The self-portrait as signature, experiment and publicity

‘The history of self-portraiture is one of the most fascinating and complex of the whole genre [of portraiture]. Because self-portraits merge the artist and the sitter into one, they have the allure of a private diary, in that they seem to give us an artist’s insight into his or her own personality. However, interpreting self-portraiture as a transparent account of artistic personality is to ignore the many other factors that have an impact on both its creation and reception. Whilst the representational qualities of self-portraits allow them to be used as a means of self-examination, they have also functioned, for example, as signatures, as advertisement for an artist’s skill, and as experiments in technique or expression.
Shearer West, Portraiture

Like many artists, I make the odd self-portrait; working on one at the moment in fact. Does this smack of narcissism? Not really. For me, it’s a question of economics and convenience. I am my most available model and I don’t charge myself anything. I’m always around when I want to draw and I’ll pose in any position or for as long as I want me to. Simples.

Self-portraiture is also a documentary process. Not only am I charting my physical and emotional changes, but also my development as an artist.

I was interested to read what Shearer West has to say on the subject in her rather good book simply titled Portraiture. She expands on the ‘personal diary’ / ‘account of artistic personality’ idea by examining the history or self-portraiture to begin with.

Apparently there were very few self-portraits made before the sixteenth century. Those that do exist tend to be manuscript marginalia or the artist as minor witness / spectator in religious paintings. The theory is that piety prevented artists from bigging themselves up in free-standing self-portraiture; in other words, the main subject of a work. An interesting example of an artist adding himself as a sort of discrete footnote in a painting is Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Marriage (1434) where the painter can just be seen reflected in the mirror on the wall behind the couple.

Albrecht Durer was one of the first to produce free-standing self-portraits (see the above image painted in 1500). An d what a self-portrait! Durer really went for it with the self-aggrandisement in portraying himself as a Christ-like figure. No worries about piety there then. It’s a beautiful, sumptuous painting in which a richly-dressed Durer gazes out at the viewer confidently. There is no trace of the tools of his trade; he has elevated himself from artisan and shows his view of his own self worth. He is declaring himself equal with the wealthy patrons who would have first seen the painting as an example of Durer’s skill.

There are several reasons why artists began to make self-portraits in the sixteenth century, the first being a matter of pure practicality. According to West, flat mirrors weren’t easy to come by outside Venice where they were invented, a significant obstacle to self-portraiture and one that is perhaps hard for us to imagine today. Secondly, during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the phenomenon of autobiography as beginning to catch on, which meant that people were becoming increasingly aware of identity and a sense of self. Again, it’s hard for us to imagine a time when the notion of self and personal identity just didn’t exist.

Thirdly, the status of the artist was beginning to change with the setting up of academies and the birth of art theory. These brought the intellectual aspects of artistic production to the fore rather than the mechanical; fine art over craft. As the idea of the role of the artist was changing, so self-portraiture was a way of enhancing these new concepts of the worth of the artist.

So, as well as being a cheap and more flexible alternative to having to pay a model, documenting physical and psychological change and providing a platform for experimentation, self-portraiture gave artists a way of enhancing their status in society.

But there’s more. Early self-portraiture also provided artists with a useful marketing tool to advertise their skills. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, they would send them to courts to attract wealthy patrons, effectively touting for business. I suppose with the various method of reproduction we have today, artists don’t need to publicise themselves in the same way. Or at least, those seeking portrait commissions.

There’s a great deal more to say about self-portraiture; West goes on to explore gender, artistic identity, self-presentation and autobiography in relation to it, but I’ll save that for another blog post some other time.

On portraits and plumbing

We are in chaos again. This seems to be a regular state of affairs these days as the house works continue. Having had the rotten floor joists replaced, we are now on the way to having a completely new kitchen installed. Or so I thought. What a lengthy, time-consuming faff it all is; meetings with the designer, surveys, more meetings with the designer, trips to the store to look at flooring, tiles and appliances, even more meetings with the designer... At some point, they will put my order through, then I will have to wait an interminable length of time for the installation. The tedium. Don't know what I expected really - having a new kitchen is a fairly involved (and expensive!) business.

