It’s strange how my relationship with the work changes as I prepare to hang for a show. It’s partly because I’m saying goodbye to it, like when a close friend moves to a different country. It’s also because the detailed admin you need to so at this stage is MUCH more stressful than doing the work itself. Pricing … Framing …. publicity and press stuff …. aaaagh. But it’s also wonderful to see how it went from here, which is a really early visual I did of the whole thing :

To here, which is one of the box works :

and ended up here which is your invite to the launch event :

I hope you can come to the launch on Friday. The performance is between 7.00 and 8.00 pm. and that’s the bit I’m really looking forward to. Once that performance is over it will never come back.

Just woke up after a long day rigging the show at Brighton. I was showing my CD engravings, people liked them and I really should do some more.

The PV was heaving, they had to stay open for extra time so everybody could get in. I checked out Alexander Korzer-Robinson again this year. His altered book sculptures gets better and better. It’s very easy to copy Joseph Cornell but very difficult to say anything new.

Off to help at Origin in London  tomorrow where Susi Hines and Maya Selway are showing. I need an assistant or three ….

Brighton Art fair : 12 PM Twelve Printmakers 

Dates : Thursday 22nd September 6.00pm - 8.30pm (ticket only)
Friday, 23rd September 11.00am - 7.30pm
Saturday, 24th September 10.00am - 6.00pm
Sunday, 25th September 10.00am - 5.00pm Venue : Corn Exchange, Church Street Brighton, BN1 1UG

It’s great to be back again this year. I’m showing the lithograph/monoprints from my Changeling series Bestarios de ensueño as well as reviving some of my CD engravings based on song titles. Come and snap up your copy of Trout mask replica.

CATOS 2011 : Open studio

Dates : Saturday 1 October 2011. 11.00 - 6.00pm.
Venue : My studio.

The annual CATOS safari where you can observe me in my natural habitat. I’ll be working on the box works for the Minories show so it’s a chance to see how they are progressing and also to see the prints from Brighton.

Such Stuff : an event of film, performance and drawing

Dates :

Launch event : Friday 21 October 2011. 7.30 - 9.00pm. Includes a performance and the first screening of the film. There is also a preview for press/networking on the same day, so please get in touch if you’d like a personal invitation to that.

Static show : Saturday 22nd October to Tuesday 6th December 2011

Closing event : “Everything must go.” Monday 5 December 2011 6.00 - 8.00pm
Performance and public auction of work.

Venue : The Minories 74 High St. Colchester, Essex CO1 1UE.

This show brings together several parts of my working life and has been really exciting to make. It combines film, performance, drawing and box installation and has become my requiem for all that redundant media and all those forgotten messages.

I hope you can come to the launch event, which is the only time you will be able to experience all the work in it’s entirety. At the end of the static show we will be pulling the show apart in an event called “Everything must go”. Such Stuff will then only exist in our memories, leaving “not a wrack behind” so I hope to see you before it goes.

Such Stuff at The Minories coincides with the opening of Firstsite at the same location. This beautiful building is designed by Rafael Viñoly as an internationally important arts centre.

Just finished a week on the big drawings. Aaaaaaaaaaaaah that’s better, to have finished the animation and to have got back into my comfort zone. There is something about charcoal - the most primitive and the most sensitive of materials. I also found out from a science programme on the radio that carbon was one of the first materials to appear after the Big Bang. We are made from soot and silicon. Perfect.

Now I can start on the box installations. Despite the wobbly moments I love this job.

I’ve been working with Trish Mansfield- Devine on the press materials for the Such Stuff show in October. She has spotted that I’ve got really contradictory ambitions for this show. Even though visual art is rooted so firmly in the object, I strongly hope for it to be an event rather than a static collection of things, for it to live more in memory than in the artifacts that remain afterwards.

