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.

people do things

i am still thinking in blog, a lot of the times. so, there have been many beginnings or even full blog posts for the past couple of months. yet: many of them didn't appear here. i kind of used them as thinking tools for myself or discussed them in person with others offline.

so, it's been rather quiet. let me see, if that can change again.

one of the more persistent thoughts over the last week or so is one of amazement and surprise. it's a little game i've been playing with myself and which now is fairly explicit: what are the things that i do not need?

i don't like the virtue of frugality that this seemingly establishes. and i don't think that's what it's about. instead, i like it to be about the boundaries of what is normal and taken for granted.

looking back, i know fine well that among the best things that happened were two significant moves, one when i was thirteen and then when i first arrived in glasgow in the mid-1990s.  both of them were difficult, often lonely and in many ways fraught as they threw myself back onto myself and myself only.

and alongside, they became about the social ways in which normality is constructed:

'this is how things are to be done'
became a
'this is how some people like to do things in this place and in this time'.

office for sale

so, my thinking of the things i do not need is whispering to me: you leaving academia is going to be alongside those two moves one of the best things you've ever done. it's a quiet whisper currently, but it's been getting louder as i'm busy cancelling taken for granted unpaid administrative chores, begin to ignore esteem indicators and the 'must-do' calls... all taken for granted, for normal, as the things one cannot do without.

... in this particular place and time.

leaving that particular place, time and institutional context is making that explicit. and even if it is going to be only for a short time, i'm excited by my tax return, the mindmap of future work for the year and the fact that i now worked out a day rate for my work.

boundaries? made by people, mostly. need a good go at stretching, extending and if sensible, ignoring.

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...

How to paint (with) ghosts

Elqui 2, Detail, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

Ok,... two gears down and turning to the left. I know (albeit not explicitly) what I'm after with my exploration of spectres. A quick verbal sketch (aka a list) turns up the following

• the ways, means and politics of hiding: domestic violence, migrant workers, politics of war
• past experiences, memories and ghosts (my own)
• other people's ghosts (e.g. Don A.'s, but there are plenty more)

... they all need care, caution and time; so I'll be doing plenty of: two steps forward, one back or three. What is however, much easier is painting technique and also, how others have dealt with spectres in art.

There has been plenty of this so far in here... and while I'm a bit rubbish at providing comprehensive summaries, how to guides and similar, I think I should spend some time on digging up those earlier posts on this.

Right now, I am thinking of

• Cy Twombly is painting loss (i-iii)
• Accidental loss
• The Bull's Hollow along with its various exploration of pond, depth, reflections and the vagaries of when the wind blows
• There is much in my working through the fields of where I grew up which is ghostly, at points ghastly.

More recently, the Elqui series of oil paintings is exploring the effects of adding layers of turpsy murky greys to add depth, distance and a general blur. Similarly, much of my printmaking has turned rather experimental and tried to hide, undo, whiten out earlier layers.

I will start with more detail on these two work processes, while I'm trying to reorder my tags and unhide some of the various strands of my new project of a new world unorder.

Elqui 3, Detail, oil on canvas, 50x50cm

For all to see, right?!

Elqui 3, WIP, Detail
oil on canvas, 50x50cm

On Friday I spoke at a seminar on the role of policing for securing well-being. My brief concerned the role of policing for securing urban regeneration and more importantly, economic growth.

One of my two fellow speakers was the Chief Constable of the police force which saw on the day before the conviction of the biggest internet- based ring of paedophiles in the UK so far. No surprise that he was buoyed up by having secured the conviction of eight men so far with some 30 charged across the UK. As he said, these were ordinary middle-class and very respectable men. The news coverage went to some detail to list the - thoroughly proper - job titles of each of the men.

I'll be sticking with crime for this post, but it'll get to the (in)visibility challenge I'm posing myself for the time being.

The end of my talk led to a call for (a) acknowledging the necessity of conflict over the use of public spaces - that this is political and not subject to a predefined, however narrow 'consensus'. And (b) to name and make visible all those that get hidden, evicted, arrested when public space is for consumption only - young people, junkies and homeless.

But even more so: that focus on street crime is so reductive in its own sense. And the guy from the centre for business crime was rightly upset that I wouldn't present figures of how much shoplifting is done by junkies. But what I should have done and didn't do was present figures over health and safety offences committed in city centres by businesses; and of all those crimes committed BY businesses.

However, the one thing I got to, and which was thankfully picked up by the audience was the problematic division of public and private. A focus on street crime and the surveillance of street crime - while apparently a response to women's fear of crime leaves out the most dangerous place of women in the world: the home.

If it's on CCTV it's for all to see, right?

Two images and stories have been sticking in my memory all week.

Story 1: the first full face transplant undertaken by American surgeons. Now, several months after the operation, the patient gaver her first interview, accompanied by many photos of how she looked at various points in the past, how she may look now and how she may look in the future. What happened to her face? Her husband shot her in the face. So, after over thirty operations she can take food through her mouth again and hopefully will be able to taste at some point.

Story 2: a young man on steroids got convicted to a life-time sentence. Why? He befriended a TV presenter on facebook (I., I'm telling you: it's dodgy!!); went out with her, when she said no, he beat her up and raped her; after that she hid for a couple of weeks in her flat. Finally, she left the house. He was waiting outside with another man and threw a full canister of sulphuric acid into her face at point blank. She was quoted how she recounted that moment and every single moment since. She too has had more than thirty operations since.

So, what is it to see if you look at one's face?

So we were hung out to dry...

On Tuesday my colleagues L and J and I did the last of three workshops with groups of teenagers on employment issues. J and L had done the two earlier ones without me while I was away. They had gone very well and I had been sorry to miss them. We had devised and applied a spread of things to do over a two hours session to let 16 yrs old talk about what they wanted to do later and how they may get there.

