Some rough notes from the studio:

The ‘necessary insanity’ of chaos in the studio

There is a lot discussed about how artists work in the studio and what it means metaphorically, as a space for creativity; a state of mind of the artist etc. but ultimately, it is just a working space. Some people have an office or a potting shed that they retreat to; artists gravitate to a studio, through need.

I have come to think a little more about how I work in my studio as I have had to do some renovations to the outside, I can begin to look objectively at it as a working space, however, I’d never consider it in terms of a romanticised space for the creative act, as it usually stinks of turps and I have to clamber over stuff to get to the paintings being worked on, and am usually unhappy with what comes from it.

However, in the words of James Elkins in his book ‘What Painting Is’ you would believe that the painter in his studio works like this:

‘Working in a studio means leaving the clean world of normal life and moving into shadowy domain where everything bears the marks of the singular obsession. Outside the studio, furniture is clean and comfortable, inside, it is old and unpleasant. Outside walls are monochrome or pleasantly patterned in wallpaper; inside, they are scarred with meaningless graffiti. Outside, floors can be mopped and vacuumed; inside, they build up layers of crusted paint that can only be scraped away or torn up with the floor itself. The studio is a necessary insanity. Perhaps writers have insanities of paper, or of erasers, but they cannot compare with the multicoloured dementia caused by fluids and stone.’

A ‘necessary insanity’. I had not considered this as a way of looking at what takes place in the studio an ‘insanity’, and what is produced at the end, but Elkins is right. The reason for this is that you are only there for one thing, to paint. It is not about appearances, unless you have an immaculate studio, which would suggest little work being done (unless you are an obsessive-compulsive minimalist?) studio’s should be ready for action, get in, pick up where you left off and start painting..

Elkins goes on saying:

‘Waking each morning and going into a room suffused with the penetrating sharp odour of turpentine and oil, standing at the same table so covered with clotted paints that it no longer has a level to spot for a coffee cup, looking at the same creaking easel spattered with all the same colours-that is the daily experience of serious painters, and it is what tempts insanity. Some artists try to keep the studio at bay by keeping it neat, or by putting their easel in the corner of a larger room, but the effect is like cleaning an infection: no matter how well swabbed the wound may be, it is useless to pretend it is healthy, or that the infection does not exist.’

Well I’m not sure how many contemporary artists use easels rather than the walls or the floor, but I think we can get the point. The main thing is to ensure that your time in the studio is spent taking you somewhere..

As Brice Marden suggests, it’s how you exist in the studio that creates the works anyway, its already there:

‘The paintings come out of these studios really reflect the places. It’s not as if you are sort of conceptualists, going around applying some idea. Your idea is coming from how you exist within where you are. That is in the painting, its part of the whole expression.’

What interests me is how we look at painting and especially abstract paintings during the process of painting. There are a number of artists who have explored this, too numerous to mention, but ultimately this is what we seek, a visceral other-ness coupled with a physical object that a painting is. On page 88 Elkins explores this:

‘..it may be that the human mind can only think of one aspect at a time: either a painting is what it represents, or it is a fabrication done on a flat surface. Or perhaps it is possible to think of both the surface and what seems to be behind it at once, in a ‘twofoldness’ of attention that takes in both equally.’

But that requires much manoeuvring through conscious and unconscious understanding of where we are in the process:

Gerhard Richter talks about this in ‘The Daily Practice of Painting 1962-1993’ in his entry for 18^th May 1985, on page 121, he states:

‘When I paint an abstract picture, I neither know in advance what it is that I am aiming at and what to do about getting there. Painting is consequently an almost blind, desperate effort, like that of a person abandoned, helpless, in totally incomprehensible surroundings-like that of a person who posses a given set of tools, materials and abilities and has the urgent desire to building something useful which isn’t allowed to be a house or a chair or something else that has a name; who therefore hacks away in the vague hope that by working in a proper and professional way, he will ultimately turn out something proper and meaningful..anthing goes; so why do I often spend weeks over adding one thing? What am I making that I want? What picture of what?’

