... and then it's blue

(D. Jarman, 1993). only in excerpts so far.

it's a conclusion in more ways than one. the highly saturated hues of journey to avebury are replaced by the colour of jarman's increasing blindness.

so, a film that consists of a single 'image' - the blue of one man's blindness. the blue inspired by yves klein's monochromatic paintings. it's all and nothing it seems to me. it's a refusal - to turn one's struggle with hiv-related illnesses and approaching death into a film-able narrative. so it's a social and political positioning. without images other than blue, the image recedes - in it's all-encompassingness - to make way, to heighten one's senses of voice, sound and music.

strangely, i find the hues of avebury far more disconcerting. somewhere i read a review of 'this garden of eden'. it could well be that 38c in berlin is frying my brain a bit too much, but the sickly hues of avebury shout at me: pain and the pastoral. the pastoral as pain.

stretch

... to another summer. 2 years back. as i am packing again i'll be sending off my eigg/berlin sketchbook to a fellow student to use the sketchbook for some music composition.

while making tea. sun am. pastel, w/c, pencil in moleskine

it only occurred to me that she could get this sketchbook as alternative to the chile one. so. i am back with summer preparations. again with going to being in berlin for a good part of it. going to be sketching for a good part of it. and glad again to be leaving glasgow for a bit. and yet: so much is vastly different.

i am also back with the malleability of time: how it stretches forwards and backwards. radiates outwards in all direction from any presence. how past and future seem constantly folded into and onto the presence.

a curious one. this relationship to time. and how it is social and the experience seems mostly my own. how far can i stretch forward. and backward. while all is now.

flicking through the eigg sketchbook it was also all about time. lykke li and island time. all in rain and low clouds. all the time.

so,

stretch. while making tea on holidays
a look out of the window
how close is the world today
depends on the mist and the low clouds
is it as far as the dry stone wall?
or can you see the cairn?
or even the high moors?

stretch. the abstracted lines come easy
capture the horizon. a tree or two
but not more
close is far more stretching
what about the stones?
or the bracken? or the sheep.

lucky i was: no sheep in sight today.

i also begun rebuilding my 0kb music library today. some borrowed, some stashed, some carefully saved. so. back to that summer there goes this.

oh. she will get the ghost of time, too. no point in doing things by half.

peter lanyon

has made it on my list for the land art investigation.
i hadn't seen his work before. but richard's course on modern and contemporary art at the tate britain last week introduced me to this one here:

Peter Lanyon, Lost Mine, 1959, 183x153 cm, oil on canvas

Tate Britain

i think it was my favourite painting of the lot. - in far as my emotional response goes. i love it for its colour balance and rythm, emphasised by the strong gestural marks. the rythm of calm and dynamic. it depicts the tragedy of the flooding of the tin mines in levant, cornwall. the tin mines were under the seabed and too close digging under the seabed led to their flooding with the loss of 39 miners' lives in 1919*.

see this bbc archive for some information on the cornish tin mining industry.

so, a couple of books on lanyon and lanyon's landscape paintings are ordered. it's been a while that i was that intrigued by a painter. there is a potential, from what i've read so far, that his landscape work actually provides a radical departure over previous landscape genre obsessions with harmony, a hiding of ownership and power relations in the landscape. i'll wait on the post delivery to read on.

*this is the information given on the tate website. i did some reading about the levant mining disaster and can't find any reference about flooding; instead, the miners were trapped and suffocated when the mechanical ladder on which they ascended after a shift broke and brought some of the shaft down with it. an incident from the mid-19c is the mining disaster at east wheal rose, where 59 miners died when shafts flooded. see the wiki entry here. i will wait to read more about the painting to get a sense which tragedy lanyon referred to.

a glimpse at the opening preview

Monoprint, Freire, 25x50 cm on Tosa Shi paper

it's all framed and soon ready for the opening tomorrow:

Eldon Group Summer Exhibition 2010

Opening Preview
Saturday 1 May 2010
11am - 1pm

1-12 May, St Andrew's Gallery, University of Glasgow
Level 5, St Andrew's Building, 11 Eldon Street

Gallery open Monday - Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturdays 10am - 1pm
Closed Monday 3 May

Paintings in acrylics,
oil, mixed media,
works on paper

Thomas Bush
Emma Ceresa
Geraldine Crossan
Gesa Helms
Sarah-Jane Sharp
Pascale Steenkiste
Chris Turpie

