Showing Now!

Over the past few weeks I've been taking a break and thinking about what next. Along the way stuff comes up - so 'for one week only' actually only until next Thursday...6th August - I'm showing with a number of other artists in an enterprising exhibition set up by Alyn Mulholland at the Angel Row Gallery in Nottingham. The three collages from the "Le Pays Minervois" series look good on a proper gallery wall and suggest to me that I may have to reconsider my final project - maybe bringing some of the fine art practice into the photographic side. I also feel that this may enable me to bring into the work some of my thinking around the uses to which we put the natural world and our depictions of it.

Out And about - The Craic

Dublin is as always bright and blustery, even in summer. I'm a great fan of Jack Butler Yeats and the sky above the city reminds me of his paintings greatly. Its a few days of immersion in contemporary (or recentish) painting with visits to the Hugh Lane Gallery and IMMA. The Hugh Lane is now surely one of the most handsome galleries just about anywhere...with the added bonus of the re-creation of Francis Bacon's studio and now the Sean Scully room (see picture). Alongside its selection of leading Irish artists and other bits and bobs (this time a delightful room of mixed landscapes across three centuries plus a striking show of four leading mid career painters) the place is a fabulous triumph of recent painting. The Yinka Shonibere work that dominated the foyer space was also a really magnificent tour de force.

At IMMA the main attraction is a ten year retrospective of the paintings of American artist Terry Winters (see picture). Winters is a bit hit and miss to be truthful - his obsessive interest in form and the endless variations around those he chooses make his drawings a real feast but the paintings sometimes suggest a less than thoroughly convincing engagement with colour and a cack handed roughness (not that in itself this is a bad thing) that occasionally overwhelms the image. At least thats my view - what cannot be gainsaid is his industry - the work on show being but a part of his output over the period.

Travel agent

I have pretty much spent my day arranging travel. My wife and I are off to Dublin next week. The painter Terry Winters has a big retrospective taking place at IMMA and besides she hasn't seen the recreation of Francis Bacon's studio at the Hugh Lane Gallery. As a long time admirer of his it will be a treat. On top of that we are off to Dresden in August to view our own work in a big art jamboree titled 'Ostrale 09' - a rare opportunity to be seen in the context of a wide ranging survey of international work. Getting to Dresden reasonably cheaply and comfortably not that easy! In addition we are off to Venice in September and then in Italy again in October. All good fun but quite a bit of organisation.

I'm also tidying up my departure from University life having decided to resign from my post at Derby - dangerously scary stuff but right for me now. In part it will help me focus in on the MA, create space for my wider practice and - hopefully - allow for new projects and ideas to emerge. One of my recent series of artworks - 'Le Pays Minervois' a set of digital collages needs more work on as it looks possible they may feature in a research journal this winter...hopefully other similarly interesting possibilities will come up as I move forward.

Through the summer months

It's proving difficult to find the need to post...not helped either by a stinking cold that laid me low for a week or so. Although it's been a busy period - sorting out work to go off to a major show in Dresden in a few weeks time alongside submissions to competitions and so forth - the real reason for not posting is that I haven't either been taking pictures or really giving much thought to the taking of pictures.

I have made a couple more trips into Dimminsdale Woods where its looking likely I'll set my major project but I'm trying to keep an open mind on the subject for the moment - and finding it pretty easy to do so!

I'm venturing into the competitions simply to get myself used to the idea of submitting my photographs for consideration - not because of any illusions as to their worth. The landscapes are proving tough to find something new to say.

Weddings and Sunsets

There was a good deal of critical commentary towards the millennium around the idea of 'beauty' spurred on, in part, by the crisis in confidence in the then rapidly diminishing returns from the YBA and subsequent generations mining the legacies of Marcel Duchamp.  Quite how the discussions, often centred around the margins of post structuralist philosophy (and particularly focussed on post feminist texts, entirely misappropriated), turned out I am not at all sure.  Part of this is down to my dwindling interest in keeping up with the current chatter in the art mags and part - I suspect - to a confusion about exactly what contemporary art activity can be as we dig into the century for real.

The place of photography in all this is even more vexing - I have written before about the barely contained horror of one or two of my fellow students as regards sunsets! - where the cliche is hard to avoid if one moves into certain subject areas.  But why can't we consider weddings or sunsets as suitable subjects for 'art photography'? Are they simply to be excluded because of their ubiquity and staus as 'known' material - after all Avedon, for just one example, mined the frontal, b&w, portrait to the point of exhaustion - Tom Cooper and Sugimoto the oceans and so on and on.

These thoughts occurred to me as I shot endless frames from a friend's terrace recently and cropped up again when I took snaps at her son's wedding - along with everyone else naturally.  At least its a change of pace and problematics from the MA for a few weeks!  In The Inhuman by Jean-Francois Lyotard there's a quote that resonates with me - "The pleasure procured by the beautiful is not the object of research, it happens or it doesn't".

Calming Down A Tad

Following on from the semester just passed I began, last week, to start agonizing over the 'major' project for the year ahead,  I bored my friend Simon with my crazy ramblings about whether it should be this or that whilst we were 'taking the air' and started to get quite het up about it.

Over the last day or so I have tried to calm down a little and take a step back.  Whilst it's true that given that it's a year from now when whatever it is will have been submitted - and that therefore if you want an image taken in May/June then it has to have been now - maybe that isn't an absolute in terms of a good idea for a project anyway.  So I'm taking a week or two off and intend just taking some pictures for enjoyments sake.  The stripped bark of the tree above caught my attention and gave me an excuse to take the picture here.  Sometimes a simple visual moment is enough.

Out And about

A trip down to London - primarily to see Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart on their take of 'Waiting For Godot' - gave the chance to think about photography and what it really means as an artform.  Outside of any immediate concerns with the MA and away from my own practice, it's easier to reflect on what the medium really has to offer.

An early stop at the Haunch Of Venison gave an opportunity to view the latest work from Thomas Joshua Cooper.  I have been a long time admirer of his landscapes, and am the proud owner of both "Dreaming The Gokstadt' and 'Some Rivers, Some Trees, Some Rocks, Some Seas'.  On this occasion though I was a little more quizzical about the work.  Not least because the images have been blown up in scale and for me at least lose some mystery as a result.  They also, dare one say it? and does it matter? looked a little old fashioned - or maybe I simply mean had less to say to us nowadays?  I am also troubled, presently, by the issue of colour.   By chance I happened upon some recent colour prints by Dan Gustav Cramer in the excellent Maddox Gallery show 'Terra Nihilus' that were in my mind far more satisfactory landscape works.  A case for more reflection on my part I think.

In another place - Hauser & Wirth - David Claerbout was showing three new video works.  One of my fellow students is a Claerbout fan - as am I - and these latest works did not disappoint.  One in particular, up in the top of the building - in the room it was made - entitled The American Room (1st movement) was a marvellous piece of work with so much to say about  time and place and photography as a medium and its relationship to film.  It had a powerful poetic quality that is impossible to describe - a must see in my judgment!