90. PETER CAPALDI by DANIEL FOOKS

Oil on canvas 1150 x 3250

BP Portrait Award 2011 exhibition

National Portrait Gallery until September 18

Daniel Fooks contacted the actor Peter Capaldi after watching A Portrait of Scotland, a documentary featuring 500 years’  history of Scottish portraiture, which Capaldi presented. He agreed to a sitting at which Fooks made notes, sketches and a series of photographs . These were the raw materials Fooks used to make the paintings during the summer of 2010.

Actors – especially Award winning ones like Capaldi – have transformative powers. What this arresting series of paintings manages to do is to capture this on canvas. Fooks makes some of the head-on, eyes-looking-straight- at-the-viewer portraits in the exhibition look a trifle heavy and cold. But there’s a trap. If you are doing 5 paintings, a less gifted artist might have frozen Capaldi's face into a series of clichés: ‘angry’, ‘suspicious’, ‘pleading’ and so on.  Fooks doesn’t go there. He wants us to catch five passing moments, each of which is freighted with a kaleidoscope of feelings and bodily expressions. 

The result is almost sculptural and deeply mysterious: the hollow cheekbones, the planes and curves and angles are worth close attention . Blake Morrison - Professor at Goldsmiths College, poet, novelist, journalist - is quoted as saying ‘Portraits have to make an impact at a glance but also repay closer examination, so that even at the hundredth look they’re inexhaustible.

Fooks ratchets up the intensity by the elimination of any background which might have distracted you.  It’s you and Capaldi, alone. 

It’s heart warming to learn on the internet that Daniel Fooks, Head of Art at Godalming College, features in an Ofsted film which went in search of excellence in the teaching of the arts. The movie explores ways in which schools and colleges inspire and nurture creativity and includes Fooks’s practice of organising his teaching timetable so that he can work on his own art one day a week, at the same time as his students.

The first link below relates to Capaldi and A Portrait of Scotland

bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ml5dd

npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions.
guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/feb/20/ofsted-film-arts

makemeaoffer.blogspot.com/2011/06/daniel-fooks-

89. CHIMERA by JOHN VICKERS

Royal Academy Schools Show

 I confess it was not love at first sight when I came across Chimera. So I stayed still and waited. It was the context, the sum total of the room itself which won me over. Walls the colour you see in the sky on the happiest and most perfect of summer days, the floor and the other exhibits  nothing but stark white.  It was fun to be there.

I looked at Chimera more closely. In legend it’s meant many things, including a fire-breathing monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail. In essence any animal made from two or more species. 

Although such creatures don’t exist we have taken the word over for a very modern purpose: a person who has an implanted heart valve that came from a donor pig is a chimera.  And in the future many of us may be very grateful to biotechnology for mixing human and animal cells or organs, to find new ways of tackling conditions which are at present beyond our reach.
 
What's this Chimera made of? I thought I’d check. Is it pedigree or mongrel? As I copied the answer laboriously by hand using a pencil and a notebook with  Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 Whaam! on the cover, someone joined me with a camera the size of a postage stamp. He got what he wanted in a split second, but the answer was the same for both of us: card, wood, Styrofoam, polystyrene, concrete, expanding foam, chicken wire, clear acrylic tube, papier mache, foam coat, white fur, paint, varnish, glue, plaster and milliput(putty). A glorious mixture of traditional materials and some pushy newcomers, one of which I had to look up

Back to the studio and here is just one more example of Vicker's work. Provider has a glass vitrine at the top stuffed with cosy cotton wool balls squashed together so there’s no breathing space. The bowl on the shelf half way down is full of pebbles, painted white of course.  The proportions are perfect. Vickers had created a space I was reluctant to leave. It sounds pretentious but I’ll risk it: it’s as if the air, the space itself is another sculpture.

I also especially liked the work of Nicholas Hatfull and Ha Young Kim (a prize winner in 2010) , and would I’m sure have liked Amy McDonough’s video had it not been placed in a room I took to be a corridor. My mistake. 


John Vickers won one of the British Institution awards in 2010 (as did Ha Young Kim). I don’t know what’s happened this year.
royalacademy.org.uk › RA Schools -

88. EXIT STRATEGY EXERCISE by BLUE FIRTH

The annual Royal Academy School Show, like the Serpentine Pavilion, is another event to look forward to each summer. It’s a chance for young artists to see their work for the first time in a professional setting, and for the work to be assessed and enjoyed by a public which may well include some collectors.