But to counterbalance Richter’s despair, we know why we are there in the studio, as the remarkable photographer Joel Meyerowitz has questioned in himself:

‘What are we trying to get to in the making of anything? We’re trying to get to ourselves. What I want is more of my feelings and less of my thoughts. I want to be clear. Whether you’re making images, poetry, painting, music or love, you should be totally enraptured by that, by the experience itself. That’s what it is about-the location of subject, it’s about the passage of the experience itself, in its wholeness, through you back into the world, selected out by your native instincts. That’s what artists do. They separate their experience from the totality, from raw experience, and it’s the quality of their selections that makes them visible to the world. What is the art experience about? Really, I’m not interested in making ‘Art’ at all. I never, ever, think about it. To say the world ‘art’ it’s almost like a curse on art. I do know that I want to try to get to myself. The older I get, the more indications I have about what it is to get closer to yourself. You try less hard. I just want to be.’

With that in mind, I want more of my feelings and less of my thoughts, it’s time for the studio..seeya

Coming across some Patrick Heron prints in the foyer of Bedruthen Steps Hotel in Cornwall on a sunny January day.

I came across some of those classic 70’s prints at the Bredruthen Steps Hotel between Watergate Bay and Newquay on the North Coast. They were just inside the foyer, shaded from the bright white light of the January morning coming in from the beach with the tide.

The simplicity of these works is what we remember Heron for. They retain an intensity that suggest the colours, usually Cadmium Red, Vermillion and Dioxide Purple, actually vibrate next to each other in their organic lozenge shapes, tethered to their space, playing their part of the composition-oscillating colour!

This pair of modest sized prints had so much power compared to those of the landscape paintings of the coasts of Cornwall on the walls around them by other artists, in this lovely louche yet chic hotel. That these two prints should reflect so subtly the rocks, coves and pools that Cornwall is known and for it to be expressed so deftly in an abstract language by a master of British abstraction most probably unknown to many visitors who pass the prints on the way from the bar to the toilet and back to the bar again as we did. A distraction from the conversation, company, they retain your gaze, steady your balance as all good art should, they seem so aptly placed.

I have a soft spot for Patrick Heron and his paintings. There are few abstract painters in Britain of the last 50 years that achieved as much as he has as a painter, a critic, writer and educator. In post-war Britain, especially London, when Tate had a ‘the’ in front and wasn’t particularly Modern, there was little serious interest in abstraction, let alone in the work of the ‘fiddling rustics’ down in Cornwall known as the ‘St.Ives School’.

In a small way this began to change during the 1950’s and early 60’s, with the rise of Abstract Expressionism in the USA and a more sympathetic understanding in Europe of the significance abstraction played in modernist movements by artists such as Mondrian, Kandinsky, Albers, Masson and others. In time we have come to understand that they were the true modern painters compared with the figurative artists such as Bacon, Bratby and Freud always lauded so much by the British.

Heron kept plugging away, he had strong connections with Greenberg in America and many many American artists, as well as other European artists and movements such as the CoBrA Movement ( and he kept up a correspondence with with the enigmatic maverick Constant.) He was also a friend of Herbert Read and other writers, critics and dealers. As a critic himself, for the New Statesman among others, he was able to push ideas around abstraction to a level that had not been done before and is sadly still not as eloquently done by any of today’s contemporary painters.

Heron did much to blow his own trumpet and those of others, some his friends such as Peter Lanyon, William Scott, Terry Frost, Bryan Wynter and Willemina Barns-Graham.

He saw his generation of painters and especially himself, as following historically the modernist 'tradition' in painting after Braque, Bonnard, Cezanne and Matisse.

And so these subtle luminous prints go on oscillating, between the bar and the toilet, regardless of the temporary inhabitants knowledge of this truly British modern master.

