jerwood talk on emerging artists - quest for validation

The Head of painting at RCA was among the panelists in this question time style event. There was generally a lot of common sense spoken really, with the occasional enlightened comment.

The general gist was :

Don't be in a rush to develop your work.

Dont get het up about cold calling galleries - develop dialogue somehow

See where you fit in being attached to a gallery

Limit/target amount of competitions you go for that require entry fee,

be a good administrator re going for arts council grants etc.

Go to the private views, find the art you like, get on mailing lists be professional in the approach of networking; (ie factor in this as valuable time spent)

Be organised

Live in your own film!

sculptor

http://mark-firth.com/

Merlin James

A fellow artist gave me this painters name - interesting article.

http://www.jca-online.com/hyde_james.html

Block Construction paintings -pictures of making

Block Construction Paintings

WHAT

A series of eight, reduced to six, block construction paintings (found pine-wood off cuts).

They are all oil on pine and board.

HOW

They were cut up, then stuck back together rearranged, with oil paint applied in different ways.

Some pieces of board were attached as some 'ground' or 'backing' to each block.

The cutting was done arbitrarily using manual and machined methods. A feel for the size of each piece with the possibility of being joined or combined to make a unit or block construction.

I decided the quality of the backing board surface was good enough to be seen (with the assumption that each piece would be wall mounted).

So after a number of stages of painting, including projected drawn elements where a positive and negative shape/space were painted black then white or vice-versa. The blocks were cut up again, pieces were swopped about and the 8 blocks then became 6.

WHY

I have tried to think about the process of deciding the reconfiguration, and how this works, at present it is how the eye responds to the looking.

They could be maquettes. But I see them as paintings.

PICTURES

I will post the photos charting the history of the making next on this blog.

Oil and wax on mdf untitled / update April painting

Work in progress: April 2 Painting

AB EX

Again nearly finished.

I have been thinking about Abstract Expressionist painting and so my approach compared with the April painting was to be much looser, building up broader areas of paint. Idea being try and paint in a style to find your own style - (It is more challenging than I thought, could've been more rigorous) but allows a greater sense of exploring space together with exploiting colour relationships.

I love those iconic De Kooning titles: Montauk highway, Suburb in Havana etc

REMEMBERING

Such as the journey up the M6 into Cumbria as a student, with the grey/rainbow skies swathed out aside of the car window. Also remembering an ab-ex painting in Cumbria College of a&d refrectory, (could have been by an artist called Nick Bullion in the year above, circa 1996) had an impact on me at the time , but only just recently remembered while doing this work. What happened to the art when the decor changes and the corporate college vision changes? - In the skip a la Michael Landy.

COMPLETION

I have found it very useful over the past month to have a number of different works on the go, with differing starting points, scale etc to work on as each plays off one another, confirming or rejecting working practices.