Nocturnes @ Guildford: An Invitation

I managed to get down to Guildford Library to make sure everything was OK with my paintings and I was delighted to see how many business cards have been taken. I really was worried that the paintings were too extreme for the venue but apparently not.

Incidentally, I have decided I will take the paintings down fairly late on the 30th of January.

Anyway, I would like to take this opportunity to let the people who are taking the cards and Googling me know that they're more than welcome to get in touch, even if they have no intention of buying (I might possibly raise the subject from time to time but I don't put pressure on people.) I'd particularly welcome feedback as the paintings are so strange and it would be really helpful to know how other people read them. I'd also love to hear from other artists (especially if they are members of galleries, groups, associations or co-operatives) who have a response to the work because a bit of intellectual cut and thrust or even full blown collaboration would do my practice the world of good. So basically, whoever you are, however you found me, don't be shy. Email me or comment here or even phone me, its all good.

Thanks.

Georges Braque: Le Portuguais

What with having no electricity due to the floods, I have started reading some of my old textbooks from college. At the moment, I'm working my way through Norbert Lynton's Story of Modern Art which, at least in my day, was the UK art schools' main primer for 20th century art - an equivalent to Gombrich for modernism.

Last night I hit Cubism, that most mis-understood and perhaps most appropriated of genres and I'm grateful for the reminder. The fundamental difficulty, according to Lynton, is that Picasso and Braque were just playing with space and surface and form and even memory and in doing so they forged a new language but almost everyone else read a lot more into the paintings than that - the language based on multiple facets was so adaptable that it could be used for almost any end and so new that everyone - artists, critics and practitioners of other arts alike - all wanted a piece. As a result, a thousand claims were made for the process and it spawned many of the conflicting approaches that enriched the last century. To add to the confusion, many of these were also known as Cubism and this has lead to the difficulty in defining it. Don't get me wrong, these offshoots are good thing, but its important to remember that in the early days, the period known as Analytical Cubism, the two mountaineers were by and large just playing with language, space and surface. Sometimes there is nothing deep behind a painting and it can be appreciated for what it is, not what a critic chooses to make it. So here we have a beautiful Braque painting from 1911, mostly brown, showing a collection of planes which hint at space and light, some recognisable shapes which hint at objects, and some elements (brushwork, letters and geometry) which draw attention to the surface. If I wanted to push this further, I'd say it was a perfect precursor to so many of the 20th century's art related angsts - space vs surface, representation vs abstraction, completeness vs fragmentation.

Runnymede in Flood: The definition of "Water-Meadow"

Went wandering before dawn yesterday...

Its got a lot floodier since, so much so that I don't want to blunder along the riverbank in anything other than broad daylight...

Incidentally, I've decided Blogger (this blog's host) sucks when it comes to showing pictures - in order to get the before dawn pictures up without really bizarre things happening to the colours I've had to sign up to things I don't want to sign up to. As a result, I'm considering this blog's future. I can't afford, when it comes to paintings, for Google to be changing colours when it feels like it. The fact it is doing this may explain my frustration with the reproductions I've been able to post here. I think that I will most likely host the blog myself as part of my website but I have yet to decide. When I do, there will be clear links from the last post that I put here.

Another day, another dawn

Look out the window now and again, you never know what you'll see :-)

Maybe its time to start painting skies again.

I'm still reading Japanese poetry and it will form the basis of some sort of work this year. Matsuo Basho was the most famous writer of haikus ever and specialised in finding the beauty and the wisdom that exists in tiny observations. One of his poems translates as follows, give or take:

Clouds now and again
give a soul some respite from
moon-gazing— behold

This was one of the times when he was just plain wrong. Clouds won't give any respite if you're a dreamer, they give you just as much to gaze at and daydream about as the moon ever will.

Now showing: Nocturnes at Guildford Library

Who knew that Guildford Library lets parts of the building be used as a gallery? Well I did, but I didn't find out very long ago.

Five of my nocturnes - two you've seen, one which is another you've seen with some reworked areas and two all new - are now in central Guildford until the end of the month. If you choose to buy one, part of the purchase price will go towards supporting the library.

It may not sound that prestigious and the spaces - staircases - may not be the archetypal white cube but it actually works really well as a gallery space and I'm very happy to be there - not least because the library is central, open long hours and heavily visited. The nature of the space works well with these particular paintings too. As you walk past them, you are moving up or down
as well as across. This means the paintings' relationship with the light is constantly changing as you move and this is critical because some of them depend on subtle variation in gloss and texture to help build an impression of space. The viewers' movement increases their chances of discovering this.


When you first see them, especially in the real world instead of an artist's studio or a more conventional gallery space, they really are sledgehammer paintings - sudden small bursts of dark and swathes of the strange sodium street lights that characterise this country at night. I was genuinely surprised at just how much oomph they have. Get past that shock though and they are minutely rich and subtle and this is the other key to the library being the perfect venue. Many hundreds of people will see the paintings every week and a high proportion of them will be there fortnightly, weekly, even every day. Regulars will have a chance to get to know the paintings in a way normally denied to people unless they own them. I don't rate my chances of selling there but I don't mind about that, I think for these paintings it is one of the best places I could have found.

Click here for opening hours and the address. The paintings are there until around about the end of January - I'll confirm here when I'm sure of the date.