But I had a lesson in how possible that is when I had one of the most engaging and reflective afternoons of my life at The Fat Duck restaurant. A proper warm welcome just like you only get with people that have very little to prove. Fourteen courses - each one a tiny, funny, intense unsettling haiku that meant we spent a lot of thoughtful time with our eyes shut. Taste and smell - the two most wired senses we have and, according to the staff nurse in the hospital when my dad was dying, the last ones to shut down just after hearing. I wish I’d had some of the honeysuckle from the garden of our tiny, cramped flat in Manor Park or the smell of cider and creosote from our two week summer holidays in Devon to accompany the quiet story I whispered to him about what an amazing dad he was, as he died with such slow grace.

With some notable exceptions visual art consistently undervalues these two important, visceral and emotionally wired senses. This is because smell and taste are very diffficult turn into a static gallery show that can stay up for the routine 6 weeks. Taste and smell are also difficult for galleries to sell to people. Smell and taste are also the most democratic of senses. As long as you pay proper attention to them they need the least foreplay and education and best of all they don’t demand a lot of babble and squeak to be written about them. Either you like it or you don’t, either it tastes good or it doesn’t. Either you fancy that person or you don’t. I know you can manipulate these senses like any other but somehow we usually know when food has been treated with disrespect, just like we know when a place or a person smells unwholesome.

So. Don’t buy that tasteful still life painting. Go and do the real thing. Book a lunch at The Fat Duck with somebody you really like.

I’ve been working on the sets and the models for weeks now. This is an ambitious animation project for the time available. What is it with me and the deep end ? But I’m totally engaged with the process of making, I’m effectively drawing with wire.  As that unfolds I’m getting more and more excited about the storytelling possibilities that emerge as I go along.

I can’t really talk about the work. If the work works, it speaks for itself. Either it does or it doesn’t, it’s not for me to say. I do want to talk about my motivations, what makes me care so much about this daft, uncertain job. I’m trying in different ways to work out where I am in all of this culture stuff, where I belong. It feels like I live and work in the tiny gap between the human-ness of objects and the object - ness of humans.

There’s something so poignant to me about things that are like humans, even more so vice - versa.

 These are some of the new prints I showed at Aldeburgh last week. They combine the direct drawing of lithography, with the painterly, unpredictable marks of monoprint. So each print is unique, 1/of 1.

 I’ve never felt convinced about the merits of hand making identical prints, especially since most people have a bubblejet printer. Giclee. You can give it a poncy Academy Francaise name, but it’s still duplicating. My friend Steve said ‘giclee’ is french for ejaculate. That sounds about right. It’s the printmaking process that motivates me, it’s difficulty and unpredictability. If the prints all look like clones, where’s the fun in that ?

This process is called lithography, but it has nothing to do with stone. It does use a flat plate though, unlike relief or intaglio printmaking. I’m drawing directly onto an aluminium plate, which I’ve abraded with wet and dry and pumice powder. I’m trying to get the surface as near as I can to toothy cartridge paper, which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

I really enjoy mixing the different monoprint inks on the painting slab, experimenting with plate oil and extender to start building layers, like glazes. This series includes some metallic ink. Each mix is unique too. Different amounts of tack, stiffness, density will repel or cover each other on the plate, so colours can be seperated and layered. Hayter called it viscosity monoprinting, and he really understood how to control that process. But there are no repeat performances for me. He was in control of this process but that kind of control doesn’t feel important for me.

This is painting by other means and just as labour intensive. The pulse of similarity and difference between each print is so compelling as they come off the press. Exciting, challenging, like improvising against a really good rhythm section.

Painting without any drawing. Easy to talk about but, for me, difficult to do. So now I’m parallel planning two paintings and can report so far so good. Gill, one of my students brought in Dale Berning’s  interview with William Kentridge. William Kentridge is talking about the often troubled relationship between drawing and painting, which for him is no trouble at all. This is because he commits fully and ardently to the process of drawing in and of iself. In this straightforward and direct interview he is both clear and inspiring about the importance of drawing as completely independent of other outcomes.Once I stopped to think about it, I could clearly see this in his work. Here’s part of what he says, but it’s worth visiting the Guardian site to read all of it :

“I work closely with different kinds of references. I have a collection of images and things to which I refer throughout my working process. I find my visual imagination is always less interesting than those things I’ve discovered in looking at the specifics of details. If one can hold on to the specific, it almost always is more interesting.”

