All a Matter of Perspective

Well, it has been 6 months since I last posted here on my blog.  A long and depressing 6 months of post school blues when it hits you that the enormous studio you had access to, all of the staff support, the library...  all gone.  Not to mention I was working a horrible and exhausting job.  But, I have found a new job with much better hours now, and have, with the help of my very supportive boy, got the extra bedroom turned into a makeshift studio.  I have made a few drawings, and two newish paintings of which I will include both below.  

I am giving a talk on my work in a couple of weeks, and am busy gearing up for that.  It is at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, on May 2nd, for those interested.  I have about 7 pages of notes, and 39 slides to show.  Hopefully that will be around an hours worth of talking.  I will cover a history of my work from the past 5 years, but also some ideas about new ways of thinking about and looking at art. 

So  basically, below is a rough draft of an excerpt from my talk that I am giving.  I am talking about an idea I have been grappling with, and I was hoping I could share it with people and see if it makes sense to a fairly general audience.  I am also going to include my new work, so if you aren't interested in art theory then feel free to just skip down to the bottom and have a look at my work.  Either way, thanks for reading and please leave comments!

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At this point, I wanted to discuss a few more ideas Ive been playing around with about perception.  Most of this comes from Brian Massumi, philosopher and professor at University of Montreal who has discussed the idea of the real, but abstract, in relation to art.  Not to be too grossly overarching in my generalizations, but among many in our detached convenience and consumption culture there is an assumption about vision.  Vision is thought of as passive, just a registering of things and, therefore, art is static and without movement.  Yet, if we were to challenge that assumption, then to say that vision is not static but dynamic, changes the question entirely.  The question becomes what kinds of movement and what kinds of visual experiential dynamics do we perceive? There are two artists who, in different ways and to different degrees of success, are working on questions pertaining to the dynamism of vision.  David Hockneys work has been concerned with time in vision.  Some of his older works like his photographic collages speak to this attempt.  Even now, in his landscapes at the Royal Academy recently on show, his answer to the question of time was to go bigger.  In an interview with the BBC he explained how in the East, the Chinese tackled this problem of time in painting by making long scrolls and wall hangings that forced the viewer to take time to look at the piece in its entirety, where your eye couldn’t physically take the entire work in at once.  Hockneys solution in his landscapes was to go bigger.  It takes time to move your eye up, down, and around his paintings, thereby highlighting the effect of time on our experiential visual perceptions.  Artist Clive Head, who recently showed at the National Gallery to great reception, says of his work, “[my paintings] display the use of perspective as a contemporary tool for painting. Creating paintings is always about inventing space, but the rigid geometry of Renaissance perspective might seem to preclude the possibility of innovation in contemporary art. This is further entrenched by photography, which is dependent on a limited perspectival formula for a fixed and narrow way of recording the world. My paintings challenge both historic versions of perspective and current photographic realism. Rooted in my experience of looking around the urban environment and moving through it, a multitude of spaces, built upon a mathematics of perspective created uniquely for each painting, are presented seamlessly within a single unified picture. This offers the viewer a compelling vision that is not a facsimile of the real world, but an alternative reality.”  Head is using a different dynamic of vision, ordered space, or geometry.  His perspective paintings don’t trick object perception, they activate it otherwise.  The experience of depth isn’t an optical illusion.  It’s a real experience of depth, minus the depth. 

In other examples of dynamic visual experience, when looking at an object, we can see its volume, feel its weight, and even tactically how it would feel if you touched it.  We see these things in an object' s form and its texture, not by making a deduction about the object, but instantly we see these qualities with and through the actual form.  Therefore, seeing is a kind of action, only without the action.  Massumi describes, “That’s why we see movement in a [spiraling] motif.  The form naturally poises the body for a certain set of potentials.  The design calls forth a certain vitality affect -the sense we would have, for example, of moving our eyes down a branch of rustling leaves and following that movement with our hands.  But [in art] that life dynamic comes without the potential for it to be actually lived.  It’s the same lived relation as when we “actually” see leaves, it’s the same potential.  But here its purely potential.  We cant live it out.  We can only live it in - in this form- implicitly.” 

This idea of the inwardly lived dynamic qualities of perception offer exciting possibilities for new ways of thinking about and looking at art.  There is an immediate self referentiality of perception set up, an awareness of the feeling of perceiving.  In real life these invisible perceptional qualities like volume, weightiness, depth and texture are all backgrounded.  They are there but they disappear into the living and action of life.  But art makes us see that we see in this way.  It brings these dynamics to the foreground.  It becomes a question of emphasis.  Art becomes the technique for making our perceptions perceivable, a technique for living life in.  In relation to my own work, then, my landscapes set up a place where rhythm, sound, perspective, and feeling of place are all foregrounded.  These intrinsic qualities from places I’ve experienced and emotional states I’ve felt are all foregrounded in my work, suspended in paint for consideration.  The abstract parts of my experiences in life are taken out of the dynamic tumbling through time and are highlighted.  This is a different kind of landscape painting.

