Closeted in my studio after a gently quiet Christmas my new drawings are beginning to come together.  My next exhibition Parallel Lines of Enquiry opens in late February at the Allsop Gallery in Bridport. These are just details of two drawings – works in progress – and a few views of the studio.

My drawing Soundscape IV won the Excellence in Drawing Prize at the Royal West of England Academy Autumn Show yesterday which was a very nice surprise.  The exhibition of 508 works, selected from a submission of over 2000, is on at the RWA in Bristol until December 31st.  There seemed to be  more abstract work this year and the hanging of the works seemed more thoughtful. I also heard this week that I have been offered another residency at The Cill Rialaig Project in Kerry for next May so I will be going back to somewhere I really love.

I spent last week in London and managed to get to both the Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern and the Degas at the Royal Academy.  I enjoyed both but definitely want to go back and spend more time at the Richter.  I also want to look again at Tacita Dean’s work Film, the new Unilever series work in the Turbine Hall, without small and tall children running around and waving their arms in front of it to make shadows.  I had forgotten it was half term!

I queued in the rain for forty minutes to see the Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement but the security staff came out with huge RA umbrellas for those people who hadn’t though to bring their own.  Nice touch!  It was wonderful to see some of the paintings of dancers which I had only ever seen in reproduction.  In one room the centrepiece was his renowned Little Dancer aged 14 circled by all the preparatory drawings he did for it, hung at the appropriate position from which he would have drawn  them as he  moved around the model making observations.  A lot was made of Degas’ connection with and use of photography and the moving image with a whole room of Muybridge films some of which I suspect were shown at the recent show at Tate Britain.  However some of the early films of dancers were mesmerising.

Degas Little Dancer aged 14 years

I had been to the Richter the day before and when I first walked in took my glasses off twice to clean them before remembering how destabilising his paintings are!!  But I loved the show, works I hadn’t seen before including a lot of his gray paintings.  The Cage series I had seen before but it was good to revisit them.

First Nocturne from De Profundus

Third Nocturne from De Profundus

Throughout the summer I made five new large drawings.  They had their genesis in the Unstable Horizon Drawings which I started at Ballinglen in the Autumn of 2010. On Arches hot press paper, the different grades of graphite followed by lines in charcoal, rubbed back with white chalk were working well.   In the smaller scale drawings which I had made leading up to these there was a dramatic range of tones but in the larger drawings I was unhappy about the way the surface of the paper was becoming muddied.  There were no clear white spaces and I was becoming frustrated with the way the materials were performing.  In tandem with the struggle with materials the lines were beginning to take a different direction and to take on a different meaning. Whether it was listening to John Cage and Steve Reich  or slowly working on a Chopin piece  they started to reference the vertical strings of a cello or a piano.  The string idea stuck with me and in working my way around the idea I started working with string and black ink and  creating lines of different thicknesses and resonances related to sound, sometimes attending to the visual composition sometimes listening to pieces of music inside my head.

I was still very concerned with leaving a space at the top right hand side of the paper but now sometimes it was becoming filled with fainter ink lines.  The vertical ‘strings of the imagined instrument were still being crossed in zigzag marks by a movement reminiscent of bowing a stringed instrument.  There is also a reference here to grids and the drawings are becoming more and more grid-like.  Now back in the studio again after a break the music ideas are becoming more insistent and the materials are beginning to perform how I want them to.

Soundscape IV

Selected for the 159th Royal West of England Academy Show in Bristol.

Post New York I have been looking at a lot of Art. Exhibitions and books. I have been picking through Every Day is a Good Day:  The Visual Art of John Cage,  the catalogue for the Hayward traveling exhibition which is sadly not traveling anywhere near me.  And today whilst working on No. 33  of my RN Drawings I have been listening to Cage’s pieces for Violin and Piano. I also bought  Bento’s Sketchbook, John Berger’s imagined drawings of what might have been in the lost sketchbook of the 17th century philosopher Benedict de Spinosa.  Promises to be utterly fascinating.  Working on another new drawing, large, already time-consuming and complex, based on a sketchbook drawing made from the top of Bolus Head in the Ballinskelligs in Ireland, I needed to revisit Kathy Prenderghast’s work.  So I dipped into The End and the Beginning, which has quite a few of her love city mapping drawings in it, though they are so delicate they are difficult to photograph and consequently difficult to see in reproduction. So a productive day in the studio, at last, lots of reading and I’m off to London at the weekend to engage with the Tracey Emin at the Hayward so watch this space!

