Influences 4 - Stuart Pearson Wright

Gallus gallus with Still Life and Presidents ~ oil on linen, 2000/01

There's so much to say about this guy's work I don't know where to start. He's been on my radar for some time but just lately I've been looking at a lot of his paintings and reading interviews and articles about him. I wouldn't say he's influenced my work to date but I'm really interested in some of his ideas and methods (and in awe of his talent generally), so who knows, his influence may creep in yet.

Weltschmerz ~ oil on linen, 2013

My head is whirling a bit; he's quite intellectual in his approach and draws heavily on the work of the Renaissance painters (medium, technique, perspective, that viewpoint somewhere slightly above the sitter, etc). But this just covers his painted portraits. I guess these are for what he's best known but his work is actually a lot more diverse than that; he also works in photography, video and makes sculptures, drawings, etchings and monoprints. I think I need to process.

Domestic Scene ~ oil on linen, 2002

More Marcelle Hanselaar

Letterbox Prints: Postcards from the Press

Making postcards is more challenging than I thought it would be. It's a whole other process; one has to come up with an image that is simple enough to print quickly and in quantity. Hence my tentative foray into linocutting - which I have to say, is a lot more difficult than I remember. My crow (inspired by a memorial to King Cnut's daughter in Bosham Church) is looking a bit more dishevelled than he should. But actually, I quite like that about him... who wants tidy crows anyway.

I guess this is more of a design brief... and I've left it a bit late to get started so I'm trying to treat it a bit like a commercial project. Paper wrapping band simply designed on the computer - check; plastic pockets and brown paper sourced - check; Cowprint rubber stamp designed, ordered and collected - check, check, check. And bit of a printathon to produce a good number of cards. Now on to the next design...

Influences 3 - Marcelle Hanselaar

Self-portrait of Yesterday ~ oil on canvas, 2012

I first came across Marcelle Hanselaar's work some years ago in an article in Printmaking Today (I'll find the issue number and post it for anyone who wants to track it down) and saw some of her etchings at Originals shortly afterwards (or was it the RE Summer show...). I'd been quite captivated by the tiny reproductons but seeing the actual etchings was a very different experience; the powerful rawness, was quite stunning. I spent some time in front of them and found it quite hard to tear myself away.

Le Petit Mort 10: Notes From an Incomplete Journey ~ etching and aquating, 2005

Stormwarning ~ etching and aquatint

She is in the same camp as Paula Rego for me; dark, violent narratives in which people (quite often she herself) and strange creatures coexist in nightmarish scenarios. Dogs seem to figure frequently in a rather Jungian Shadow-type way. Bizarre, macabre and faintly comical.

Open Sesame ~ etching and aquatint

Le Petit Mort 6: Notes from an Incomplete Journey ~ etching and aquatint, 2005

Etching and aquatint

In this short film, Hanselaar talks about her relationship with the medium, in particular oil paint. She talks about the intimacy which develops over time (she says it took twenty years for her to really get the measure of it) and one gets the sense that it would be impossible to separate her from her art and vice versa. The interviewer asks 'Who is Marcelle Hanselaar?' She replies, 'I have have no answer to that but I paint about that.'


Marcelle Hanselaar - Postcard From The Edge from Beats Shots on Vimeo.

Ten Public Hangings

This linocut will be overprinted with drypoint

Pirate Baby is taking a break whilst I work on some other projects. Having messed up his solar plate, I got a bit stuck about where to go next. The fog is slowly lifting on that one but in the meantime, I'm making headway with the Cowprint postcard project in preparation for our exhibition as one of the Ten Public Hangings at Red Hot Press over the next few months. Intrigued? More details soon.

Influences 2 - Grayson Perry

 

Composition in my own work has changed over the years to become less… static? I don’t quite know what words to use here. My images have become a mix of elements, some portraiture, some narrative, some diagrammatic, with text thrown in for good measure; all jumbled up then fitted together like a jigsaw. I suppose I’ve always done this a bit but that way of working has gradually taken over. It may be partly due to moving from card cuts, where the image has to be complete before varnishing, to etching where the image can evolve over time. Elements can be added or taken away and this gives great flexibility to the creative process. 

 

I think it’s this that inspires me about Grayson Perry’s work. Rich, dark, satirical; his images evolve as he works on his pots or tapestries, almost like subconscious doodlings. I love his style of drawing and the macabre humour he often displays. His pots are always a surprise; beautiful in shape and colour schemes which, on closer inspection, reveal worlds of the grotesque and wryly comic. I guess I am also drawn to his pots for the craft aspect - there’s a lot of process and technique required in the same way that there is with etching. Steps, stages, states, layers. And the guy is such a dude. What’s not to like.

 

 

Dilys Bryon: 'Outside Eye - Inside Eye'

Dilys Bryon ~ Earthquake

Went to the private view of an exhibition of works by Dilys Bryon at The First Gallery this evening; lovely monoprints, etchings, mezzotints and paintings. Being an intaglio printermaker myself, I was particularly drawn to the etchings; beautiful abstracts printed using the Hayter method, a kind of viscosity printing which enables the printmaker to achieve an incredible vibrancy of colour - and Dilys Bryon is a master of colour. Go see.