He says that the observation of specific details gives “authority” to a drawing. I’ve always felt this too, which is why I get annoyed with people being snotty about “representative” art because they think it has to be literal and obvious and can’t be “abstract” or “conceptual”. For William Kentridge the process of drawing has to be fast otherwise it gets stuck. Maybe it’s a matter of temperament, but for me it is more important for the drawing process to be slow and meditative. But he’s totally right that it must be rooted in the actual all the time.Today, a day of thin layers over the sharp drawing and opaque white. Creating the weather in the empty spaces around the drawing, linear drawing can be sterile unless it is inside an ecosystem. This one is just paint :

Simple process really, applying printmaking techniques to painting. Using a roller to apply thin areas of tone and colour, and wiping back with a soft rag. This one is paint over charcoal drawing :

I find it really inspiring, to have a negotiable surface which can add tone or colour and then wipe back in the same way that you can erase back into a tonal charcoal drawing. Had a lot of fun and even breathed new life into a painting that had paused …

This one began with that amazing line in Paradise Lost where Lucifer says “Awake, arise, or be forever fallen. ” Milton’s devil might just be the first modern hero. Back to watching paint dry now and then an hour on the boat ..  This weekend I’m making a film prop, for an independent project called “See”.

Working with just one brush and two colours forces me to simplify. Working from memory and limited sketches forces me to keep my intentions clearly in mind. I think it also may have  the potential to turn a weakness into a strength. I hope it will make me more concise. I have a tendency to work fast and instinctively which on a bad day, can often overwhelm an idea. I think the best ideas are very timid, and I often lunge at them and scare them away. Brushes force me to be premeditative.

Working on this painting at the end of a long day printmaking reminded me of someting that my friend Rodger Worth said about direct painting - “It’s like tuning in an analogue radio. You move to either side of where you want to be until you find the right place.” Leaving out the sharp lines of drawing is liberating as well as scary. Brushes work in a similar way to our eyes, in flowing fields of light and colour. Perhaps for me painting is closer to looking but drawing is closer to thinking. I couldn’t imagine a day without drawing so also made a couple of A3 size lithographs, drawing directly on the aluminium plate.

Was a good day, in the end. Here’s the sketchbook plan for today :

Smell of turps in the studio again. It’s about time. I’m working on another double portrait, one that I feel very strongly about which is one of the reasons it wasn’t easy to know when I was ready to start. What clinched it and got me going was something (I think) Sergeant said about never moving paint around more than twice. Here’s my hand signal which means “No more tormented paint”. Three fingers means the maximum number of times that the paint can be touched.

This resonated with my strong feeling about trusting first marks, which came out of the animation experiments I’ve been doing. I used time lapse to record a drawing or painting. Puts you right in the Samurai zone, knowing the shutter is going to click every 2 minutes. It was strangely liberating, I’ll put these up once they add up to something worth watching.  The page opposite the hand signal is the final visual for the new painting, which is called “Isaac and Melvyn”. Here’s the previous pages, its interesting how I started with an imaginary place where they would both be, but lost interest in it after the first three versions.

So here is the first days work. There’s NO DRAWING. Which I found very scary. I really wanted to flow into the painting with a brush rather than cut my way in with sharp drawing instruments.

It remains to be seen if I was right to be scared or not.

Three new prints in the Brighton Art Fair show.

I’m now back in the studio, to the quiet but encouraging feeling that the work knows where it wants to go next. These new prints combine two widely divergent printmaking techniques : engraving and viscosity monoprinting.