3 observations in landscape (ii)

bums... i made the mistake of writing post iii before post ii and inbetween the two i fell into the night stars, morning mist and a chestnut bud and thus disappeared momentarily.

but stars, mist and buds were all on queue for short and sweet observation on landscape (ii).

it concerns james turrell's minimalism of light and perception (as discussed in more length in an earlier post). two quotes stick in my mind from my web trawl even if the source didn't (sorry!).

quote 1 paraphrases as james turrell is one of the great romantics in his search for light in the (american) landscape.

quote 2 paraphrases as james turrell with his skyscapes and installations does want to take us back to the stone age.

out of this my observation (ii) arises:

a minimalism of form is required. only with this, the limitations of landscape can be transcended. such minimalism - if it works with light (and shade) and our perception of this - will be contemporary, as in the here and now (as indeed Turrell's work is). nature and our experience of this is one of presence not tradition.

is this romantic? is working with light and perception romantic? i wonder....

3 observations on landscape (i)

with all the work on portfolios it seems ages that i spent some time in landscape. assembling the material for the portfolios, demonstrating and providing a statement around these was very useful in surveying my 'fieldwork' as i indeed called the statement [reminder to self: rewrite and post this].

it however also made obvious that i am moving along something less painterly and more conceptual and 'other materially' than paint. some of my reservation about the genre of landscapism remain, remain and remain and need addressing in other means.

the three exhibitions i saw over the past week will serve as initial markers.

1. the return of landscape. akademie der kuenste, hanseatenweg, berlin

it draws knowingly on the romantics' constructions of landscape and the rich and varied and problematic nature (!) of germany's cultural history and its basis for geopolitics (be it it with prussia's colonisation of the east; or ns blood and soil politics and economics).

however, the main part of the exhibition is a juxtaposition of two cities (venice and las vegas) and their dependence on nature - water. so: landscape becomes the domain of landscape planners to struggle with issues over sustainability amongst capitalist thirst for land and expansion. the imagery that dominates are those of aerial photography of landscape patterns - nature/cultivation/destruction, the main slide show made up of images by alex s maclean. a third part of the exhibition shows various landscape projects, their master plans and details to manage sustainability.

in this, the exhibition is limited: it's limited to the act of planning for sustainability and the belief that a plan will solve a problem. though my own professional background has always been situated in close proximity to the 'belief in a plan', i find this increasingly tiresome and mis-placed. mis-placed also if we consider the power of aerial photography without social practice, without people. to assume that patterns from high above reveal the groundwork. - the photography of bernd and hilla becher marks the precendent of a rich tradition of photography of human activity and the outcome of these with the agents being absent. rich by absence and stillness. photography always freezes activity in stillness. and nonetheless, it's probably one of its biggest problems.

the piece that really caught me, was - possibly unsurprisingly - a video by the canadian documentary film maker peter mettler. his documentary on the destruction by open pit oil production, petropolis (canada, 2009, 43min), visit the site for the film here.

again: it's aerial imagery. yet, this destruction through the tar sands is narrated by mettler. he tells the viewer how his requests to visit the fields was refused again and again so that flying over the fields was the only way of getting access and of being able to document; he talks about the first experiments of flying and much more. thus he makes an imagery thoroughly part of this world and the relations that make petropolis possible.

mettler's film is one of three shown on the side of a large field of illuminated boxes which show quotes concerned with landscape from throughout (German-speaking) history.

landscape text panels, illuminated, wiederkehr der landschaft, adk, berlin

two I noted down.

ich hatte einst ein schönes vaterland
so sang der flüchtling heine,
das seine stand am rheine,
das meine auf dem märkischen sand.
wir alle hatten einst ein (siehe oben).
das fraß die pest, das ist im sturz zerstoben.
o rößlein auf der heide
dich brach die kraftdurchfreude. (mascha kaleko, 1907-1975)

i once had a beautiful fatherland
so sung the refugee heine
his stood next to the rhine
mine on the markian sands.
we all once had one (see above).
it got devoured by pestulence, it broke apart in its fall.
oh little rose on the heath
you were broken by strengththroughjoy.

