New Blood Art Blog

In My Craft or Sullen Art

Newbloodart — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:57:35 +0000

Emma Tann’s piece In My Craft or Sullen Art is beautifully invested in the source from which the title was derived. It is a piece of art – something to be viewed and studied – but it also as forlorn and unattended as a spider web.

In My Craft or Sullen Art

BY DYLAN THOMAS

In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labour by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart

From the raging moon I write

On these spindrift pages

Nor for the towering dead

With their nightingales and psalms

But for the lovers, their arms

Round the griefs of the ages,

Who pay no praise or wages

Nor heed my craft or art.

hfhffhjhjfhjf

We are all made of stars

garethbuxton — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:51:03 +0000

Carl Sagan the American astronomer said

“Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. ”

I remember watching with wonder Carl Sagan’s series “Cosmos” on Channel 4 in the 1980′s. For me the stars and the night sky have always seemed as beautiful as the daylight landscape. So as a slight diversion from my normal landscape work I have redirected my thoughts to representing nature on a grander scale. Over the past few years I have developed working practices that have help me represent the landscape and in particular the changing weather. So its not been a difficult transition in using the same knowledge to represent nebulae, stars and clusters.

Its early days yet but the canvas starts with a gesso black undercoat and then Mars Black layer on top see below.

Apologies for the poor photograph, taking photos of black canvases is quite tricky.

Painting the dust clouds is similar to painting mist. The star details are speckled and then many stars are added individually. Its time consuming but very relaxing. The end result so far looks something like this

I am encouraged by the early results, this canvas is only 30x30cm. The next one is 75×60 cm. I will post again when I have made some progress. I would be interested to hear what you think.

New Blood Art Film: Bartosz Beda

Newbloodart — Fri, 18 May 2012 07:10:43 +0000

This week we are proud to premiere a series of films on New Blood Art artists. The first film is about Bartosz Beda, whose gestural painting offers an emotional charge that is outside of words.

You can view the film via the link below. The film is a collaboration between this month’s Guest Curator, filmmaker Sam Norton and New Blood Art’s new Associate Creative Director, Soraya Gilanni.

We hope you enjoy it and look forward to your feedback.

Artefacts and Other Finds

Beatie — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:46:53 +0000

By a friend’s suggestion, I paid a recent visit to the Freud Museum, which turned out to be unexpectedly inspiring. So, I thought I’d document it here as an interesting find and a worthwhile place to visit if you get the chance.

On a leafy road near Finsbury Park, Sigmund Freud’s last home contains some exhibition rooms, a beautiful garden, and one particular room where he had worked by himself and with his patients. In this long, dimly lit room were his analytic couch resplendent in rugs and cushions, a heavy library full of science, art, history and language, some da Vinci and Rembrandt prints, and most compellingly a vast collection of small and strange artefacts that he had collected in Vienna, most of a vague human shape but others in shapes of implements and other odd forms.

There was something magnetic about the artefacts: somewhere in between a simple nugget of natural material and a recognisable subject, they said so much more to me than a fully realistic, detailed figurine. I felt that they held a much larger presence than their material reality: it was not so much the objects’ iconic meaning, or that they were around twenty centuries old, so much as the sensation that one got from that particular kind of half-formed figure. When you can’t quite put your finger on it – on its scale, it’s form, it’s expression – this is where I feel a visceral experience, a particular sense of time.

I keep coming back to Bridget Riley’s essay entitled ‘The Artist’s Eye: Seurat’ (1992), where she wrote,

‘we cannot sometimes be sure of the identity or even of the actual forms we are looking at [in Seurat's work]. To put it another way, by confronting us with an experience just beyond our visual grasp, with something unfathomable, the im-perceptible in short, Seurat asks: What is that we are looking at? … he fabricates the answer to the question by holding up a sort of mirror; and what we see is ourselves looking.’

It is this ‘seeing ourselves looking’ that intrigues me and drives my creative practice. Seeing those strange artefacts at the Freud Museum spurred me on to the British Museum, where I found many eroded stone works and reliefs, many from the Parthenon and others from the Nile Valley, some of which had become so worn that they held both the pure materiality of crumbly stone and the smoothness of a carved image, alternately in and out across the stone relief picture plane. There was an amazing sense of flicking back and forth between two things, and again, I became aware of the process of seeing, and how we make sense of our perceptions.