In the meantime, those lovely kitchen people have given me a couple of tasks to keep me busy whilst I wait. They announced that they won't build a cupboard around the hot water tank as it is (as originally agreed) because they don't consider it safe (suspended four feet off the ground on two iron poles which fitted into the wall on one side and two pieces of 2 by 1 on the other). Fair dos; if the whole lot comes down in an unplanned way, it wouldn't be pretty. So, we're having the tank moved to the floor. Five days' work for the plumber (during which time we have no hot water or heating) and much mess and expense; particularly irritating as the new tank was put in less than two years ago. Yes, I KNOW I should have had a combination boiler.

Anyway, there is a point to me telling you all this - it's not just a whinge. The upside is I've had a couple of good days in the studio whilst the work is being done. I was planning to work at home (busy time of year in Children's Social Care data) but, well, the pull of the studio was just too strong. Etching or data analysis...? Etching or data analysis...? No contest really.

I recently completed the first in a new series of images in which I'm trying to combine narrative with portraiture. All portraits have an element of narrative to some degree; everyone has their story. I think it would be hard for the viewer not to pick something of this up from the portrait if the artist has done his/her job - whether it's the subject's true story is a different matter of course.

The above image, Sister Mary, Mother of H and M, evolved into something I hadn't foreseen really and became about family. I'm not entirely sure what it's saying though... they look kind of ghostly to me, ephemeral. I wanted to have them in a formal pose reminiscent of a Victorian photograph but M wasn't up for that particularly, so added two fingers and a poking-out tongue. A nice touch I feel. Of course, anyone who knows H and M will spot immediately that I've used a drawing which is nearly four years old. Knew it would come in handy some time.

April Exhibitions Part 2 - The Green Man

The First Gallery here in Southampton has to be the most unusual art gallery I’ve ever visited, and certainly the most unusual I’ve exhibited in. Run by mother and son team, Margery and Paul Clarke, the gallery was set up in their home in the late 60s with the remit of providing a small, personal space in which professional artists can sell their work, and those with an interest in art can view and buy the work, having seen what it might look like in a domestic setting. The gallery has grown in reputation over the years whilst remaining small and personal.

I was pleased to have a print selected for the gallery’s exhibition entitled The Green Man. The show centred on a series of prints and paintings by Elizabeth Nash based on the subject of the green man (more information here). This was complimented by work on the same theme from other local artists including fellow Red Hot Press members Sue Anderson and Tamsin Loveday. As well as print, there were works in a variety of media; drawing, painting, bas-relief & wicker, sculpture, book-works, digital photography and textiles. My own piece was an aquatint of a Woodwose or wild man, a sort of distant relation of the green man, explained here in my blog post about the print.

There. Not everything's about the royal wedding today.

Image: Elizabeth Nash, Green Man

April Exhibitions Part 1 - Red Hot Impressions

Private views were a bit like buses at the beginning of April; none for months then two in five days. Red Hot Impressions which runs from 5 April to 18 June 2011, is the first collaboration between Red Hot Press Printmaking Workshop and The Art House, Southampton’s not-for-profit café gallery and arts venue. It’s a great venue right in the city centre so we were very excited to be asked to show there.

The Art House has a lively programme of events including art, music and poetry, and workshops in just about anything you can think of, from English folk fiddle to drumming, and sign language to beadwork. They even run a workshop on how to run a workshop! The venue also provides a meeting place for a number of groups which include writers, knitting, language café and a group which makes stuff out of scrap anything – very much in line with The Art House’s green ethics. The café serves vegan food prepared and cooked on site, grown organically and locally sourced where possible. And those who run the show, mostly volunteers, are great. What’s not to like about this place?

Red Hot Impressions includes original prints from sixteen members of Red Hot Press and covers a wide range of printmaking techniques; etching, linocut, woodcut, drypoint, letterpress, screen printing, collagraph, gum transfer, monprinting… I’ve probably forgotten some. A full and varied show! We had fun hanging the exhibition - a team of seven of us did it in just under three hours, and during that time, I think we put every print on just about every screw in the gallery! It all came together really well in the end though. Here’s the Art House’s blog with some pictures of us hanging the show.

