Posted on by — Leave a comment

Site Update

a matter of detail - abstract print exploringharmony and balance

I haven’t been very mobile for several months, so my studio time has been severely curtailed. I’m improving and hope to get back before Christmas. The forced downtime has left me frustrated and with lots of tiny sketches and notes. I hope they will still mean something by the time I try to use them. In the meantime, I’m trying to make some improvements to the site. I’m unhappy with a few aspects of the site layout, and I want to improve the presentation of my work by bringing it to the forefront. I’ll try not to break anything as I tinker, but if something isn’t working as it should, please be patient. It would be very helpful if you could also email me with details of the problem. You can also comment on this post, or even send me a message via Instagram.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Exhibitions and sales

Blue Tango - digital print of two tango dancers entwined in a classic tango position

I currently have two prints selected for two different shows. On top of that, I’ve just sold three prints via a small village show, including ‘Blue Tango’ above, which was quite something. It’s the most I’ve sold at one time in ages. So, don’t ignore similar opportunities in your area. They usually benefit a local good cause, too.

This below is in the Bath Society of Artists Open Exhibition at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath. These are always worth visiting if you are in the area. I’m very pleased to be in such good company.

The second will be in a show at the Devizes Museum. This one, ‘Sarsen Stones’, is a collagraph on a hand made paper. The show is only held every other year and attracts submissions from a wide area. This is only my second submission to this show, so again I’m pleased to be included.

A collagraph print of simplified sarsen stones on handmade paper in an edition of 5.

Finally, tomorrow I’m off to see an exhibition of work by American artist (although UK based) Felice Hodges at the Vanner Gallery, in Salisbury. I’ve seen the images on the gallery website, and I’m looking forward to seeing them in reality. I’ve always enjoyed the shows I’ve seen there before, and I don’t expect this one to be an exception.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Playing with digital images again

Photographs of the iconic 'Get Carter' car park in Gateshead, before demolition

I came into printmaking via digital images and still use digital tools, for example to make stencils, as I have described in various posts here. When I can’t get into my studio, whether lack of time, or more recently health issues again, I also like to play with my software of choice, Paint Shop Pro, to make digital prints. These may or may not end up n the shop, my main reason for making them is simply to keep my creative eye in practice.

These are two of the latest such prints, both monochromatic, both and made from some old photos of mine of the now demolished ‘Get Carter’ shopping centre in Gateshead. The main image is one of the source files. It was pretty much abandoned when I took them, and I was vaguely aiming for the same grey dystopic feel. The first of these seems to capture that feeling quite well.

Digital print entitled Dystopia, with grainy indistinct buildings in the background and on the left a sigh saying PARKIN without the G, aligned vertically
Dystopia 1

Working on the second digital image, however, it decided to take a different path. Instead of a brutalist buildings, I saw not architecture but some sort of engineering structure, floating in space. This may have come via the TV series, ‘The Expanse’. Then I noticed a round white shape with what looked a bit like an outstretched arm, and out of that came the title, ‘Space Walk’. I’ve added a detail below in case I’m seeing things…

Digital image showing what appears to be a tangle of engineering structures in a harsh light against a dark, star-studded background with a figure in what looks like a white space suit clinging to the structure about halfway down on the left
Space Walk
detail from the previous image showing the apparent figure with helmet and outstretched arm
Space walk – detail

I love the smoky, grainy aspect of both these digital images and think they would work well as photopolymer etchings. That’s certainly something I intend to try.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Gallery visit – Eleanor Bartlett at the Vanner Gallery in Salisbury

After a series of recent health issues, It was sheer delight to get out and about. I chose to see this exhibition of work by Eleanor Bartlett. I had seen one piece by her before, also at the Vanner Gallery. It was by far and away the best in that show.

She paints using very utilitarian materials, metal paint and bitumen from hardware stores. The work, though, transcends the hum drum nature of the materials. The large paintings have an overpowering presence which dominates their surroundings. Even the smaller one have a physicality which transforms them from 2D painting to sculptural objects. I’ve quoted Terry Frost before, “To look at a painting which gives you the opportunity to have solitude, to be yourself and to be able to wander into reverie, is more than hedonistic, it’s spiritual” and these works have that same quality. They have a depth into which one can fall. They also seem to have a history, with a sense of millennia of accretion and erosion, all leading to the object before the eye.