Well, and then Tue 5pm came and we wholeheartedly crashed and burnt. Wow... the flames on Shettleston Rd were probably visible right across the East End. I've before had interviews that wouldn't go well, people weren't interested, didn't want to say much etc. You would wind up after a while and write it off to experience. But to be hung out by fifteen 13-16 yrs olds over a two hour period is a bit different. So glad I'm not a school teacher.

Now, why do I care to write about it?

When I went to the first facilitation training workshop in December, we were asked to come up with a question for the workshop itself, our own little inquiry strand for the weekend. It had to be compelling, not easy to answer and be worth investigating seriously.

My first question was 'how do I convince my colleagues to do more participatory action research [PAR]?' - that was a fake question, I knew that after five minutes: it wasn't a problem of me having to convince them but whether I'd care enough to want to convince them. So it changed into:

How can I apply my painting knowledge to my academic work. It was a fumbling, half-conscious question. I hadn't quite explicated what constituted 'painting knowledge'. I knew it was there, quite happily growing over the past few years and the reason why I'm continually intrigued.

So, over the weekend I really begun to figure out what that confidence in painting as process was made of... while doing all sorts of group facilitation thingies and being in the middle of an actual group process which was quite exciting. [Funnily, a similar process took place at the conference in Santiago, at a larger scale, but it was very lively indeed]

At the end of the weekend, we got to talk about our questions again. My interim findings were very much informed by the weekend itself: an emphasis on experimentation; an iterative process: the same things are revisited often and they need to be practiced, tried out, applied; and a careful analysis of what goes wrong - because a lot of stuff goes wrong all the time.

Here, PAR is a fantastic method to do these three things. And so is art for me.

Us being hung out on Tuesday made all of that very clear. In many ways it was one of the most useful insights into group research methods. So, while L, J and I were leaving terribly embarassed and took to the pub we discovered not only a lot about our facilitation skills, our research questions but also the politics of youth work, the dynamics between different youth groups and their internal dynamics.

There's plenty of stuff I'd try out. But also there is plenty of stuff I will never try again if it goes wrong once. A friend of mine, who tries out even less, told me once a while back: well, you need to think about it very carefully because there's unlikely to be second chances. So, there's little room for experimentation.

I think he was wrong. There is always plenty of scope for second chances, change and trying stuff differently. Art is making that very apparent for me: if something goes wrong, try again, start again or rework it. Mixed media is a fabulous example; printmaking is a bit more difficult but I'm getting to see that in terms of reworking the printing plate, adding another layer, applying different media, or, or, or...

So, now we need figure out whate next for making amends for having bored those kids for two hours...

Notes to future self

Ryuichi Hirokawa, Al Ram checkpoint, West Bank, 2002
Guardian, g2, p. 25, 30/4/2009

... really for in five years, but maybe also already in two?

I gave a research seminar on Wednesday and was talking about youth policing, workfare and the making of criminalised selves. Much of what I was initially interested in with my academic work revolved around questions of social control, discipline and importantly the practices, policies and experiences that make a responsible and disciplined citizen. Much of these original questions had gotten a bit submerged in the interim with a much stronger focus on policy and governance but after the seminar I ended up talking to two colleagues who have, though in different fields, maintained a keen interest on such disciplines of the self.

...

Longwinded, half-baked... it links up with some of the abstractions I am intrigued by, again and again, and which require a much fuller set of art skills, techniques, and experiences that I currently have. - Questions over person-making, the stuff that happens inbetween, outside, elsewhere or in the middle. Well: the stuff that matters.

When I was talking to my two colleagues about what art I do and would love to do, I for the first time made those links between academia, knowledge production and painting quite explicit. Well: I do tell people at university that I love the kinds of questions and problems a piece of art poses in its production, and how it is necessary to let it provide its own answers - that no will of my own can make that canvas into something finished.

And I do enjoy the way in which this undoes what so much academics perceive the individual ingenuity of the lonely, fabulous, young academic who raises, on the basis of his own achievements to intellectual and professional heights. - well: remember the snake fights?

But, the discussions with M. and E. took me back to Foucault's Discipline and Punish; they also provided links to some more recent work on the making of entrepreneurial selves in thoroughly flexibilised and casualised labour markets.

On the way home, I saw this in the paper, took it with me, scanned it and it's here now as a reminder. That look, locking the police officer in its stare, defiantly. Now: I love that kind of photography, holding, maintaining a moment which radiates outwards, captures stuff (incidentally or purposefully) beyond its immediate reach. For whatever I'll do in two or five years? We'll see. I doubt that it will be photography, and I doubt it will be figurative, but: who knows?

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.

An end of January recap: organising, notetaking and subject matter

I am trying to get to grips with a number of different strands here right now, and I don't think I'm managing too well. Too many other things are calling for my attention and while I've so far been rather good at avoiding nasty winter illnesses, a tonsilitis rather effectively floored me for the past week. The throat is no longer sore, but... wow, I had never noticed just how tiring a trip to the post office can be (well, that 100 metres to and back).

In any case: enough late January winging

[hahaha... whingeing is of course what I meant;
what a nice buckage* I produced at the end of this month]

• Linocut printmaking
• Colour, marks and general influences in Wolf Kahn's use of pastels
• The facilitation workshop, specifically: production of knowledge

For most of these, the scenes are set: it'll be about the pondtreedarkwinterreflections that have come out of the visit to the bull's hollow. I'm very happy to stick with these scenes (two or three) at the moment and keep working with them.