allmählich entdeckte sie neue linien im gesicht der landschaft. ackerflächen, deren grenzen in einem anderen winkel zum horizont verliefen als die uralten grabenrunzeln der erde früherer zeit. so schnell prägten die neuen züge sich nicht in die gesichter der erde. (christa wolf, *1929)

slowly she discovered new lines in the face of the landscape. fields whose boundaries were running in different angles to the horizon than the ancient furrow marks of the earth of previous times. it wouldn't be that quick for the new contours to settle in the faces of the earth.

thus, my first observation:
 
while nature is never outside from what people experience and engage with (i.e., nature cannot be external to people... unspoilt or otherwise), considering nature outside of landscape is a necessary opening to get beyond the landscape genre and its conventions.

this is likely to require radically different means to the framed picture plane and conventions of landscape compositions in painting.

it's probably not by chance that these reconsiderations of nature hit me as i'm about to engulf myself in a week of facilitation training inspired by deep ecology and sustainability. it's a reconsideration that i avoided for a decade or more. so, i think it's high time. hello dartmoor, hello permaculture.

in light

there is (no) matter.

this one - like bethan huws - was in my diary since december. and with attempt number three, i not only saw the matter that light makes, but so did my parents.

before we arrived, we laughed at the arrogant marketing that the City of Wolfsburg - Hitler's car city where the Beetle was first mass-produced - was of course with the Turrell's Wolfsburg Project the site of Turrell's largest installation in an exhibition space:

the main installation, Bridget's Bardo is a ganzfeld piece of two spaces that merge from one into the other: the viewing and the sensing space, separated by a sensor, you must not step into the viewing space. light changes and all the while you sense the view and wonder what that space is in front of you, a wall, a cube or simply nothing in colours that change as the light changes.

and you wonder and wonder. the separating between viewing and sensing space are sharp corners in space. but behind or in front of the planes become depths and you see nothing but colour. all around you and in so doing colour becomes you.

at the back of the installations are two rectangles, one at the top where the bridge lead down, one at the bottom where steps lead down to the floor below. of distinct and separate colour they appear as planes again, not as openings.

small groups of people spend ten minutes as light and are encouraged to go again, as many do. second time round i begin to see some shadows, not on the walls nor ceiling, but on the floor, looking back into the piece.

how crucial shadows are in helping you orientate yourself and to grasp dimensions, forward and backward and upright.

how do you mark light in the absence of shadows and spatial demarcations with any thing other than that pure light?

what form has fog and nothing than the absence of form?

the exhibition continues with some smaller installations, one (milk run iii, a spectral wedgework, 2002) operating in darkness with dark orange light and your perception as it plays a myriad of tricks on you; and plenty of illustrations of the roden crater project and some large scale aquatints Turrell made with experiments of light deprivation and selective openings of panels in the mendota hotel in california. here, the light modelled geometric objects which he captures on the aquatints. i found a link with images of this aquatint series, First Light (1989-90) at this site here.

and i thought i'd add this video here too: about another skyspace and roden crater. enjoy!

Fields - enclosures, commons and change

One of the last things I did before I left Glasgow was sending off my previous sketchbook (Chile and after) along with all the prints from the assignment 3 to my tutor for the printmaking course. With the distance learning, all material is posted between N. and myself several times, and each time I'm holding my breath that the tube with the prints or the logbook and sketchbook don't get lost. In any case, this time I managed to scan in the recent logbook entries and some of the pages of the sketchbook that I would have liked to take to Germany with me.

It's the sketchbook with some of the Chilean field sketches and some further developments, and ideally I would have like to continue working with this book until it's finished.

So - the pages I hadn't scanned in before were those from an article I read in May which prompted some bigger questions around fields.

Well - fields - they are obvious and approachable. They simply ARE. Are the landscape patterns of my childhood, ever there and ever changing, in colour - greens, yellows, browns and crop rotation. For a while I had - but without success - collected some of the symbolism and mythology around fields, but all the stuff around harvest, fertility and abundance wasn't what I was interested in.

But then I read this piece on the English peasant poet John Clare, who arrived in London in the 1820s from a rural community in Northamptonshire which in the time of him growing up was going to undergo significant change following the enclosure of the English countryside (take this Wiki entry as a starting point on enclosure).

