Friday 21 August 2009

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from travels across Germany - its a big country when you travel from the western border with Luxembourg to the eastern boarder with the Czech republic! Still we visited both Weimar and Dresden that (apart from Berlin) are my first forays into the old east. Both of them in their own way very beautiful cities. The show in Dresden was fascinating - a mix of ultra professional and student shindig - and all taking place in the old slaughterhouse buildings (as immortalised by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse 5). My work got a small room in the Direktoren Villa to itself and I was pleased with it! See the photo...the rooms had been left pretty much as they were creating an interesting tension between the marks on the canvas, deliberated but seemingly random and those on the 'distressed' walls, random but now seemingly deliberate! I'd taken a last minute decision (chicken maybe?) to show paintings rather than photos and/or manipulated digital works but in the context (of over 130 artists exhibiting) where there was a predominance of such work I was glad I had. In fact I am increasingly worried that the photography 'experiment' is proving to be a bridge too far for me in terms of my passion for the handmade. But maybe I can (as my friend Simon hinted at recently) bring the two closer together over the coming months?

1 comment:

Simon Marchini said...

I really don't believe that your 'art' and photography should be mutually exclusive. They should both reflect what you have to say about a subject and really are different techniques to communicate nothing more.