past, memories, and above all: plans and hopes, into the two months and into this large empty room.

Many of them will begin to properly unfold as of in eight days (and counting). But until then: a bit of art.

I played a few games with myself and this space. Was curious what would happen with this two-months short-term lease in the middle of Kreuzberg, tagged it as a research trip. And research I did.

With all the training and cpd stuff I've been doing at work, I've become a lot more experimental and daring with the contexts in which I can work well. And I generally work well in chaos: pull everything out off the cupboards, mix it up and stir and be confident that whatever is important will emerge. So: I tried deliberate confusion. And confused I was. Until, one day - well: 31 july, really, it all became crystal clear.

With the White Room as art work I tried to be pushy, determined and rather forceful - after all: time was limited and so very precious.

I was intrigued by the bareness, the emptiness and some strong colours. I was also intrigued by this room as outwith time and space. A place that somehow had become unhooked from a past and a future, it only existed as an improvised holiday flat with bare kitchen and people coming and going, leaving some notes while passing but that was all.

I wanted, and still want, to capture some of that fleetingness, something that is present, remains out of focus and I can't quite grasp it while all the time I feel its presence.

And so I tried:
- Weiss, weiss, weiss, das weiss ich
- More white overlaid

and on Matisse, specifically:
- Interior illusions
- Matisse, colour and I

And sketched:

Hahaha.... and of course that challenge made me trip up. It mirrored some of my own confusion over the past two months, but as a wee sideline art project to play with, it was far too ambitious - or, well, maybe not... I could in fact not get it into focus. What I could see in front of my eyes was clear - in white and lime and orange.

But everything else???

I was getting myself lost a bit in Matisse - and that has been very useful and exciting. There is something so intriguing about his compositions and his constructions of space. And all the same, I can see far more about what I'm not after than what I can take. But I think that's a productive tension and I will keep asking about that one in Matisse's work.

There are really two points or rather lines, I finally got to with the White Room

1. Layering of one view (today)
2. Distortions of the room floor as picture plane (next post)

The obvious approach for me seemed layering: I tried tissue paper, with acrylic inks, pastels and other assortments. And was craving for tracing paper. Something more solid, stable than the tissue paper. On the last weekend I finally got some and did a few more turns with it.

It's only a small sample in my large sketchbook. It is layered, pulled apart and flipped. It is the view that intrigued me most: an old-fashioned window, with some strong colours and reflections. The layering in itself was not enough. It needed to be spread out and distorted this way. And I think, that idea can go a bit further: onto larger sheets and possibly some other media.

The White Room, study
mixed media collage, 25x20cm

It's the space, some definite lines and still it isn't. You think you can see it clearly and yet you can't. The shapes look familiar and yet they aren't.

What do you think?

Personality crisis

A bit of proto punk to start...

I actually had collected a second song from the radio alongside this, as antidote, but can't think of it what it was... too bad.

I've still been circling around Matisse's condensation of sensation that seeks harmony and balance. And whether 'getting to a fleeting impression/sensation' is what I actually do with pastel sea sketches like these. I think it's not the intensification, the boiling down, getting to the essentials (if not essence) that I object - no, 'object' is the wrong word - to but the oneness, the balance and harmony.*

And, all the while, I'm back in California. A heavy thunderstorm clears the air - just as it does right now outside my Berlin window - , Ate tries out the various setting on the fabulous dSLR, I end up with some very nice portraits of myself in trashy camping van setting with a plastic palm tree in the background, and I read her from Matisse's Notes of a painter.

Read her pretty much the passage of my last post - the thriving for a true, thickened and authentic representation of who the artist is on the canvas he paints on.

The picture wall, graphite in A4 Moleskine

And we're playing time warp - trying to bridge about a hundred years of identity politics, psychology, feminism and subject formation. Try to relate Matisse's sense of self, his belief in his own skills, ability and worth to our visit in California, to Ate, Justin, Kerstin and Fynn and their drag performances between glamour model, business woman and Texan cowboy (a link to Ate's films? Try here), and my own fumblings about person-making by abstract landscape paintings.

