Cover Artist for the April edition of AN

Wonderful news, this is going to be the cover image for next months AN. Totally out of the blue and apparently as a result of the review of the Newport show which was in this months copy. The kind people at AN even pay for the honor so, extra good news!

Although nothing is perfect, unfortunately the thing was put together in a bit of a rush and the text that goes with it is not as I would have liked, I never had a chance to even proof read it!

For a start I don’t think you can consider Euan Uglow a contemporary artist now that he is dead! More seriously the text was taken from an artist statement from before I was working with scientists and when I was working on the pseudo, fake and discredited sciences, such as phenomenology etc. I hope that no one from Cardiff University reads it and thinks I am talking about them! I am most certainly not! And there is no web address or contact details so I suspect I will see very little reaction to it. Anyway to put the record straight here is the cover of AN as it will be and here is also a recent copy of my CV. So you can all see exactly what I have been up to!

A little diversion from abstracted ideas of space and colour

As the title suggests I have recently briefly returned to painting from life.

First off there is this small little studio sketch. I particularly like the way it falls apart when you look closely. For example the linseed oil bottle on the far left which is just a few marks on the bare plywood background and yet becomes a bottle as you again as you move away. In a similar vein I like the way in which the brands of the paints can be made out and yet the whole things is a very quick sketch. i think it is about the minimal that can be done to make a painting, and as it is a painting about paint, I called it ‘Whats in a painting?’ – sorry for that…

The secondly, there is this little painting of the coloured blocks that I use to model the Chance composition and colour pieces. I loved the simplicity of the scene and have tried to capture this. Keeping everything as minimal as possible. The blocks are sat upon a cutting table in the studio and I love the roughness of the scored formica surface. Perhaps most interestingly by scoring down to the plywood support and by leaving the background unpainted, this painting makes links to the more graphic and abstracted series of works. I have been trying to work out how I might be able to tackle observational painting alongside the more graphic styles and this little painting my hold the key.

Continued work on the Chance colour and composition series.

Here are four new workks exploring the Chance colour and composition series. This series is now going to be continued alongside other works and may hopefully one day be shown together as one series of works. So they are made as paintings lite, they are small and done in acrylic to speed up drying times.

They still do all the same things. These ones, in particular, make the links to graphics and comic books explicit. Interestingly the black shadow seems to have flattened the images a little, so I suspect that I will avoid this and go back to using a wash to render the shadows.  Anyway here you go and I hope you enjoy them.

Composition Colour and spatial perception works

Here are a few new works that continue the series briefly mentioned earlier dealing with random compositional arrangements (although the cropping and selection is of course not a passive act, so perhaps chance arrangements is a better description). These are created by computer mapping simple elements like coloured blocks, dominoes and coloured sticks, which have been dropped onto a gridded table. In addition some faces of the cubes have been rendered invisible blending with the flat wooden background, setting up a tension between 2D pattern and 3D spatial illusion. Giving the pieces a spatial ambiguity that subtly grabs the attention of the viewer. The potential in these works is massive and this series is continuing as fast as I can to explore tints, representational elements in space, and variations in the degree of spatial tension and ambiguity.

Commercial work

I think it is time to document some of the commercial work I am doing on the blog site. Although I had intended to keep the two areas quite separate, I think now that it is perhaps more honest and forms a better portrait of the artist if I acknowledge both. If people dont like the idea that a conceptual artist does commercial work or vica versa, then they need to get their head out of their backside and smell the roses.

I have three main lines of commercial work, these include portraits, murals and pet portraits. In fact I will do pretty much anything! Some of the pet portraits are displayed on this blog… http://www.doggyportraits.blogspot.com/ but here are a couple…

 

This portrait below is a commission for St James Piccadilly in London. Hopefully it will be up and hanging later this year and you can visit it. Done from a single black and white portrait, this was a tricky commission balancing the needs of the family to have his sentimental nature recognised and the needs of the church who needed the portrait to match their other institutional portraits. Hopefully I succeeded.

