Category: Artist Research

Artist: Ross Bleckner

Artist Research Second Term Second YearMarch 12, 2019March 13, 2019

I am trying to figure out how I incorporate the cathedral interior influence into the structures in my paintings. The mediums I have been using- charcoal and acrylic sketches don’t seem to be helping me get what i want, so I want to look at Bleckner’s work to look at how he uses cathedral structures in his work, and push me to experiment with new mediums out of the sketchbook.

The book Milazzo, R. & Bleckner, Ross, 2008. The paintings of Ross Bleckner, Brussels: Editions Alain Noirhomme.

Chapter 9: Articulating the Void: Unknown Quantities of Light (1987-88), Knight/Night (1987-89), Architecture of the Sky (or Dot or Constellation) Paintings (1988-93), and Other Series

Bleckner’s part, despite the odds, and no matter how irrational, [is to] to articulate the void,

P.116

Architecture of the sky series of paintings is the one I’m interested in – even the name is great!

The circles are ‘ever-widening’ and go down from a ‘focal point’ at the top centre of the paintings.

Bleckner was interested in constellations, cells, dome shapes, light waves.

It is as if Bleckner were trying to come up with images of our world or the universe whose patterns could tell us or show us something about who or what we are in a more minute but objective and scienftific way.

P.116

His architecture of the sky paintings reference the Abstract Expressionists but also reference architecture.

the larger or more universal [painting] – the abstract image, the signs or symbols, the transcendent dimension – yields another, more architectural or architectonic in nature.

P.116

The paintings are about the AIDS epidemic. The dots in the paintings can be seen as a number of things relating to this, including the a feeling of universal-ness.

The domes are ‘mapped’ by the spots of paint, arranged in ‘horizontal tiers or arcs’.

The dome beckons the gaze of a single individual… upward into a private, sheltering realm. The dome embodies awe, desire, and consolidation… Its insistent, ascending rhythm draws the viewer upward with all the force of desire, and… delivers him into the empyrean.

P.118

Empyrean meaning the (the highest form of) heaven.
^ I like the idea that the dome shapes embody feelings.

Bleckner completed these paintings using complicating layers of paint and resin that required specific drying times in the process.

the constellations of ‘mere’ dots, in these paintings, on a universal level or plane, articulate an architectural figure or vision, one that has as much to do with the cosmic, the heavenly or the divine, the transcendent per se, as it does with the gruff ‘patina’ of earthly experience.

P.120

^ I love this sentence! My work is also about this play between the ground, the earth, and great heights, with intrinsic meaning and grandeur.

P.121 is an image from a page in his sketchbook – his sketches of structures are similar to the shapes I want to make.

Looking up ‘as the emptying itself into something larger than itself.’ I get what Milazzo is saying when he refers to the sensations of looking up at ancient churches, sky scrapers or the sky itself. I think this sensation is easy to experience when looking at man-made buildings, especially modern architecture. But for me the wonder that comes with seeing vast and grand spaces is a sense of being grounded in myself. And this is especially true when looking up at forest canopies, or buildings with more religious or cultural gravity than modern day buildings.

“I still see myself looking out of the same window,” Bleckner says “still wondering about things in the sky and things I’ll never know… I like to paint paintings that are full of awe.

P.120

^ I am so painting things that I am in awe of too!!!

Bleckner goes on to explain that his paintings move from being one thing to the next when one is looking at them: ‘They go from being things in the atmosphere to being nothing at all..’. My work plays with that line between the representational and anything the viewer identifies it with. And as a result I think my paintings also shift in what they ‘are’ as one looks at them.
This is interesting because it is in reading about other artists and works and looking at them in relation to my own do I realise what my painting and thinking is and isn’t about.

Bleckner’s work also reminds me of the medieval model of the universe – where the sky was to seen to have an edge to it, which was the barrier between the next layer, like an onion with the earth at the centre. This idea of the sky being infinite, as we see it today, vs the sky being a closed space really changes how space is seen! – Since when there are edges to a space, a space can feel vast and grand is a way that an endless space can not feel.
Lots of interesting points on P.120 that I could refer back to! But too much and perhaps not relevant enough to write all here.

Domes, as models for the cosmos, are one of man’s attempts to recreate and rationalize the external world. Moreover, they refer to the Ptolemaic vision of astronomy, which holds that the earth (and therefore man) is at the centre of the solar system.

P.122

^ What I was just talking about above! Also the use of domes is an interesting take on architecture!

