Tozeur, desert station, 2012

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Tozeur, desert station, 2012- oil on card, 12 x 13.5 cm

 

 

This was from the Tunisian trip ten years ago, and for some reason wasn't catalogued at the time. 

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Union Gallery Exhibition, 2011, The Itinerant Painter- text

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Display of pochades

Text- The Itinerant Painter

These photos date from 2011 and are records of an exhibition in Edinburgh`s Union Gallery.

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Poster advertising an exhibition in The Engineer, Primrose Hill, London, in 2001.

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Poster template

Template for a poster advertising an exhibition in The Engineer, Primrose Hill, London, in 2001. 

It features a monotype entitled Mysteries.

The exhibition was accompanied by a small book with a short story, The Vicious Pixie, by John Eccleston,

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Aberdeen, sea, May, 2022

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Aberdeen, sea, May, 2022, oil on paper, 25 x 30 cm  SOLD

I`ve been trying out pre-primed card for painting. I am not sure I like it much, the texture, which imitates canvas doesnt allow me to draw so speedily across the surface.

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This picture has sold and the proceeds will go to help Ukraine

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A visit to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

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The Gallery

This lovely gallery was always, and remains, characterised by a quality of precision, with crisp modernist works on pale grey walls.

I enjoyed visiting the collection and seeing the permanent collection, temporary shows of Joan Eardley, contemporary painting and a Barbara Hepworth retrospective.

Eardley

The exhibition of Eardley related to her time in Catterline is accompanied by cases with photographs and letters.

The work on display are major work. In  these she incorporates some of the rough textural effects seen in American Abstract Expressionism. My feeling is that the variety of surface effects masks an underlying sentimentality- that there is a glossiness given to the scenes which is a projection from Eardley. 

But it`s hard to define exactly what this sentimentality really consists of, unlike in her street urchin paintings where it is in plain sight.  All I can say is that I feel it is there.

Hepworth

Hepworth, Torso , African blackwood, 1932

This is major survey. By 1935 Hepworth`s work as settles into an exposition of the idea of  significant form, and from then on her work consists of repetitions of these ideas on a larger and larger scale. The sculptures continue with consequently decreased intimacy, and take on the characteristics of typical corporate or institutional art- i.e. coldness of temperament, bigness, inoffensiveness, suitabililty as a means to offset or complement architecture without outshining it. 

Sculpture thus becomes the opposite of what it should be- it becomes a meaningless thing, a spacefiller, a thing you pass without realising it`s there.

 Appropriately, the show ends with a screening of Hepworth`s address to the United nations. As earlier work by Hepworth has a curious and emotionally rich quality, especially in such torsos as that in my photo.

This is sad. I fear that the ideas she pursued in her art, these formalist ideas, especially taken to a institutional environment, rapidly lead to a creative cul-de-sac. I remember feeling the same pfff on seeing a giant, insipid Miro in a Chicago plaza.

Carol Rhodes

Carol Rhodes, Industrial Complex, 2006, oil on board

There is a little show of contemporary British painting, an from it the two Carol Rhodes works are the most interesting, tackling as they do contemporary built landscapes. 

 I do, alas, feel that Rhodes` work is better in photo than in the flesh, where they appear rather like academic exercises, the paint handling having a mechanical quality.

I have done a little work on similar themes- I intend to do more. But they are not enjoyable places to visit. They`re inhuman, unkind, and making work in them requires definite fortitude.

Some paintings in the permanent collection

Peploe, Veules les Roses, 1910-11, c. A3

 

Peploe, Boats at Royan, 1910, oil on coard, c. A3

Deleunay, The Cardiff Team, 1922-3

oil and tempera on canvas, c. 100 x 120 cm

There is a joyful quality in these three above that I find very pleasing, and necessary. I love the golden colours. The Peploes are such tempting sweets that I`ve included too.

Margaret Mellis, Relief construction in wood, 1941

William Geissler, The Hill Farm, 1934, 60 x 80 cm

I sense that all my choices are all essays on geometric rightness, though the abstract construction obviously much more so. The ruggedness of technique in The Hill Farm is very satisfying.

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A visit to Aberdeen Art Gallery

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Aberdeen Art Gallery

The Gallery has been reconstructed and rearranged.

 

The new arrangement benefits cafe users, increases disabled access, allows access to a roof terrace, reduces focus on painting in favour of mixed galleries, increases the role of the galleries as educational (as opposed to aesthetic) showcases, and now displays artwork thematically, when previously the galleries had focussed on a linear historical display of painting, with rooms aside for the French schools. There is a new ceramics display and James McBey`s works are given greater prominence.

The new arrangement also gives more ready access to the Aberdeen City War Memorial.

Regarding the art, I think I preferred the previous hanging. The focus on education is all very well, but often feel infantalising. I think perhaps they looked at the Kelvingrove and copied them, hoping thus to attract school groups. The previous hanging made nice use of balconies around the central court, and I found it to be more coherent. But the new ceramics display is very good and it the view from the roof is beautiful.

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My tastes are rather split between art which has a distinctly interior quality (such as Jackowski) and that which entails visiting, perhaps confronting, the great outside ( the other two). Though one might argue -happily I think- that the two mental states are in no sense polarised but meet and feed off each other.

The first and last are "new" artists for me. 

Walker was born in 1930 in Kirkaldy and Jackowski in Penley, Wales, 1947, but for some reason this is the first time I`ve encountered their work.

I especially enjoyed these-

The boy who broke the spell, Andrzej Jackowski, 152 x 162 cm, 1996

Mount St Hilarion, Cyprus, David Bomberg, 72.5 x 92.5 cm, 1948

Sand seaweed and shore pool, Frances M. Walker, c. 80  x 60 cm, probably 1981

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Visual Arts Scotland, catalogue for Open Show, Edinburgh, 22 December 2019 -30 January 2021

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Catalogue cover

Catalogue-open spread

Ponte Marguerita, Rome - the lonely cyclist, oil on card, 18 x 16 cm SOLD

A page from a catalogue from Visual Arts Scotland, 2019.

 I`ve only just obtained this.

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