Above is a drawing I made just prior to the visits, where I was really interested in creating a sensation for the eye, and below is a drawing made on my return, where I looked to figure out a way of describing a surface-object that could create a kind of visceral sensation. I’m excited about following these paths and seeing where they might lead.

Work in progress- What’s so funny Jack?

Hewittus — Thu, 17 May 2012 20:46:20 +0000

This is the start of my latest painting- using my beloved Acrylic paint ( how I love your super fast drying ways!) As you can see it’s far from the finished stage but you can see the basic image. This is painted from a photograph of mine that I took in Southport a couple of weeks back. A photo of the Jolly Jack laughing sailor in the Victorian arcade at the then end of Southport Pier. I had to paint this photo as watching Jolly Jack laughing his head off like he’s on some some manic high is just so shockingly sinister and cruel! I just couldn’t believe how desperate and mocking his laugh was- especially along side the malevolent look on his face. It kind of made me think how he sums up the recession in the U.K at the moment- particularly up North.

I usually choose pictures to paint from in quite an arbitrary way- little things that might interest me in an image or what other kinds of things I associate with an image. So for me this painting has had a bit more thought, structure and planning than usual- especially regarding how I want to paint it. I usually have quite an autonomous approach to painting whereby I don’t think I just paint! like Gerhard Richter once said ‘painting is thinking’ ! whereas for this painting I have intentions!- basically I want it to look aged to reflect how run down a lot of towns are in this country- the painting like most of the country will have a general air of neglect with the content of the painting (Jolly Jack’s malevolent stare and crazy laugh) reinforcing the fact that the government aren’t interested and if we didn’t laugh we would certainly cry!

Anyhow must get on and paint it! hopefully the painting will turn out like I planned?

The House of New Blood Art

Newbloodart — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:57:38 +0000

For children of a certain generation the illustrator Richard Scarry’s Busytown was a homely but nonetheless baptismal first encounter with a depiction of Being-in-the-World – a particular and supervening awareness of the worldhood of the world. I remember the reading* of his books being an eye-widening experience, verging on a kind of sensory overload, so many details required attending to, while the overall picture beamed out coherently. The bustle and intricacy of his books was for a many a first dawning of the different occupations people can have in the world, even the notion of difference and variety, awaking an itching sense of possibilities.

Annotation of people and the objects that signify, reveal and distil them, and activity-filled cross sections of highly partitioned spaces are, it seems, excellent devices for calling forth this particular form of awareness of the world’s worldiness. The delight of exactly this quality in Richard Scarry’s work can be found in the films of Wes Anderson, when he allows us to see the invested minutiae of the Tenenbaum household, (achieving that impossibility – neat clutter) or the cross-section of the submarine in The Life Aquatic, showing the detail and mere procession of the lives of its occupants.

There is something possibly theatrical about a house without a façade, in the sense that it makes us suddenly alert to and tender towards the everyday: ordinary hard work, day-to-day endeavours, the daily return to the same tools – in short, the miracle of habit. And increasingly the façadeless house recurs to me as a good, and apt, image for what is happening here at New Blood Art – a house made of rooms of great endeavour and activity, open to the world, and without a homogenizing house style imposed on the artefacts created within its walls.

reading, or viewing, retreating from, returning to, taking in

New work and news

georgie — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:55:58 +0000

It’s been a while since I last posted. I haven’t been idle though, just developing, thinking, layering, painting over, and turning pieces to face the wall… They get on my nerves when they aren’t working, and sometimes I think they’re finished, only to realise they aren’t after a couple of weeks. I put up nails in the studio recently so I could hang ‘finished’ paintings and just look at them over a period of weeks to see if they do work.

Currently my work seems to be incorporating so much, gardens, clouds, gesture, colour & control. Speaking of colour, I spent a week removing the pond from our garden, moved the bird table and now we have a whole plethora of new bird visitors, including a stunning, hot pink Bullfinch – I am quite obsessed with this beautiful finch, his colouring is simply incredible.

In other news, I met Princess Anne yesterday (dressed a bit neater than in the above picture!), shook her hand and made conversation about my paintings, she was very brisk and kept the conversation flowing… The princess was formally opening the new J2 Centre, a state of the art leisure complex in Newcastle –Under – Lyme. The space includes a light, spacious gallery area showcasing the work of local artists.