For reasons too mundane to tell, I turned up at the Show (just behind the Royal Academy (RA) at Piccadilly), in the clothes I wore that morning to clear out my study. Did I look like a bag lady? It didn’t matter. I was invisible. The slim and beautiful young things who were stewarding in their red tops with the RA logo never made eye contact with anyone they didn’t know.

The gallery space is stunning (if labyrinthine, and although there's a map, the stewards would have come in handy). A haven of peace after the heat and bustle of Piccadilly, full of light and air and space and surprises. Not just in the artwork but the building itself – turn a corner and you’re up against a glass- fronted cupboard of elderly skeletons crouching, standing tall or in bits and pieces, which suddenly remind you how many distinguished artists have walked these corridors and profited from contemplating  those bones. The school was established in 1768 as an integral element of the Royal Academy.

I would call Exit Strategy Exercise a folly, but not in the sense that the OED defines a folly:  ‘A popular name for any costly structure considered to have shown folly in the builder'. Chambers Dictionary is even more finger-wagging:  ‘a great useless structure, or one left unfinished, having been begun without a reckoning of the cost’. 

‘Folly’, from the French folie meaning ‘foolishness’, indicates works which are built (usually in the open air) with great ingenuity and variety but what links them is a joyful unpredictability. And they don’t seem to do anything useful except be there. If it stops you in your tracks and you ask yourself ‘Why?’, as Exit Strategy Exercise certainly does, the chances are you have found one.

  

When I went into the room I seemed to be confronted by a solid, substantial wall. Now no one needs something of this size and majesty to divide a perfectly inoffensive studio in two. As you move closer you are faced with what is at one and the same time a barrier, an entrance, a crack, a corridor, a place to play hide-and-seek. Of course you are looking at a flat surface but when you push with the palm of your hand and take a step or two forward, not only does a way ahead open up but the pattern glides and sometimes jumps around into different configurations. (The image was even playful as I moved it around the computer screen). 

I like the 60s. I’ve never forgotten the moment I first saw Bridget Riley’s Movement in Squares 1961  (there’s an image of it in Blog 35). I like black and white, geometrical patterns, minimalism, op art which teases you, art which you can choose to ‘enter’ and so become part of a ‘performance’. So there you are, no longer a passive viewer but for a moment an ‘actor’. My camera shot catches one - a gallery visiter passing through.

Blue Firth is half of Via Vaudeville! with Tomas Chaffe. Formed in Nottingham in 2005, Via Vaudeville! was aware of how few multi-disciplinary events unite the traditional and the contemporary,  and it wanted to engage a wider audience in artistic activities

 royalacademy.org.uk/raschools

nottinghamvisualarts.net/image.../476/recent-work-blue-firth

viavaudeville.com

87. SERPENTINE GALLLERY PAVILION by PETER ZUMTHOR

 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, Kensington Gardens, until October 16

Every summer for the past decade I've looked forward to the opening to the public of the Serpentine Gallery's summer pavilion, a temporary structure which this year will be there for 4 months before being dismantled and shipped to the lucky person who's bought it.  Recently there have been some  spectacular however-did-they-think-of-that constuctoin. (Last year, for example, we had bean bags and Ping-Pong tables). So we're used to seeing fantastical shapes and colours peering through the trees to whet our appetite from far off . This year you suddenly come across the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor's long rectangular black box.

You walk through a doorway into a high black corridor which runs round the perimeter - and instantly you are into a quiet shaded cloister pierced, the day I was there, by sharp angles of sunlight from the other 5 entrances. Step through the door opposite and you are inside a rectangular courtyard where the sky is the roof and shaded benches and stools overlook a rectangular garden.


Chelsea Flower Show it is not. Be prepared to be ravished by something entirely different. It was designed by the Dutch landscape artist Piet Oudolf and the first impression is of grasses and wild-looking plants which might or might not be second cousins to Queen Anne's Lace or Grannie's Bonnet.You begin to notice the array of colours - mostly greens - and the shapes, the pattern of shadows, the stirring of leaves in the breeze, even the birds and the bees.

Peter Zumthor says 'Plants have long been part of the earth's history...Their beauty is deep and beyond question...I look at my garden and I see vibrancy, opulence, serenity, . I see dignity, playfulness, infinite tenderness, the 'nodding kindness' of Herb Robert and in the larger, beautiful picture, I discover small modest dots of colour that enhance the luxurious whole.'