And it is at that point that I begin to appreciate the ability of different media - other than a paintbrush, pen, paper, paint - to get to what I may be after with my persistently growing tag 'person-making'.

My 'getting to what matters' may happen through life drawing/painting or even photography. But, honestly, I think I need to delve deeper first into more of theory_politics_practice of stuff I know, I've learned and experienced. And with these, I will always end up with some far more complicated than harmony if I seek to condense sensations and experiences. Sorry... there are one hundred years between us... so much happened, unhappened, got lost and won. It does not translate.

As you may guess, I am actually pretty pleased with myself over this. For all the stuff that I am concluding at the moment, this is a great point to have arrived at - beginning to set more explicit into relation the art I am doing to the theory and practice of knowledge production that I have engaged in up to this point. The myriad of interconnections are becoming clearer and I am also quite happy by now to talk about them. Put them into relation to each other, to write them into one cv.

Good, that has been one of the points I've been aiming at. And I also think this the conclusion of California - certainly not of Matisse - there's more to the White Room, but that will probably have to wait until I'll be on holidays - finally and long overdue - Among the Fields, from Friday onwards.

So: Bye, Bye California... I'm looking forward to seeing you on a video loop soon. But have some slides of my photos, complete with campingsite ambience first:

* and, if need be, I can add at least 5-10 pages on the relevance of internal relations, dialectics and all that stuff that is being kept continually in motion, sets itself into relation to itself and others, doesn't stand still and moves, moves, moves, often with plenty of friction, and thereby is always in the process of becoming. - But I better didn't

Matisse, colour, and I

I'm putting myself up for the modesty award today, with a title like that. But never mind...

Following my White Room experimentation I've been reading more about, and preferably BY Matisse. It's Matisse On Art. And it's a funny little book. Funny because each original piece of writing is preceeded by an, often longer than the original, introduction by Jack Flam. It's all very well but goes some way in confirming my view on why I do not want to become an art historian/critic. [hahaha.... slagging while blogging is so much more fun ;)]

So, after reading the first few of the introductions I've decided to skip them altogether and it makes for much better reading.

There are three themes that intrigue me in Matisse:

1. The way he produces space that is so full of ambivalence, superficial and completely out of reach;
2. The way he uses colour to achieve this;
3. And all the while the space he creates on canvas is so ambivalent, he thrives for an expression of his own sensations and emotions - by the means of painting - that ranks harmony and serenity above all other sensations.

Oops, (3) just acquired words while I was typing. His desire for balance and harmony struck me first off when reading On Art, but all the same the space he creates is so ambiguous, so obvious yet ungraspable. Interesting... is there more in it than harmony?

Similarly to Morandi, Matisse's use of flattening of 3D space catches my attention - the trickery, the playful involvement of the onlooker in letting us partake in a game of hide and seek, of appearances, illusions, a bit of shadowdancing and a good performance. In the form of an apparently immobile and fixed STILL LIFE. Ha! Still life, my a***! It is certainly not still.

Well... I was planning to cover (2), his use of colour, in this post today, but seeing my ongoing rambling in tangents - while always worthwhile - it seems an ambitious plan.

So, maybe I should start with the "I" from the title. I was introduced to Matisse with one of the very first of my pastel sketches/drawings/paintings that I posted on WetCanvas for some c&c, four years ago. I don't remember why I posted a second version of this view from my previous flat. In my mind, this, the first one, is still the better one (even if only on greyboard rather than any proper ground), and if I remember correctly it's still at home behind M.'s wardrobe.

View through Hallway, 2005
soft pastel on board, 48x65cm

For some curiosity, see the link to the discussion on WC here.

Matisse was recommended for his inversion of blue and green for distance, red and yellow for proximity. And that I should make up my mind between a more 3d or 2d feel of the image.

