The B's have it

                                                



B flat minor

slowed this down to 0.25secs
makes the whole tune even more frickin freaky and goosebumpy
trying to find a way to combine this with stop-motion footage of smoke and time-lapse of semi-opaque windows


time and time again,'le fil' by Camille keeps nagging at the back of my mind. One note plays through the whole album. A sustained B note.....


Play both of these together and I think I've had my herbal tea spiked with something a bit more hardcore than licorice.

Smoke circles and stars

charcoal works

 

incense charcoal 
rain
& watercolour

ordinary time circles

watercolour on incense charcoal

 

 

walk the line

richard long lonely hearts
loner rambler 
likes mud
WLTM fellow introverts for cross-country walks and rock hunting

each bio i read about Long talks about him being kicked out of art school
not just any art school
the one i'm studying at at the moment
i suppose the point being is that 'in spite' of that he became famous and successful, ie it was a very good thing that happened

2 things of note here, why speak of a 'supposed' failure unless it's to big yourself up and stick 2 fingers up to an institute from your home town. Do we still need to know this? Why is it still part of his narrative

2. Long's current piece, boyhood line, is on the downs. Durdham downs, an expanse of grassland owned by the merchant venturers ( a possible shady secret type society if we are to believe cynical conspiracy theorists from Massive attack. Or is it just having beef over it mainly being a man's club of red trouser wearers). Anyway I digress. The downs, is cut in pieces by roads linking wealthy parts of bristol to each other. If this was Longs upbringing it does make me wonder about successful artists. 

He is of his time. Long and Andy Goldsworthy, outside making serious art out of nature long before cynical Saatchi got his mitts on the BYA and the landscape of Britains 9(capitalist) art scene changed forever.

What was the man walking away, to or from. Heavily eyebrowed, intensely staring out of portraits of him at the arnolfini show. This is a man to be taken seriously. He might be a middle class Bristolian, but goddamit he's got gravitas and punk to him. He just chucked out of art school the little bleeder and makes art from mud. And stones. This artist is all man. Like the stonehengers before him, he is a pagan stone mover. If art is about context. His stone moving and walking is art. We call cave art, art, because it's visually recognisable and figurative. It may well just be a visual shopping list for a bunch of illiterate cave people, daydreaming about their next ideal feast. But we label it art. It's the context. We assume, holed up for the winter, fed up of bopping their female kin over the head with clubs and giving them a proper seeing to neolithic style, that they then got bored and needed a more cultured and creative outlook for their developing frontal lobes and energy. So of course they drew. We all know that drawing and painting are proper art. Using wood fired charcoal, ochre and probably spit. 

Fast forward a couple of millenia, and there's a bloke from BRistol, traipsing round the planet recording it all and then selling photos of it in books.

My annoying trains of thoughts when I was walking round are sadly like an amateur gallery botherer. Yes, but why? I get the pleasing duality of mud on black wall versus mud on white wall. I'm intrigued to know if he's even taller than his photos suggest and he didn't need a step ladder to reach the ceiling. I wonder about the sloppiness of the mud and the vessel he held it in. Not really the lofty thoughts of an art critic. There was something like nail marks down a blackboard, a slight slow meditative form to the strokes applied that seems like a controlled frenzy of a madman. Or just an obsessive. My doctor mind wonders about his wanders and note taking. A bit on the spectrum? But aren't we all
Recording details, miles walked, objects seen, thrush blood. All verifying the deeds and walks done. So it's not up for questioning. An impressive walk from Bristol to London bridge in 39 hours. Again, tall man, long legs, quick walker. This obsessive need to leave a mark. I was here, I matter, I did it really. It made me sad. If a woman had done this, I think it would be dismissed as contrived,conceited and light weight. I think Long looks too intense and scary to have his credibility called into questions. But the female vagabond artist? What was she doing all that time. On her own? Did no-one want to marry her? Why's she making such a spectacle of herself? With mud, can' she go to Glastonbury and be a hippy there. Nancy Holt, did similar trips, but on a slightly more altruistic and secretive mission, left objects for friends at places and recorded the locations.

All these conflicting ideas. How does he afford to do this? The downs. The guy grew up near the downs. Must be middle class. That explains it. Anthony Caro, Henry Moore, all growing up in penury.
Just like someone convinced to go to medical school and growing up a stones throw from the downs. Privileged and playing around with art. It's a disgrace. That's me I'm talking about now. Not Long, I have no real idea about his background. Although it's a familiar story throughout art history (and I reference these people for whom the only possible similarity will be our backgrounds, not our successes) but Tapies, Miro, Redon, all academic/professional families. This is why I'm bemused at the criticism levelled at Tracy Emin and Damian Hirst and friends, the little jumpstarts made it when they shouldn'thave done. They're not establishment. How awful for the british bourgeosie to be challenged by people they would never rub shoulders with otherwise. I think of this each time I see another oil painting in turdy colours at the RWA in an open exhibition. This is what the fight is against. People lauding the skills of people that can copy nature as proper genuine artists. This is still happening now, ie contemporarily. 