So many of his works are interesting, I have included a bunch of his works here to refer back to.

Chapter 10: Examined Life (1988-91) and Other Paintings (1989-1993) seems interesting but not as relevant I don’t think to me. Might be worth reading though?

Bleckner also works in watercolours to convey his intentions. These works are less refined by as interesting if not more:

It looks like he’s used bleach here to remove the pigment? Or perhaps just skilful watercolour use!

These watercolour works seem to support his oil paintings. I can see ideas in the watercolours that have been defined and strengthened in the oil paintings. The lack of control one can have working with watercolour or ink is good for exploratory work because you have to lose some control over the work. Leading to happy accidents and interesting things to unfold.

Implications for my work

I am going to return to the ink YEY!
It seems a bit symbolic or nicely cyclical to be returning to working in ink. AH.
I want to play around with shapes and dimensions to figure out how I can use the cathedral architecture in my paintings.
It seems appropriate to get out of the sketchbook and work in the medium ink to push myself to act on new things in a refreshing medium.
Ink seems the right medium because of how versatile it is, and because I can play with how much I control the ink – maybe bring bleach back into the process?
Anyway, I am not bothered about colour here so monochrome ink will be good, plus Bleckner’s work has an inky quality. I am going to play with the shapes he used in his paintings and see what happens.

Reading ‘Landscape and Power’

Artist Research Second Term Second YearMarch 4, 2019March 7, 2019

Mitchell, W.J.T., 2002. Landscape and power 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

I read the selected chapters of this book over a few weeks, making notes here as I went. I read this book to understand how my intentions and landscape painting fit into landscape painting in history. And also to understand the British (and western) relationship nature, so I could better understand my paintings in relation to those ideas.

Preface

Landscape exerts a subtle power over people, eliciting a broad range of emotions… landscape exerts the passive force of setting, scene and sight. It is generally the “overlooked,” not the “looked at,” and it can be quite difficult to specify what exactly it means to say that one is “looking at the landscape.”

P.vii.

“looking at the view” is said instead of “look at that mountain”:

to look at landscape is an invitation not to look at any specific thing, but to ignore all particulars in favour of an appreciation of a total gestalt , a vista or scene, that may be dominated by some specific feature, but is not simply reducible to that feature.

P.vii.

^ This quote above has similar intentions to what I want my paintings to achieve; there is no focus on any individual brushstroke, and the scenes are dominated by one feature – the structure – but the whole painting is not reducible to that feature, instead the painting is about an appreciation of ‘a total gestalt’.

An empty space is not the same thing as an empty place. An empty place is filled with space, as if space were the negative void that rushes in when a place is vacated. It is the spectral absence that “fills” a hollow shell or a clearing in the forest.

P.ix.

^ My paintings are filled with empty space that is defined by the brushstrokes hovering in it.

Seeing landscape “as an instrument of cultural power”.

Chapter
System, Order, and Abstraction by Ann Bermingham 

Landscape drawing and painting is argued by Bermingham as transforming landscapes into active “sites of specific ideological attitudes and ambivalencies,” in the 18th c. P.78. Bermingham goes on to read placements of objects such as trees in the landscape and compositional tools to suggests things like man’s isolation in nature P.79.
My paintings therefore are a reflection of how I see the natural world. This was proved true when I had my group crit, and there were comments on how spring like and happy the painting looks, which reflected the feelings of spring arriving and the good mood I was in when painting the scene. Pathetic fallacy?

Difference in two paintings (PP.80-1) between a painting of imagination and a painting of sensation. Between a grand overview of a perfect landscape, and a description of ‘internal details’. P.79

The experience of vastness is… internalised and contained by the oak trees rather than extended over the landscape.

P.79

^ The oak trees are containing the vastness just like a giant building would contain vastness. You need defined boundaries for this sense of space and vastness to be created. If there is no edge to space, it is vast in a much more unimaginable way. 

Chapter Israel, Palestine, and the American Wildnerness by W.J.T Mitchell

“purification” – landscape as a liberation of the visual consumption of nature from use-value, commerce, religious meaning, or legible symbolism of any sort into a contemplative, aesthetic form, a representation or perception of nature for its own sake.

This purification… is… a modern and Western discovery, a revolutionary liberation of painting from narrative and ecclesiastical symbolism that can be dated quite precisely in the seventeenth century.

P.265

^ Seeing where my works sits in relation to history. My paintings are a product of my culture: at the moment see the landscapes I am painting are a purely a celebration of nature for its own sake.