(These two prints are from 1970 and are not from the Bedruthen Steps Hotel (they are however from the same print run and are courtesy of the Adam Gallery, Bath.)

Mel Gooding Lecture on Mary Fedden, ICIA, University of Bath (24/07/08)

This was a fascinating lecture on the artist Mary Fedden by the art historian and biographer Mel Gooding. In this lecture we were taken through the works of Fedden's long career with specific focus on the paintings she made in the 1950’s and 60’s.

For me she is one of those artists that sits between abstraction and figuration in a way that only the British can. Not quite committing, yet bringing fourth a metaphysical landscape instead. In her most successful paintings ‘Hopjes’ from the mid sixties, ‘Blue Still Life’ from 1969 and other simple table top still life paintings, she is able to express, through paint, what she is thinking beyond the simple objects in front of her.

She explores the colour and the space between the objects, but also something else. Something that makes you see them as shapes first, surreal yet familiar, (influenced by her late husband the painter Julian Trevelyan) sitting on arched plains that drop down the picture plane in front of you, neither real nor imagined viewpoints but found ones created through the process of each painting.

Gooding discussed the ability Fedden has in transforming scenes of objects ‘alchemically’. How she creates ‘the mythic from the commonplace object’. There is a deep understanding of colour taken from both Braque's late ‘Atelier’ paintings and Matisse’s ‘Red Studio’ of 1911; where space, perspective and ‘objecthood’ are questioned through the act of seeing through painting.

The University of Bath now has a Fedden Room at No.16 Lansdown Crescent at the Vice Chancellors Office. This now comprises of four paintings and one drawing, including a recent donation from Fedden herself called ‘The Feather’ of 2007. These were exhibited alongside nine other paintings from local collections. An impressive little exhibition full of vitality.

http://www.bath.ac.uk/news/2008/7/28/maryfeddenroom.html

The significance of a 'lyrical' abstraction in painting by David Moxon:

Monet / Cy Twombly / Joan Mitchell / Patrick Heron

Rationale: This essay is responding to the way painting, especially abstraction, is being pumeled to death with the overloading of our senses with paintings of the ironic/Pop Art/icon style. My frustration is that these paintings are little more than paintings copied from photographs and filled in like a colour by numbers template . My concern is that any aesthetic consideration, when viewing paintings that are abstract in nature, is being starved of oxygen. These paintings require more than an intellectual response of a few seconds, they requires 'time', to reflect, to absorb and to respond...

'A single line, violent, passionate, broken, or beautifully calm, regular, uniform, conveys what we are feeling. It corresponds to what we are living through..' Hans Hartung

Painting. What is it about the act of painting that is so captivating? The process of painting, the creative act of placing pigment on canvas is an extraordinary experience..

I am thinking beyond any romantic ideas about the smell of linseed oil or turpentine in the studio or the image of the artist out on some kind of action-painting bender; drunk on the stuff in a Pollock-like fury.


Hans Namuth, Jackson Pollock in his studio

I am interested in paintings and not pictures. Paintings that require some thought beyond a merely visual reading of the subject matter. Perhaps, I am thinking about the 'letting go', that is required from us as a ‘viewer’ to go beyond just looking. For me painting and especially abstraction, is an activity that coalesces the engagement between thought, material and action. A process that responds to the 'feel' of the painting.

There is something of the epic, of Renaissance heroicism, in the large painterly canvases of Pollock, De Kooning, Rothko and Kline. The power these paintings reflect through there size is important to painting in the second half of the twentieth century. We read these paintings through the physiological effect that they exhude. This can only be received when standing in front of one of them, yet we know them best through tiny images in books. When was the last time you stood infront of a Pollock?