The opening was well-attended; the wine flowed, thanks to the Art House crew, and work sold. All in all, a very pleasant evening. More pictures here. If you haven’t paid a visit to The Art House, jog on down and have a coffee and some of their superb home-made cake - surrounded by excellent works of art of course!

Non-toxic etching

Weekend before last, I was fortunate to be able to attend an etching master class at Red Hot Press taught by Andrew Baldwin, etcher extraordinaire and non-toxic printmaking evangelist.

The weekend started on Friday evening with Andrew giving a talk about how he’d got into printmaking and why he’s particularly keen to make it as non-toxic as possible. Having come from a family of commercial printers, Andrew feels that printing is in his blood. It was his interest in art however which led him to apply for a job as a print room technician at Aberystwyth University where he has taught for the last twenty years or so. It was there that he first discovered (and was smitten with) etching.

Problems with the etching bath ventilation system and his father’s health problems following a life time in the printing trade lead Andrew to start thinking about the hazards of printmaking, in particular etching; he told us horror stories about dissolving tooth enamel and exploding fingers. There are a myriad of dangers in the print room – arsenic, mercury and lead in traditional etching grounds which can be absorbed through the skin, vapours and gases given off by solvents and mordants which can cause all kinds of lung and central nervous system problems.

To avoid as many health hazards as possible, Andrew has researched and/or reinvented virtually every substance used by etchers, from degreasing solutions to aquatints, from stopping out to etching grounds. It’s his new ground, Baldwin’s Intaglio Ground (BIG) which is the real news however; a ground which can be used as hard, soft and liquid and which is completely non-toxic. Check out his video here.

Over the course of the weekend workshop, Andrew showed us as many of his non-toxic techniques as he was able to pack into two days; intense information upload! Topics covered include plate preparation, using hard and soft grounds, stopping out techniques using BIG and Copydex, sand paper aquatints, poor man’s mezzotint, blue guitar process, icing sugar aquatints, instant coffee sugar lift, etching mordants and how they work, spit bite, plate registration techniques, double drop printing… We even managed to fit in some etching of our own! We each made a three-plate sandpaper aquatint. I think it was his mission to tell us everything there is to know about etching!

Although there was quite a lot of basic information given, it filled in a few gaps for me, and I learnt new stuff too. I’m particularly keen to try printing some of my portraits double drop as I’ve been thinking about how to get some colour into my work for a while. For those who aren’t familiar with the technique, this provides a way of bringing some subtle colour to the work by printing the same plate twice on the same piece of paper but in two different colours. The best registration in the world is never going to be perfect and it’s the interplay of the two colours very slightly misregistered which give the image its quality. Now I’m looking forward to some solid studio time so I can apply some of this new knowledge to my own work.

Image: Andrew Baldwin
Punch Drunk
Etching and aquatint

I am a draper mad with love

I’ve been reading a lot of Dylan Thomas recently. What happened to the Melville binge? Slight detour – sorry Herman, I’ll get back to you.

My current read is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, a book of semi-autobiographical short stories, tales of Thomas’s early life in Swansea, as beautifully written as his poetry; but it’s Under Milk Wood, Thomas’s play for voices, that I really want to talk about. It must surely be one of the most beautifully lyrical things ever written in the English language. Just the tumbling, twisting word-play alone is enough but I love the vivid character studies, bawdy black humour - ‘bombazine black’ – and the whole imbued with a wistful melancholy that makes it ripe for illustration. There are images spilling from every page.

Here’s a passage which epitomises Thomas’s expressive character descriptions, lyricism and observance of human relationships: the first exchange between the draper Mog Edwards and his inamorata Miss Myfanwy Price. Their passion for each other, declared through letters, flames with what could be though they have never met.

‘From where you are you can hear in Cockle Row in the spring,
moonless night, Miss Price, dressmaker and sweetshop-keeper,
dream of her lover, tall as the town clock tower, Samsonsyrup-gold-maned,
whacking thighed and piping hot, thunderbolt-bass'd and
barnacle-breasted, flailing up the cockles with his eyes
like blowlamps and scooping low over her lonely loving
hotwaterbottled body.