Engraving and drypoint

• Linear - a singular, sharp, trace that can only record direction and weight.
• Concerned with the geometry of position - angles, bearings, splines, longitude, axes. The naming of parts.
• Direct and committed - a engraved lines are just about impossible to correct. Drypoint lines are made once and then left alone.

Viscosity monoprinting

•  Tonal - a spreading, edgeless field that can only record inclusion and density.
• Concerned with flux, the flow of light between things. The naming of connections.
• Direct and conversational - a tonal mark can be remade as many times as needed.

I always had a problem with the idea of editions. Editions suit galleries and A list artists just fine because they can use them to control the market. There is something faintly absurd about endeavouring to make a big series of indistinguishable intaglio prints since the invention of the photocopier. It was accessibility, handle - ability and the democratic nature of prints on paper that inspired all the really good people - Blake, Hogarth, Goya. Every National collection has a full set of Goya’s prints. None of them are numbered and hardly any are signed. How many did the dear old chap get time to print ? We now have far easier and cheaper ways of making reproductions, which was never the interesting bit of printmaking. This new combination of monoprinting with engraving is like doing a painting by other means. I can’t wait to get started. Playing fugue form - contrapuntal improvisations between the hard linear engraving and soft tonal monoprinting.

I’m about the start a run of new Changeling prints, and during the long period of head scratching before the Brighton Show I developed a thought experiment about painting which helps me be calm and collected as I start work. This started when I was working with Bill Brody in Skye - we talked about the most basic assumptions you have to make to use drawing and painting materials. It has to do with questioning assumptions by asking really obvious questions while trying to avoid giving obvious answers  :

Painting  thought experiment

1. Light will advance. Dark will retreat.
2. Warm will advance. Cool will retreat.
3. A colour field can be established by what it is (it’s colour)  or by what it is against (contrast).

Drawing thought experiment

1. A moment cannot be drawn. A drawing has to be an assembling of fragments on top of each other,
2. A tonal drawing cannot be made without an imaginary light source (traditionally top LH side for RH artists).
3. Caravaggio and Bacon both claimed/had claimed about them that they didn’t draw.

Anyway enough of that, time to get some paint under my nails.

Loads of freelance work to grip the body and mind, mostly props and painting and some carnival work. The props are Stymphalian Birds, for a show in Chester about the labours of Hercules. They got that right, I made 8 of them.

 I especially enjoyed doing the paintings. What is it about easels and frames and galleries that throttles the pleasure of painting ?  There’s something playful but purposeful about painting for the theatre. It’s so rewarding because working towards a performance has to be more collaborative, less ego driven. The work ends up less polite and prissy than working for a gallery show.

 Strangely all this activity left room for my heart and guts to think at their own pace. Guts and heart are good at asking the why questions, the questions you tell yourself you haven’t the time to ask. To be honest I’ve felt dissatisfied with business as usual since I came back from Skye and Orkney. As my dear friend Bill Brody said :

“I’m tired of doing art that I’m supposed to be doing”. 

He heads for the backwoods whenever he needs to think. He’s just back from a two week canoe trip in Beaver Creek Alaska. He’s very good at using the rigour of proper travelling because he has the practical stuff sorted, and keeps working whatever happens. The first thing he does is absorb himself into the silence. This allows the questions to appear at their own pace, and then it’s just a matter of waiting for an answer. It’s been the opposite of the backwoods for me - I’ve been in the studio without a break for nearly two months - crowded, sweaty, dusty and anxious. I love all of it. I particularly love working on things people actually want.

 Somehow the pressure of other peoples projects and deadlines means that the deeper bits of me carry on at their own pace without distracting themselves with making ‘Art’.

Art. I really dislike that word. Here we all are, queueing up for the last dance of the hominids. How can making eyeball pleasers be a priority ? How can desperately trying to get some airtime from the chatterati be a sensible job ? The trouble is, I never really got myself to believe that ‘artist’ was a proper job, even though I really wanted to be one. When I was younger (small kids and big mortgage) people who said they were artists either had rich parents or were blokes who talked all the time, drank most if the time and saw their kids intermittently. Or they lied about it and were really teachers. Never felt I belonged there, however much I was drawn to the work.