In Notes of a Painter (1908), Matisse made his first and explicit intervention into how he paints and what he regards as important. And there's a lot in there on order, clarity and what he calls a 'condensation of sensations' which achieves serenity in a painting and supercedes the capturing of fleeting moments and impressions.

I'm circling round that sentiment... circle, circle, circle... and I think that that is very different to how I use colour. And how I enjoy using pastels for plein air work. I think that whenever someone asks why I love pastels I will reply (probably along many other pastelists):

I love them for their immediacy... pure pigment in stick form and on it goes and it's there.

No condensation of sensation for me... rather a bit of a shameless: I feel. I paint. It's there. (Or not).

Circling further, I also see how Matisse is thus radically different from people like Eardley or de Stael. The ability of Eardley's paintings to move me to tears stands out, and it stands out as very different to Matisse's pursuit of serenity and harmony.

Isn't that all very intriguing!? I will continue.

But first, another pastel sketch I found from California. Initially I thought it was from the day when sky and sea become one, but it is in fact from the morning after the fog was beginning to lift, Ate had already gone swimming and I needed to get a bit of the silence of the fog on paper - though I admit, it looks a bit too thunderstormy humid instead of silent.

Kalifornien Strand, soft pastel on board, 35x25cm

Nonetheless, I am with Matisse when he declares he employs colour to capture sensations and emotions... they are not there to copy nature but to be expressive of his subjective being there. And for that, I am also rather forgiving of the rather rubbish composition of some of the plein air sketches of late... this one's particularly bad and wonky... but it was the sensation of colour that I was after. That's all.

Interior illusions

Chris made this fabulous comment on my previous White Room experimentation: to look at Matisse and how he arranged objects in space.

And that's what I did. I swiftly made two (in)expensive book purchases... small format, b/w photos and a lot of text on

• Matisse's own writing about art and his art practice: Henri Flam's originally 1973 published collections of Matisse's writings: Matisse - On art (see google books here); and
• A small collection of Matisse's cut-outs with some commentary: Ralf Schiebler, Henri Matisse. Scherenschnitte, Schirmer/Mosel, 1994. (sorry, there's not really much to see about this book online.

So, I've been reading these books on my various journeys across Berlin's public transport system for the past week. I sought out the cut-outs for a variety of hunches: to flatten space, to simplify space and to make objects moveable - to be placed and shaped where one likes. In that, I explicitly ignored Matisse's numerous earlier paintings of decorative still life and the curious games he plays with them with the construction of space.

And thus I stumbled to the extraordinary end point of someone's extraordinary artistic career. Which clearly doesn't make for an easy starting point for someone else. And neither should it.

So: we need a series of diversions, complications and confusions if this is something to work with, on, besides.

Let's start with a couple of his cut-outs. Yes?!

Henri Matisse, The Heart, 1943,
papiers decoupes
Jazz, tablet vii, 44.5x67.3cm
Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Note the limited colour scheme; note how the different forms do not touch each other; note that in print the depth of the collages is lost; note how the heart makes the rest of the construction fall out of place - passionately.

It's constructions of space by cut out - the practice of cutting shape into colour - there is little more direct in approach than how Matisse - so late, and after decades of searching - stumbles onto this new medium that in its simplicity provides such clear expression. Playfully innocent and all the same something to arrive at after years of searching.

Henri Matisse, Figures, 1944
papiers decoupes
Jazz, tablet ix, 44.3x67.1cm
Musee National d'Art Moderne, Paris

Positive and negative shapes, space; the frame is as important as what is (not) inside. And yet: the positive remains incongruent to the negative; the forms do not match; do not exhaust themselves in each other. Instead, they are subtly changed, amended, rounded, flattened; so: one is not the opposite of the other.

So, I'm standing on the sidelines and my jaw is dropping in awe.
Don't forget to breath, dear
... and now??