MR EDWARDS

Myfanwy Price!

MISS PRICE

Mr Mog Edwards!

MR EDWARDS

I am a draper mad with love. I love you more than all the
flannelette and calico, candlewick, dimity, crash and merino,
tussore, cretonne, crepon, muslin, poplin, ticking and twill
in the whole Cloth Hall of the world. I have come to take
you away to my Emporium on the hill, where the change hums
on wires. Throw away your little bedsocks and your Welsh
wool knitted jacket, I will warm the sheets like an electric
toaster, I will lie by your side like the Sunday roast.

MISS PRICE

I will knit you a wallet of forget-me-not blue, for the
money, to be comfy. I will warm your heart by the fire so
that you can slip it in under your vest when the shop is
closed.

MR EDWARDS

Myfanwy, Myfanwy, before the mice gnaw at your bottom drawer
will you say

MISS PRICE

Yes, Mog, yes, Mog, yes, yes, yes.

MR EDWARDS

And all the bells of the tills of the town shall ring for
our wedding.

[Noise of money-tills and chapel bells]’

What a joyful celebration of the English language Under Milk Wood is! And hearing it is even better than reading it so have a listen to the first part here. Enjoy.

The joys of teaching

It’s all go art-wise at the moment with teaching, two exhibitions coming up and an etching workshop with master printmaker Andrew Baldwin, he of the BIG etching ground, next weekend.

My recent teaching was fun. I taught a group of experienced etchers how to use pine resin (otherwise known as rosin, colophony or Greek Pitch – splendid name!) as an aquatint; a first for me and the workshop.

It made me think particularly about the difference between teaching beginners and experienced printmakers. There’s a lot more process with beginners whereas with those who are coming to a technique with some experience already, it’s much more about the image; critiquing and problem-solving the composition etc. Both are fun and challenging but require different skills I think.

The course was fully booked and went very well, despite a slightly tense start to the day. The power went off half an hour before everyone was due to arrive but it was just a switch tripped fortunately. My students produced some interesting images and certainly kept me on my toes all day; felt quite pooped when I got home! In a good way of course. I love teaching.

Images:
top - Beatrice Caniggia, pine resin and drypoint print
bottom - Ruth Barratt-Danes, pine resin and drypoint print

The Passages of Herman Melville

I’ve just finished reading The Passages of Herman Melville by Jay Parini; a satisfying and entertaining read. This is a novel, not a literary biography, in which Melville’s life and thoughts are laid out in alternating chapters, one narrated in the third person and the other by his wife Lizzie. The narrative isn’t chronological which I found a bit confusing at first, but once used to the form, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Parini is at pains to remind the reader that this is a novel. He has played with what facts are known about Melville, rearranging, surmising and embellishing here and there to forge a rollicking good tale of seafaring, cannibalism, homoeroticism and creative angst. Of Elizabeth Shaw Melville, the author writes, ‘I should add that very little is known about Lizzie Melville, so I made her up.’ Quite tantalising really; Parini’s Lizzie is an opinionated woman who isn’t afraid to tell her allegedly violent husband when she doesn’t think much of his work. An educated and well-read young woman, captivated by Dickens (she met him when he paid a visit to her father), it’s hardly surprising she was swept away by the hirsute Melville, romantic sailor-cum-writer full of fresh tales of the South Seas. According to the author anyway - one has to keep reminding oneself that this is a novel.

The ending is rather sentimental but not so overdone as to please Dickens. And you kind of want Melville’s story to end as benignly as it can. It’s a sad fact that in his lifetime, he just wasn’t appreciated for the great writer he is. I can’t help feeling the book could do with some pictures though; one can never have too many pictures.

I am no book reviewer so have a look at Phillip Hoare’s review in the Guardian for the views of someone who knows what’s what in these matters. And read the book yourself.

Herman Melville is one of those writers who keeps popping up for me. I greatly admire his work though I’m ashamed to say that I’ve only read Moby-Dick and his short stories. It’s daft really because I’ve certainly appreciated what I’ve read. And it has inspired some of my images. The characters and stories are entertaining and intriguing, sometimes downright befuddling (take Bartleby for instance), but for me, it’s the language that really does it. It’s so vivid and poetically put together, but not in a flowery way. A line that comes to mind is one from Moby-Dick where Ishmael is describing death by whaling as ‘a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity’.

