Art Path

Friday free due to conferrings so took the opportunity to head to Dublin to see two art events.

One was called VUE and I had got a mail from the RHA with an invite to this (let's not get too excited here -I think the invite was sent to everyone on their mailing list) - it is a new a event (2nd year), being an art fair with about twenty galleries showing.
I would have to admit that past experience of art fairs has not been great, but I was amazed at this. The very best of contemporary work in Ireland and some from England was on show and a lot of it was impressive. One relatively new gallery from Dublin -Oonagh Young -was showing an English artist Amy Stephens whose work I loved:

Icelandic Glow by Amy Stephens

 

This picture really doesn't do her justice because this is a 3D piece, the yellow section being made of  flock - I would go out of my way to see more of this woman's work.

(By the way, I checked with her by email and she was happy to have this published):

Here are some other pictures from the show:

 

 

 

The other exhibition was a major retrospective of Alice Maher at IMMA in Earlsfort Terrace and this was a perfect demonstration of how there need be no limits to an arists work.

 

 

This, again, is a relatively poor photo taken at VUE but is representative of work in IMMA where no photos were allowed. Scale is hard to judge from this but in fact it is about nine feet high and is a charcoal drawing of hair, of which she did quite a lot at one stage. I happen to know the artists brother and he told me that when she was doing these she had him and other family members collecting hair from barbers and hairdressers so that she could make models from which to draw.

She had some animations there and now with my very limited experience of same, I really appreciate the amount of work that has gone into her pieces.

I think I will revist this exhibition before it finishes.

 

We are constanly being exhorted to think outside the box, Here is an example of same:

 



More like a river than a path

So much for the wonderful rail journey of early morning in the frost and cold sunshine; for the second time in a week, no train at 7.35, but no bus either, at least not immediately.....and I wasn't waiting.
So, into the car, parking fee lost and off to school. At least there was very little traffic because other schools still on half-term.

Loads of work done in research on material for CCS essay question - Caravaggio and Rembrandt with a taste of Velasquez -more about that later, but just a hint:

 

 

Colour is poor in this.

 

 

More CCS in the afternoon - and interesting discussion on the motivation of Ingres in his nude paintings, and on a rather more prosaic note I learnt how to comb-bind paper courtesy of those wonderful people in the library!

 

I mentioned the work I did with acetates before. Here a some of the pieces I produced with acetates and overlays:

Its probably a bit presumptuous, but some of them reminded me of Rothko

He spoke of the Edge

I have looked back over rhe blog to date and am absolutely amazed that I havent mentioned Nntony   gormley up to now. That will be correctd.
today we had our third CCS lecture on Sculpture and it ran through Giacometti with his existential angst which led to the emaciated figures I have always so lopved (maybe I enveid them when I was a lot more overweight than I am now!) and into gormly whose fascination wth space and edge rellay spaeks to me.
 I really liked the comment he made to Gombrich who asked him:
'Do you want me to feel like you?'
 'No' said Gormley, 'I want you to feel like you.'

Without further ado, Antony Gormley

Sitting at the side of the path

Bank Holiday Monday in October -there was a tie when I would have been in Cork for the Jazz Festival -never missed it and the weather always seemed to be good. The first time I went there was to see the Modern Jazz Quartet (MJQ) who had reformed after apparently permanently retiring. I couldn't believe I was seeing such legends so close to me on stage.
Here's a taste:

 

 

Anyway, enough of that nostalgia  -   no, that's wrong; the fact that this is great music and will always be is slightly devalued by thinking of it only as nostalgia.

We often talk about happy accidents -well last week I was copying a Japanese woodblock print and when I took out the copy I discovered that the paper marker I had been using had lodged over the face of the figure in the print; at first I was infuriated, but then I began to think about it and these are what eventuated from that thinking: 

 

 

Barnett Newman -The Edge King

Ellesworth Kelly Rocks!

I know, I know it's all a bit irreverent but surely you cant be too po-faced about the things you love?

Ps  Any earlier readers might note that I at last managed to get the pictures in the right way up.........well it's the least one can do .........under the circumstances.

The path meanders at the weekend

So it's a wet Sunday night and to add to that it is now winter time. Here is something to brighten things up:

 

These are two pictures by Sarah Morris(b. London 1967) called Dulles(Capital) 2001 (top) and Endeavour 2005 - very bright and sharp doncha think? Their colour range really fits into the way I am thinking about my animations at present.