Eleanor Bartlett Untitled 2022

I was also intrigued to hear, talking to David Christie, the gallery director, that Eleanor Bartlett holds a similar view to mine about the meaning of abstract work. I missed the artist talk, but she refuses to talk about meaning – ‘it has no meaning’. The composer John Cage apparently said, in a talk, “I have nothing to say, and I’m saying it”, cited by Gerhard Richter in the context of his ‘Cage’ series. I’m obviously in good company.

Unfortunately, you don’t have long to see the show – it closes on Saturday. I’m sorry I didn’t make it earlier, if only so that I could have gone again. If you can make it to Salisbury in time, I recommend you make the effort.

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Why is it art?

a wall painting at lascaux cave

Since the cave paintings at Lascaux and similar locations were painted before concepts of composition were even thought of, are they art?

Some time ago, in a Facebook group, someone asked this good question.

My initial answer was as below.

I doubt if the people making them saw them as ‘art’. That’s imposing our view of the world on the makers. From our perspective, though, yes they are art. Plus, places like Lascaux were painted by numerous hands, perhaps over centuries. They are not single compositions. What they show though is considered mark making towards an idea.

I suspect the principles they were following were more in the line of magical thinking than aesthetics. They may have thought, “if I paint this animal being killed, we will be successful on our next hunt.” Another possibility is that it was an offering to the spirit world, giving thanks for a successful hunt. Both these have been found in modern times by anthropologists. Whatever it was, they seem to have had something guiding them. They were not just throwing pigment around at random.

Sadly, the discussion didn’t progress much. The rest of this post is based on the argument I was trying to make. It includes a few extra points that didn’t occur to me at the time.

I now think the original question was based on a false premise. We don’t know if they had ideas about composition. We do know that they are not random daubs on a wall. They represent a significant human achievement, only possible because of a great deal of effort and time. They meant something to their makers.

We can never know the motives of the makers or the guiding principles they were working under. We can only speculate. Our speculations cannot fail to be coloured by our own world view, as was the original questioner.

The question of what was in the minds of the original makers of these paintings is a different question to whether they are ‘art.’ We don’t even know if the makers had a concept of art as an endeavour in its own right. There seems to have been an urge to decorate, shown in other finds from many similar cultures, but we still don’t know why it was done.

If we shift our viewpoint from looking at cave paintings to looking at scientific illustrations, it is perhaps clearer. Hooke made incredibly detailed and brilliantly executed drawings of what he saw in his microscope. These are hugely valuable in terms of their scientific intent. To see them as art means looking at them from the perspective of a separate set of values to those of the original maker. The one doesn’t negate the other. Both reference frameworks can apply simultaneously.

In the end, I suspect defining art is like defining a game. After all, what links tennis, golf, poker and Resident Evil? All games, but we would find it hard to describe the common characteristic. So in my view art includes Lascaux cave paintings, Neolithic rock carving, Medieval illuminated manuscripts, Rembrandt, Monet, Malevich, Hockney, Basquiat, and David Bailey.

Hooke is close enough in time for us to have some idea of his thought processes. I think we can feel reasonably confident that he had a sense of his work as having an aesthetic value beyond being a ‘just’ a scientific illustration. We can’t know whether the creators of cave paintings had ideas or concepts of composition, or what they were thinking. We can be sure, though, that they were thinking…

This post is related to several others about meaning in art.

Neolithic art has also provided inspiration for many of my own prints.

Mixed media print - monotype and pastel
Rocking in Rhythm #1 mixed media pastel over monoprint
Collagraph print inspired by neolithic rock carvings
Hammer marks on Weardale
Posted on by — Leave a comment

Asemic Writing

Some time ago, I linked to this wonderful video, featuring an artist book ‘Hushed Writing’ or Grafia Callada, by Spanish graphic designer and artist, Pepe Gimeno. I make no apologies for showing it again.