Melville appeals to all the senses as this passage from Redburn shows. The young Wellingborough Redburn muses on one of his father’s paintings.

‘Then we had several oil-paintings and rare old engravings of my father’s, which he himself had bought in Paris, hanging up in the dining-room.

Two of these were sea-pieces. One represented a fat-looking, smoky fishing-boat, with three whiskerandoes in red caps, and their trowsers legs rolled up, hauling in a seine. There was high French-like land in one corner, and a tumble-down gray lighthouse surmounting it. The waves were toasted brown, and the whole picture looked mellow and old. I used to think a piece of it might taste good.’

I can almost taste that chocolaty painting as I read the passage… Or is it toffee?

2011 started out as the Year of The House owing to the large number of domestic challenges to be faced. I think I’m going to add to that the task of becoming much better acquainted with Melville’s work. Here’s to 2011 – my own personal Year of Herman Melville.

Garrick Palmer: A Life in Wood Engraving

2011 got off to a slow start for me due to two bouts of illness and a variety of domestic disasters involving broken cars, rotten kitchen floor joists and cracked toilet cisterns. Creatively, January was pretty much a bust.

February however began much more promisingly with a visit to Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition of wood engravings by Garrick Palmer. I first came across his work about five years ago when I was working on a series of card cuts based on Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville. I found a copy of the Folio Society’s publication of the same from 1967 (Three Stories, Herman Melville) on ebay, illustrated by Palmer. Naturally I had to buy it, being very careful not to look at it until I had all my images established. I didn’t want to be influenced even subconsciously by another artist’s images of the story.

Garrick Palmer was born in Portsmouth in 1933 and studied Fine Art at Portsmouth College of Art and Design where he first learnt wood engraving, and at the Royal Academy Schools in London. He taught at Winchester School of Art from 1962 to 1986 where he was Head of the Foundation Department. This last is particularly interesting to me as I studied in that same department from 1987 to 1988 so missed him by a whisker; how annoying.

The retrospective exhibition brings together prints and book illustrations spanning Palmer’s whole career and includes many images of the English landscape, something he returns to time and time again and clearly loves. These are autobiographical to some extent, marking significant points in his life; his wife’s battle with cancer for instance, and when he himself was diagnosed with diabetes.

It was Palmer’s book illustrations I was drawn too though, particularly the nautically themed ones. His illustrations for Moby-Dick are breathtaking in complexity, composition and atmosphere, as are those for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (the latter took ten years to complete). I found it hard to tear myself away from these. And although not my favourite of Palmer’s images, I was pleased to see an original copy of Bartleby himself. I love Melville’s story of the Wall Street Scrivener.

Not being a wood engaver myself, I don’t feel qualified to comment on his technique; I do know however, that he’s a master of it and if you’re at all interested in wood engraving, go and see this show before it finishes on 13 March.

Images:
Ancient Mariner II
Hampshire Fields

Temporary winter quarters

It was -2°C in the studio yesterday; the water in my plate-rinsing bowl had frozen over. That’s the coldest it’s been in there so far this winter (when I’ve wanted to work anyway) and even with the heater on, it’s not warm enough to ink up. So, I have decamped to the kitchen and utility room for the time being, with swift sorties to the studio to print.

I finished a plate yesterday which is satisfying; it’s taken me just over two months which is quite fast for me so I’m pleased with that too. My big problem is that I work so slowly, partly because I just don’t get much time to spend on my artwork these days. Or write blog posts; when was the last one…?

I’m glad this particular plate is finished because having worked on aluminium for the last few months, I can now go back to zinc which I prefer. This particular plate has come out peculiarly speckly in comparison with other aluminium plates I’ve worked on (see image with blog post dated 13 October 2010) and I have absolutely no idea why. Does aluminium have a ‘grain’? With zinc, I find I can get much cleaner lines and more variety of tone and texture. Shame it’s so much more expensive and not so easy to source and cut. Aluminium is great in that respect.

