Chelsea Art Fair

Thanks to to Helen for the suggestion and Helen's Mum for tickets to this show last weekend, selling works for people to take home and live with. So there were many fewer conceptual pieces than in many London galleries, and quite a lot of rather mundane portraits and landscapes and still lives, but among them a few artists I wanted to note:

Ellen Bell: thoughtful and delicately created pieces using strips of printed paper from specific books or with specific words. Often they wrinkle or curl up from the surface giving a further texture to the piece. 

 

Heidi Koenig for stunning colour. Her website has other different tones, but how could I resist the red one?

Next to Heidi Koenig was Byron Gin - layers of paint stripped back and peeled away.

Andrew Hood for figures and landscapes that are kind of there, kind of melting into a lively ground of layers and splatters of paint.

I laughed out loud at this: Lisa Swerling's Glass Cathedral series, boxes full of sparkle and miniscule figures. The message above this one reads: 'The World is a scary place, but I have Armbands'. Fabulous - gives us all hope!

Window No 1 evolves

My last post had the ghost tree meshed with a misty ground. But they were too much the same.

Strips of paper torn and glued over the tree shape gave a smoother form to the tree, and differentiated it from the rest of the woven support. Next I tried burnt siena on it, with some ultramarine and burnt umber to cool it down:

But now it's too dark, and still orangy hints creeping through, so lets go grey instead:

And that's where it stays...for the moment.

Inspired by Nicholas de Stael

I've got a book about Nicholas de Stael from the library. I love his contrasts of colour - passages of very saturated in your face colour and  very neutral, subtle greys, flattened shapes, texture around each block of colour, like hedges round fields.




Nicholas de Stael 'The Fort at Antibes'

A quick mess in my sketchbook with just two colours got me inspired

I enjoyed the contrasts, how the colours overlapped, the small blocks of colour against their contrasting ground. So get a canvas out and get going:

I'm going to get a different hue of grey and cover alot of the RHS, and maybe the LHS as well.


Outside the window no 2

Another version of the same view. This one started with some dribbles on canvas as somewhere to start from. Messing with a cold and a warm colour.

But the tree just wanted to make a reappearance, and the block behind it.

I liked the links that seem to form between the tree and the dribbles underneath. Like kind of dancing shadows. So I wanted to preserve the transparence of the layers to let them continue to show through. The block looked too vague. I wanted it more angular. Adding the felt tip pen made it more urban and added another style of marks.

The colours (watered down gouache mostly) had rather gone their own way. I wanted greater definition of the block, and by contrast the tree was too brown and tree-like...so this came next:

Losing some of the pen marks, but enjoying the lines of the block, and the flat tree shape, but the yellow lower section bothers me. Thinking of unifying the non-tree ground so it all gets a layer of blue:

And the tree got a tinge of pink as contrast.

Outside the window - painting No 1

I've been working (very slowly and intermittently) on a 'painting'. It started back in November with some eco-friendly packing material which caught my eye, especially since it had that kind of grid quality from the cuts that had been made in the cardboard.

To make it even more textural, I glued some scrunched up tissue onto it  and gave it a coat of PVA, hence the shine. And then out came the bright colours! I was reading a biography of Gillian Ayres at the time. Her work is so fresh and vibrant. Here's an example. It's not the one I was looking at (in a library book, which has since been returned), but you get the idea....

I loved the show last year at the Alan Cristea Gallery in Cork Street, for her 80th birthday! I hope I'll still be painting if I get to that age. See their website for more of her work. So I thought I'd try and understand her complex juxtapositions of colours by using similar colours.

The composition was based on the view from the window: a mis-shapen tree in winter against a block of flats, the binary opposition of nature and the man-made environment which always crops up in my work. I had thought to place a window frame around and through the whole thing for another layer of contrast, but I think that would be over the top.
I was also trying to get a tonal range in each colour block; exagerated aerial perspective, if you will. For sure, I don't have Gillian Ayres eye or skill, so this was too much a jumble of brights with no rhyme or reason, trying too hard to do too many things.