My most recent exhibition roundup is on isendyouthis art-diary, link in the side bar.

Back to art though.  Following on from my mention of the American Abstract Artists show in New York I asked Don Voisinc to send me some images because I was having trouble sourcing them off websites.

Debutant Twist  Don Voisine.  2009.  Oil on wood 72 x 18 ins

One of the special things about the OK Harris space are the random bits of beautiful architectural detail.  Also installation shots sans people really do allow the work to speak for itself.  There is a lovely interaction here between the architecture of Don Voisine’s vertical painting and the verticality of the pillar.

Above and below

Left:  Don Voisine, Debutante Twist 2009
oil on wood, 72″ x 18″

Right:  Victor Kord, Avon VI 2009
acrylic on canvas, 48″ x 48″

There is a mouthwatering selection of abstract art in this show.  One thing that comes across really strongly in these digital images is the care with which the show was hung.  The Opening Reception was so packed with people and it was a really hot evening, the way that different works bounced ideas off each other or communicated was not apparent. Colours, lines, tones often flowed across the surface of the space making for a coherent show which ‘read’ well.

Below are a few of my favourites, there are more on the website, URL in the side toolbar.

Merrill Wagner, Wave 2009
rust preventative paint on steel, 41.25″ x 60.25″

Steve Karlik, True Orange 2010
acrylic, enamel on wood panel, 20″ x 32″ x 2.5″

Having just spent a week in Maine where I started making drawings about the clapboards on  the houses,  Merrill Wagner’s painting was bound to catch my eye.  The destabilising sloped edge resonated with other parts of my work too.

Julian Jackson, Will O The Wisp 2009
oil on panel, 56″ x 48″

I photographed this limpid painting by Julian Jackson at the opening but my photo didn’t do it justice, although this has possibly a little too much light bouncing off the centre of it. However it is much easier to see the colour and the way the shapes melt into each other.

Mon Levinson, Open Sided Diamond-Two 2011
cast acrylic, enamel and light 43″ x 43″ x 10.5″ (unlit)

This was a fascinating piece, every angle offered a different perspective and it caught the light and seemed to play with it.

Mark Williams, Split Diptych-Correspondence (1033) 2010
acrylic on canvas, 14″ x 21″

Alice Adams, Frame With No Corners 1967
aluminum, bx cable, 20.75″ x 20.75″ x 3″

Daniel G. Hill, Blue Plate 4737, 2010
archival pigment print Edition size: 3 with 2 AP’s, Image size: 16×24 in Paper size: 21″ x 29″

Vito Giacalone, Untitled (Shirley 2) 1992
acrylic, alkyd, enamel on canvas, 22″ x 24″

Quietness seems to be a word which offers an appropriate response to  these four subtle works. However far from disappearing into the specially painted walls,  each individual piece demands  attention from the viewer whilst remaining in harmony with its neighbour. Installation shot below

American Abstract Artists 75th Anniversary

OK Harris Works of Art

May 21 – July 15, 2011

OK Harris Works of Art
383 West Broadway
(between Spring and Broome Streets)
New York, NY 10012
212-431-6300

Curated by OK Harris Works of Art

Donald Judd at the David Zwirner Gallery was of a very different scale.  Still pools of reflective light and colour in his square aluminium boxes whose resonating rays bounced off clear walls.  And the luxury of a huge space filled with just a few pieces  of work, every artist’s dream.

The first evening in New York we went to the opening of the 75th anniversary show of the American Abstract Artists  at OK Harris.  It was packed with people, room after room of striking abstract art by nearly eighty different artists.

AAA Opening Reception

I met some wonderful artists whilst I was in New York and stayed with two of them Pelavin Gallery Artist Margaret Neill and photographer Don Muchow. Thank you.

Rebecca Salter Quadra 1

Back in London I went to see the Rebecca Salter exhibition at the Beardsmore Gallery in London. Work on paper suspended unframed which really allowed the viewer to see all  those lovely rich inky tones.  Then it was off to the Frith Street Gallery to see the Callum Innes show. A big space again but fairly unusual for central London and some huge work as well as smaller pieces all with his signature layering of colour.

Piercing the grey mist and the oily surface of the sea at Popham Beach near Bath ospreys fished watched by seals  and groups of cormorants.  In Harpswell a  kamekase American Robin, much bigger than its European counterparts, acted the part of either Othello or Narcissus in its  love hate affair with car wing  mirrors. Blackbirds with red/orange splodges on their sides were everywhere and just once I glimpsed a beautiful red and yellow Baltimore Oriel.  I saw art too.  The Biennial exhibition was  on at Portland Museum and a beautiful installation of large scale drawings of trees using text as line on clear film particularly caught my eye.