My work’s been hanging there since December 2011 (link to images of the work in situ) and will be in the space till June. It was actually a really fun morning, what with the excitement and formality of it all (I’d secretly been dreading it) I particularly enjoyed chatting to the other artists, chatting to the dignitaries about my work, enjoying the free cups of tea and musing on the odd opportunities being an artist affords me.

Surrey Open Art Competition

Emma C Tabor — Wed, 09 May 2012 14:53:17 +0000

Whilst little has been written much has been happening. I have been working hard at Ochre Print Studios where I am currently artist in residence. It has been a wonderful opportunity to have the time and access with the studio and it has been possible to work on a whole new series of prints.

I have been exploiting the potential of the silkscreen mono-printing technique. It allows for a quite painterly look which would be difficult to achieve by other techniques. It is also possible to print multiple layers of ink and gradually build up an image, as well as using more conventional stencil methods.

I have also been working on both canvas and paper to see what differences occur. The canvas prints have a slightly softer finish but with more luminosity in the colour which is really effective. But it is also the challenge that they give the viewer that is interesting. The painterly look on canvas gives an initial impression that it is a painting, while in reality it is a print, which can be determined on a closer inspection.

One of the recent prints on canvas was recently accepted into the Surrey Open Art Exhibition currently on at the Lightbox gallery in Woking.

It was exciting to have my most recent work acknowledged in this way. The work is relatively small 30cm square, but I have now started working on some larger pieces which are proving quite a challenge.

Rebecca Fontaine Wolf’s Maxine in the Morning

Newbloodart — Tue, 08 May 2012 18:31:30 +0000

Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf’s work attracts attention; the artist was selected for the BBC television series ‘Show Me the Monet’, and is now set to grace the cover of Art of England magazine (out on May 31st).

Here we take a closer look at her new painting Maxine in the Morning.

Original painting in oil, acrylic and gold leaf on canvas.

Mournful or merely thoughtful? Lonely or self-possessed? Maxine in the Morning depicts a solitary, beautiful figure at that time of day when, wordless from dreaming, you daily re-negotiate your relationship with outside things, and learn to accommodate the world once again. The figure has the languor that seems to overcome one perpetually in a hot climate, but there remains a flicker of tautness, as if she will not entirely succumb to comfort and decadence. As always in Rebecca Fontaine-Wolf’s pieces a dialectic is at work, here between softness and hardness, fullness and scarcity, limits and exoticism.

Fontaine-Wolf has often created work poised between the extremes of the photo-realistic and the Expressionist; polished fullness existing alongside the raw blank canvas. Here, there is a turn towards Symbolism, even Cloissonism, in the large areas of flat colour separated by dark contours reminiscent of Gauguin. The expressive use of colour suggests a subjective view that tinges the reality it cannot relent from shaping. The setting of the subject and the use of the graphic print, recalls Matisse’s textile works of women in exotically furnished interiors, though stripped back and contemporary, giving the work a similar Bohemian and faded grandeur.

The artist seems less and less to be overrunning limits and boundaries in her work, becoming more polished and contained on the physical surface, which only makes the work more mysterious. Here where the paint does make its presence overt, in the hair that devolves into drips of paint – as if to contain the figure flatly against the canvas – the spirit of exploration in this mysterious woman only seems more defiant.

Imagine the mystery of seeing a vast body of water for the first time…

Newbloodart — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 07:36:39 +0000

Sometimes artworks create a sense of mystery usually granted only to first times…

John Hainsworth, 'August', acrylic, oil and watercolour on aluminium mounted on 9mm mdf block.

Re-posted from It’s Nice That:

Matt Lee’s Presence of Absence photographic series features a “decontextualised black shape” looming ominously over a Bangalore apartment block. The title of the work suggests the shape is some kind of infinite void of time and space, poised on the brink of causing unthinkable chaos and destruction (see The Fifth Element for reference). Or perhaps it’s a giant black obelisk serving as a memento mori constantly reminding us of our fleeting time on this mortal plane. Either way it’s very sinister, or I’m very paranoid. – James Cartwright, It’s Nice That