Residency: lessons learnt

Lessons learnt from residency

Asking for residency

-be confident, succinct, explain that not knowing what you will produce is normal and not a reflection of not being serious about the process.

-show examples of previous work

-provide and artists statement

-set and be clear about specific dates of events, eg when you will be attending, handing over statements, available for talks, hand out contact details to improve trust and transparency. Provide references if needed- I said I was part of known art school which leant credibility and local interest to the project

-offer something, make it clear you intend the public/involved parties will get something out of it, I suggested a mosaic photobook

-ask to be mentioned in newsletters so that interested parties know what is going on

-if you ask for input from building users/public, be specific about what you’re interested in knowing, it helps them open up (I asked to know personal stories about what the church meant to them as a place of reflection, this was too broad)

-ask directly why people like a space, people like opening up about where they choose to spend their time. What’s special about it?

-Expect the unexpected: people will want to know what you’re doing, don’t really on people looking on blog

-Leaving business cards doesn’t work

-Ask if people would like to see your workings/experiments, what you see as rubbish/mistakes, interests others and helps them understand how you develop ideas

-taking photos not only helps record but helps you identify what your themes/interests are

- people like to see things BIG, not just photocopied in a note book

Developing ideas

-wikipedia!! This links from one page to another, this way I ended up learning about liturgical calendars, women bishop laws, coming across all kinds of terminology I’d never heard of and imagery linked to the church that stimulated ideas.

-don’t feel bad about spending lots of time researching, ideas came out of this Agnus Dei->I then came across a music script in a

-the process will come, daft scribbles or making a mess will leave things to settle and ideas and experiments will come. Making bad uncomfortable pieces helps clarify what feels right

-ask feedback from others about what they like/don’t like about a piece

-asking people/friends if they would like see what you’re doing helps you practice explaining in different ways what you’re doing, how you’re working and the ideas behind it, doing this lots of times, helps clarify and improve confidence in what you’re doing

-trial and error- eg using go pro too complicated, risk of theft, looked even though small too intrusive and ‘’blinking’, be sensitive to other users, this meant I had to find alternative ways of recording photos/footage

-get expert help but also wing it, I looked up a stop-motion app that my phone could use, it could do square format that I like, turns out there are forums for sharing work, that I then used the imotion to record in other places which has ended up giving me enough footage for a mini-film

Starting point:

Circles in tree of life photo, circle in hallway entranceway, baptismal font,

Arches: baldaccino,

Lines: organ,

Light/dark: columns, acoustic ceiling, wood panelling vs concrete,

Contrast: boiled sweet colours-primary, strong, simple

Colour and symbolism: blue (sea/sky)

Senses affected: smell (fragrance of dust- reminiscent and evocative of grandparents house-memory), incense- frankincense, sight: has to adjust from dark to light, touch: cool not cold on skin- constance of temperature,

What did I produce?:

a series of experimental drawings, with regular geometric patterns from circles

research: James Benning

still from video Ten Skies 2004

James Benning now converted to digital until recently known for working in 16mm film
hailed as the cinema's voice of the midwest
raised and studied in Wisconsin US
Policitally awakened during 1960s and participated in civil rights movements, friends drafted and died in vietnam.
This American artists work was suggested to me when I was working on my first project using video.
The timeless, meandering quality appeals. There is no trickery, fancy editing. He is filming what is in real time.
I feel these sorts of video and arts that are more contemplative are reassuring to me. Most of the artists I have been researching based on what their visual imagery is about have ended up being interested in zen, meditation and more calm and tranquil results in their works. This may not be so coincidental after all but it's a stark finding after looking into a number of artists whose biographies and interests stated in interviews raise similar preocupations: Agnes Martin, Ian McKeever, Bill Viola, Tapies etc etc the list goes on.
Part of me wishes I could create more political, engaging, bold, humourous light hearted or innovative work. I appreciate these elements in other peoples but ultimately I seem to return to what I'm drawn to and it's light, calm, abstracted elements that are probably obsessions as a way of coping from the frenetically paced and emotionally draining work that I do when not at college.


Bio:

 His philosophy of “landscape as a function of time,” and “Looking and Listening” (which is also the name of a course taught by Benning) is particularly evident in his films since 1999 in the form of fixed, stable shots


Benning's use of duration reflects his accord with Henry David Thoreau's passage from Walden, “No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history, or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life, compared with the discipline of looking at what is to be seen?”


Inspiration
artists:

 Bill Traylor, Henry Darger, and Mose Tolliver.