So I’m liking this theatrical painting. Make the stuff I care about, work fast (it’s later than you think), stick it in front of an audience and don’t blink first. Don’t need to perform, just need to mean it. So now I’m working for a local festival, a bunch of pre Christmas shows (Brighton art fair and Old Fire Engine House gallery in Ely and Open Studios in October).

I’m going to push the colour lithographs, do some more scenic painting and mostly I’m going to follow the stuff that excites me.

Now back at 9 Torrin to dry out the tents, sleeping bags and humans. This has been the most physically difficult bit of the trip.

Quiraing is such a compelling place - I felt most vulnerable and exposed here. The walking is harder and you feel unstable and unsafe. Bill described it as more precarious, like it could all come tumbling down on you at any minute. Glad he told me that now we are safe back in 9 Torrin - at the time I asked him about the big rocks that had clearly fallen onto the trail. ‘What happens if one lets go now?’ He replied ‘It wouldn’t hurt for long’. In his journal he wrote ‘Quiraing is fantastic, a blasted, precarious jumble of unlikely spires set amidst impossibly green sheep pastures on steep, STEEP slopes.’

Where the Cuillins are resistant, embedded plugs of hard granite this place felt altogether more fractured, tortured and twisted. Hard shards of bare rock with slopes covered by scree and big rocks loosened by frost and rain. Everything is toppling over, humans just don’t stay around long enough to see it happening. We were working higher up too, so the wind felt colder and more gusty. This meant I paid too little attention to proper kit and wet feet, stayed still for too long and then wasted the best part of the day trying to warm up in my sleeping bag. Bill sorted me out with a dry pair of woollen socks and a hot water bottle made of his drinking flask. I felt so ashamed, a proper city boy who had gone on holiday by mistake. Bill has been working outside for twenty years and he just keeps working through the weather. He has evolved a very impressive working method that can set up and sustain the beginning of an exhibitable painting just about anywhere.

I am just beginning to get the idea of making an outdoors workspace. Bill lent me his wonderful Thermarest seat so I didn’t get backache. This led directly to my best day in a strange field of broken rocks, by the cave of bones. I’m so excited by using oils outside where the stimuli are so direct and compelling. Bill has a handful of pieces that are not far off from being exhibitable. For me there will need to be some thinking back in the studio, I’m still reeling from the strength of this place.

I’ve never had a life or career strategy apart from getting in over my head just to find out what happened next. This time what happened next is a really important working partnership with Bill and some fully felt records of a proper journey. The real work starts when I carry back the energy, the subtle alloy of certainty and uncertainty, back into the studio.

Just back at 9 Torrin for the evening after six days working above Lock Coruisk. The most amazing camping, between sea Loch Nan Leachd and freshwater Loch Coruisk. Off early tomorrow for another week working in Quiraing NE Skye. 

The weather was magically kind, looks like Hurricane Bill had finally got bored and left us with some high pressure weather. Loch Coruisk is really special. So much to look at, impossible to know where to start. From where we camped we could see 40 seperate mapped features that people had taken the trouble to name. Visually intense. Waterfall sounds. Strange crows that live in the cliffs above. That wonderful electric smell of kelp. Weather that totally dominates your mood and the practical dispositions of your world.

Hard red-grey granite, sometimes sharp sometimes sinuous and scored by glaciers. Clouds that grasp and beckon like fingers. Old, old rocks, marked by fire and ice, the two extreme forces that shape landscape. As Bill said, most mountain ranges that are old are also worn down. These definitely are not, despite being some of the oldest rocks on the surface of our world.