What I thought I needed was separation between colours, and to take the tone of everything lighter, so I added lots more white paint:

I got very excited by the layers of overlapping colour, particularly in the top right hand corner, where blue and pink merged. But overall as a whole picture it wasn't working, so I covered the lot in a veil of white, and because the surface is so uneven, the colours below are still peeping through. I like the texture, the layers of colours, and the ghostliness. But I think I preferred the first, bright version, which is gone forever!

I've lost all the gradations in tone across the colour blocks, and the tree has almost disappeared. Indeed, the tree needs a different treatment from the building to differentiate the two.  I've redefined the tree as the strongest, whitest figure and it looks better already.

I think the tree needs to go even more opaque, but maybe not completely white...but then again, it still has a certain ephemeral quality because it isn't dead flat white. But being white, it is a non-colour against the still-coloured building. I'm going to leave it a bit nw, to see where it wants to go next.

Watercolours

I went with Jane to see the new Watercolours exhibition at Tate Britain nearly two weeks ago. It covers a huge range of works, from ancient illustrated manuscripts with elaborate birds and foliage, botanical illustrations, through the expected landscapes in pale shades, but also some unexpected ones, like Charles Rennie Machintosh's 'Fetges', which had a clarity and rhythm to its huddle of grey houses that was alot livelier than my description!




Mackintosh 'Fetges' c1927




Melville 'The Blue Night, Venice' 1897

 

Then larger pre-raphaelites, which looked fussy and static (Arthur Melville's 'The Blue Night, Venice' being an atmospheric exception), aspects of war (Ute Wittwer's 'Ruin' - large black and white scene of bomb damage) to more modern and abstract work, including Andy Goldsworthy's trace of one of his melting snowballs, full of earth. His work always has that ring of truth to me; letting nature do the talking.

I was struck by Jenny Franklin's 'Sourced Earth: Regeneration'; puddles of yellow ochre and black looking like cactus shadows. As always for me it's that combination of chance and intention.





Jenny Franklin - from her website. Not the work on show, but similar

 I also stopped in front of  Rebecca Salter's grey and black panel which looked like watered silk, but was aparently made by dragging a  chopstick loaded with black colour across the grey ground.

Anish Kapoor's Untitled 1990, below, has that intensity of pigment that he so masters - nothing could be redder, or blacker. But I read that this is gouache, not watercolour. So does it really belong here?


Anish Kapoor Untitled 1990

And although it is more than 150 years old, Turner's 'The Blue Rigi, Sunrise' of 1842  has such power and atmosphere, I just had to stop and stare. There is something so modern in his hints of form and looseness of application and yet you feel that you could have been there, standing next to him, and it would have looked just like that. We were on a Swiss lake two summers ago. I wish I'd got up before sunrise to see this sight. Or then again, is it all his invention? I think I read that he worked mostly in the studio.



Turner ' The Blue Rigi, Sunrise'

Looking for photos to add to this blog on the Tate website and came across the video of John Squire doing a mix of printing and painting. Look here: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/watercolour/default.shtm. (Sorry uploading videos is beyond my blogging capabilities at the moment) I want to do stuff like that...

Time to get the paints out...but I always say that....

Knitting niggles

I've been knitting in front of the TV. Got very excited when I found some very colourful Japanese wool in John Lewis, so colourful I just had to have it!

But maybe a bit much all on its own, so I bought some quiet greys to accompany it. First of all I thought I would knit a kind of plaited gilet from a Rowan book. So I knitted all the strips, plaited them, crocheted the plaits together...then realised that it didn't work.

So started again with just the pale grey, and a more interesting cable pattern, which I decided could work as a cowl / collar. I felt it needed lining because the wool is just a bit hairy and I think it will probably irritate my neck, so back to John Lewis (what would I do without that shop?) for some jersey, and a couple of buttons. I'm pleased with the result.

But what to do with the original multi-coloured wool? I tried it with the knitting nancy, so now I'm left with some long tubes of Japanese multicoloured wool. What to do with them? Maybe another scarf/cowl??? How many does a girl need?