Gallery representation
neugerriemschneider gallery in Berlin


Sources:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/interviews/sight-sound-interview-james-benning
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWuDiSd09S4

research:Julie Mehretu

This artists work, often monochromal, gestural with intriguing marks was suggested to me when researching my drawing work.
I'm interested in the piece above particularly. I've been working on an A4 limited size, on ECG paper or MDF pieces in experimental work and do want to think about scaling up, using fragments that are completed pieces in their own right. Whether this feels less daunting than a huge empty board I don't know. I like the detailing of smaller work and find it alot more peaceful and absorbing and it would be interesting working on a larger scale to see if that feels the same.
 Do you have to go large or go home?!

"Typically, Mehretu begins these paintings by imposing a plan that will dictate the composition, then responds to these outlines with architectural drawings. Gestural marks inhabit those spaces: they act on and are acted upon by the built space of the painting."


I like the fact that there is some sparcity in her work, they're not completely covered, the marks are distinct whilst remaining coded, obscure and subtle.
She uses overhead projectors to lay the foundations of marks on a piece, draughtsmen colloborate to make marks, often architectural designs.
It was interesting to hear that she used to push the works too far and then realising she could erase back into it that the favourite repeated marks that were initially creating an obstacle could be pared back. She describes the work as 'moving back and forth'. That the 'resolution emerges' some pieces may take a couple of week others years.





b.1970 Addis Ababa Lives New York

Bio from website
Julie Mehretu makes large-scale, gestural paintings that are built up through layers of acrylic paint on canvas overlaid with mark-making using pencil, pen, ink and thick streams of paint. Mehretu’s work conveys a layering and compression of time, space and place and a collapse of art historical references, from the dynamism of the Italian Futurists and the geometric abstraction of Malevich to the enveloping scale of Abstract Expressionist colour field painting. In her highly worked canvases, Mehretu creates new narratives using abstracted images of cities, histories, wars and geographies with a frenetic mark making that for the artist becomes a way of signifying social agency as well suggesting an unravelling of a personal biography.

Mehretu’s points of departure are architecture and the city, particularly the accelerated, compressed and densely populated urban environments of the 21st Century. Her canvases overlay different architectural features such as columns, façades and porticoes with geographical schema such as charts, building plans and city maps and architectural renderings, seen from multiple perspectives, at once aerial, cross-section and isometric. Her paintings present a tornado of visual incident where gridded cities become fluid and flattened, like many layers of urban graffiti. Mehretu has described her rich canvases as “story maps of no location”, seeing them as pictures into an imagined, rather than actual reality. Through its cacophony of marks, her work seems to represent the speed of the modern city depicted, conversely, with the time-aged materials of pencil and paint.

Mehretu was born in Addis Ababa in 1970 and lives and works in New York. She has exhibited in several important group exhibitions including ‘Poetic Justice’, 8th Istanbul Biennial (2003); Whitney Biennial; São Paolo Biennial and Carnegie International, Pittsburgh (2004); the Biennale of Sydney and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2006); Prospect 1, New Orleans (2008); ‘Automatic Cities’ MCA San Diego (2009); ‘From Picasso to Julie Mehretu’, British Museum, London (2010) and Document XIII, Kassel (2012). Solo exhibitions include Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; REDCAT, Los Angeles and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo (2003); St Louis Art Museum (2005) and MUSAC, Léon, Spain (2006); ‘City Sitings’, Detroit Institute of Art and ‘Black City’ Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2007); North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, (2008); ‘Grey Area’, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin (2009) and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010). In 2015 she was honoured with the US State Department's 'National Medal of Arts'.

Gallery representation:

White cube London

References

http://whitecube.com/artists/julie_mehretu/
http://bombmagazine.org/article/2714/julie-mehretu

Research: Gerhard RIchter

How did you come up with the idea to paint these blurred photos?


I was a student, and as such you generally rely on prior models of how to make art, but these were not satisfying. Then I discovered in photos what had been missing in paintings; namely that they make a terrific variety of statements and have great substance. That is what I wanted to convey to paintings and apply to it.

SOURCE

Interview with Christiane Vielhaber, 1986

For me Richter blurred paintings are awe-inspiring. The fact that he is as happy to paint something that is an (improved) version of an existing photo as well as extremely colourful paintings.

I was interested to read he's been criticised for the variety in his works and techniques. He originally worked from colour charts. He proficiency of paint knowledge means he has can layer up his 'squeegee' paintings with different colours, avoiding cracking dependent on the drying rates of the different pigments. He also peels off layers of paint

I found his website with a huge number of quotes and book to be a fascinating insight into an artist not shy about talking about his work.