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From the Chew River, Oil on Sized Canvas, 214 x 111 cm

Portrait in Light and Shadow, Oil on Sized Canvas, 55 x 45 cm

Well, here are my last two paintings, as promised.  One is a portrait and the other is a new landscape.  Feel free to comment with whatever your thoughts are, about the work or the excerpt from my talk.  I would love to hear your thoughts!  xx  

MA in Fine Arts.. Check! Now, What Next?

The final show for my MA in Fine Arts is over - done and dusted.  I've been a mixture of feelings from proud to deflated, but I think right now, a couple of weeks on, I'm feeling excited to return to studio work.  It is wonderful to live with my biggest supporter and a fellow artist.  As a struggling ('emerging') artist it is essential to have someone who fiercely believes in your work as much as you do.  Thanks Pete!

As for the show, it was a great experience.  I found that I was able to talk about my work without feeling like I was schmoozing or being disingenuous.  That was a big hurdle for me because I hate feeling like I have an agenda when I'm meeting someone new.  I found that the people I talked to actually did most of the talking anyway, and their opinions of my work varied far greater than I thought.  Some loved one painting and disliked another for the same reasons that another liked and disliked the opposite ones.  I'm just glad people had thoughts on them - indifference is the worst reaction.

I have a few pictures to post - some new work, and some randoms from the show.

photo taken by Nick DiSessa before the show, 2011.

From South Shields, Oil on Sized Canvas, 

Photo taken by Nick DiSessa before the show, 2011.

From Near Connection Rd., Oil on Sized Canvas,

From St. Michael's Parish Churchyard, Oil on Sized Canvas,

From Green Park, Oil on Sized Canvas,

These last two are small studies for larger paintings I'm considering.  I think that they pack a little visual punch, but part of what makes an interesting experience for the viewer is being in front of the work where the eye has, necessarily, to move around the canvas. If the work is too small it seems to loose the heightened  or suspended sensation of movement that I want to convey.  I hate to say it because it makes my life as a struggling artist much more difficult, but I think I need to work big.  It is impractical, and it also makes it difficult to apply to group shows because of size requirements.  Frankly, it is a very limiting choice for an artist to work big before they are well known - and that's not even considering the financial side.  But for these paintings, I think they need to be larger, at least for the time being until I get a brain wave of how to convey certain sensations into small works.  Morandi did it very well, maybe I should look more at him again?  hmmm.  

Please feel free to comment! xx 

Soon to Come

Well, it is almost time for my final MFA Show.  Stressful, yes.  And I feel like my high expectations might just lead to a feeling of utter deflation after the show is over.  But the show must go on and hopefully something will come of it, whatever that may be.  I thought I'd just give everyone a sneak preview of some of the work I've done this term.  Although half of it won't make it into the show, you may like a look anyway.  Many of these paintings have changed since these photos were taken, so I'll add new photos after the show.  I'd love to hear people's thoughts!

From South Sheilds, 230 x 350 cm

From Victoria Park Lake, 35 x 180 cm

From Victoria Park Looking North, 60 x 80 cm

From Victoria Park Looking West, 60 x 80 cm

From Broad Quay, 199 x 60.5 cm

From Near Connection Rd., 208 x 150 cm

Epheme-reality

It has been a while since I've last updated this blog.  I would get done with a couple pieces, but already be onto the next couple, and want to include those as well.  So, here are 4 new paintings.  Since I also like to foster any art conversation, I'm also including some contextual thoughts pertaining to my work.  Please feel free to let me know what you think, or if you have other ideas to add, or anything!  Thanks!

From Chesil Beach, 105 x 100 cm, 3/2011

From Portland Bill, 96.5 x 178 cm, 3/2011

From Under the A46, 91.5 x 122 cm, 6/2011

From Near Bath Bus Station, 110 x 150 cm, 5/2011

I believe that evolution is a process, not a point to which things ascend.  I think that art follows a similar process, not a progression.  Progression, end- points, working toward something greater yet to come – all these imply the idea of an as-yet unreached finality that can somehow be gained through our personal or collective striving.  But evolution is a process, non-cyclical and without an end.  It doesn’t move creatures forward or back on a scale of development.  Creatures respond to their environment.  The process of their responding is named evolution.  They don’t strive to evolve any more than one strives to age, it simply happens.  In the same way, art is a response to cultural climates, the world as experienced and responded to by people.  There is no progression of ideas, just ideas that change in response to the cultural climate changes.    