More so than Clare's poetry, it was something in the way the article itself was written that ended up making sense. It was a very descriptive exploration of rural change, of the change that was coming about through the abolishment of common land and the enclosing of individually owned parcels of property:

"The countryside of Clare's childhood was differently owned, differently shaped, differently peopled...a set of intricate concentric and adjacent circles: villages, each with their commons, their pub and church, the green, surrounded by fields divided into strips, the use of which was portioned out with some effort at equitable distribution of the best land."
(Adam Foulds, Everywhere an exile, Guardian Review, 23/5/2009, p. 20)

And:

In contrast to the idea of fields of harvest providing a stable, always there and never changing presence, the article pointed towards the profound changes in access and even more so ownership over land. - Industrialisation and the industrialisation of the countryside, the making efficient and effective of rural land, and: supposedly idle and unproductive rural inhabitants, has in past been and is in present turning up side down those fields, those patterns that seemingly simply exist.

Let's think about the Highland Clearances, the Enclosures, the Levellers, the Zapatistas etc etc....

All this can take us further than harvest. Very good. Let's dig around a little more in such patterns and movements.

A photo? How about a scribbled sketchbook page?

The Scottish islands with a bit of (poetic) distance

... ok, my timing is often somewhat out of sync. But why not?

I felt really lucky to stumble across the Strawberries just before I left Glasgow. M had sent it to me first last summer along with some more of Edwin Morgan's poems about Glasgow. They are Glasgow just as much - though rather differently - as Eardley's paintings are Glasgow. Funnily enough - though not dissimilar in time, Morgan's Strawberries were maybe written ten years after many of Eardley's paintings - his poems are of a presence while she tries to recapture spirits and experiences of a sense of community that was disappearing.

But... out of the city and up North for today.

Quite a few weeks ago I had been watching some of the programmes of the BBC's poetry season. And made several discoveries. Firstly, obviously, much poetry of which I was utterly clueless. But, almost more significantly: the performance of doing poetry. One was by a young woman about growing up in a London housing scheme. And it was just utterly fabulous in presence. There was also another spoken word artist who was working with primary school children and rhymes, words and sounds as means of expression.... I think if I had someone like that for my German classes of years past, I would have loved them.

The programme I saw and which fascinated me was the one on George Mackay Brown who lived for most of his life in his home town of Stromness on Orkney, and died in the late 1990s. His most famous poem is Hamnavoe - the Norse name for Stromness.

Listen to it on this page of the Poetry Archive.

Hamnavoe by George Mackay Brown

My father passed with his penny letters
Through closes opening and shutting like legends
When barbarous with gulls
Hamnavoe's morning broke

On the salt and tar steps. Herring boats,
Puffing red sails, the tillers
Of cold horizons, leaned
Down the gull-gaunt tide

And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
A stallion at the sweet fountain
Dredged Water, and touched
Fire from steel-kissed cobbles.

Hard on noon four bearded merchants
Past the pipe-spitting pier-head strolled,
Holy with greed, chanting
Their slow grave jargon.

A tinker keened like a tartan gull
At cuithe-hung doors. A crofter lass
Trudged through the lavish dung
In a dream of cornstalks and milk.

In "The Arctic Whaler" three blue elbows fell,
Regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,
Till the amber day ebbed out
To its black dregs.

The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring,

And boys with penny wands lured gleams
From the tangled veins of the flood. Houses went blind
Up one steep close, for a
Grief by the shrouded nets.

The kirk, in a gale of psalms, went heaving through
A tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven. And lovers
Unblessed by steeples, lay under
The buttered bannock of the moon.

He quenched his lantern, leaving the last door.
Because of his gay poverty that kept
My seapink innocence
From the worm and black wind;

And because, under equality's sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.

There was an interview with Don Paterson, a contemporary Scottish poet, on the relevance of Mackay Brown. For Paterson, he was so relevant to the current generation of Scottish poets precisely because Mackay Brown offered a way of talking, writing and experiencing nature in a way that was relevant but did not try to appropriate or to own it.

That comment stuck - it resonated with my thought on landscape art as a genre and landscape as a subject of critique. And it also offered a tension to Gabriela Mistral's appropriation of the Chilean landscape for patriotism.

There's no painting to go with this, I'm afraid. But here one of Don Paterson's poems - on the most innermost of the Inner Hebrides, Luing. It's a complex and yet very simple line of thought, I like it.

Again: listen to it here.

Luing by Don Paterson

When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover’s wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion,

I’d say go here, maybe, to our unsung
innermost isle: Kilda’s antithesis,
yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.

Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft,
the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch
to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
in her arms than ever – sharing her breath,

watching the red vans sliding silently
between her hills. In such intimate exile,
who’d believe the burn behind the house
the straitened ocean written on the map?

Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the fontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,

aching at the shearwater’s wail, the rowan
that falls beyond all seasons. One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.

What images... gull-gaunt tide, seapink innocence and dreams of cornstalks and milk...

Now... poetry slams... Berlin has some... already seen some posters for it...

But also: landscape painting, round x, fields in oil... all here and in my bag, waiting to be unpacked...

Let's skive with Turner

JMW Turner, The Val d'Aosta, 1840s
Oil on canvas, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

... and so we did. Just as well, seeing that tomorrow would have been too late (and not a day for skiving anyway... facilitating PhD students on how to become effective).

So: there was at points nothing to see and yet the paintings were so full of everything. Talking about Turner... hm, dunno... while happy to take Twombly apart (well, a bit), Turner is something different altogether.

So, while I'm getting over introductory shyness and am sussing out some of the obvious and less obvious links why this has been a phantastic day out in Edinburgh, here's some of my favourites.

JMW Turner, Landscape with River and distant Mountains, c1845
Oil on Canvas, Walker Art Gallery, National Museum, Liverpool

From Elqui 1 to more fields via de Stael

Nicolas de Stael, Landscape: the road to Uzes, 1954
Oil on Canvas, 80x53.4 cm, private collection

There's someone I haven't been able to get out of my mind for the past few weeks. - Well, the title already gives it away. De Stael's landscapes are on my mind rather persistently. Quite some time back I enthused about Agrigente when I came across him via Chris's admiration for him. I did a few experiments with his compositions to help me work out the final abstractions from the first fields. And then I stopped.

I need to go back. No: First I really need to see some of his paintings in real life. But hunting for them only ever seems to lead to: 'held in a private collection'. If I ever was to have one single painting, it would be one by him - anyone. I happily take one of his tiny compositions, or the footballers, or a nude but really, really, really: I'd love one of the Agrigente paintings. That heat, that tension, that drama in a minimal composition.

The exhibition catalogue I have is in French, so it's a bit tedious but it's nonetheless delicious. It talks about the drama and danger of how de Stael constructs space across the canvas. They have - albeit from a different angle (or plane?) a similar impact on me as Joan Eardley's seascapes. I wholeheartedly and passionately submit to them, let them take over and be all there is. A canvas to loose yourself in. How delicious.

How did I not know before that art can do something so powerful? But now I do and it will remain. How wonderful.

The thing is - de Stael's landscapes are full of ghosts too. I haven't figured them out, maybe I won't try much further. But I suspect that such impact carries so much 'other' with it that there have to be ghosts. Hm, well, I of course know of his depression and anguish. But that is far too simple for ghosts, I've decided.

Nicolas de Stael, Landscape, 1953
Oil on canvas, 80x65.1cm, private collection

Did I intend to be practical today... I actually did. But not much chance of that. So: more posts on de Stael. And some sketching on my part of Chilean fields as mediation between myself and de Stael. How presumptious and how delicious at the same time.

Oh... and my best chance for seeing one of his paintings seems to be this one at the Tate Modern. So: London, very soon.

And I'm also curious: have you seen one of his paintings? Which one and where?

Now: please, please, please - can I have a de Stael retrospective somewhere nearby and very soon...

Layering across space

Elqui 2, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

... from Elqui Valle to the Scottish West Coast?

I had posted a number of work in progress updates of the three oil paintings I've been working on over the past months (e.g., here at: art? anyone?). They are finished now.

In the process a number of intriguing things took place.

(a) I lost the hill tops and managed to continue on Elqui 1 as an abstract piece at the first attempt. This was where I wanted to get to with the oil paintings but, on the basis of previous iterations required to move from representation to abstraction had not thought it would happen so quickly. But, Elqui 1 is for the next post.

Today, I want to talk about the Elqui 2 and Elqui 3. Well, they were meant to be larger - 80x70cm like Elqui 1 but somehow I very successfully have (still) mislaid my framing tools and so while I have stretchers I cannot for the life of me find the stapler nor the canvas I bought ages ago.

So, the two pieces are only 50x50cm - one on a bought deep canvas, the other one on a handstreched rough(ish) cotton canvas. One was too slick in surface, the other one far too rough.

(b) The task? Undo layer 1. The challenge: How? The palette, though very limited, is strong with the two cadmium yellows. I stuck with turpsy paint right throughout, for each layer work first with brush, then a bit with palette knives; often softening the knife marks again afterwards with brushes or rags.