Bill cracked right on, I went rather quiet for a day or two. It was also a challenge to work with oils in the open but I slowly learned to make a workspace on a rock  and to start settling my dancing eyes. But it was so exciting to just be carried by the visual torrent that was unfolding right in front of me. Really exciting to be handling colour in such variable light. My little glass palette turned into an anvil where I was hammering out the grey-reds that make up these extraordinary rocks and the blue greys that mark the weather. And the greens - I used shed loads of prussian blue and lemon yellow. Good enough for Turner (he did a really balletic watercolour of Loch Coruisk) and definitely good enough for me.

 Waiting for the boat back we met two climbers Adrian and Charles, who nonchalantly mentioned they had ‘walked’ a traverse of several peaks, including the Monroe Sgurr Nan Eag and Sgurr A’Choire Bhig. Looked like a lot more than a walk to me, more like tightrope walking (without the rope). It’s amazing how respect and admiration for this landscape can bring total strangers together so quickly. They gave Bill some Avon Skin so Soft - because his Alaskan insect repellent called Deet was being totally ignored by the Skye Midge. Here’s my answer to them inglorious varmints :  dress flamboyantly and rub myself with Tiger Balm :

This midge really impressed Bill, even though mosquitos once took two pints of blood from a drunk passed out on the banks of the Chena River in downtown Fairbanks.

When we got back we visited Elgol school, to show them our work and to find out what it is like to live in a place as beautiful as this all year round. We showed our work, and were both totally bowled over by the fresh curiosity of the kids. I gave thenm some blank pages from my leperello sketchbook and they promised to do some work in it. We ended up doing a long  drawing together, lovely vigourous and colourful marks. The sort of effortlessness that adults really have to work on.  I wish my primary school had been as nice as that.

Sunday hiking with Bill in Quirang NE Skye. Coast all churned and sliced, the track slipping away from a scarp that overhangs the sound of Sound of Raasay. Glimpsing Rona and Wester Ross on the mainland through the weather. Not much drawing but lots of looking and “Oy vey ! will you look at that”. Reassuring to see what a strong impression this place I love is making on Bill, who is used to 40 mile long glaciers and 20,000′ high mountains. There is something happening here, even thought we don’t quite know what it is yet.

Monday, proper hiking and painting with Bill and Susi along the S edge of Loch Brittle. Working on the cut edge of a waterfall, all roar and rumble with more fluidity than fixed things to look at. Similar feeling to a freight train roaring past when you are standing three feet away on the platform. Susi made a beautiful mark study of the big sweep in front of us and then, being a jeweller, went in for a close up study of a sedge clump. This was the first time I saw Bill working out in the open. He was perched on the edge of the biggest drop, pinging up and down and working on a horizontal panorama in rapid brush marks. He somehow has the capacity to claim the whole picture, whereas I chewed away at segments and had a lovely time working the charcoal into the paint and vice-versa.

Tuesday we visited Elgol, SE Skye, on the recommendation of my mate John Dyvig. Elgol is at the end of the road at 135517, overlooking Loch Scavaig. A wild SE severe gale with spindrift flashing over the breakwater, Soay Island looming in and out of the grey wall of cloud and spray. We could barely speak in the open but now have a plan to get a boat into Loch Coruisk as soon as the weather calms down.

Wednesday Last day with Shug and Susi, wisely spent visiting the Tallisker distillery.  Now all packed up and ready to set off tomorrow from on Elgol for up to a week camping around Loch Coruisk We are sailing on Misty Isle with Seumas macKinnon.

Thursday I’ve only just got time to post this before in an hour’s time, and will be off the grid for around a week, will post proper pictures of the place and the work when I get back.Here’s some really links I’ve picked up along this really wonderful journey :I was pointed at an interesting blog of artists who work with water, called Watermarks :We got a really friendly reception from Ian Chard in Broadford Books and Gallery. When Bill went in to buy a piece of plastic to repair his broken pallette.Got a lovely mail from Nigel and Kathy, a couple of kayakers I met in in Orkney. Working the tides and dodging the winds in that magical island.