Sticking with a couple of compositions that work well and keep intriguing me usually seems like a good idea. It kind of does away with the need to sort a composition for each new piece and allows instead for some more systematic - and yet at the same time: more playful? - exploration of media, colours, marks and all the other stuff around them.

The pond reflections in some sense feel like an easy option: I am painting stuff I've known for so long again. I keep thinking around this one, and whether it actually matters? Oh, well, yes it matters quite centrally. I think one of the things from last year I learned was the dynamic and energy I got from painting something known and familiar. From taking it from something known and familiar and slowly, patiently letting it go elsewhere; in part wilfully - and, dear, did I try to push those fields to transform and become something new from all that was old.

Over Christmas, I realised that there is almost endless possibility in continuing with that. And how enjoyable that is: take something that was taken for granted and let it go, run with it, see where it takes you and it may surprise you. It's like Benjamin's sock: where does observation turns to narration, poetry; where do past facts turn to memory and the making and invention of selves, a history that is imagined and yet filled with so much memory at the same time.

This all provides a little bridge across to the facilitation workshop again: and the questions it posed for me about different types of knowledge and understanding; and the realisation just how much I've learned and begun to understand through painting.

Relatedly, I've changed my writing and recording arrangements. A new laptop allows me sitting on the sofa while blogging... does it show in a sitting-on-the-sofa-chattiness? Similarly, I have finally taken the digital recorder I bought for work and interviewing home with me and am experimenting with recording notes and thoughts verbally, rather than in writing.

I am used to take a lot of notes in writing, either longhand or in the computer. But most often, the reason something doesn't get recorded is that I can't be bothered to type/write yet more again. So, I am curious whether having spoken files will see to that in some sense. Generally, I think I am someone whose thoughts and arguments are becoming much more quickly much clearer in conversation, when spoken. It's quite often at those moments that I feel something coming together. So, maybe I should just organise the 'talking to myself' element of that.

And: if it's noted, I can chuck it out of my mind, I no longer have to keep thinking about it in worry that I may forget. So, Folder A on my rather impressive Olympus recorder has various thoughts on labour politics on it, notably (a) the wildcat strikes at UK refineries against the use of foreign workers; (b) comments on an article on Rosa Luxemburg, experience and organisation, and (c) notes from the class I taught on Wednesday where we discussed the end of career.

Well, this post was supposed to be on some earlier experiments with pastels on dark paper. Have a taster of these. I think they will be on show tomorrow.

Pond reflection on darkness #1
Soft pastel on board

* buckage, n. , first usage c2001; denotes the wilful combination of two unrelated words into a new creation; usually based on some metaphorically imagery employed by Gesa Helms, etymological origin: a combination of the English nouns bucket and luggage for a bucket full of unnecessary luggage that one carries around.
Does that sound about right, P.?

Der Strumpf - Walter Benjamin

A bit of reading I like and had meant to put in here for ages. A wee while ago I did some scouting for translations, so that I don't have to do it myself and found a copy of the English translation online in Solveigh Goett's blog on textile art.

It's a little story I like to go back to since I discovered it (admittedly rather late) in my Berlin discovery. It's from Walter Benjamin's Childhood around nineteen hundred.

Der Strumpf
Der erste Schrank, der aufging, wann ich wollte, war die Kommode. lch hatte nur am Knopf zu ziehen, so schnappte die Tür aus ihrem Schlosse mir entgegen. Hinter den Hemden, Schürzen, Leibchen, die dahinter verwahrt gelegen haben, fand sich das, was mir ein Abenteuer aus der Kommode machte. Ich mußte mir Bahn bis in ihren hintersten Winkel schaffen; dann stieß ich auf meine Strümpfe, die da gehäuft und in althergebrachter Art gerollt und eingeschlagen ruhten. Jedes Paar hatte das Aussehen einer kleinen Tasche. Nichts ging mir über das Vergnügen, die Hand so tief wie möglich in ihr Innerstes zu versenken. Ich tat das nicht um ihrer Wärme willen. Es war "Das Mitgebrachte", das ich immer im eingerollten Innern in der Hand hielt, was mich in ihre Tiefe zog. Wenn ich es mit der Faust umspannt und mich nach Kräften in dem Besitz der weichen, wollenen Masse bestätigt hatte, begann der zweite Teil des Spieles, der die Enthüllung brachte. Denn nun machte ich mich daran, "Das Mitgebrachte" aus seiner wollenen Tasche auszuwickeln. Ich zog es immer näher an mich heran, bis das Bestürzende sich ereignete: ich hatte "Das Mitgebrachte" herausgeholt, aber "Die Tasche", in der es gelegen hatte, war nicht mehr da. Nicht oft genug konnte ich die Probe auf diesen Vorgang machen. Er lehrte mich, daß Form und Inhalt, Hülle und Verhülltes dasselbe sind. Er leitete mich an, die Wahrheit so behutsam aus der Dichtung hervorzuziehen wie die Kinderhand den Strumpf aus "Der Tasche" holte.

Walter Benjamin, Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert. Suhrkamp 2006, p. 56

Print project 2_3, T/P Detail
Lino cut on blotting paper, 15x15cm

And here, the translation [with added suggestions by Solveigh]:

"The first cabinet that would yield whenever I wanted was the wardrobe. I had only to pull on the knob, and the door would click open and spring toward me. Among the nightshirts, aprons, and undershirts which were kept there in the back was the thing that turned the wardrobe into an adventure for me. I had to clear a way for myself to its farthest corner. There I would come upon my socks, which lay piled in traditional fashion - that is to say, rolled up and turned inside out. Every pair had the appearance of a little pocket [bag]. For me, nothing surpassed the pleasure of thrusting my hand as deeply as possible into its interior. I did not do this for the sake of the (...) warmth. It was the 'little present' rolled up inside that I always held in my hand and that drew me into the depths. When I had closed my fist around it and, as far as I was able, made certain that I possessed the stretchable [soft] woolen mass, there began the second phase of the game, which brought with it the unveiling. For now I proceeded to unwrap 'the present', to tease it out of its woolen pocket [bag]. I drew it ever nearer to me, until something rather disconcerting would happen: I had brought out 'the present', but the 'pocket' [bag] in which it had lain was no longer there. I could not repeat the experiment on this phenomenon often enough. It taught me that form and content, the veil and what is veiled [the wrap and what is wrapped], are the same. It led me to draw truth from works of literature as warily [carefully] as the child's hand retrieves the sock from 'the pocket' [bag]."