Mitchell goes on to say that other cultures, such as Chinese, have placed religious significance on the landscape that prevent ‘a pure appreciation of nature for its own sake.’ This is especially common in cultures that have not ‘developed a tradition of realistic or naturalistic pictorial representation.’ P.265.
In these non-Western cultures, a person sees themselves as part of the landscape instead of ‘as a consciously detached viewer’.

Chapter
Picture and Witness at the Site of the Wilderness by Jonathan Bordo

Discussing ‘the wilderness’ and what it means.

Wilderness behaving like a name tag attached to some one or group or tribe’s intimate and parochial [relating to a Church parish] relationship to the real, to real estate.

P.292

The wilderness in a landscape as a denial of human presence?

Western European art from ‘at least as early as the fifteenth century’ is full of landscapes that are marked by human presence, be that dwellings, roads, smoke, ruins, graves etc. Wilderness as witnessed… wilderness

Removing human traces in landscape painting crosses ‘the threshold’ from witnessed to un-witnessed landscape and therefore makes the landscape about the wilderness. P.299

The painting ‘Arnolfini Portrait’ by Jan van Eyck, 1434:

The painting posits both present and absent witnesses… On the one hand the picture carries a delegate or proxy witness to the event (the witness figure in the mirror). On the other hand the picture as witness substitutes itself for the witness. It is the picture that notarises the event… It “arbitrates” because it sees without having to be present.

P.301

^Interesting and relevant in making me consider what my painting’s role is as a witness to the landscape. The painting is created outside in the elements of the landscape, so is it less a witness and more of a recording of an experience?

Wilderness – a place for incident without witness? P.309.

The wilderness is a denial of the meaning of the event…

The wilderness also comes to be a frame and topos [argument] of the aesthetic of the sublime, a reflexive specular looking, constituted through a cultivated or practiced relation to pictures, visually testifying to an unpredictable condition.

With modernity there is no wilderness without a picture.

The wilderness might thus be constructed as a monument without a witness.

P.309

^ Our human events, both external and internal, are irrelevant when standing in ‘wilderness’?

Reading this book has been very interesting! I want to return to these notes as my project continues. The implications that will materialise interwoven with future works.. we’ll see!
I do now have more self awareness around how my culture and upbringing affects how I paint the landscape; it makes sense that my paintings are so linked with aesthetics, experience and nature as something to witness as external from it, I think you can see that in the painting.
It will be interesting to see if I can challenge my own defaults with this, and bring in elements to the painting. I am thinking here of the interior of cathedrals that I have become interested in.
The implications of drawing religious inspired structures into my paintings; I then could be reintroducing ritualistic, spiritual or religious associations into woodlands. Like a conversation I had last night: the vikings had a lot of rituals in the woods.

I am also fascinated by this idea that for space to have depth and height and atmosphere it must be contained. So Cathedrals act in the same way as woods – they both contain space and therefore create a lot of height.

This book has really impacted my practice!

Artist: Clare Woods

Artist Research Second Term Second YearFebruary 27, 2019

These paintings above, Woods says, are painted from many photographs taken at night. She would put use the camera flash to photograph undergrowth.

Woods works from photographs of British landscapes back in her studio.

Visually ambiguous, sometimes disturbing and definitely claustrophobic, it is as though Woods is telling us through her representation of rocks and tangled vegetation about her own conflicted relationship with the rural environment. Having studied and lived in London for many years, she moved to the country relatively recently, and finds she has experienced feelings of alienation from and ambivalence about both city and countryside, but in different ways.

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/what-s-on/arts/a-larger-landscape-and-an-epic-sense-of-place-1-3894999

Some of the images are full of foreboding, the encroachment of nature on a human being entering the corridors of ancient rock which threaten to engulf and even devour. Others are imbued with playful pinks and aquas, suggestive not just of seething ecology but of complete worlds encased secretly by the granite. 

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/what-s-on/arts/a-larger-landscape-and-an-epic-sense-of-place-1-3894999

“I wanted some of the pieces to have a collaged feel and create a world within the landscape. I also wanted the pieces to work with the landscape of the gallery,”

Quote of Woods, https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/what-s-on/arts/a-larger-landscape-and-an-epic-sense-of-place-1-3894999

Woods has a strong sense of both working within a pastoral tradition in British art, but of also trying to extend boundaries in how responses to landscape are expressed.

https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/what-s-on/arts/a-larger-landscape-and-an-epic-sense-of-place-1-3894999

The landscapes of Clare Woods are about as far removed from the sublime as you can possibly get.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/sep/24/clare.woods

Interesting how Woods uses blocks of swirling paint and colour to form semi-recognisable landscapes in her more recent work.
It is interesting to look at her work to understand the atmosphere she creates in the variety of paintings.