Since then, I have come across the work of the US artist Cecil Touchon, in particular his asemic writing. Some of Touchon’s work involves fragmentary text which he arranges into collage, often then painting the image. I’ve touched on the idea of fragmented text in this post on making stencils, but I confess I hadn’t thought of taking that idea further. It is the earlier work in which he transforms found texts by overwriting that seems to have strong affinities with Gimeno. They both produce pieces which have the structure and appearance of text, but without content.

Asemic writing is not the exclusive domain of Touchon. Indeed the roots, seem to go back to c800 CE and the Tang Dynasty. Since then, the Middle Ages and Renaissance saw the use of Pseudo-Kufic (imitation Arabic script) decoration. In the 20th century, many artists including Kandinsky and Man Ray have experimented with it. In many ways, the pictographs of Adolf Gottlieb fall into this genre too. The abstract expressionist scribbles which appear in much contemporary art are surely also descended from this idea. However, in its approach, Grafia Callada, from Gimeno seems to remain unique.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Meditation

Minimalist Collage

Some time ago, I can’t remember how, I came across a reference to this book. The images intrigued me, since they seemed to have so much in common with 20th century abstraction, despite their origins in 17th century Rajasthan as aids to meditation.

Book cover Tantra Song

Paradoxically, the strongest visual affinity seemed to be with minimalism. Compare, for example, ‘Tremolo’ by Agnes Martin from 1962 (on the left) with this piece from the book.

The paradox stems from the symbolism of the Tantric paintings when compared with the aim of the minimalists to remove the self. To quote another minimalist, Sol de Witt, ‘what you see is what you see.’

Mark Rothko, not a minimalist, described the myths of antiquity as “the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas.” This ties in very strongly with the work of an avowedly spiritual artist, Bill Moore. That isn’t surprising since he was an ordained Roman Catholic Priest.

“I often use cruciform shapes,” he says. “But, like Antoni Tàpies, I believe that the power of the cross goes far beyond its use in a Christian context. We’re drawn to what I call essential shapes, patterns and textures. They’re found in all kinds of civilizations and traditions. In fact, the geometric ratios that I use almost subconsciously are the same as those used in ancient Indian, Egyptian and Greek architecture, as well as medieval European cathedrals.”

https://frbillmoore.com/

The Tantric images seem to be made on similar terms. The symbols used have meaning for the devotees, although according to Jamme, these are not fixed. The images are the prop for meditation, beginning with whatever the image ‘means’. This expands and shifts as the mind explores itself.

This seems similar to the use of the Stations of the Cross in Christianity. While the images at each station can be quite elaborate, they can be reduced simply to a Roman numeral. It is the meditation on the meaning of each station that matters.

Another painter, Sir Terry Frost, (here) said: “To look at a painting which gives you the opportunity to have solitude, to be yourself and to be able to wander into reverie, is more than hedonistic, it’s spiritual”.

Until I came across that quote, I had never ‘got’ the work of Mark Rothko. I loved his way with paint, but the paintings themselves seemed shallow. Somehow it managed to pin down for me their essentially meditative nature. Which leads me back to the man himself:

“Art to me is an anecdote of the spirit, and the only means of making concrete the purpose of its varied quickness and stillness. “

However, despite all this, the artist who first sprang to mind when I looked at the Tantra paintings, was Robert Motherwell. More specifically, it was the collage in this small catalogue from a show of his work in 2013.

(See also here)

Cover to Robert Motherwell Collage, published by Bernard Jacobson Gallery

I think it was probably the simplicity of these pieces which made me draw the parallels. They transcend their commonplace, everyday origins, encouraging a similar meditative response as the Tantra paintings.

When I discovered it, the quote, from Terry Frost, gave me a focus for thinking about my own work. Until then, I think I always had, at the back of my mind, the guilty feeling that I was just making patterns. Understanding that others can find meaning in something, even if I don’t embed it there myself, liberated me. I realised that there is no meaning in abstract art. It does not require understanding. It just is. An artist may mentally attach meanings to the shapes and colours of their work, but even if they explicitly share those meanings, there can be no guarantee others will discover them or see the same things.