Walter Benjamin, The Sock, in Berlin Childhood around 1900, Transl. Howard Eiland, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge/Mass. & London/England, 2006, pp 96, 97.

Have a look at Solveigh's wondrous world of textile art, files and textual musings:
http://thetextilefiles.blogspot.com/


The sock - it's about knowledge and discovery, about knowing, seemingly, superficially if one isn't careful. I like it a lot, and it reminds that I've meant too to write up the course on facilitation I went to in December - if you remember: it was about asking a question...


And a bit of music? Maybe? Perhaps... something more about the wondrous world. Why not this:

Rewind 2 – Writing

Ok, it took me some time to arrive back home, but now it’s week 1 of the new year and what better things to do than to look back… not?
I think there may be three posts to this

• Rewind 2: writing

• Rewind 3: blogging

• Rewind 4: Art, art, art… not that either of the above are NOT art, but it’s painting, sketches, drawings and projects I finally want to talk about.

• (Rewind 1 was my Hogmanay flight above the clouds, here – in case you wonder about the missing first)

Found Papers Project Book #1.3
Mixed media collage 6.4x8.9cm

I want to start with the writing, partly because it provides so many overlaps with a lot of other things I’ve been doing; it also provides the actual tool for the post on blogging; and lastly the medium through which I’ve found I communicate (by blogging) most of my art.

Ok, I’ve written a lot over the past year. A lot in here (in fact 170 posts; that many, many words and almost a post every other day over the year).

But: I have written quite a few other things too over the past year. Most notably, 2008 has finally been the year that my PhD came out in print. Do you want to have a look at it? It’s over here:

Gesa Helms 2008 Towards Safe City Centre? Remaking the Spaces of an Old-industrial City. Ashgate: Aldershot, see publisher's site here

It took five years to get it published. And that’s already a first observation with regards to the blog. While here, I write, I publish and it’s there – for better or worse, but still with plenty possibility to edit – academic writing takes a long time.

This is to a good part due to a long process of peer refereeing, comments, revisions and hopefully final acceptance. But just as well, a piece several times revised can still get rejected and you start again. For academic writing, at least in the UK, there is a clear preference for such peer-refereed journal articles over single-authored books, edited collections or book chapters. So, once my articles were rejected, I postponed further and further the book publication, and suddenly five years were gone.

Most of my writing to date has been very clearly for academic outlets, with all the limitations (see above for time; but more crucially for a limited audience, it is e.g. considered successful if 5+ others quote your article over the ensuing years). But this autumn I co-authored a short piece on the Glasgow Gorbals with a colleague of mine in Berlin for the Berlin Tenants Association publication (Gesa Helms & Jens Sambale 2008 Rückbau in der Finanzkrise? ME189, see full text here). It’s shorter, much more immediate than other pieces I’ve done, it’s in German (which I don’t write in often as I tend to have forgotten about German grammar, or at least claim to) and it was published within a couple of weeks after we agreed on the final version.

These two pieces do have a lot to do with this blog. Why?

If anyone at the age of 16 would have told me I would earn my money with a job consisting of writing and public speaking I would have screamed at them. Writing wasn’t for me, and public speaking even less so. Moving to the UK and learning to write a piece of 100,000 words changed that. It changed that also because I could learn a writing style where I could ‘explain’ any of my favourite idiosyncracies with foreignness: I am not from here; and that hid issues notably to do with class and education.

In this sense, the blog over the past 18 months has more and more become a playground to experiment not only with art but with writing too. Have you noticed?

Most obviously, it’s the posting of little ditties and word plays. I have been writing these for a long time [and am in fact still looking for a suitable outlet for cringey, love-sick poetry by 14 years old school kids; any advice welcome].

When I was sorting through my sketchbooks yesterday, I came across this one. It was a drawing/observing/writing experience which was new, exciting and rather sublime; and I’m glad that that moment didn’t remain singular but has become a more and more frequent occurrence as the year progressed.

Mist. Graphite in Moleskine, 10x8cm

And.

Into the mist. Out of
Nowhere it descended
Embracing
The woods, branches
A lonely leaf
Silently it calls. Haziness
The world blurs to take
Notice. Lazily
Then - as it lifts
A spot of cobalt above
Trees in the distance
And
The world didn't stop
After all

Like most of the other stuff in here, it is pretty much about exploration: stuff I passed by 10 or 20 years ago, didn’t consider it to be ‘for me’ – poetry belonged very much in that category; it wasn’t that I couldn’t appreciate it, but it was tied up with habitus and status that wasn’t mine and so I discarded it. Here the last year, its encounters, discussions and experiences have opened up plenty of possibilities - be it about writing in a more open, associative manner without regarding it as not rigorous, or be it writing in German, or, or, or...

And with the blog also a medium where they are easily explored. How? That’s for the next post.

The distance a photo a day makes

Did you notice my little sidebar slideshow? Yes, after 18 months I finally got to grips with a slideshow widget.