 

As to that, I had a great time on Friday with the studio essentially to my self for a good part of the day as I waited for PJ O'Connell (my teacher from last year in Colaiste Mhuire in Thurles) to come along -he txted to say he would be an hour later and that suited me fine working away and occupying a very large part of the studio with my own taste in music flowing : from Julian Bream on guitar to NeilYoung.

 



 

I got plenty of exercise walking back and forth across the studio, but I got to do a lot of stuff quite quickly and I am hoping to use these images in producing a further series of animations and also possibly to do a number of collages which may be worked up into a 3D or bas-relief :

 

 

 

This one may be made into one or a series of card collages - I'll put them up if they happen

 

 I think I already mentioned that we got our essay assignments for CCS and the one which is concerned with the Renaissance has produced a number of ideas one of which concerns Caravaggio and re that I picked up a copy from the library of Derek Jarman's 1986 film eponymously titled. Now while it is not a documentary I think anyone who wants to think about Michaelangelo Merisi de Caravaggio should see this.

 

Here's a still from it:

 

 

Some of the set pieces were stagings of Caravaggio's paintings and were stunning.

 

Let the weekend roll on and I'm being very well behaved.

 



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 



 

 



 



 

 





 







 

 



Narrow is the way

It's Thursday morning and I have my first review in an hour. I thought it mightn't be a bad idea just to put up an updated statement:

Now Where Am I?                                                  October 24

 

I composed my first statement nine days ago, but even in that time one’s own standpoint, perspective and consequent point of view changes.

The animation features I have made and the additions of music to short videos provide me with some insight into image- production and manipulation, and a view of these images which has surprised me.

I now have some ideas about further manipulation of image, and use of pre-existing image, such as earth surfaces and the addition of sound track and video to these.

The other possibility would be the making of a large-scale painting using the image material created from the animation, and even the possibility of transforming such an image into 3D –maybe bas-relief.

The third avenue is the use of a separate set of images that have always particularly interested me for their use of colour blocks and sharp-edged outline and that is Japanese woodblock print. This is an area I have not touched upon at all yet.

Later I would like to make some comments about our first CCS essay assignment and  the business of writing an essay.

 

A toute a l'heure!

OK its a lot later the same day and this is one much happier dude! Again thanks to my two tutors of the day -Sylvia Shortall and Mary Nagle - who not only were very encouraging and supportive of what I have been doing, but once again have pointed me in a slightly different direction 'along the enchanted way' (thank you Mr Kavanagh).
This evening I returned to Len Lye and discovered that he had made a film of the music of Tal Farlow who was one of my first heroes of modern jazz guitar -what a melange : you just have to see this!

Its a combination of  two of the  things I love best: abstract art and modern jazz .

 

 

I have to do this.

 

 

I will leave the comments on CCS till tomorrow.

 

On the Road Again

With that title I shaould really be able to add a bit of music from Canned Heat but maybe that would be a bit ambitious.

Anyway, I'm here at my desk with my own laptop working away as the mid-term reviews have been going on around me. I met my tutor in the corrdor and she asked me if I was today and I said  "Thursday" so Iam continuing to work on more animations using pictures of shutters on shops ont hre way from the station to here.:







 

Thesae shutters are everywhere and people have been complaining for some years that it was now impossible to window shop anymore - envy seems to have produced a society whreer people hold on desperately to what they have; anyway, they are now ubiquitous and thus familiar. So, the challenge is to make them unfamiliar, not just to look, but to see.

 

Heres the first result of that process:

 

 

But thats not the only thing that has apperared as part of the ongoing process today:

 

 

 

These are the results of our session in the ceramics workshop last Tuesday, And while they are unlikely to appear in Fu Ping or the V&A for my first ever attempt at ceramic work I am delighted with them. The lower piece is a sort of ham-fisted homage to woman who was gifted in ceramics and had a studio in Cashel where I  saw serious work for the first time -Sarah Ryan (1950 - 2001)

 

There are nine of her pieces in Limerick City Gallery of Art, which are well worth seeing -looking at the date of her death it is hard to believe it was so long ago and that she had reached that age -she seemed so much younger.

 

 

Anyway the path calls once more and even though I have some more ideas about animations I would kike to push in a somewhat diffeent direction. Two things have occurred to me: one involves doing a series of drawings or paintings bearing on the concept of edge, photograhing them and then animating them usung editing processes to change them from the original.

 

The other direcrion is to look at a series of prints which are very edge-orientated - japansese woodblock work such as Hokusai, Hirshige or Utamaro. I imagine there would have to be some checks made on copyright issues before using these, but it might be interesting to download or print fragments of these prints and put them together in an animation.

Some japanese woodblock prints:

 





 



There are possibilities here