There is an energy in the use of the large expanse of space that these painters brought to modern art, through the interaction of colours, the shapes or gestures that remain on the picture plane. In this age of instant gratification, perhaps something is being missed here when not standing in front of a real painting. We can learn a lot from looking at developments taking place little over a hundred years ago by Monet. A debt of gratitude that the art historian Jed Pearl in his article, 'After Monet', Modern Painters, Spring 1993. He suggested many artists have followed in the direction of Monet, perhaps indirectly, and with specific interest in the late and large series of paintings entitled 'Water Lilies’. These are now in the Musee de' l'Orangerie, Paris, at MOMA, New York and London's Tate Modern, to name a few.



Claude Monet. Water Lilies. c.1920.
Oil on canvas, triptych, each section 6'6" x 14" (200 x 425 cm).The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. (Photograph ©1997 The Museum of Modern Art, New York, by Kate Keller/Erik Landsberg)

This is often where there is a concern with the modern artist and his/her choice in subject matter. Good painting doesn’t need subject matter. How important is it that something is from reality or non figurative? The interest for me, lies in what response we receive from the painting, for instance, as a subject matter how interesting are water lilies on the surface of a pond? Is it the way the water lilies are painted that we pick up on or is it the transference of the water lilies into paint onto the surface of the canvas that we some how receive visually? In this way good painting transmits a signal that requires more than just an intellectual response, surely it triggers your visual experience, and that subsequently triggers your emotional response, just like music can.

When visiting the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as a student, I stood in a large room of Clifford Still paintings, they were the large, black, red, yellow and brown paintings from the late fifties, they opened up the room in terms of colour and space, they jumped back and forth, what Hans Hofmann called the ‘push and pull’ of the picture plane. These paintings came alive in a way that was not just visual, especially those jagged fault lines of Stills; compressed next to each other like the surface of a cliff (no pun intended). It was a defining moment for me; I then went around the museum, looking at the paintings through this understanding of a perceived depth, trying to decipher the paintings through this 'visual experince' which could actually be called 'sensation'. The funny thing was, I was not even fond of Still’s work, but the concept of painting in that way, in that size, worked, it could equally have been Pollock, Rothko or Kline, or any of the others come to think of it..

The painting of Cy Twombly work in a similar way. His paintings are the ultimate in ‘epic’ sized ideas, especially in An Analysis of a Rose as Sentimental Despair a triptych from 1985, Twombly is transmitting something powerful, a subdued act. It echoes what Harold Rosenberg suggested in the 1950's:

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American after another as an arena in which to act...What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.



Cy Twombly, Untitled panel V of V
(An Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair)
(the colour is more subtle on the original painting)

Few artists seem to communicate in this strange energised frequency that Twombly maintains, yet Joan Mitchell comes close. For these artists abstraction is not just somewhere to explore and experiment with gestures, marks and forms. Nor is it a safe platform for visual communication, good abstraction, occupies an arena that is constantly moving, vibrating with energy and restlessness. It should draw in some other element; an unexpected spontaneous response through marks, a deliberate choice of colour that creates an awkwardness to the painting etc, to ensure that it does'nt fall into an all too easy parody of beauty. A number of works stand out as powerful evocations of this ‘arena’.

The large triptych at the Whitney Museum entitled Clearing by Mitchell, is one of them, with its large echoing black lozenge shapes and mauve ringed areas, and a later one ‘Untitled’ a diptych from 1992, that hovers in the centre of the paintings like the boughs of two trees in a Japanese garden.



Joan Mitchell, Clearing, 1973, oil on canvas, triptych, 9' 2 1/4" x 19' 8”


This painting can be traced back to Monet and his energised responses to the water lilies at his house in Giverny, France, towards the end of his life. Even if Mitchell is unaware of it, the influence is there. Monet’s paintings were shown later in New York after World War II, and bought by MOMA, seemed to have meant more to Abstract Expressionists, than any other artists in Europe at the time, except perhaps the artist Patrick Heron, who followed the modernist cause from Monet through Bonnard and Cezanne to Matisse and Braque, but didn’t expand his paintings on the scale of the American painters, until the sixties and seventies, but I'll be discussing him later.