God I'm waffling. I think my reaction to work like Long's like that of the recent exhibition of Randall-Page's (ooh, double-barrelled, there's a surprise) at the RWA, was an irritation at the simplicity of it. Because that's what I'm doing and obsessed with. Where on earth does that leave the rest of us, if the 'successes' are keeping it simple. I turn that on it's head though as, despite the insistent critical middle class narrow minded art naive numpty in my head still screams the loudest, the other more, er..authentic one whispers, pleased, it's ok, this is what it's about. If other people label as art/not art. it doesn't matter. It's all context and it's about experience. Not skill. And how good is that. To stick to your guns over decades and keep making the work and journeys that please you. That make sense of things. To record them and show them on walls. To mark out a line with your feet, and use those marks to show how you've marked your time on this planet. I was here. This is what I did. I'm tall I'm intimidating looking, but goddamit, I'll do what I please because I can stay true to myself. I'm rebel like that. I won't live how you tell me, I won't not break the rules. Even if it means I get chucked out of art school. Said Richard Long. Maybe. Or never

all saints abstract and blues

research photos taken for all saints residency summer 2015

murmuration

final cut of murmuration video

murmuration

murmuration

agnes martin

I was prepared to be a bit underwhelmed with this exhibit at the Tate Modern

It's easy to spend ages poring over the wonderful book of her works,
I dipped into a lot this year researching. The middle pages seemingly stuffed with forgotten leaves from the artists journal. Yellow and grey lined notes covered in a loopy handwriting, extracts from Martin's lecture notes to art grads.

The book is full of prints of striking yet subtly coloured square format canvases Martin is renowned for. Slightly sickly pink reminiscent of my attempts at skin tones in painting. More evocative midnight blue squares but all covered with some controlled repetitive elements, that regardless of colour, feel reassuring and attractive despite a misleading simplicity.

The exhibition was a walk through 5 rooms. Each with at most, 2 works per wall. They were hung high and stand out more for the white space around them.
It's only seeing their real scale that made their precision and repetition more impressive. 
Patience impresses me more than skill. Maybe the two go hand in hand.
If skill comes with practice, then Martin's patience came with practice too.
Art history pigeonholes retrospectively, and these pieces as has been widely noted stood out in stark contrast to more, muscular emotive works of Pollock et al. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Martin was close with Sol le Witt, another fan of the repeated.
I'd long tried to imagine these works being painted in a location that to me would be more associated with bright passionate colours and contrast. Taos and New Mexico, stir up all sorts of contrived romantic and spiritual associations. The great expanses, the rock colour, the heat, the desolation of a desert landscape. The aloneness, and that's where Agnes chose to move to from New York, isolated and alone to sit, wait for the voices/creativity to speak to her.
I didn't realise beforehand that Martin was schizophrenic, or gay. Irrelevant details perhaps. Nowadays where sexuality is mostly in western worlds, apart from areas in the US, a lesser noteworthy part of someones lives, albeit still a titillating bit of info (Grayson Perry springs to mind) these parts of her life seemed to add an extra melancholy to the way I approached these works. They are not boldly referencing either parts of her or the world. I can't imagine choosing to isolate myself so extremely, so I wonder if she felt compelled to, better as a result and the works were the route and by-product to harnessing a bit of calm with respect to her psychotic episodes. I've seen the work of psychotic people first hand, born the brunt of furious rages and illogical rants and threats. None of them would have been capable of sitting still long enough to do what Martin has. Or had the humility to attribute the works to something other.
Martin was interested in Zen and had contact with the discipline relating to Suzuki that was responsible largely for a number of important art figures in being exposed to eastern ideology. The mad hedonism and psychedelics of the 60s were still way off.
 The most out there element of Martin's works seemed to be almost cultish use of triangular symbols in her works. Geometric, basic.
These felt jarring next to the rest of the grids and lines.
The works in gold leaf somehow indulgently uplifting. Canvas after canvas in white with lines, a corridor of 20 slightly differing grid patterns from lines, bafflingly simple and intriguing.
This was the first exhibition I have come out of actually not feeling exhausted with a slight tension headache from trying to work out something, often whether I like something or not. 
This to me is the key and genius of Martin's work, it's created in a meditative fashion. We only get to see the ones she considered successful, so even the zen master of dots and lines, had some ego and critical standards. It's as if that calm she was searching was drawn in, etched and left to be released from the canvas overtime. We can all tune into the calm, there's almost laughingly nothing to understand or be dramatically impressed by other than the simplicity of an idea and action working. I started off thinking it would be like the emperors' new clothes. And in a way it was, for the wrong reasons. Sometimes stripping things back so much there's nothing left, or clothed in pretense, you can see more clearly and it makes you smile without a hint of cynical knowing.