Wednesday 21 August 2013

De-camping

 
NOTES ON COLOUR MIXING WILL BE MOVING TO COURBET'S TENT:
 

After nearly three and a half years and 30,000 visitors to Notes on Colour Mixing, it seems like a good time to move things in a slightly different direction- still painting orientated, but with more of a specific focus on the contexts and locations of contemporary painting practice. NOCM thanks all of its visitors and followers, and hopes you will set-up camp in Courbet's Tent when it goes up soon.

Thursday 13 June 2013

Hopper under the radiograph

One of NOCM's favourite Best Links (go to bottom of page), 'A Piece of Monologue', has a fascinating new post linked to a past show of Edward Hopper's  work. Worth checking out...



 


 

Thursday 18 April 2013

Katz Amongst the Peytons

With two of Patrick Procktor's paintings still in NOCM's TOP 10 (see right) and Alex Katz to boot, click on following link to see James Kalm's report from Elizabeth Peyton's current show in NY. NOCM's post of August 17th 2012 had linked Procktor's work to Peyton and Katz amongst others. Also, look out for Katz in the crowd at the Peyton show...

Elizabeth Peyton/ Jonas Kaufmann, March 2013, NYC
 

Friday 8 February 2013

ONCE A RAILROAD

Image/ text magazine, Abridged, has launched issue 0-28. Entitled 'Once A Railroad', it takes as its theme the lost dreams and aspirations of our world. The work below, from a folder of drawings entitled 'Building Pictures', shows a Modernist/ Utopian-type monument, protesters on horseback in Amsterdam during the oil crisis of the early 1970s, and a family in post war West Germany awaiting the completion of their new apartment block. The track below accompanies the image, ideally played whilst looking at Abridged magazine.





Monday 7 January 2013

Black or White



From 'The Writings of Robert Motherwell', University of California Press, 2007:

Black or White
February 10th, 1950

Are we to mark this day with a white or a black stone?- Don Quixote, II, ii, 10

There is so much to be seen in a work of art, so much to say if one is concrete and accurate, that it is a relief to deal on occasion with a simple relation.

Yet not even it, no more than any other relation in art, is so simple.

The chemistry of the pigments is interesting: ivory black, like bone black, is made from charred bones or horns, carbon black is the result of burnt gas, and most common whites- apart from cold, slimy zinc oxide and recent bright titanium dioxide- are made from lead, and are extremely poisonous on contact with the body. Being soot, black is light and fluffy, weighing a twelfth of the average pigment; it needs much oil to become a painter's paste, and dries slowly. Sometimes I wonder, laying in a great black stripe on a canvas, what animal's bones (or horns) are making the furrows of my picture. A captain on the Yukon River painted the snow black in the path of his ships for 29 miles; the black strip melted three weeks in advance of spring, and he was able to reach clear water. Black does not reflect, but absorbs all light; that is its essential nature; while that of white is to reflect all light; dictionaries define it as snow's colour, and one thinks of the black slit glasses used when skiing. For the rest, there is a chapter in Moby Dick that evokes white's qualities as no painter could, except in his medium.

Indeed, it is our medium that rescues us painters. "The black grows deeper and deeper, darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable. As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface. Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface." (Arp).
Only love- for painting, in this instance- is able to cover the fearful void. A fresh white canvas is a void, as is the poet's sheet of blank white paper.

But look for yourselves. I want to get back to my whitewashed studio. If the amounts of black and white are right, they will have condensed into quality, into feeling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_evtvqBawY