My own work questions of the nature of our existence, the way we perceive our every day experiences.    I am interested in questioning the structured thinking and assumptions of Western culture through subverting the expectations inherent in the Western tradition of painting.  My paintings can be accessed or understood through many other mediums.  For example, poetry has a sensual quality, an ability to express an understanding through the senses, that is found in my work.  My paintings can also be understood through the lens of philosophy.  Henri Bergson, Delueze and Guattari, and Brian Massumi all explore similar concepts through their words that I reach through painting.  One might also access my work through music, or even through food (as I generally wish I could eat my paints due to their sensuous color and texture).  While my influences are varied, it is this synesthesia of sensations, emotions, and concepts – the movement between them as one becomes the next – I am after in my work.  Epheme-reality.  My work attempts to question this endlessly abstract thing we call life.

My work is influenced by Eastern thought, specifically by the aesthetic concept in Japan called Wabi-Sabi.  Wabi is the projection of simplicity, meagerness.  Sabi is the atmosphere of solitude, and of attentiveness to impermanence – the ephemeral.  When using the term aesthetic, I am using it in the sense of a lens that I see the world through.  It is the filter for my experiences. It is an underlying mood, or mise-en-scene, that I try and communicate.  This feeling functions in a cathartic way for me during the process of painting, as well as for the viewer as they connect with the work.  I want the viewer to engage with the sensations and emotions that might come across through the image. 

While much of Japanese art has this Wabi Sabi aesthetic at the heart of its meaning, I am particularly influenced by the poetry of the ancient Haiku masters; Basho and Saigyo.  The sparseness of their imagery highlights the very momentary, transient feeling of life.  Basho describes Sabi as “the color of a poem”.  Perhaps for my work, Sabi is like the sound of my painting.  This synesthesia is the tone of a concept, the feeling of a place, the ability of people to empathize with their surroundings in a specific moment.  The poet Charles Baudelaire[The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, transl. and ed. by Jonathan, Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), p. 116.] writes: "What would be truly surprising would be to find that sound could not suggest colour, that colours could not evoke the idea of a melody, and that sound and colour were unsuitable for the translation of ideas, seeing that things have always found their expression through a system of reciprocal analogy."  Through this system of reciprocal analogy my paintings resonate with others.   Just as emotions resonate in us as we listen to music, my colors, tones, and imagery sing about life and experience.

Brian Massumi uses the term virtual to discuss the real, but abstract.  My work is aligned with this concept.  I am interested in ideas of fields and of intensities, of emergence or becoming, of indistinction -- or in my paintings, of understanding distinction as an arbitrary cultural norm, not a definition or grasping of reality.  My subversion of the densities of objects questions what we consider substantial.  My use of natural patterning breaks object and image into fields of varying intensity, offering a different perspective on how we consider our surroundings as real, solid, graspable, namable and manipulate-able.  What neuroscientist Dr. Ramachanrda terms “metaphorical thinking” in his work on artists and synesthesia, in my work functions in a virtual way to connect paint, tone, image, and layers into ideas surrounding our reality - life.  My work is a different kind of landscape painting.

In a way, my paintings can be thought of like haiku poems.  I apply a similar aesthetic sense, but in an American West Coast language, through my choice of non-specific subject matter that echoes a bereft aesthetic.  I also find this through the process of editing superfluous objects, of paring the image down and leaving as much of my ground tone and non-depictive surface as possible.  I let my ground act as ‘the color of my poem’, my mise-en-scene.

My paintings don’t have solid objects that sit in a less-important space that supports them.  Sometimes the space is more active or more palpable than any object depicted.  I play with density and translucency to question the conventional understanding held of our being ‘subjects that manipulate objects’.  Offering a world that doesn’t recognize the substantial, or the ‘real’, I try and paint with this non-hierarchical idea in mind, although my paintings in no way try to illustrate this idea.  I choose my subjects due to inherent rhythms or patterns I see in a place.  The naturally occurring patterns I favor are another way of breaking down the hierarchy in our minds of object-priority.  Functioning like visual white noise, it is this virtual patterning, this abstract found in the real and everyday, that simply calls out to be considered if we step out of a conventional way of seeing.  My layers question hierarchical thinking, breaking apart the strata of so-called objects and space, giving each equal measure, an all-over feeling that challenges the assumptions in our perceptions.