Avy Claire  For the Trees  2008.  rapidograph on polyester film.

Once in New York it was the not the yellowness of the taxis which caught my eye more a case of being glad I was sitting in the back with a seatbelt on!  The show at Pelavin looked really sharp – not a piece out of place and the work hung together really well.  The preview was stuffed full of people, like sardines.   Like many previews more talking and drinking than looking but people spilled out onto the street in a cacophonous mass creating a real buzz of excitement.

Next day in soaring temperatures we headed for the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see the Richard Serra Drawing Exhibition.  Huge areas of dense black mark-making floating  in high-ceilinged white spaces, the powerful physicality of the work intensified by the strong smell of oil stick.  Subtle shifts of line as the edge of the canvas sloped down, out of parallel with the line of the floor, cleverly unhinged the viewers sense of safety. More Serra’s, Circles, were on show at the Gagosian.  Unlike the vast rectangles at the Met these were more human in scale – less monumental – lovely.  Somehow a very good size to work with.

In commemoration of the institution’s thirty year anniversary, Pelavin Gallery is proud to announce a group exhibition of gallery artists based on the cultural historian Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Using Solnit’s meditation on the pleasures and terrors of getting lost as a premise, this show seeks to present a collection of works which entices “the wideness of the world” and the virtues of being open to new and transformative experiences. Curated by Todd Masters with the intent of celebrating the gallery’s new diverse program, a variety of media will be shown—installation, wall drawing, mixed-media, painting, photography, drawing, sculpture, collage—and a number of gallery artists represented, including: Kate Beck, Jean-Paul Cattin, Tara Fracalossi, Patricia Gaeta, Dima Gavrysh, Karl Klingbiel, Norman Mooney, Timothy Paul Myers, Margaret Neill, Fiona Robinson, Mark Safan and Cecilla Vissers.

The exhibition of A Field Guide to Getting Lost, like Solnit’s essays, advocates the importance, for any creative act, to allow the mind and body to wander. Throughout the show, the artists’ personal and professional wanderlust is showcased through the implementation of layering, repetition and unique use of materials. Viewers are presented with such assorted works as a thirteen foot installation of meticulously hand-cut graph paper by Patricia Gaeta; a multi-layered reductive painting of poured oil paint, graphite and mica on canvas by Kate Beck; a nine inch thick Lincoln Library filled cover-to-cover with daily ink drawings by Margaret Neill; and a plexiglass display case filled with a collection of hundreds of pages covered in hand typed dollar signs by Timothy Paul Myers.

Solnit’s writing is often abstract, constantly interlacing personal reflections and cultural histories. She informs us that the word “lost” derives from the Old Norse for disbanding an army and extrapolates from this the idea of striking “a truce with the wide world.” Alluding to the author’s literary methodology and references in the curation of this exhibition, Masters combines diverse styles and subjects by the twelve artists on display. One grouping of works ties together a Carbon Drawing by Norman Mooney created with the billowing smoke of a blowtorch; Dima Gavrysh’s Untitled night vision portrait of an American soldier in Afghanistan; Cecilia Vissers’ smooth and saturated anodized aluminum diptyich titled Gaoth; and Karl Klingbiel’s The Hunter’s Sleeve, an expressionistic oil and encaustic on board that showcases a depth of divergent palettes and textures.

Blue, in concept and color, is an important character in this exhibition as the idea of disorientation—“Blue is the color of longing for the distance you never arrive in.” The alternating chapter titles in Solnit’s book of essays, The Blue of Distance, is a point of reference for several works in the show. Fiona Robinson’s atmospherical Unstable Horizon displays layers of mirage-like lines of a shifting horizon, while Tara Fracalossi’s site specific installation of photographs—mounted to the walls of a narrow hallway in the gallery—presents the viewer with various sea and sky scapes from the artist’s daily documentation of her everyday life. Other works focus on the discussion of the distance and disembodiment of Blue—Mark Safan’s oil on canvas depiction of a torn cloudscape and Jean-Paul Cattin’s abstract c-print of Motel de Founex both play with ideas of nostalgia, longing and loss—illustrating Sonit’s conclusion that “to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty.”

For more information please contact the gallery at 212.925.9424 or gallery@pelavingallery.com
Pelavin Gallery 13 Jay Street New York NY 10013