And finally, here are a couple of examples of murals, both very different. the first is an abstract mural with an african landscape flavour that was commissioned for a stairwell in a domestic extension in Barry, South Wales. the other is an enchanted forest mural for a child’s bedroom in Cardiff. The forest is currently unpopulated as we have a deal with the child that she has to first name the animals she wants in the forest!

Milkwood residency September 2011

Again well after it has finished here is the report from the Milkwood show back in Sept/October 2011.

The residency was split into two parts. The first part was an experimental arts science laboratory where I gathered data on peoples responses to a range of pseudo scientific experiments. Key in this was the collaboration with Georgie Powell, PHD student at Cardiff School of Psychology. Georgie had been working on a project investigating the stability of coloured afterimages. http://psych.cf.ac.uk/contactsandpeople/pgs/powell.html

Using Georgie’s expert advice, I was able to create complimentary coloured after-images from exposure to a coloured stimulus, which were far stronger than I had ever seen. With the help of a friend and his soldering iron and the acquisition of two decommissioned laptop monitors, I made linked light pieces for the show.

 

 

 

 

When the green / blue circle went out a powerful orangey colour appeared and vic versa when the orangey red cross went out a powerful green / blue colour appeared. For me this piece was important in highlighting the illusion of colour. Emphasising the fact that colour does not exist in the world, but is imposed upon the world by our perception. Colour exists within us and not without. The experience of colour is a sort of visual coding that is applied to light of different wavelengths… but oh what a spectacularly beautiful and emotive coding!

In addition to this, I collected data on peoples music and colour associations to use in the ‘Made in Roath’ Conservatory project, already documented in this blog.

Dotty Illusion at Milkwood Sept/Oct 2011

The second part of the residency was an opportunity to show the remaining works from the degree show in Swansea, in Cardiff. Allowing people who had not seen them before to get the chance. For this I wanted to experiment with the installation by turning the basement space red. It gave, what was a dank poorly lit space, a rather cosy womb like feel, the mid tone quality of the colour also ensured the white canvases were not lost and that the plain wood panels stood out equally well. It is interesting that despite red being such a dominant colour it didnt seem to overwhelm the pictures, although it did completely change the mood of the show making it much more relaxed and informal. Interestingly in the Wet Paint exhibition at Newport Museum and Gallery in January 2012, Shaun Featherstone the curator, did a similar thing with the dotty illusion piece, putting it on a mid to dark toned grey background. Many thanks Shaun, it looked great.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The exhibition/residency was also an opportunity to let people play with the Anblickspiel dominoes and invent their own rules for the game, as well as showcase the first of the new series of works. These new works feature random, or chance arrangements of simple blocks with coloured surfaces. These arrangements are created by dropping the blocks onto a gridded board and then mapping them into a computer based drawing programme before painting from the modelled arrangements. In an added level some of the faces of the cubes are left blank. These faces fluctuate in the viewers perception becoming part of the cube and the background at the same time. These lead to a theory of mine that suggests that spatial ambiguity is a way to highlight spatial awareness and make a piece more visually interesting.

The first of the new works exploring composition colour and spatial perception

Made in Roath – Brain Art

Rather belatedly, here is an update of the Science imagery project I devised for the Made in Roath festival, which was shown in the ‘Sho’ gallery near Albany Road, Cardiff. The aim was to take scientific imagery out of its usual context. In the summer of 2011 I contacted Professor Derek jones of CUBRIC research centre at Cardiff University after he responded to a call out for psychologists wishing to collaborate with me.

Professor Jones had devised a method for mapping brain structures that had in many ways surpassed traditional anatomical dissection. These methods produced an array of quite beautiful visual images, some quite literal and others more abstract. After seeing these images I encouraged him to exhibit them out of a science context so that the images could be appreciated for the conceptual and aesthetic beauty, quite apart from their context within Scientific research.