Undoing - initially it was going to disappear under a white layer. But I didn't dare too... as you can see. I kept the original composition for the most part and discovered the fabulous greys in that palette. So, on went a succession of grey layers interspersed with keeping local colours and the main composition.

Elqui 3, Detail, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

Here, the rough and poorly primed canvas of Elqui 3 proved a fascinating ground for experiment. Suddenly, I ended up with a whole new series of edges, lines and half disappearing vistas. Even more bizarrely, the piece - solely designed to explore hue and markmaking was taking on some landscape element. Well, despite the name it wasn't never going to be a landscape. Even more strangely: it wasn't the arid valley of the Chilean Cordillera that was appearing but some West Coast of Scotland seascapes.

I kept working on it - something I am very pleased about. With oil paintings I have in the past closed them off far too quickly. Quickly I would no longer be able to see what to do next. Not so with these ones. Somehow I managed to keep them open for much longer, adding more layers in the process described above.

Elqui 3, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

And, what did I learn?

1. painting with oils is fabulous (well: I knew that before, but now I do with even more resolve)

2. the palette of cobalt blue, cadmium yellows and burnt siena so easily creates landscape associations, regardless what you do

3. layerings with grey build up distance (possibly also sense of time? - need to explore that further); wiping these and reworking at various stages of drying can strengthen that illusion further

4. I now know how to keep open a painting for longer

Towards the end of the painting process I deliberately played with 2. and 3. - to have a little flirt with the landscape elements in the paintings, to bring them out, muddle them up again, displace them and so on. VERY enjoyable. It was also interesting to get people commenting while I was painting. How much they enjoyed being able to see a landscape - something - emerge and how sure they were that that was what they saw. Interesting... let's think more about that...

Art? Anyone?

Elqui 1, WIP
oil on canvas, 80x70cm

Not quite finished but this is what Elqui has transformed into (once the hilltops were lost). The three made yesterday morning very enjoyable. They, and the fact that we are getting rather excited about the exhibition opening on Wednesday - and that pretty much is organised. Oh, yes, and then one of my fellow painters expressed her interested in buying Elqui 1 off me once it's finished. Hm... nice... just as well that there's no space anywhere for me to put it up, otherwise I may have been tempted to keep it.

More about them once they are finished in a couple of weeks.

Elqui 3, WIP
oil on canvas, 50x50cm

Elqui 2, WIP
oil on canvas, 50x50cm

And then I lost the hilltops...

... Find something, lose something.

Today's painting (as started here) had plenty of both. My cadmium on canvas fest was indeed rather strong-willed. So much, so that I ended up with this and was a bit speechless.

Elqui Valle 1, WIP,
Oil on canvas, 70x80cm

Its challenge was rather obvious: c'mon, Gesa - I'm about abstraction, I don't want to be Elqui Valle and the Cordillera. Ok, ok... away they went with one turn.

Elqui Valle 1, WIP 2,
Oil on canvas, 80x70cm

And stage two thus looks like this.

[oops... sorry, empty promises...
didn't take a photo from what it looked like at the end of the morning,
but I can tell you: it's MUCH better... promised!]

I wonder if I'll find Elqui Valle in here again or whether I'll just be left with a marvellous palette, plenty of texture and plenty of layers.

... To be continued....

Postcard 5: ¿El valle lo mas lindo de Chile?

¡Elquí Valle! ¡Claro!

... I think I´ll be slotting the days in as they happened, seeing that it is now Saturday and we are already 1000 kms further south.

So: Monday 6 April, we went to the Elquí Valley. Rura, rural, RURAL. Narrow, narrow, NARROW. The most fascinating contrast between densely cultivated vineyards and orchards on the valley´s bottom and the Cordilleras rising steep and bleak up to the sky.

Something like this:

Tres Cruces, Elquí Valle,
Pastel on board, 35x25cm


Pisco Elquí, Elquí Valle,
Pastel on board, 35x25cm

... and in colour...

... the monotype gave me what I was after for a sense of different layers for a reductive lino cut.

Monotype, Edge lines 3
48x40cm on Tosa Shi paper

But as you can see: the marks are all a bit too squashy. I had already taken some of the excess paint off with a bit of blotting paper, had to rub quite extensively to transfer most of the ink onto the actual print, but it's a bit homogenous in terms of markmaking.