Well, that’ll be the last plate of the year; a very good time to finish it. Time now to reflect on what I’ve achieved over the last year and what’s coming up in the next. Some exciting firsts on the horizon for me - looking forward to it.

Create from a place of no-mind

A friend lent me a book recently – The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. I’m not entirely sure where I stand with this fellow. He has some interesting things to say but I don’t like the way he writes (too mystical) and I’m uncomfortable with the way he’s set himself up as a kind of spiritual teacher. His ideas are drawn from many different religions and philosophies including Zen Buddhism, Sufism, Hinduism and the Bible. He talks a lot about mindfulness which I have a great interest in but there are other writers I prefer on this topic; Jon Kabat-Zinn and Russ Harris for example.

I thought I would share this excerpt about creativity from Tolle’s book which relates back to my posts Art practice as meditation? (May) and Doing non-doing (June).

‘The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analysing information – this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nation-wide inquiry among America’s most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking “plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself.” So I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don’t know how to think but because they don’t know how to stop thinking!’

The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle

Bridget Riley: Flashback

I had an interesting afternoon at Southampton City Art Gallery taking in the Bridget Riley exhibition, Bridget Riley: Flashback. The show covers work from the early 60s up to more or less present day and includes some of her preparatory studies. These, many of which were plotted out on graph paper, took me right back to my to my student days at art school when most of my images were created using mathematical systems. Whereas the other students could be seen carrying sketchbooks, I was usually brandishing a pad of graph paper. Very different from the kind of work I’m making now.

There was a selection of books on Riley for browsing at the exhibition; ten or twelve with her customary op art images on the front. I was immediately drawn to the one with a conte sketch of a woman on the front. It seems that Riley was an ardent portrtaitist and spent her three years at Goldsmiths drawing, drawing, drawing from life. Although her work changed direction dramatically in the early 60s when she began to produce the sort of images she is so well known for, this early experience of looking and drawing has been crucial to the way she has worked throughout her career.

'A great deal is involuntary. At best the drawing seems to unfold on the paper almost by itself, the hand being directly guided by the eye. Drawing is an exercise in looking: one finds out what can being seen and at the same time one finds oneself having to organise the visual and emotional information extracted. How to sort out and clarify this confusing wealth?'

Bridget Riley, From Life

Cataract 3, 1967

Less swilling, more forming

I’ve a lot of ideas about my artwork swilling around in my head at the moment; swilling but not forming properly, which probably means my work needs to change direction. Portraits seem to be where I’m at right now but I’m still very much drawn to narrative images. As The Undertaker’s Nuptials seems to have stalled (temporarily I hope), I’m thinking about how I can work narrative into straight portraiture. This has lead me to consider how we all have our own personal stories; who we are, where we’ve come from, what’s shaped us, what’s important to us, where we’re going and so on.

I’m reading an interesting book at the moment – Portraiture by Shearer West. How about this:

‘Portraits are not just likenesses but works of art that engage with ideas of identity as they are perceived, represented, and understood in different times and places. ‘Identity’ can encompass the character, personality, social standing, relationships, profession, age, and gender of the portrait subject. These qualities are not fixed but are expressive of the expectations and circumstances of the time the portrait was made. These aspects of identity cannot be reproduced, but they can only be suggested or evoked. Thus although portraits depict individuals, it is often the typical or conventional – rather than unique – qualities of the subject that are stressed by the artist, as demonstrated in Holbein’s George Gisze. Portraiture has also been subject to major changes in artistic practice and convention. Even though most portraits retain some degree of verisimilitude, they are nonetheless products of prevailing artistic fashions and favoured styles, techniques, and media. Portraiture is thus a vast art category that offers a rich range of engagements with social, psychological, and artistic practices and expectations.’

Less swilling, more forming.

Image: Hans Holbein the Younger, George Gisze, 1532

It lives...!

Last week was a productive week. Not only did I finish a plate I’d been working on for far too long, but my website redesign was completed and the new site went live. The latter was courtesy of the excellent Martin Davis of Still-Moving.co.uk. The final result is quite different to how I originally envisaged it – and much better I think.