 'Make of it what you like", says Zumthor.'There is no hidden, or even obvious, meaning here. This is a place for you to be. To be. Nothing else."  The third century saint Irenaeus said something like  'The glory of God is to be fully human'. This pavilion demonstrates how architecture can create spaces to help us contemplate our place in the world. It's a calming and joyful and beautiful place to rest and think.

I suspect St Iraneus would have loved it.


serpentinegallery.org
 guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/27/serpentine-gallery-peter-zumthor-garden
telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/architecture/8602611/Peter-Zumthor
Kieran Long, Evening Standard, 28 Jume 2011

For a very different view to mine see:.  independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/architecture/serpentine-pavilion

86. PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER by TOMAS GEORGESON

Oil onboard  230 X 300mm

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY  2.7.11

This portrait does two things: it shows us what riches can be achieved by taking us this close to another person, while paradoxically reminding us that human beings are ‘other’,  and are gloriously unknowable.

At first sight it appears to be a simple record of a moment of unrehearsed, unscripted real life. In the family home. So, why not whip out a camera and take a photo instead? After all that’s what cameras are good at – intimacy, the immediacy of an impromptu decision and the poignant documentation of a moment forever lost.

Instead Georgeson uses a classic medium and style to make what he describes as ‘the most honest, intimate statement possible about my father’. What moves me about this painting is that Georgeson has set himself this challenge: it is as much a painting about a relationship as about a person. It’s about an intimacy which is both rooted in the past and welcoming the future. 
 

Georgeson makes it even more difficult for himself by painting a sleeping figure. If a face is ‘a window on the soul’, perhaps a face at rest is a window with the blinds down?  A face ‘at play’, as it were, can capture  expressions and nuances which tease the viewer into making assumptions about the character of the sitter. But here we have a blank. And what about eyes? They’re often used to draw the viewer into the picture. There are no eyes here and the viewer will still play tricks: one sees a wrinkle as a sign of wisdom, another interprets it as pure dissipation.

I like the warmth of the reds and earthy colours;  the trust of the sitter who allows us to see him in less than heroic pose; the unpretentious yellow Retro lampshade which sheds warm light on the subject’s face, on his limp hands and on the solid polished wood of the sideboard. Although the viewer is standing close enough to reach out and touch one of those hands to wake him, it is not claustrophobic.  There’s a pale door with glass panels onto the outside world behind the chair.

The artist has been making drawings and paintings of his father ever since deciding to become an artist fifteen years ago. He paints his uncle too, the British actor, Tomas Georgeson. This intimacy and warmth between sitter and artist is not sentimentalised. It’s almost raw The painter has used his access to a living breathing human being to pay attention to the sitter’s otherness. Quakers have a verbal equivalent: their practice known as ‘active listening’ means paying attention to another person. To do that we have to switch off the chatter in our own heads where we rehearse what to say next and resist the temptation to wait impatiently for the moment when we can interrupt.

The artist Giacometti, who spent long hours working on portraits of his wife and brother, would understand:  
. the great adventure is to see something unknown appear each day in the same face’
 

This work is not like a lot of portraits which carry the hint of a story: the ruler high above our heads on his mighty steed, the artist with her brush and palette, the couple posed against a wedge of English countryside which they happen to own.  In this BP Portrait Award 2011 exhibition Wendy Elia’s portrait, for example, (blog number 84) has a  scatter of clues – the young man coming into the room with his hand over his eyes, the black tape on the armchair. But there’s little to divert us in this work 

npg.org.uk/index.php?id=6757

thepaintedact.com
npgprints.com/image/697677/portrait-of-my-father-by-tomas-georgeson
Reading Faces, Sebastian Smee PROSPECT  May 2004

85. AXIS MUNDI by MATTHEW DAY JACKSON

(c) Matthew Day Jackson   Photo: Peter Mallet

HOUSER & WIRTH 27.6.11

You are prepared for most things – from taupe spats to discreet hats - as you walk along Saville Row’s gentlemen’s outfitters, some of which have been creating "the finest bespoke garments for over 200 years". But you are hardly prepared for this magnificent sculpture: the reconfigured cockpit of a B29,  which glitters and glows, seeming almost to billow out from Hauser and Wirth’s  huge plate glass windows. It's an arresting piece, dwarfing mortals as they stroll by. Inside its surface, polished to a high mirror finish, reflects back distorted images of the kind you see at a fun fair.  You cannot detach yourself from this monster. 

