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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Vase of flowers, the green room, Miro.

Vase of flowers, the green room, oil on card, 12 x 15 cm unavailable

More work about my apartment. I`m finding great delight in brighter colours these days, really pushing them out, trying to keep them bright and sharp.

 There are fantastic Miros that feature an expanse of blue punctuated by a dot or dash of red,(such as Blue III, 1961)paintings that seem to be all about timing, and are so very musical and full of humour, and which I wish I could easily visit for inspiration.

Before the Party

Before the Party was painted back in 1993, when I was living in Maude Road, in Camberwell, London.

It shows four men- three are dressed to go out, while one remains in bed. He is ill, or sleeping. A putto urinates in one corner; there is an elephant, a fantastical bird and a giant snail in the room too. A demon lurks behind the bed.

It was a breakthrough painting for me, bringing to a close several years of doubt about what sort of creative art I should be doing. I had graduated unhappily, knowing somehow that the art I'd made for my graduation show did not do what I knew in my gut art should do, which is, in Hamsun's words, to reveal the "unconscious life of the mind".

I'd been oscillating uncomfortably between art that was essentially impressionist and art that was very directly autobiographical and illustrational for some years. I'd wanted to incorporate elements I'd gained from the sort of literature I like - (fables, fairy tales, Kafka, Bulgakov and Waugh) - into my work but hadn't been able to find a format. I think I'd felt embarassed about how close my work was to children's book illustration, as if that wasn't sophisiticated enough.

The themes of the painting are friendship and strangeness and death, but I do not understand it entirely myself. I made it very instinctively, following no sketch. I think sometimes art is made like sleepwalking, following deeply set patterns of movement and consciousness. Perhaps it's a false idea that art can be "understood", anyway? No-one would talk about "understanding" a game of football or a plate of asparagus, other sensory experiences.

Artistic breakthroughs are solutions, but the solutions they bring bring problems, -artists often get stuck repeating the same solutions for their entire lives (the worst case being Chagall, I think, whose work turned into a a series of catch-phrases with the same forms, colours, settings, faces and hands used over and over again from 1930 until his death in 1985. Miro likewise, alas). For me the risk was that I would do "room" paintings forever, and I baulked against that, going on to produce a lot of architectural pictures in a sort of realist style, while continuing to work on these more idiosyncratic images.

It was painted at an odd, lonely juncture in my life, but after I painted it things improved for me, at least temporarily.