In the end, all art has the potential to be a subject for meditation. Even the flight of the eye across an image, is a form of meditation, a form of reverie. That is as it should be, I think. Art without emotion, seems an empty exercise.

Some images from Tantra Song

Further Reading

Tantra Song

The Atlantic

The Paris Review

Hyperallergic

Robert Leeming

Bill Moore

Modernist Missionary

Stations of the Cross

My Last Art Beats (video)

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell, abstraction and philosophy

Robert Motherwell, early collages

Agnes Martin

MoMA biography

Abstract Minimalism

Terry Frost

Tate Bio

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Finding your style

It is common for artists to be told of the importance of developing a consistent and coherent style. Galleries of course like this since it makes marketing so much easier if an artist can be nicely packaged up.

It wouldn’t be too far off the mark to say that pretty much every professional relationship that I had cultivated throughout the 1990s collapsed as a result of what happened to my work in Mayo. When people looked at the paintings, their jaws dropped. It was as if I’d betrayed them. How dare I take another path?

Stuart Shils – https://www.stuartshils.com/writing/reviews/aidan-dunne-the-irish-times/

The artist Stuart Shils about the problems he had when his style changed after a visit to Ireland in 1998.

The artist Patrick Heron had similar problems after a change of direction.

[The gallery director] wrote to Heron complaining that he was just beginning to find a market for his still lives and now Patrick had to hit him with this. Most artists have to put up with gallery owners who would like them to stick to the latest selling line…

Patrick Heron by Michael McNay, Tate Publishing

Some other posts on style and the creative impulse.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

What is profit?

assorted paintings

How do you price your work?

Pricing of work seems to be one of those black arts with no definitive answer. It should go without saying of course that you need to cover the cost of your materials. Beyond that, go on any art based forum, and you will find a myriad of answers. I’m going to stick my neck out here and say that most of these are simply wrong, especially in the handling of profit.

Artists in particular seem to think that the art business is somehow different to mere commerce. They are wrong. Artists need to eat just as much as car mechanics or window cleaners.

Profit

Let’s start by looking at profit. The key mistake, made by many, is to think that profit is the same as income. It isn’t. You will often see statements to the effect that profit is the money you have left after paying for business expenses. From income, you pay your personal costs – food, rent/mortgage etc. It is the wage you take from your business, just as much as the wage you would be paid as an employee. Wages are an expense of business, even for a sole trader. Profit on the other hand is the money you use to build your business – from profit you pay for tools and materials, advertising and promotion, web costs, studio rental. I don’t know why, but for some reason this distinction seems hard to grasp. There is one further complication you do need to be aware of. In the UK, at least, the tax position of sole traders – which is what you would be as a solo artist – does not differentiate between income and profit. This only applies on your tax return. Do not make the mistake of applying the same approach in your accounting practices.

A common response in forums is that if the cost of say a painting is made up from hourly income plus materials plus profit, the final figure will be too high. That may well be true, but if you ignore the difference between income and profit, you may effectively be paying people to take your work…

It is common in start-ups for the business owner not to take an income in early years. They don’t however expect this situation to be permanent. Would you work for nothing for the rest of your life?

So, with that in mind, how do you calculate the price of an art object? That will be the subject of a future post.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Is Generative AI just a party trick after all?

Magician show clipart, vintage illustration

My last four posts on generative AI may have been late to the party, it seems. This story, from Vox, suggests that the public are not taking to AI with quite the enthusiasm of a few months ago.

Their conclusion?

Generative AI can do some amazing things. There’s a reason why Silicon Valley is excited about it and so many people have tried it out. What remains to be seen is whether it can be more than a party trick, which, given its still-prevalent flaws, is probably all it should be for now.

https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/8/19/23837705/openai-chatgpt-microsoft-bing-google-generating-less-interest

I’m not sure. My experience has been mixed. With care, I think text based generative AI could be a useful tool. My experiences with art AI were less positive. I totally failed to get anything which matched more than the simplest of briefs. I don’t think that will change very soon, certainly for the average user. For now, I think it is indeed a party trick. My grandson, at least, appreciated the pictures I made for him.