Some of my friends take a lot of photos, ordinary stuff, stuff you just stumbled upon, nothing special. I also saw the archive of someone who had taken a photo every single day for over 20 years until he died. And I must admit I am intrigued by the pretend simplicity and innocence of using a single photo to represent a day. No words (well, maybe a caption, please?!), no drowning in incessant chatter. Just an image.

So, when I was walking down one particular street in Uelzen last Monday, I took a photo. That road is part of an area in that small town that in memory is my favourite place in the world. My grandparents lived there in a housing association flat, and in that flat I spent a large part of my first few years. And most good things seem to have happened there.

Sternstrasse, Uelzen
Monday, 22/12/2008

It already started with the name of that area: At the star - Am Stern. Imagine that: to live at the star. How fabulous. And: their flat was on the second floor. High up from the ground, and with a balcony. Even more fabulous.

After leaving primary school, I would walk that road for two years every day after school to get to the bus station. AND THAT ROAD TOOK FOREVER. IT WAS SOOOO FAR AND SOOOO BORING. Forgotten was the great name. Star Street became Boredom Street. Just this year I ended up walking that road a couple of times into town. The first time for probably 20 odd years. I timed it: eternity lasted precisely 7 minutes when I was 9.

So, eternity, photographic simplicity, and memory lead to something that has come up a few times before: distance, familiarity and abstraction.

I was walking down that road and that difference in time then and now was one of those moments where it became so clear how stuff had changed, the stuff that had happened in those years, that that is somewhere I grew up but I feel utterly foreign nonetheless: I struggle with the customary unpoliteness when talking German, I say far too often please and thank you, hold doors open, try to queue orderly, and forget that words have literal meanings. And then again: I do all know this. It is mine... if not in presence than in past. And: the longer I am away, the more confident my awayness does become.

I think this is the distance I am circling around in some of my seascapes. See these two posts over at Watermarks, if you haven't read them before.

• Summer sketches of the sea
• Introducing Gesa Helms

Well... they also go back to some of the thoughts around landscapism and abstraction, there's some links on the Summer sketches post.

I hadn't quite caught sight of the importance of distance before. But Star Street made it just so much clearer. There is a poem to go with this:

DER EINSAME

Wie einer, der auf fremden Meeren fuhr,
so bin ich bei den ewig Einheimischen;
die vollen Tage stehn auf ihren Tischen,
mir aber ist die Fremde voll Figur.

In mein Gesicht reicht eine Welt herein,
die vielleicht unbewohnt ist wie ein Mond,
sie aber lassen kein Gefühl allein,
und alle ihre Worte sind bewohnt.

Die Dinge, die ich weither mit mir nahm,
sehn selten aus, gehalten an das Ihre - :
in ihrer großen Heimat sind sie Tiere,
hier halten sie den Atem an vor Scham.

I found a translation by Phillip Kellmeyer (sorry, I did change it, felt it could do with improvement):

The lonely one

Like someone who sailed distant seas,
I am with the ever natives;
full days are standing on their tables,
yet for me distance is full of promise.

In my face a world reaches in,
perhaps deserted like a moon,
they leave no feeling alone,
and all their words are inhabited.

The things which I took with me
look rare, compared to theirs -:
in their great home they are animals,
here they hold their breath in shame.

So not to make strange creatures hold their breath, I am taking some photos of the world where no feeling is left alone and all words are inhabited. To make theirs a bit more abstract and distant? Possibly?

I also doubt the title:
is it not much more about being foreign/alien/strange rather than lonely?
Ok, the latter may be a result of the former, but not necessarily so, no?

- Distance? Abstraction? What's new? Oh, and BTW, the poem is Rilke again.

But, do have a look at the photos, one a day while I'm here:

Tell me, what is your question?

I have been experimenting with Participatory Action Research (PAR) of late to be able to understand group processes in organisational settings (e.g., labour market training initiatives, young people’s involvement in volunteering etc.).

Central to PAR is a relatively short and reiterative cycle of observation, analysis and action. It employs a set of ongoing inquiries – for oneself, personally; for the group setting which is at the centre of that piece of PAR and the wider context. So, at any time, many questions are being asked. The course I went to over the weekend was Part 1 in Group Facilitation run by the Business and Management School at Bath University.

As part of the weekend, we were early on asked to formulate such inquiry for ourselves. It’s a different take on asking about participants’ expectations for a course. But, formulating it as a personal inquiry is more specific as it:

• Has to be compelling
• Needs to energise you
• Makes you want to answer it
• Leads you into the unknown.

The last point is rather crucial: how many people do ask questions to which they actually already know the answer? It’s about comfort zones: doing stuff as usual and knowing how you will get an ok result. And: both in question and in our way of going about answering them, that comfort zone will show.

I think this goes for any piece of (social science) research but also for fine art pieces, doesn’t it?
Learning, however, really only happens outwith that comfort zone: when stuff is difficult, when it’s something new, unknown, experimental and a bit scary.

So: the unknown bit is crucial.

….

Part one on learning and creativity is thus about asking compelling questions: What is the stuff I want to find out more about? Get to know? Try out?

For pretty much any of my paintings, there were questions like this… some more compelling than others: how can I work with light? How can I include those fabulous clouds? Some were plain daft questions: when will cartridge paper dissolve?

If those questions weren’t there, I end up with pieces that clearly didn’t rock me; were so/so; quite ok but really rather lukewarm.

Seascape in Earth

Some of the pastel studies [from here] have already found their way into large print, eh: scale.

Seascape in earth WIP
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

This one intrigued me for the burnt orange/cobalt blue. The colour field inbetween was struggling to hold the strong hues together. But nonetheless, I liked the lime green/earth pigment in the sea a lot.