Where else can we see the influence of Monet?

At the Whitney retrospective exhibition of Mitchell’s work, an essay in the catalogue brings forward the significance of the series of paintings, twenty-one in total painted in 1983–84 called 'La Grande Vallée'. Their is an essay by Whitney curator Yvette Y. Lee devoted to the series. Unfortunately, only three of the paintings are in the show, which makes it impossible to assess the impact of a body of work ideally seen as an environment. These lush, abundant paintings are landscape impressions, predominantly floral in feeling. They clearly echo Monet's 'Water Lilies' and other garden subjects like 'The Japanese Footbridge', and the 'Grande Vallée' cycle is deeply indebted to the Impressionist master, never mind the repeated denials by the catalogue authors.

But lets look at the processes used by Joan Mitchell in her painting:

Her paintings are about the very materiality of paint; slashing strokes, colour over colour and scratchy, tangled lines characterize these early works from the fifties.

Mitchell worked to a distinctive palette and personal vocabulary of marks from beginning to end. Green, blue, orange, black, and white are favoured colors. According to Brenda Richardson's essay for the Whitney Museum Retrospective, her marks include:

• choppy vertical smears, rather like a color test, usually in pairs,
• thin "washes" of pastel hues (lime, flesh, rose, slate blue)
• daubs of impasto, almost always on top of other paint
• slashing strokes, long and stiff, vaguely scimitar-like
• eroding or "melting" once-geometric rectangles, mounds, or blobs and drips

Nearly all her paintings use nearly all her colours and all her marks in some combination; the paintings are almost always all-over mat in finish (glazed bits appear only occasionally). A painting like 'Low Water', 1969, is absolutely classic Mitchell, combining all of the above in hieratic descent.


Joan Mitchell, Ici, 1963

Mitchell first visited Paris in 1948 and was to stay there from 1955 until she died in 1992. During this time she met the Canadian-born French artist Jean-Paul Riopelle; they remained close for the next 25 years, lived together from at least 1960 to 1979. There was a close dialogue between his Surrealist-influenced "action" painting and her own Abstract Expressionist oeuvre. There are also in Mitchell's art the impact of contemporaries like the German abstract painter and theorist E.W. Nay, who developed the theory that "to paint is to form the picture from colour." A similar approach adopted by Patrick Heron at around the same, this is discussed later in this essay. Mitchell lived on the banks of the Seine at Vétheuil from 1967. Paris was only thirty-five miles away; here was the cannon of European modern art, the Courbet and the Impressionists at the Museum D’Orsay and Monet’s ‘Water lilies’ at the Orangerie.

As for contemporary artists of the time, she presumably had the opportunity to consider the work of Europeans of shared sensibility, artists like Mathieu, Soulages, de Staël, Vedova, and even Alechinsky and Jorn of the CoBrA group who would have often exhibited in Paris. The CoBrA artists believed in spontaneous painting, what one writer described as "pure psychic improvisation," this view was shared by Mitchell, who said she never planned her paintings, never thought about them, never did preliminary sketches or laid down any "starter" outlines on the canvas. She insisted she just painted what she felt.

What other influenece are there on her work? You could add Phillip Guston’s early abstractions of the fifties and Sam Francis on a good day, Deep, Orange and Black from 1955, in particular. As well as having strong friendships with Philip Guston, they lived in the same apartment block in New York. It was the work of Sam Francis which Mitchell took most creative influence from. What these artists retain in their paintings is a quality that engages your senses rather than your intellectual powers. They state almost immediately a familiarity in their forms that suggests nature, but it is painting imitating nature, a virtual reality drawn from nature, existing in colour pigment, gestures, the use of space or the resonance of the forms on a surface, what Irwin Edman stated in ‘Arts and the Man’ back in 1928:

A painting is not a design in spots, meant merely to out do a sunset; it is a richer dream of experience meant to outshine the reality

