Richter’s work made a much bigger impression on me than I had expected.
Beforehand, when I thought of Gerhard Richter, it was his blurred works that came to mind. But there’s much more in this exhibition. A lot more colour and more abstract works than I imagined. What I liked most was the variety of his subjects. I had expected his portraits to intrest me most, but it was the landscapes that caught my eye, and the different approach he took to certain subjects. He works mostly from photographs but for some reason I feel his paintings are more alive, more realistic. He makes photographs seem like grubby snaps and his paintings improve on photos.
He really focuses on colour tone and brushstrokes and these sometimes distract from the often simple subjects of his paintings. In some pieces it is simply about the tone and colour rather than the object. With The Candle, you spend more time looking at the tone and colour rather than the object and you realise, after that, that colour is very important to the feel of his pieces. The soft glow reaches beyond the canvas.
A lot of his big canvases take a simple idea and work at it in great detail, with the emphasis on tone and colour. I was pleased to see how, in certain pictures, traces of the working grid are visible. In some of my pictures I have found it hard to eradicate the grid. In Bombers Bomber, the grid almost feels an integral part of the picture.
Study for Clouds reminds me of when you hold a balloon up to your eyes and see the faint blurred outline of the objects, but not focus on their colour. This strikes me as a key to understanding Richter. He forces you to look beyond the surface, to look harder. Distortion is important and yet there is a calmness to the pictures. Some are so blurred it is hard to make sense of them unless you work hard. For example, Paris is a large picture, but you have to to squint to view the building.
I had attempted a similar idea with my Linocut (see Stranded, below).
The exhibition makes me want to experiment with my own pictures. For example, to try scraping thin and thick paint over canvases and dry-sanding them down. Of course, I could blur my pictures in PhotoShop first… but that would be a little pointless. I would rather create effects myself than achieve them in a purely mechanical way. I like how, in certain pictures, the grey streaks make a sort of splash puddle effect, achieved apparently by painting blurry straight lines then disturbing while still wet. Or for example, the smoother effect he achieves in Two Couples, how, when you look at it up close, it seems as if he soaked the canvas in white spirit then painted over it so the colours blended more…