This sculpture is constructed from a reconditioned B29 cockpit – the first pressurised bomber, and the type of aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Inside the cockpit is a Wunderkammer, a cabinet of archeological and anthropological curiosities. In the past such cabinets contained collections gathered  by individuals for their own pleasure and learning, and many became the nucleus of our national collections and museums. Indeed when I was a student, the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology had more in common with a Wunderkammer than with the clean lines of its present day counterpart.

Axis Mundi means ‘axis of the world’, something which symbolises a place or time where earth and sky (heaven) seem to connect. Jacob had his ladder in the Old Testament, churches have steeples.  People’s experience differs from culture to culture but you could argue for an underlying communality. Only last month Nick Mayhew Smith published Britain’s Holiest Places, a guide to 500 sacred sites, designed to appeal to people of all faiths or none. It includes entries on the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery and the British Library, all Wunderkammer of a sort.

Day Jackson's Axia Mundi has been described as a modern day ark, containing within it 'the beginning of a new world through the use of the world's most destructive technology'. Wonder, beauty, terror intermingled. It's surrounded by other pieces in the gallery which demonstrate Day Jackson's versatility and justify the exhibition title Everything Leads to Another.

 ‘The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art – and , by analogy, our own experience – more, rather than less, real to us’. So said Susan Sontag about 50 years ago in her essay ‘Against Interpretation’.   ‘Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back on content so that we can see the thing at all’

You might look out for a showing of Harrier and Jaguar by Fiona Banner which once filled the Duveen Hall at Tate Britain - a decommissioned Sea Harrier and a Jaguar Jet, former killing machines of great beauty and awesome elegance, now challenging our concept of war. (See my Blog No 1).

84. I COULD HAVE BEEN A CONTENDER by WENDY ELIA

c the artist

 NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY  26.6.11

 Oil on canvas   1700 x 1300 mm

BP Portrait Award 2011

 Wendy Elia is a painter, lecturer and tutor. The work shows the artist with her children and grandchildren, some appearing in the photographs and postcards scattered around her studio.But this is no ordinary family portrait.

Just look at the title. ‘...I could have had class, I could have been a contender, I could have been somebody...’. It’s a quote from  On the Waterfront’. Below is a link to a video clip from the film.  

The irony and wit of the title gives us an unconventional introduction to her non-professional life. She is naked. We know that our clothes have an instrumental function (to keep us warm/cool/safe from cuts and bruises etc) as well as an expressive function (to tell the world who we are or would like to be). Yet she stands there vulnerable, courageous, almost daring us to judge.  Her nipple seems to point at the picture (low down on the floor, not high up on the wall)  of Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns at his crucifixion. Another vulnerable figure. Her feet are beautifully painted. They may not win an advertising contract for stilettos, but they are sturdy and strong and human.

I think this portrait brilliantly and poignantly illustrates the self-reflection on ageing, career, family and the meaning of it all in a post modern age, which is a major concern (among men as well as women) in this year’s BP Portrait Award show. Another example is Angela Reilly’s striking self-portrait Departure  which ‘marks the departure from youth to passing middle age’. She scrutinises the physical changes in the upper part of her body, making her consider what is yet to come in her life.  And Thea Penna’s self-portrait in triptych form is another moving example of telling it how it is.

You can see all these portraits and their captions on the link below.

There can hardly be a greater contrast than with the portrait which took the second prize. It’s 8ft high and encased in an ornate  gold frame. A very lovely naked girl is chained to a rock. Her face is not stained with tears, her eyes are lifted calmly to the skies. She waits with calm and equanimity whatever fate is going to befall her. The critic Jonathan Jones, one of the judges, writes ‘(it)  creates a tension between art and pornography. The urge to dismiss it as kitsch may be a defence mechanism, to avoid confronting its uninhibited sexuality’.  The urge to dismiss it may also be because we cannot afford the luxury of celebrating images which reinforce the humiliation and violence millions of girls and women experience worldwide every day. (To read the case against what I've just said, use the link to Jonathan Jones.

That painting reminds me of  The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche. Another innocent helpless young woman facing death while we all stand round and watch. This time it's a fictionalised account of a real event. There is deep pathos as she emerges from the shadows, blindfold and wearing virgin white, appearing to grope towards the execution block.

More postcards of this picture are sold at the National Gallery than any other.

‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’ (T.S.Eliot: Burnt Norton)