The small 15x10cm format is always a tricky one I find. I like its challenge to work something out so small, but for many compositions that simply doesn't work for me: so, while several of the small studies have some beauty in them somewhere, they do so precisely because of their flaws.

Now: a seascape in earth colour/green and orange. In some way it gets me around the earlier posed concerns about landscapisms: the obvious enframing, reading as something specific. The walking, running, stumbling between abstraction and representation, and back and forward again.

Seascape in earth WIP (Detail)
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

The pastels as medium took me one step beyond my struggles over perspectives, marks, lines, textures and palettes. There's something awfully complex about the sea, water, reflection and movement.

I reckon that part of that complexity is also unfamiliarity? I'm not too sure about that - while I also think that being unfamiliar with 'stuff' is usually quite helpful, it seems to be standing in my way. It does so in a manner that the fields from earlier this year didn't do. Well: there is probably nowhere in world I have spent more time, been more often over more than 20 years than those fields. So: they are known, familiar, saturated with stuff: experiences - some better forgotten than others.

Does that make it easier to represent them? Push them onto a canvas, turn them into something else in that process? Something that is outwith my biographical past?

I am in two (or five?) minds about that.
Well: seeing Rothko in London made me think about abstract expressionism - expressive of the artist, or precisely not! - a bit more... to be followed up later.

So... from all that experiental expressive experimental struggling, just going with fields of colours, and doing so in ways that don't read obviously as water was just what was required. And it was good and harmless fun. I made use of Brian's experiment of using water for diluting pastel on the board [thank you!]. Well: the board I used was one I had prepared quite some time back - it was a glorious lemon yellow with plenty of splattered acrylics on top. To mute some of the underpainting (and not to have to use too much pastel rubbed into the uneven surface), I used a wet brush. It flattened the pigment, turned it opaque. And: mysteriously and fortuitiously, took on the resemblance of water (how lucky is that??); I also found that my priming with pumice powder, and the resulting brush marks work rather well for the seascape.

So: a cop out on several levels - not building up by use of lines but again by fields of colours; no limited palette - but that's ok, that's for later. Let's stick with this for a wee while.

Seascape in earth WIP (Detail)
Pastel on board, 70x50cm

Landscapisms

Picking up from the previous posts: no, I won't now go and do figure drawing for four years. That idea is one of approaching art very differently, it is also about learning/education/knowledge - and different ways of getting somewhere (anywhere?).

There is something in here about pedagogy, art education, traditions, expectations and how these differ of whether one does art as a full-time education at the age of 17 or later on, with later on usually meaning in addition, besides, after work. I think this calls for different approaches to learning and teaching. But, again, another post.

So: I am doing landscapes - in fact, I kept thinking of Casey's post a while back: what is your subject matter? [see link here]

In fact, landscapes matter, they are important. Seashores, moorlands and hills. Oh, and don't forget woodlands and fields. So, nothing trivial. But they are not pastoral, serene, idyllic. I think that is what I was in part trying to get at with the construction of landscape in a few posts back.

It's the kind of stuff that reminds me of several visits I had from German friends years ago, when I was in Scotland 'only for a year'. One of my friends, in fact, loved the idea that it was me who know was in 'her Scotland'.

Her Scotland was a year spent after school somewhere in Aberdeenshire growing organic herbs. Her Scotland were the wild, rugged and yet innocently beautiful landscapes of the Highlands. So, she came to visit. We went up North - Portree in fact, where my flatmate was from and we stayed with his sister. So, we went to the pub, or in fact every pub in Portree. She didn't like it. Not the pub, but the stories people had to tell, the stuff that happened and how suddenly Highland Scotland looked far too much like rural north west Germany: plenty of insiders/outsiders, plenty of alcohol and drugs, plenty of sexism and general boredom.

Where on earth did the beauty go?

Yet, she even liked Glasgow much less. I was staying on the 13th floor of a 1960s high rise flat, now scheduled for demolition in 2011. With friends we argued over how to share the three bedrooms among four of us; the plumbing for the washing machine didn't work with the low water pressure, neither did the shower; the firebrigade came once in a while - either my drunk neighbour had fallen asleep with the grill on, or on a different floor someone was throwing out furniture after setting it alight; the lift wouldn't work when it was stormy - safety mechanism kicked in then.

A shopping centre, somewhere on the outskirts

So: Where on earth did her Scotland go? - And I think my great friends whom I was living with, the balcony and some very nice neighbours didn't make up for it in her mind.

Landscapisms... important to keep that all together when the waves break on the beach in high winds and rain; or even in sunshine.

Waves, somewhere on Ayrshire coast

... On a more practical front I am trying out the no background, different perspectives; also been finding some very good books etc... but let me play with that a little longer while I generally think.

The stuff that matters

A few weeks back I had a little favourite fantasy of what I'd do if work stuff went wrong. Among various options was my favourite: get rid off the flat and use the money to go and study art. It was a nice and good thought.

And I figured that the kind of art I would go and study would actually be quite different to the stuff I'm doing now. What intrigued me most, and what it would probably be about for four years would be life drawing and painting; portraiture; figure drawing: exhaustively, excessively, single-mindedly.

Oil on MDF board, 30x45cm

I may run into problems with my quickly lost patience and interest. But nonetheless, there was something terrifically exciting in this thought: to have all the time in the world (well: near enough: four years) to do one thing and to learn one thing so that it becomes part of you and you find your way around it, intuitively, with your eyes closed.

And that it is about stuff that matters: people. Which are generally left out of landscapes...

