My First Exhibition

The final picture was exhibited in Manor Park. It was a small space that had been arranged with a few other people on the course. My picture was wedged up between eaves on a staircase. The experience inspired me to think of the possibility of other exhibitions in the future – and I started to plan one for next year, in my head.

I was pleased with the way the painting worked out, particularly how the baby looms over the shoulder of 'Colin', the way he senses its presence.
It made something more of the commuters. I was pleased with the way Mr James turned out. And Colin. Towards the end, I had to move more quickly than was ideal, just to finish in time – but I think this actually worked in my favour. It pushed me to make decisions.

Train again – and Unfinished Painting

I am still taking pictures of commuters on the train, focusing on their expressions. I have a folder of all the faces and today I spread them all out on the floor. This reminded me of an exhibition I had seen on the top floor of the Saatchi Gallery, small pictures of victims of the war in Afghanistan. So many faces. So many different expressions. Eyes looking in different directions. Different skin-tones. What I need is more faces, more people. I would like it if viewers did not know quite where to look. Or maybe they would be drawn to one face, one pair of eyes.
I have looked at the work of artist John Stezaker. It is interesting how he pulls different faces together as one.

The odd juxtaposition of tones made me think that instead of using the same size box for each face, the same colour and texture of paper, the same colour printing, I could experiment. I would like to incorporate collage, photos and paint.

I had the idea of putting a baby in my picture. It came from the idea of parallel play – babies playing side by side but independently, self-absorbed, oblivious of one another. 

I played with the idea of putting a character from Vermeer in the picture. But it seemed too much. And I thought it would result in a mixed message. I wanted to keep it fairly direct.

Some Recent Exhibitions

Fight the Nothingness
A couple of weeks ago I went to see David Shrigley's exhibition at The Hayward Gallery. To me, he seemed like a clever cartoonist. Most of the pieces depended on captions written either directly on the picture, or close by. For example, a rough-drawn fist with the writing, FIGHT THE NOTHINGNESS. Or the cow looking back at the woman milking it, and saying WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? I found the cartoons funny, but did wonder what the hell I was doing, there...

Joy in People
Jeremy Deller's work at the Hayward Gallery was remarkably varied, but not much interested me very much. A crushed, rusted car. A functioning tea shop. A 3D film of bats. An outline map of of the UK with Iraqi place names and a similar one of Iraq with UK place names. A film of wrestlers. A set of stamping machines that you could put sheets of paper in to spell out phrases like HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE'S MONEY and A GROUP OF PEOPLE STANDING OUTSIDE A CLOSED DAY CENTRE. It all seems to me to be not nearly as clever as it thinks it is.

To the River
This exhibition by Sophy Rickett at The Arnolfini in Bristol was a video installation with various screens. The screens show various people hanging around waiting for the Severn Bore. And there are recordings of the crowd as they wait. The river and the landscape are never shown. All we have are the people and what they say. And what they talk about is interesting: a fox dead in the tide-line; the stress around crossing the weir at night.

It was interesting, the way the screens and voices arranged around the room. It created a brilliant, sombre and moving atmosphere.

Someone Else
Another exhibition at The Arnolfini in Bristol, this time by Indian artist, Shilpa Gupta. A Singing Cloud was extraordinary, a large object made of 4000 microphones with an audio loop. My favourite was a Motion Flap-Board that reminded me of the noticeboards at train stations. It flipped through a number of statements. Gupta says she is interested in 'the media that we employ...and the loss of the inherent gap that takes place during the process of communication. I am interested in the process of absence, which could take place in the authoritative mode of history writing, of censorship, or simply even how our actions are largely controlled by the unconscious'. I thought if I wrote this out it would make more sense. It doesn't.

Lygia Pape

Today I went to an exhibition at The Serpentine Gallery called Magnetized Space, featuring works by the late Brazilian artist, Lygia Pape. The exhibition included films, prints, paintings and sculpture.

Pape was a founding member of the Neo-Concrete movement – where the object wasn't as important as the feelings it could generate. The work was pretty experimental and abstract. Pape said 'My concern is always invention. I always want to invent a new language that's different for me and for others, too'. I didn't really get it - apparently many of the works were a response to political repression in the 1960s and I don't know anything about that era in Brazil. It was a little bit confusing.

The woodcuts, abstract patterns, weren't that well cut or that well printed, to my mind - but then, I think that not many people are familiar with the medium of woodcuts, so might have a different approach to them.

The films and the prints didn't really capture my interest. A big series of square paintings (called Book of Time) that looked a little like emoticons and a little like stages in a origami instruction book were a bit more interesting. Not one is the same. Apparently each is meant to represent a day.

The one piece that really did impress me was an installation called Ttéia 1, C (Web). It consists of a series of fine wires arranged in square tunnels, cleverly lit in a deep dark space.

They reminded me of shafts of light in a forest - but there was also something urban and architectural about them. The way they criss-crossed was really impressive. There was something really beautiful and challenging about this work that struck me as special - and challenged me in a way I hadn't expected.

David Hockney

Today I went to the David Hockney exhibition at the RA. I did not know quite what to expect. The reviews had been mixed, to say the least. His old art teacher had said that he had become a decorator.

For me, though, there were several impressive things about the pictures. The multi-panel paintings worked well. I like the idea of working at large scale and this is an easy way to do it. The use of colour is important, the brightness and 'clean-ness'. The speed of painting, especially in the Woldgate Woods sequence.

The extent of his obsession with recording his vision. There is so much work here! His versatility. I had seen his iPhone pictures before, but the iPad pictures, scaled up, looked very good. The 51 prints making up The Arrival of Spring were all very well done. I also liked his film work. It was a very interesting idea, putting nine digital cameras on the bonnet of a jeep and using the films to create a huge eighteen-screen images, is impressive. There is an energy about Hockney's work in this exhibition and a dedication that really inspired me. On the other hand, the quality of the painting isn't always great, it seems to me hurried at times – which I guess is a rather obvious thing to say...he is trying to capture a mood, a light - and he is painting, often (always?) on site...

The Sermon on the Mount sequence struck me, too, as being out of place with the rest, but at the same time it demonstrated Hockney's energy and range of interests. All in all, very enjoyable.

Enid Marx

Also at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester was a small exhibition of engravings and linocuts by Enid Marx - who I connect with patterned papers on book covers.

I was interested to see how she used stylisation so effectively in her work - and managed to bring some humour, even happiness, to simple ideas. For example, the fishbone feathers in the tail of the cockerel. (Odd choice of paper for the printed engravings, by the way. They'd work much better on smooth paper, in my view.)

The use of colour in the seascape is particularly well done, although I suppose it is rather childish, in a way.

Edward Burra

On Saturday I went to the Edward Burra exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester. I didn't really know what to expect. Burra struck me as a strange artist. I couldn't quite understand why he had chosen to paint so much in watercolours. To me, oils would have been better. (I guess that is his choice!)

A good example of his style is Striptease, above. There is an almost-cartoony style to certain elements – for example, the clown above the stage, his eyes rolling towards the performer. Then there is a huge sense of menace that's hard to explain. It is a combination of the ugliness of the audience and most of the characters, their lurid green faces, the leering grins and, most of all, the bright eyes gazing fiercely in different directions, like spotlights - fierce rays of light criss-crossing like Kitty Krause's lightboxes (below).