Influences part 1 - Paula Rego

Paul Rego ~ Three Blind MiceCopyright Victoria and Albert Museum

  

Lately, I've been thinking about artists who influence my work. This is a tricky one. I found I could name many artists I like but had to think hard about whether they influence me in making my images. Do I like them because I see similarities between their work and mine, or are those similarities there because I have been influenced on a subconscious level? Probably a bit of both. 

Anyway, to get some clarity on this issue, I think I shall throw in more posts about artists I appreciate - because they probably do influence the way I work to some extent, even if I don't realise it. 

Top of the list has to be Paula Rego, painter and etcher extraordinaire. I'm not going to give you a bio because you can look that up for yourself if you're interested, but here are some images I like (hard to pick just a few!). Figurative, narrative, a darkness... these are things that immediately grab me. She's a story teller.

Paula Rego ~ Celestina's House

Paula Rego ~ The Flood

Paula Rego ~ 'Crivelli’s Garden (The Visitation)', 1990

Ship to Shore

Art and the lure of the sea. The subtitle sums up the latest exhibition at SeaCity Museum here in Southampton. I paid it a visit this week and thought it well-worth the trip. Here's how the museum website describes it:

'Ship to Shore explores the different ways that artists have engaged with seas and oceans. The exhibition is an intriguing visual feast of paintings, films, photography and prints alongside archival objects evoking the disorientating vastness of oceans, the romance of sea travel and ship-to-shore communications. Works by contemporary artists such as Tacita Dean, Tracy Emin, Susan Hiller, Steffi Klenz, Richard Long, Langlands and Bell, Humphrey Ocean, Simon Patterson, Zineb Sedira and Yinka Shonibare MBE are exhibited alongside historic paintings including La Vague by Gustav Courbet.
 
Ship to Shore also offers the visitor a rich visual and audio experience, where the voices of the past are linked with the present, enigmatically joined by the theme of the sea. Ship to Shore is curated by Dr Jean Wainwright in collaboration with the SeaCity Museum and John Hansard Gallery, and is shown across both venues. Artists exhibiting at the John Hansard Gallery include Chris Burden, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Isaac Julien and Catherine Yass.'

Catherine Yass - Lighthouse series  2011

I guess the piece that stayed with me was Zineb Sedira's 16-minute film entitled 'MiddleSea', in which the viewer joins a solitary man on an empty passenger ferry travelling from Marseille to Algiers. He wanders the empty corridors, drinks coffee by himself and stares out over the vast expanse of featureless sea. We see the waves, we hear the deep throb of the engine, a seagull, a radio, the ship's horn and feel engulfed by it; the images are projected on a wall which must be something like 30 feet wide and 20 feet high.



I've always had a rather difficult relationship with video and film installation... I often struggled to 'get' them and would rarely stay to watch a whole piece, but I find as I get older, I can appreciate them much more (or maybe it's the lure of a bit of a sit down in a quiet, darkened space...). I don't wrestle with them in order to 'get' them; I experience them and take from them what I can. This piece was calming, it lulled me. I was travelling with the figure in the film but also we were waiting, in between places, neither here nor there. I particularly liked that other sounds from the gallery building blended with the film's soundtrack; violin music from another exhibit, the clatter of crockery from the museum cafe, slow footsteps of other visitors, the odd murmur of conversation. They didn't in any way distract from the piece but somehow complimented it - for me at least.

Langland and Bell - Into the blue  2014

Steffi Klenz - Concert for Maison Seiren  2014

Steffi Klenz - Concert for Maison Seiren  2014

Learning from mistakes

It may sound obvious but don't stick acetate to acetate with glue.

Things wot I have learned about solar plate.
1. If you're making a multi-plate print, make your acetate template from a proof, not your original drawing.
2. If your acetate template doesn't match up with your etching plate, don't just cut it up and rearrange it onto another piece of acetate.
3. If you must do the above, don't stick the pieces together with glue.
4. Don't try to block out areas with a marker pen - the light goes straight through.
5. Do get something soft to put your plate on and a thick, heavy piece of glass so that you get 100% contact.

Think I made every mistake it's possible to make with this plate. Not tried printing it yet as it's still hardening. Bit afraid to ink it up really but at £12 a throw, I'm determined to use it in some way. The image may not end up as I first planned it, but hey, that's the beauty of printmaking. Keeping everything crossed that serendipity will strike, not disaster...

Pirate Baby trots on

Two more aquatints done and a little testing of colour. These won't be the final colours... just testing to see if the colour would lighten the image as it seems a bit daerk at the moment. Still too dark so some burnishing needed and a little line work to add detail. Overall though, seems to be coming on okay. Think it's time to make the solar plate for the background next though, to see how the etching looks against it. It will affect the colour of course. Still struggling to motivate myself with this one... but onwards and upwards.

Website update

Met my web designer today (get me). He made some tweaks to my site and changed the images on the front page. It's a great site and has served me well over the last few years but we both agreed that the images need to be given more room, particularly on the home page. So, time for a revamp. I shall be looking at other artists' sites to see what's out there and what would suit my work over the next few weeks. Watch this space...