The  overpainting works I only came across more recently. I like the idea of changing the impact and interpretation of a piece with spontaneous abstracted bold marks. I particularly like the surreal quality of the photo above with the alpine landscape. It's a picture postcard view that has been given a vivid makeover that makes you look twice

Sometimes your abstract paintings give the impression of a landscape. Are you looking for realism again in abstraction? 
I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.

SOURCE

Interview with Anna Tilroe, 1987

Chance as a theme and as method. A method of allowing something objective to come into being; a theme for creating a simile (picture) of our survival strategy:
(1) The living method, which not only processes conditions, qualities and events as they chance to happen, but exists solely as that non-static 'process', and in no other way.
(2) Ideological: denial of the planning, the opinion and the world-view whereby social projects, and subsequently 'big pictures', are created. So what I have often seen as a deficiency on my part – the fact that I've never been in a position to 'form a picture' of something – is not incapacity at all but an instinctive effort to get at a more modern truth: one that we are already living out in our lives (life is not what is said but the saying of it, not the picture but the picturing).

SOURCE

Notes, 1989

Source:

https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/techniques-5

ideas

http://www.studentartguide.com/articles/creative-photography-ideas

Chen Po-i

this taiwanese due follows me on flickr. get in.

research: Louise Hopkins

80Louse

Louise Hopkins does not work on blank canvases

Using pre-printed material whether it be music sheets, maps, comic books, she plays with representation by painting over and obscuring the original material and thereby changing it. "looking for a way to disrupt or re-work what's already there".

Influenced by cubism.

I like the quirky, simple quality to the work. It can be enjoyed just for the visual patterns and shapes but there's an added intrigue from her choice of materials that she's choosing and how covering up rather than revealing works. Her titles are relevant at times. Named freedom of information one of her exhibitions was full of beautifully 'censored' images.
I first saw her work in the amazing book of (mainly) contemporary drawings collected in themes by Tania Kovatz.
Soemthing intriguing about how she's chosen what to leave visible and what to obscure.
Layers and monochrome and repetition are what seems to be most obvious in the drawing work I've done over the last few months.

Black Sea 2003 acrylic on ink 80x126.5x2.5cm

Bio from website
Since the early 1990s, Louise Hopkins has used furnishing fabrics, maps, song sheets, comics and pages of magazines to create works that address the process and problems of representation. Her project is to transform existing surfaces into paintings or drawings, taking them from the everyday world and giving them a new status. With an experimental approach, she starts with her own physical gesture to explore colour, form and mark-making, using pencil, ink or paint, and often produces several versions before fixing on the final composition. The relationship between the original and new surface is ambiguous. The printed materials she chooses often have social or political associations. The certainty that maps, shopping magazines or manufactured textiles might offer seems to be questioned when they are transformed into a painting or drawing.

Work

"The artist has spoken of her interest in working on supports which contain information, often an image, and in turning that image into a painting by repainting and hence remaking it."^[3]

"Louise Hopkins’s world is in an endless state of flux, becoming and adjustment. Meaning for her is never something to be merely established-through research, for example, or contemplation-but rather galvanised, sparked into a state of pulsing iteration and reiteration…In an indicative work, Untitled (011), 1998, she once crumpled a piece of white paper, the kind generally used to write or type or scribble or photocopy on. She acted not in anger or frustration but to make the paper more interesting, yet not less itself. To the same end, she then used a fine pencil to draw thin parallel marks delineating the faint shadows cast by the creases. The paper’s once latent complexity was unleashed. Its pristine (artless) past remained a presence beneath the surface. Through a set of effects, both accidental and intended the blank sheet had become defined, articulated through hard-edged incident; it also continued to carry the dynamic tension of its violent collapse."

Louise Hopkins: Freedom of Information, paintings and drawings, 1996-2005, published by The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2005

Bio
Born Hertfordshire

1965 Born in England Lives and works in Glasgow
Education
1992-94 1985-88 1984-85	M.A. Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow B.A. (Hons) Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic, Newcastle Brighton Polytechnic, Brighton

Gallery representation:

mummery and schnelle

references

1. http://generationartscotland.org/artists/louise-hopkins/
2. Freedom of Information, paintings and drawings, 1996-2005, published by The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 20053. The Drawing Book Tania Kovatz

4.http://www.mummeryschnelle.com/pages/artists.htm