Artist: Pieter Jansz. Saenredam

Artist Research Second Term Second YearFebruary 26, 2019February 27, 2019

This is the painting that I saw and sketched in Edinburgh’s Scottish National Gallery. The use of perspective, space and height captured is wonderful. The more I sketched the painting in the gallery the more I realised it had parallels with the structures in my work.

It states on the National Gallery Scotland website that although the painting was based on lots of precise perspective drawings, Saenredam “deliberately distorted the proportions of the pillars and vault to increase the sense of monumental scale.” This decision is the reason the painting has such gravity.
Standing in front of the painting and looking straight forward, I could see the scene from the eyes of someone in the cathedral. Looking up at the painting I could really feel the sense of space and height. I’m not sure if the painting was hung at this height deliberately, since my individual height happened to cause this experience, but nevertheless it was is effective way to experience a painting.

Saenredam’s paintings of church interiors and town halls demonstrate his remarkable eye for architectural detail and his sophisticated use of linear perspective. He achieved a sensitive balance between topographical accuracy and pleasing design in his finished works, which were the result of meticulous preparation through carefully measured drawings.

National Galleries Scotland website https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/pieter-jansz-saenredam

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Digital sketches looking at these cathedral paintings. Trying to understand the shapes; why and how they work. I think it would be beneficial doing more linear sketches like these in my sketchbook to explore the shapes more. It is making me reconsider the shape of the structures in my paintings.

Artist: Alex Katz

Artist Research Second Term Second YearFebruary 7, 2019February 8, 2019

Katz, A. et al., 1999. Alex Katz, Torino: Hopefulmonster.

Painting ‘Reflections’ 1994 (p.170).
I am interested in the blocks of colours, and the marks made on top of the blocks of colour. This work has a limited colour palette, and is abstracting its subject quite extremely.
Katz believes the ‘all-overness in a lot of the big landscapes’ comes from art.
I interpret ‘all-overness’ as meaning a quality where every inch of the canvas is equally important and there is no focus on one point or subject, the whole is the focus point. This idea makes sense since he goes on to talk about Pollock and Baroque paintings which he says ‘don’t have much of an image, they just have motion.’
This idea of all-overness is present in the painting ‘Reflections’ .

Paintings ‘Dawn’ 1995 and ‘Dawn III’ 1995 (p.200-1).
Idea of painting with consideration of the light and atmosphere, and prioritising that over brush marks or anything else.

Painting ‘Autumn I’ 1999 (p.260).
Love the use of yellow as the background. Impactful light and atmosphere created. Katz seems to use a lot of this colour in his work.
The colour is overwhelming considering the size of the work.

Painting ‘Dark Green’ 1997.
Interesting use of one sap green shade for background, which acts as a colour indicator as well as a suggestion of distance where no paint has been applied on top.
This makes me consider adding more ‘blocks’ of colour in my work.

Painting ‘Lawn Party’ 1965 (P.52).
The trees in the right hand top corner have been painted wonderfully. They are painted four colours; light yellowy-white green, dark sap green, light grey, blue-grey.
Katz paints the leaves in blocks of shape and dots of the same colour surrounding the blocks. It’s a very pleasing way to paint trees and more specifically leaves, simply.
This is reinstating how successful block areas of paint can be.

Sylvester, D. et al., 1997. Alex Katz : twenty five years of painting : from the Saatchi Collection., London: Saatchi Gallery.

Painting ‘May’ 1996, oil on canvas, 305x610cm, p.26.
This is more like the work I have been doing – the brushstrokes are fractured and there is movement in the work. Instantly, the scene looks far more alive and spring/summer like than other works.
More fragmented brushtrokes seems to indicate more life and energy than bigger ‘block’ of paint.
One thing I have been considering in my painting has been how to convey these still, wintery, bare woods, when my painting language has been very energetic and fragmented etc. Perhaps bigger areas of still paint would work for stiller landscapes. This is something I cannot learn more about without experimenting!

Learnings

Paint applied in blocks appear ‘stiller’ than small separate brushstrokes.
Try adding more blocks of colour maybe as the first layer of painting to map out the landscape.

My paintings have a quality of ‘all-overness’ in my paintings; where the whole canvas is the focus point.