On Sunday I remembered a conversation on my favourite radio show: Guy Garvey's Finest Hour on 6Music Sunday nights 10-midnight is my radio highlight of the week. His choice of music is a bit too folksy for me generally, but there is something wonderfully irreverent and all the same comforting about his show. In Spring, he had a conversation with Hal Glebe about the role of music for politics (small p, mind you); and while I was drifting into sleep, they talked about how a good song gets at the things that matter: they called it something like the molecular structure of something just before it turns into being political, but also the moment a kiss turns into a kiss. Guy continued to play a song by Jesca Hoop - Love is all we've left, which she wrote about Hurricane Katrina.

Now, this Sunday, I missed Guy on the radio because we had gone to see him and Elbow play at the Carling Academy. We missed half of the support - and it was only in the end that I realised it was indeed Jesca Hoop who was supporting the band. So, I went back to look for the song after - here is a clip of how she plays the song in front of an audience in New Orleans - she stops several times inbetween, overcome and wrestling with what she's doing.
I'm not too sure if it's a bit cringey/worthy, but maybe that doesn't matter?



Have a bit of Elbow too - here's one clip - that was the best one in the show - Weather to Fly, but also have a look at the very cool official video of A day like this, where a guy has some fun with an obviously redundant sign, advertising condos for sale.... hahaha...[see link here]



And thinking about it: there's of course some of this, that needs to make it into here:

Still concerned... about landscapes

I've been trying to work through some of the mess of the previous post: too much jumbled together, and answering to Steph's comment, some of that became a bit clearer.

Study Plains 3_1
15x10cm, Gouache on Board

Landscape paintings: Does it matter where YOU stand? As observer, onlooker, artist, master of the painting to be? Because, eventually, you don't stand anywhere yet everywhere: all that anyone looking at the painting can see is the vista constructed by you, but you being left outside the frame (literally so).

I'm transposing social science arguments on reflexivity, standpoint and a critique of the all-knowing scientist onto my paintings. And I'm struck by the actual process in which in particular that God trick as Donna Haraway talked about it is at play when I paint - only what I see and regard as important makes it into the painting and yet I am not there.

Well, I am there only by proxy: sloppy brushwork, poor composition, shades in the wrong places etc.

Which probably takes me onto the next point to consider: with the God trick, the artist is simultaneously elevated into this creative, perceptive, tortured (?), expressive individual that does all these great/rubbish pieces of art. Person-making and individuality probably struggle to find more receptive recipients than artists - and also academics and politicians? Strangely enough, I landed squarely in the middle of two of these fields. ... But that is for another post.

But back to the God trick: this ties back to the critique of the construction of landscapes as 'naturally there', well, that's nature, what you see, what is, stupid! - nope, they are not, they are made - by onlookers, often powerful ones, to turn rural poverty in pitoresque pastoral scenes; or construct Williams' knowable communities as those which consist of the right people living sort of nearby.

This leaves two further items to examine:

- nature without people? nature v people? naturepeople? As something about subject matter. [discussed in this post here]

- something much more mundane: how to translate a 'not-framing' into composition? Into composition of landscapes in particular - rather than action painting a la abstract expressionism or similar (that is clearly one answer, though, isn't/wasn't it?); and to explore how paintings without background could counter such framing? But then there are lots of more questions:

• Would that not merely mean that the middleground becomes the background?
• How does dis/orientation work between different planes?
• What role does perspective have in this?
• Viewpoints? Angles? Distortions?
• etc

There you go,... that should keep me busy...

For the sea.... a limited palette and some concerns over landscapes

I've been toying with ideas for the next paintings. I've known for a while that they will be seascapes - based on the sketches from Eigg. [see the Flickr set here]

But I've also known that I don't want them to be pretty or fluffy. And I think I now am getting a sense how that can be avoided:

• focus on lines and markings not fields/shapes of colour. I want to try and build up fields/shapes much more strongly through lines and textures: layer them more strongly and busily
  
  
• don't do landscapes, i.e. to enframe them as beautifully constructed views.

The making of landscape in culture takes me right back to Geography (yes, academic discipline and thus capital G). I just had a little look on my computer, as I was sure I would find some writing done on a critique of the construction of landscape in Victorian England. But instead, I found something on something not so different, and for the moment, that should be sufficient:

The British Marxist historian and literary critic Raymond Williams wrote succinctly on the construction of rural communities in Victorian novels as visible, or as he calls it as knowable.
Williams finds that most novels operate with the concept of a community that is knowable, meaning that people, and their relationships can be easily communicated to the readership. More importantly, however, is that the knowable community is highly socially selective, as, for instance in relation to Jane Austen’s novels:

It is outstanding face-to-face; its crises, physically and spiritually, are in just these terms: a look, a gesture, a stare, a confrontation; and behind these, all the time the novelist is watching, observing, physically recording and reflecting. That is the whole stance – the grammar of her [Jane Austen’s] morality. Yet while it is a community wholly known, within the essential terms of the novel, it is an actual community very precisely selective. Neighbours in Jane Austen are not the people actually living nearby; they are the people living a little less nearby who, in social recognition, can be visited. (Williams 1975 203)

In contradistinction, the city in English literature became the place where such knowable communities were hidden from view and easy visibility – but had, as in Dickens’s work, to revealed and teased out. So similarly to Austen's seemingly 'simply there' rural communities, 'landscapes' are also made: produced, conveying particular views of what is contained within a vista, what isn't - and it's usually the stuff that doesn't fit that is hidden.

Good... so, there's my essential ambiguity with landscape painting. Doesn't stop me from doing them, though.

Now, one way I try to address that (and surely won't resolve it) is by foregoing the distance.

Foreground, middleground, finish. No background to enframe. It's a concept that keeps fascinating me, but also one where my intuition on reasonably good composition so quickly leaves me. Where is the horizon line to orientate? To know, to see where you stand?