The subject matter could be trees, it could be a wood, could be an old wall or ruin, it could be anything, but it’s paint responding to the artists physical movements and sporadic hand gestures on the surface of the canvas. the paintings success is at the whim of the artists feeling or his sensations. It’s paint in its most dangerous and potent form…

Another artist who took the large scale painting from Monet was Patrick Heron. Consider, the late Heron paintings from the eighties, that he called ‘Garden’ paintings. They retain a freshness and vibrancy still. when looking at these paintings are we meant to perceive these forms squeezed straight out of the tube across the canvas or the blobs of pigment as specific native flowers from Australia, where many of the paintings were made? Or like the Clifford Still paintings do they respond physiologically? Again that feeling of space is present, of a space made from colour. Heron did suggest that the time has come to give up 'to truly sensational painting.’ Here he is not copying nature but evoking it.

Let's look at Heron in more detail:



Patrick Heron,Big Purple Painting: July 1983-June 1984

Big Purple Garden Painting: July 1983-June 1984…This painting has similarities to the paintings of Mitchell’s, as a horizontal canvas that echoes Monet’s late paintings. On Heron, Mel Gooding referred to reading 'Big Purple Garden Painting', through the lateral scanning across the canvas:

..a process of continuous apprehension that moves across the surface, from left to right and back again as the eye is enhanced by the flicker of light, and then caught by the space of the experienced world, and the eye seems to glide into an indeterminate distance, potentially infinite.

But as Gooding continued to discuss, there are obvious differences, Monet, being a nineteenth century painter, is interested in the ‘descriptive’ qualities of paint and Heron, being a late twentieth century painter who’s raison d’etre is ‘paint as colour, colour as paint’.

But again we have this interest in the ‘visceral’ qualities of paint, where the transformation from an observed and lived experience like Monet to the more ‘sensed’, in Herons words, to ‘translate sensation into terms of aesthetic emotion’.

What is interesting is considering Heron in the same light as Twombly and Mitchell as a lyrical abstraction painter. I believe we have a series of paintings that emerged in the early eighties from Heron’s Porthmoer studio in St.Ives, Cornwall that will be seen as a highly significant body of work, that should be considered with Twombly and Mitchell's oeuvre.

Alongside Big Purple Garden Painting: July 1983-June 1984, there is Red Garden Painting: June 3-5 1985, White Garden Painting: May 25-June 12, and Pale Garden Painting: July-August 1984. To me these are the embodiment of what painting is about, they sit individually as explorations of paint on a surface tracing the artists movements in front of the canvas, transformed to spontaneous actions on its surface. These evocations could refer to a real landscape but this never really emerges, they exist as an alternative landscape transformed through ‘sensation’.



Patrick Heron, Red Garden Painting:June 3-5, 1985



Patrick Heron, Pale Garden Painting, July-August 1984

Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly and Patrick Heron are still painters that retain a fragility, a concentrated energy in their work, a possibility of what painting can achieve.

To sum up, in 1958, Cy Twombly he wrote in the magazine L'Esperienza Moderna:

'Action must prove from time to time the realisation of life. Act is therefore the primary sensation. In painting act is the formation of the image, the mechanical action of its evolution, the direct or indirect impulse brought to exasperation in this high act which is invention'

Bibliography:

Jed Pearl, After Monet, Modern Painters, Spring, 1993
David Sylvester, Cy Twombly-Theatre of Operations, Modern Painters, Issue 7, 1995
Mel Gooding, Patrick Heron, Phaidon, 1994
Richard Green Galleries, Patrick Heron: The Shape of Colour, Exhibition catalogue, May 2006
Siri Hursvedt, The Mysteries of the Rectangle-Essays on Painting, Princeton Architectural Press, 2005
Alan Gouk, Article: An Evening with Patrick Heron: 1998, State of Art: Notebook
James Elkins, What painting Is, Routledge, 2000
Brenda Richardson, Review: Joan Mitchell exhibition, Whitney Museum, 2002