Nonetheless: I find using oil paints for this very worthwhile by being able to use actual pigments - again, the cadmiums are doing their work.

I've now started with the next linocut: I'm cutting a 20x25cm vinyl plate, and the first colour is a [paleish] ultramarine. I thought an edition of 10 maybe acceptable, but now have the washing lines across my flat stuffed with drying sheets - I'm using the Tosa Shi, another thinner Japanese paper and very smooth printing paper - it's interesting to see how different they respond to the ink.

That's for the art stuff today...

Here a bit music:

Du weisst schon, dass ich ganz, ganz froh bin ueber das, was du heute gemacht hast, ne??
So oder so gehoert da viel Mut zu; und auch wenn's erstmal etwas unbefriedigend ist, gibt's vielleicht noch ne Moeglichkeit zum Nachtreten.
Und in diesem Sinne: etwas neue Musik, und auf die freie Wahlmoeglichkeit zur Bitterfotzigkeit. Mit nem Kuss und so :)

BTW: noch ein zweites?
Vielleicht zuviel Elektroclash fuer deinen Geschmack,
sie koennte auch locker unsere Tochter sein.
Bisschen Annett Sonstwie mit dem Spielen, ne?
Hier einmal klicken

Step x: more monotypes

Monotype, Edge Lines 1
45x38cm, Printing paper

Last week's misshapen pastel sketches on printmaking paper did offer up a few insights into the next relief cut. But before I want to proceed to that, I thought I'd try again some more monotypes. I was keen on trying them out on a larger scale than the previous 20x15cm.

So, with all the courage I could muster this morning, I inked up an A3 sheet of acrylic paper - I had assumed that its preparation for acrylics would have prevented the oil paint I am using for printmaking to sink in, well - nice idea; in practice, though, the paint sunk in rather quickly; and for the next prints I just used one of the large laminated boards floating about in the studio - that worked perfect and provided a large enough surface to fill.

The 'plate': a sheet of acrylic paper

I started with monochromatic: the remainder of my tube of burnt umber was mixed with a bit of stand oil and turps and pasted onto the board; I then proceeded with various rounds of markmaking (knives, tissue paper, etc), adding and removing ink as I went along. Printed one, then another and another.

I've been doing a bit of systematic exploration of different papers, there's some I've been using a fair bit by now, but there was a new, very smooth, sized printmaking paper in brilliant white on the go today, (interim verdict: I LIKE IT); the trustworthy Tosa Shi (but too few sheets of it).

I like these sparse monotypes a lot, and on the larger scale they are fascinating: so extensive and yet very reasonable (!). In reverse, I am also reconciled with the composition - last week I initially thought it was weak, but no, it isn't. I moved to another one in colour. But that's next post.

Monotype, Edge lines 2
45x38cm, Tosa Shi paper

By the way, if you want to have a look at a larger size of the image, click on it, the click on 'All sizes' on the flickr image, this takes you to the full resolution.

Landscape marks

Where the wild things live, Detail
Soft pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

I have been going back to my copy of Wolf Kahn's Pastels rather frequently, soaking up some of the markmaking and palette choices of his.

I was intrigued to read more about his approach to landscape as a subject - it resonated on a number of levels, some of which I mentioned before briefly.

1. Landscapes as creating space (I am tempted to talk about the production of space, but then I'm firmly in academic jargon, so I leave that for a moment).

Barbara Novak, in her Introduction (p. 7) talks about it as:

Kahn's art represents the most difficult of closely negotiated mergers between the dialectics of abstract form/color nurtured by [Hans] Hofmann's tutelage and his own pragmatic observation of nature in the 'raw', if not the wild...

Kahn's work is very subtly positioned, perhaps through part of what he calls 'strategies', midway between the demands of nature and those of art.

Bend in the River by Wolf Kahn, 1984
Soft Pastel, 22x30 inches, location unknown

She lists a wide range of key influences including

• George Innes
• Albert Pintham Ryder
• Edward Hopper
• Mark Rothko
• Martin Johnson Heade
• Winslow Homer
• Paul Gauguin, and
• Vincent Van Gogh,

and continues that

The nature of this space is disturbing in its imbalances, impressive in its effects and probably the result not only of artistic intention, but of a subtle push-pull between natural and pictorial spaces that must be mediated. (ibid)

This creating and making of space on a two-dimensional surface is infused by a

2. Sensitivity to mood, climate, light and place - I called that romantic love of nature landscapism before.

- so, the German romantics figure prominently, notably Friedrich Schelling's philosophy and
Caspar David Friedrich's paintings - fertilized, as Novak (p. 11) calls it by Hans Hoffmann's teachings and Kahn's own admiration of modern masters such as Giorgio Morandi, Mark Rothko and Pierre Bonnard. These names suggest

... clues to what [Kahn] is after in his own work: stillness, what he calls 'radiance', and a coloristic experience that, as he says 'ups the ante'. Place becomes meaningful for him when returns to it again and again, to 'deepen the experience'.

Here, soft pastel provides a medium with which to record immediate experience and ability to rely on process - to be worked up later in a more formal process with oil paints. The medium enables Kahn to grapple at once with the subject of nature and its pictorial solution.

• See my previous posts discussing Wolf Kahn, here
• One of my previous posts on concerns over landscape, here

Oh, and then I had an image of myself staring back at me in a weird place on the sidebar, having momentarily forgotten that I had sent it to Casey at Pastel for a guest spot. So, Casey will host a post about my fields, ponds and various reflections shortly, but has announced it yesterday. I am very excited about this - Casey's own work as well as his discussion of Kahn and other Colorists has been hughely important for me to get a sense of the possibilities of pastels.

Lines across a field

Lines across a field, 37x45cm
Pastel on Japanese paper

... ok, here's the promised crit & comment bit on Saturday's studies of THE field. This should have been ready earlier in the evening but some simple editing tasks currently take ages. I even had a Photoshop Elements in my shopping trolley inbetween.

I am intending to be good-willed and patient with my new open source image editing software.

But: essentially: I don't understand it! It makes out to be intuitive and yet it asks for channels, terminals, plug-ins, for me to build its help file and suddenly I am back in year 11 trying to ignore the fact that not a single one of my scripts ever got the computer to play chess, move the cursor or whatever tasks one tried to make a computer in 1990 perform. Ach... but... I still don't understand it. The Help files aren't built and the user manual doesn't tell me how I can change colour retrospectively. So, Gesa, start again...

After a while of this, I now have something that highlights the problems in the study. It was study no 2, it followed the one I posted on Sunday. Again: the task was drawing marks and a different palette. The scene originates with last summer's sketches and I did some more in December. I am therefore back with the fields again; searching for a subject for a reductive lino print.



But before that, I tackled some highly unsuitable paper with my Terrage sticks - it's a Japanese paper, fairly thin and with a kind of felted surface - consequently: crisp marks kept evading me and it dissolved rather quickly - as the second circle from the bottom shows.

The composition looked wrong to me, but after a while I realise that it's a bit more subtle than that: the top circle shows too much contrast between sky and forest in the background; and the salmon in the second from top circle folds the space of the field against the forest in a funny way.

In many ways I love that effect: how hues make space, bend it, twist it and confuse the onlooker. I like the salmon colour a lot since I discovered it, but it doesn't work in that field.

So, for a pastel drawing study, the marks are intriguing but some of the hues are not worked out in relation to each other - I think the violet blue in the foreground is wrong too.

And, while I cannot as of yet put my finger on it, I think it got me further for a reduction linocut. There's something in the layering of different hues here - and perhaps the solidity the drawing is struggling with in the background, which could work well in print.

Good... more on that to follow.

'Where the wild things live'

- that was Juanita's comment on this drawing. You have seen a small detail of it already and today is the day for all of it*, and some more details.

Where the wild things live, Detail
Pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

'Where the wild things live' - I was well chuffed with that title. She got the eeriness and moodiness straight away. I made it a couple of weeks ago when I took more of the handmade Arches paper to draw with pastels. The palette is again similar to the earlier one, but less limited. The marks are drawing marks with some later reworking to calm some areas and to introduce more highlights. It is less sketchy than the previous one, and - at least for me - a fair amount of time working and reworking was spent on it.

I was meaning to write-up more on Wolf Kahn's approach to landscape as subject matter along with this post. But: I left my notes on that in a notebook in Glasgow, while I am - again - in Berlin for a week. So: the WK's landscapisms have to wait a little long.

Do go and visit the wild things in the meantime, though:

Where the wild things live,
Pastel on Arches paper, 58x39cm

* oh, dear, there's a bit of stage fright going on right now:
what if the detail was so much better than the whole piece???