Troon shoreline, Oil sketch in Moleskine 24x21cm

Now, this sketch does look pretty dumb as photo, it doesn't do that badly IRL, but yes: middlegrounds confuse the heck out of me, generally, and need some more attention. Well, I better just call that sketch 'sketch' rather than shoreline, so that there is no confusion ;)

Well, the past couple of weeks, I've been spending saturday mornings at some mixed media experiments with this.... VEEERY variable success. [But yes, the Eldon Group is back in full swing, and very nicely so).

But, at least today I took out the oils, gave Irene the challenge to pick three colours for me, and I chose a fourth and so the palette for the series of paintings is going to be:

• Naples Yellow Light
• Raw Sienna (yes, again)
• Prussian Blue
• Cobalt Green

And this is where they get me to colourwise:


Well, there's a start, I need to make sure I've got at least two canvasses ready for next Saturday and then it'll be all good (at some point along the line)...

'Taking a photo

is like an assault, a mugging.'

That was a line of the text that accompanied Laurie Anderson's Fully Automated Nikon (Object/Objection/Objectivity) project at the Tate's Modern recent exhibition Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography.

Anderson, in 1973, made an analogy how a photo - or rather: a camera stuck into someone's face - really does resemble an assault, when she got fed up with the chat she got off blokes on the streets of NYC. So, Fully Automated Nikon is the result of her asking for a photo, in response to any stupid/aggressive/annoying chat up. So, there's a series of guys, white guys, black guys, young guys, old guys, with other guys, with their girlfriends; and a couple of lines of how they responded to her assault of taking a photo.

It stuck - or rather linked up with a series of other things: notably, my hesitation to take pictures of strangers. Something my PhD examiner remarked on in response that photos labelled 'young skaters in the city centre' don't really have that many young skaters in them, similar 'builders during a break' requires the onlooker to look hard for the builders. LOL.

Now: a picture, a snapshot is really something done reasonably quick, inconspicious.

But, what on earth about a sketch, a portrait??

My parents fell victim in August to my determination of sketching people. And after my mum was mortified about my (admittedly poor) sketch, I deliberately did not try to sketch my brother when sketching him... so as almost on purpose not to produce any similarity.

Now, a long lead-in to this: stealing sketches of unsuspecting people. I still - and in fact probably before I stumbled across Anderson so wonderfully single-minded let's turn the table kind of take on mugging - think of taking something not offered by sketching strangers.

At Central Station
Ink in Moleskine, 18x13cm

But: here are some takings: at the train station on the way to the sea a few weeks back; and this afternoon while waiting on an appointment.

At the Coffee Shop
Ink in Moleskine, 18x13cm

The woman on the bench in profile found her way into my printmaking project: it needed some life drawing; and the outline worked reasonably well, it probably needs a bit more colour (how about a trusted orange); but the backdrawing - sketching on the back of the surface which lies on a thinly inked print plate - works well. It effectively produces an old-fashioned carbon copy of the sketch.

Print Project 1.3 Waiting, 20x25cm
Monotpye with backdrawing on blotting paper


Print Project 1.3 Waiting, 20x25cm
Monotpye with backdrawing on blotting paper

Cy Twombly is Painting Loss (Part 2)

Twombly wasn't really painting loss in Hero and Leandro, or was he? What he did was taking a poem based on Greek mythology and wove a different narrative for it. It was one of loss and sorrow. But nonetheless a far removed one all the same.

Yet, a couple of rooms before Hero and Leandro - and about ten years earlier - he was painting some of his own loss in Nini's Paintings. A series of five huge, 300x260cm tall, canvasses, in response to the sudden death of his gallerist's wife, Nini Pirandello, in 1971.

Cy Twombly, Nini's Painting, 1971, 261x300cm
Oil-based house paint, oil paint, wax crayon and lead pencil on canvas
Kunstmuseum Basel

They are all there is in the room, apart from a bench. They are all part of the same. Tall, wide, repetitive: scrawl upon scrawl upon scrawl on beige canvas. Unlike many of his other series, these five are so similar - it is difficult to discern which preceded the others. There is no numbering, no development. They are all simply Nini's Paintings. And that is important: it doesn't matter. It's melancholic sadness that repeats itself, over and over and over again. Not just across the canvasses, but in layer upon layer.

Much of the commentary on Twombly's work process remarked on such layering right throughout his work - the white housepaint that is used so frequently to undo what was before, e.g. also in the Poems to the Sea, or the centrality of the whites in Hero and Leandro, notably in Hero's drowning. It's gone and still it is there. Joane Eardley's work process was also driven by such layering: of paint, of dirt, of collage - in fact, any collagist actively builds this into her work process: to build up history, narratives, stories through such layering.

In many ways it's probably too neat an image - one of the things I like about collage or mixed media is the fusing of different layers, how they become something new, one, many, rather than staying separate.

Well, and that kind of goes back to mourning. The catalogue's opening paragraph on Nini's Paintings refers to Freud's 1915 essay on Mourning and Melancholia*. How, with any loss, mourning goes through all the previous ones to finally arrive at the most recent. [Well, and his argument is that melancholia occurs if that isn't happening right].

So, there is a layering, recalling, rewriting and perhaps fusing of past experiences. Working the way through the various rounds, experiences of loss... scrawling a name, different names over pages, over and over, whitening them out, adding new ones on top. And at some point the painting is done. Well, done in the sense that it can remain as what it is. And one can look at it.

It's funny. I read most of this when I was back home. But I remember the sheer physicality of those paintings in that room. Me sitting on that bench in the corner, they all around. It was about acknowledging the presence of something important.

Paintings I like? No, they are not pretty nor nice. They are important.


* - Hm, I tried to find a full text version of the text, but didn't; here's a summary of some sort: