And so this is Xmas

Merry Christmas everyone.

May the seasonal holidays rest, inspire and rejuvenate your creative spirits... and wherever you're gathered, I hope it's with loved ones, good food and fine weather.

Me, I thought I had summer school sussed for my Christmas break - but the class was cancelled at the last minute.
A pity because I could do with the stretch and Carole Shepheard's course sounded like an interesting little leap at this point.

It makes me think though, as artists, how DO we stretch ourselves ....?
I know for me sometimes it takes an objective person (or 6) to help me see what's under my nose - or where I could extend the work I'm doing.

Do we get better at that as we go along do you think? (I wish, says this difficult woman)

At the moment amongst other books, I'm reading Wassily Kandinsky's book 'Concerning the Spiritual in Art'.

He has some interesting things to say about 'art for arts sake'... and the perennial questions of 'what' and 'how' that drive artists who try to express some kind of spiritual depth in their work (and produce something other than a dreaded Nikau palm - though Mr K doesn't mention THOSE).

He wrote the book in about 1911 (off the top of my head) and mostly what he says about the power of colour and painting for meaning (or spirituality as he puts it) is pretty cool - though he's prone to sweeping statements (I suppose that makes two of us).

For me, I'm thinking too often it's easy to get hooked up on the 'how' and lose sight of the 'what' that drives us. In rather quaint language Mr K says...

" If the emotional power of the artist can overwhelm the "how?" and can give free scope to his finer feelings, then art is on the crest of the road by which she will not fail later on to find the "what" she has lost, the "what" which will show the way to the spiritual food of the newly awakened spiritual life.
This "what?" will no longer be the material, objective "what" of the former period, but the internal truth of art, the soul without which the body (i.e. the "how") can never be healthy, whether in an individual or in a whole people..."

I was just talking to Bob - my studio mate, about 'what' and 'how' the other day too.

On that note, I'm returning to my last years Summer School work, trying to recapture the essence of it - the energy and the spontaneity as well as working from the source imagery to create some new works for a show in February.

I remember this orange artwork as a struggle - so NOT what I thought I'd be doing that week, so unexpected and unfamiliar (Hah! isn't that just the point of Summer School?).

Sometimes what we make isn't LIKE us - (what arrogance leads us to think it will be I wonder?) - or isn't immediately recognisable or seem to be where we're at. (Hmmm - this orange work was vivid,bold,decisive and full of warning symbolism as well as dark corners).

I remember looking at the stranger we made when she was born too, and being transfixed by the knowledge of her 'otherness' and lack of familiarity even though she was contained in me...

The learnings from the orange art have been good though, the loose brushwork has informed the under painting on the gesture and figurative Sara drawings, it fed into illustrations this year and taught me what happens when you push something over the edge, or when you push through the desire to screw it up and start over.

So I'm thinking sometimes 'how' IS enough - there doesn't always need to be a 'what' in everything we make, and the learning we need doesn't always come without pain - or obviously.

I'm painting a couple of times a week at the moment - a much needed antithesis to my job these days. It's so much harder to be spontaneous now.

Meantime mark 24th March in your diaries for 'Beyond words' - it should be good, and please.... have a wonderful Christmas OK?

arohanui Adele

Hands up

Aye! it's been a while since I've been in here.

Doesn't mean I haven't been working though heh heh. Just that life's intervened again.

This body of work is gently coming to a close now. I've made 3 large sign drawings in all... since posting the 'birds' one. Each one is different and has a different feel.
The poems still move me and I hope I've done them justice - I chose a phrase from the poem titled 'The manual alphabet'; it talks about 'trees signing in the storm' ... such a stunning concept I think. Sarah's face is very expressive and so this one is less about hands and more about faces - it looks like she's calling up a storm.

Then there's a line from 'The hand as nest' - it goes ' you choose a fruit the size and shape of a heart'. So that's the last big drawing. I'm not so sure about this one - it seems a little 'bitty' in terms of the composition. (I'll borrow Ricky' camera and post up some terrible pics soon).

But then... I decided to move the idea of nesting hands along a bit and I'm experimenting with papier maché using silk paper and twisted ropes of tissue paper to make little 'finger bowls' (yeah cute huh?!) which I'm going to line with hands drawings - like fragile nests - or gifts that you give (which after all is another form of expressing a feeling or speaking to someone without words). I want them to be fragile - and quite deconstructed.

Here's the poems in case you're interested.

The Manual Alphabet

Sculpts. Just look at these neighbours. Who sees with the fingers
sees these things together. I once built a neighbour of light.
We used to read by his skin, the whole town, reciting "Repeat after

until we could decipher branches signing in the storm and
long past the fields now speaking, walking on his hands out of town.

Cole Swensen


The Hand as Nest

What caress?
and who
of slate who made
this flute, you

hollow out a bone with a smaller bone.

You choose a fruit the size and shape of a heart.

Cole Swensen

Words like birds

This is a 2 meter long drawing.
It's the first of the 'Sara' drawings I've made. She is signing 'words emerge like birds'. I've put up a close up too so you can get a better look.

And a continuation of eyes...

The last drawing I posted was about the language of eyes - what we allow to be seen, what we see and what we say. This next drawing is the opposite - still thinking about eyes as windows, and all that they say about us... if we allow it. This one has something of those butterflies that have big camouflage eyes on them - so they appear like owls, you know?

Thoughts on storytelling

I know I haven't spent much time in here lately - just post 'n' run - so here's some real thoughts.

I've enrolled in an art history paper at Victoria this semester, just for fun and to keep things interesting - y'know?
We're being guided through a potted history of art from the 1800's to the present, and this week I've been thinking a bit about how my own art might be influenced by what I'm learning and how critically I'm seeing now.

So far I have to say, it's the story telling that amazes me in the works I admire - the ones that make me shake my head in wonder.
It's probably the single most important thing I could learn right now, that will empower my work and make it better. It's as much what you don't say, as what you do - and the references to myth, allegorical tales, history, the sublime and the narrative tale...Basically any complex means of developing that message you want to say.

The way that stories have been explored by artists through the last couple of centuries is fascinating. I'm drawn to the dark ones at the moment - the dimly lit depths of romantic paintings dealing with madness- or with emotions -overblown and overplayed, or just on view and asking the viewer to experience it.

I have so much to learn it's humbling really.

The Language of eyes

Ok so here's a new one. This drawing's pretty self explainatory and it follows on from the hands - so much is spoken wordlessly, I couldn't ignore it now could I?

More on a theme

Here are the latest drawings on this theme of gesture. I'm playing with the way we view images (in this case of simple gestures) and imbue them with meaning.

Sara Signing

Oops I can't believe I haven't written about this - what an oversight!

Recently I met up with two really cool people named Sara and Darrel. They're both deaf, they both sign beautifully and Sara's been signing some of the hands poems for me.

Watching her talk with her hands is close to watching a flock of birds take off with a flurry of wings - very lovely!

So I've been making small movies while she signs. I plan to work from them later, to make large scale drawings that scroll at each end.
I hope to capture the movements of her hands as well as the sign shapes and I want to associate the shapes and phrases from the poems with loose imagry and underpainting. I've got a huge roll of Fabriano paper and a blank wall to pin it on ... I'm looking forward to beginning the first drawing as soon as I've worked on these gesture pieces a bit more.

It's funny, but I find working on large paper ( like metres of paper) ... both exciting and daunting. I've spent all month procrastinating beginning this part of my project - why, now that I have the time, have I chosen to make gesture drawings?Ironic.

Hold

This is a pic of the latest drawing in this series. It's getting there- looser, more contrasty... a bit more mystery maybe.
The fruit's a fejoa ! Think I'll try and work on the looseness and play a bit more with this idea of gestures and the meanings we apply to them.

It's so nice to be back playing with these ideas again - I was pretty busy there for a while and some of the thinking got strained through the work soup.

There's a hand that lives inside

These are still working drawings inspired directly from the poems, but I'm beginning to play with adding other imagery and thinking about increasing the sense of depth without making them too weighty. Here's the poem.

The Hand Thinks

There’s a hand that thinks, that lies inside, that lines the hand that moves

and it thinks: “While tying a knot, you can utterly forget, you can think
(can be thinking of something else at the time)
that muscles have a memory all their own
that lives again a braided time
alive
I tie.

Watch
what without you lives. The life of fingers
harbours
mutiny that doesn’t even bother. The hand, ever prior
avatar of architecture: archlessly, each one
is a frame.
There’s an empty frame on the wall and the hand is the sky
that opens the wall.

Cole Swensen

So what next?

As of this month I have new studio, (and it feels like another beginning) and some new ideas bubbling up.
It's exciting, and I'm enjoying getting my teeth into a whole new concept.

Firstly, I'm living in a garret now (well, working - but I'm here A LOT) - really, it is ! My room is at the top of the stairs, in the attic space on top of an old Cuba St building which I share with two art galleries, another painter, and two designers. But my garret is all mine!! I look east onto roofs and west onto more roofs and a peek of the street. It's sunny and warm...and I love it !

After the show people said I'd feel flat, maybe even a bit down. I guess I did, but moving here helped sort that pretty quickly.

So what's next ?
I'm picking up on some of the ideas from folks who responded to the work in our show.
The drawings, the movement, the relationships between people...

And I'm planning a body of work that may be drawings, based on the idea of communication. Specifically, about modes of communication that're not dependent on spoken language. So the language of hands, of touch, gesture, texture, (maybe braille), body language (the language of space and intimacy) and of dance (especially polynesian dance where the hands are an important part of telling the story).

I want to make some large drawings that describe the dance of communication and movement through the qualities of line and tone.

So far I have a huge mind map, a collection of amazing poems, some great quotes...

Here's a few of them, and a couple of drawings from the series I've made this week. One focusses on the idea of caressing, and the other is titled 'snap!' ... I'm loving this new beginning !!!!


"We don't just think with our brains. We think with our bodies." ..." our bodies are a result of our ongoing experience and involvement with the world, which is always specific"...

"Communication is an embodied act. Researchers believe it has been so from the beginning. In fact gesture is believed to be the original form of human communication. Before writing and even speaking, our ancestors gestured" - Jürgen Streek

And a beautiful poem of Cole Swensen's titled:

The Hand That Caresses
after Alphonso Lingis

Glean sheet
that's soft and flees
gliding just above the surface
constructs a second skin of close attention.
The hand cannot tire in the face
of another, a hand hovers or floats
detached from the wrist, my hand fits your face precisely What recognises the suffering of the other is a movement in one's hand. He points to the plane, which is landing, which is the same.

(Her line phrasing is spacious and pretty, but it doesn't work on Blogger,sorry)

If you click on the photos they'll enlarge.

The Show

Look at the date of the last post !

Before I can begin to describe what I'm up to next, here's some pics from the show and a bit of an update.

As you can see we had our exhibition last month. It was very cool and we had a good time. What more can you ask for really .... ? (don't we look pleased with ourselves - that's before we got flashed up for the opening or sold any of our work too!)

Our work looked beautiful together - it gelled and the pieces spoke to each other as we'd hoped. AND it was so cool to see it all together for the first time.

We had...
a gallery packed with a big buzz of enthusiastic guests and friends for the opening
some good sales
and a fine week in a friendly little light filled gallery space.

The week 'personing' the gallery flew by and we met all sorts of weird and wonderful folks who happened by, came in to shelter or bend an ear, to talk about the work, our practice, our ideas behind it all - or just to gaze. I think for me the biggest thing was having people 'get' the ideas and appreciate the journey as it was described by us. Especially the civic planner who yarned to me about the 'talking campi' in Venice and the way that people use social spaces globally.

I had no idea that the drawings would illicit such a positive response - I needn't have worried about my work looking cohesive - in fact, I needn't have worried full stop!

Here's a few pics of the inside of Thistle Hall, they give you some idea of how the work looked together.

Meaning something

Remember when I posted the summer school photo I said I was still working out what it all meant to me ?

Well here it is. It's about painting for meaning. It seems to me that for myself, there are a couple of modes I paint in - and primary reasons for them. (I've talked about this before too, back in the archives).
One is the sheer pleasure of the paint - right down to the drag of the brush on the surface. And for this - I don't need to plan or stage an image, or have a preconcieved idea of the finished result... it's about the paint and me losing my critical stressed out self. Process, play and experimentation. (and this weekend I did that - and needed it like good sex after a drought)

The other's about expressing an idea that's important to me. Much harder, involves the critical and analytical self, and accesses a different kind of creative brain. It also opens me up to the wealth of messages I carry, so it's a double edged sword.
But you know - in the end, I think that these paintings are the ones I value most - where the thoughts and the process marry seemlessly to create some wonderful synthesis (and I'm not beginning to say the work's wonderful by a long shot - so don't get me wrong).

My summer school work was fun. It's sufficiently complex to be pleasurable to make - and hopefully to appreciate, but it has no meaning to me, so I'm struggling to integrate the lessons other than the gestural markings back into my work.

Expletives and knots

Why is it that as this show gets closer I feel so tied in knots?
I should be working, but here I am describing how it feels to put yourself out there so thoroughly you might just as well have walked out of the house and accidentally forgotten your clothes.

The project manager in me is damned organised, and thankfully keeping the insane one roped in - but just sometimes, you know... she gains the upper hand. Fear is so paralysing, it needs to be kept in check - it'd be so easy to leave all this work in the plan drawers here in the studio.
Actually, the framer has the lot, and the rest of the canvasses are waiting to have fixings attached. Our joint sculpture is finished - (thanks Les for your help!) and looking great, so there's no going back - and I know we're both ready and looking forward to it.

I came into the studio on the weekend and slapped red and orange paint onto a big canvas, just to feel the joy again. I'd post the painting, but it's not finished... and I'm going to start another one for next week so I have at least a couple on the go.

I've been warned there might be a flat spell afterwards - so I'm working on some ideas I could develop next. Thinking it might be time to start a series of self portraits, ( there's a group online that challenge eachother to complete a self portrait a month for a year - think how much that would describe).I'm also thinking of ways to develop this 'space' theme further, and casting about for some clarity and some inspiration.
A few knots less and it'll show it's self. ¡pintar es vivir! (to paint is to live!)

Wharf walk

Here are the most recent paintings I've done, worked up from the large series of five pencil drawings of the waterfront walk.

They're whiter than this in reality - though still dirty and fairly loose. The nuances of Photoshop to fine tune photos gives me such grief, so I give up... you'll have to make that leap yourselves! I'm enjoying the flatness of Flashe paint (vinyl based and with a gouache feel, as opposed to acrylic paint which is polymer based) and contrasting it with acrylics to play with matte versus sheen in parts of the work.

It's so hot the paint's drying almost before I can get it on the canvas (I love it!).

Our show

Great news.
We've secured a spot at Thistle Hall to have our show - and the dates are the 20th to the 26th of March. (Opening's monday night at 6.00).
It's going to be GREAT, and I hope that everyone following this blog can make it along (if not in reality then in spirit!).

It's good for us to be organising this at last, to have the discipline of a deadline to work to - finishing things, framing and planning how we'll display the works and tell the story... making publicity materials and press releases (awful writing format - truly awful!).

It's a short show but the space is a nice one - so I'm pretty excited (and a bit nervous I guess).

Here's an image from the publicity we're putting out. It's a combination of our joint piece and some of the sections of the long waterfront drawing I made a while back.

Last week I began two paintings from the drawing too - so far not finished. If they turn out as I hope I'll add them to the collection and post them here too.

Summer School Wanganui January 2007

Back from Wanganui and trying hard to work today... so far unsuccessfully. So I'm blogging instead.Here's a picture of my workspace by the end of a weeks hard work at Summer School.

As I'd hoped, we used the photocopier as a tool and the resulting images as drawings. Each excersize began with original drawings or paintings which where copied, changed with paint or conte and developed further. These pieces informed the paintings which were the focus of the weeks work.
Robs aim was to keep us moving - and hopefully developing our skills.
It was hot as hell in the huge green shed, huge doors rolled open and a breeze from the river if we were lucky. Throughout the week vibrant coloured work bloomed on the walls - the output from our class was prolific.

As for me, I struggled and fought both the process, the marks and images I made, as well as the physical conditions I worked under. By thursday I was settled and working well thank goodness. Wish I could work out why this happens to me - the keys and the blocks need a bit of unpicking and scrutiny... but I'm not up for it just now, maybe in a few weeks.
Meantime, I'm enjoying the paint again - the fix that you get from the sheer physicality, and the excitement of colour. A cool week!