Monday 31 May 2010

Painting without edges



Having just completed a visit to Sligo Art School as extern. to the 3rd Years, I continue to be impressed by the firm grounding in 'materials and grounds' knowledge provided by the painting tutors, which is often then pushed in new directions by the students. Here, a really innovative use of electrical tape (and chewing gum)takes painting beyond the frame.

Wednesday 19 May 2010

Dougal McKenzie/ Allan Hughes: Who loves the earth? (a series of points)




Catalyst Arts, Belfast. Ex-Directors' Show opens Thursday 20th May, to Saturday 12th June. Collaborative work shown here, combining themes of Robert Smithson's 'Wooden Hut' at Kent State University 1970, and 1972 Munich Olympics (the Rainbow Games).
Myself and Allan came together on this one due to a shared interest in certain events of early 1970's culture and politics.

Thursday 6 May 2010

Book Recommendation


Inside the Painter's Studio by Joe Fig

"Inside the Painter's Studio collects twenty-four remarkable artist interviews, as well as exclusive visual documentation of their studios. Featured artists were asked a wide range of questions about their day-to-day creative life, covering everything from how they organize their studios to what painting tools they prefer. Artists open up about how they set a creative mood, how they choose titles, and even whether they sit or stand to contemplate their work." http://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn=9781568988528

Here's a google book preview just to get a flavour of it: http://books.google.ie/books?id=ZiLe3woEtmwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Inside+the+painter%27s+studio&source=bl&ots=nd5zhu8uVl&sig=_I8dtEDmi4EtLYNJYNxjEyQd8gg&hl=en&ei=rxjjS_2AMcHdsAaWkrwG&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false
Isn´t this another version by Manet of said painting below Dougal ?? Derm.

Madame Manet


Tuesday 4 May 2010

Paint, Misbehaving???


So this morning I came across this article called "Paint, Misbehaving"
You can read it here: http://blog.art21.org/2010/05/03/letter-from-london-paint-misbehaving
It begins "Writing about painting isn’t easy, simply because painting isn’t built to be written about." which grabbed me instantly. It then goes on to explain that "[...] writers writing about painting tend to rely on a checklist of clichés: the one about everyone thinking painting was dead [...] finding out it wasn’t. Or the one about painting lagging behind other forms of art because it isn’t brainy enough. Or the one about painting being challenged by photography, or besieged by video art, or troubled by conceptualism." So now you can add to that list: or they write about how difficult it is to write about painting.

But there is actually quite a bit of food for thought in this article particluarly here: "Some contemporary painters, admittedly, paint with an eye to their work’s transcription into a wall label or press release. [...] Similarly, a kind of ironic abstraction has tended to dominate painting in recent years, [...] That tradition slots in nicely with a dominant strain in other art practices, the tireless and joyless unpicking of modernist utopianism."
"Both strains in painting are hard to love, since they postpone or even nullify the principal joy of experiencing painting, which is looking at paint. The good news is that because of those think-first, act-later artists (who, you feel, might be happier not painting), there’s a certain amount of renewed attention given to painting in general."

The article goes on to look at the work of Angela de la Cruz, "asserting painting as an object in space, rather than as a window into a made-up world."

I think there is a lot of food for thought and maybe discussion here in this article or at the very least it's been a good excuse for me to add my first post to this Blog.