It was important to me that these images were left as raw as possible. I wanted to ask  what the difference was between images that had been crafted through arts research and those that had been created through science research. Essentially what is the difference between conceptual art and scientific/statistical modelling. Of course the intentions are very different, for one the image is the prime concern and the only source of information transfer between viewer and artist. With the other, it is a small part of a much larger research programme, supported by presentations and reports. But, if you did not know which was which, could you tell the difference?

What does this say about ownership and authorship in contemporary art, the value of conceptual art and the role of the artist. Could art be created by mistake or as a side product to a totally different enterprise? The results suggested that maybe it could, although there is still an important role in the selection of images and the instigation of the project/exhibition…

This project has clarified the role of the artist as an originator and manipulator of context. Of course despite my intentions of leaving the data as raw. Professor Jones and his research assistant Silvia De Santis had to resist the temptation to doctor the images. Of course their selection of images and choice of crop brought into play a range of aesthetic choices. These choices would normally have been the territory of the artist, by avoiding these decisions and trusting them to the scientists, I hoped to avoid creating images that were in any way created as art. It may be however, that I have not quite succeeded with this, as the role of the artist was eagerly taken up by the scientists.

Hopefully, there is a lot more work to be done in this area, it may be possible to expand this idea into a funded exhibition blurring the work of artists and scientists. But it might be hard to find more scientists who are happy to have the context of the work so radically changed and even harder to find artists and art venues who are happy with the potential undermining of the role of the artist. Whatever happens this project has been very important in teaching me a number of important lessons about working with scientists and running projects with so many different bodies involved.

Many many thanks to Made in Roath, Sho Gallery, Professor Derek Jones and Silvia De Santis, Cardiff Psychology Department and Ali Roberts.

Roath Park Conservatory Project

This is the slightly rough video documentary of the sound piece (installation) that was commissioned by The Made in Roath festival organisers for the Roath Park Conservatory.

Originally intended to be shown along with a fake projected rainbow, the technical and financial constraints soon took their toll. The budget was £0 and the humidity in the greenhouse would have destroyed any projection equipment.

That said I was delighted with the way the finished piece was received. Knowing full well that sound pieces can be incredibly irritating, I hoped that this would work well with the ‘Garden of Eden’ greenhouse environment. The general consensus seems to have been that the public enjoyed it, the rangers tell me that they had a much larger crowd than usual and people even engaged with the content of the piece and started trying to guess and debate the colour music. What more can I ask.

The piece was developed from the Luscher test audio pieces featured earlier. Again it involved surveying the public to find peoples subjective note and colour associations. These were then listed and sung by the incredibly talented and pitch perfect Danielle Meunier. Exploring the objective validity of subjective associations… or, in a more simple way, the fuzzy logic created when we want to make a universal objective truth out of our personal subjective opinions. This project explores those themes touched on with the Physiognomy project done in Wirksworth back in 2009.

October – MADE IN ROATH

October is the month of the made in Roath Community Arts Festival in Cardiff. The festival runs over the weekend of the 14th -16th. http://madeinroath.com/

I will be taking part in the festival in a number of different ways. Here is a sneaky clue as to what I will be getting upto. More details will follow later.

September preview

This month I am holding a monthlong residency in the basement space at the Milkwood gallery (http://milkwoodgallery.com/index. ) This will be split into two parts.

The first part is an investigation into the production of afterimages. These ‘negative’ visual phenomena occur all the time but are edited out of our perception. Only in special circumstances can we trick our brains and glimpse this hidden world.

This project has been researched with the support of Georgie Powell a PHD student at Cardiff University. Although adjustments to this will be made throughout the first half of the residency, the focal point of these experiments will be an opening event on Friday 16th September from 5pm to 8pm.

The second part of the residency is an opportunity to see the recent 2D works exhibited together in Cardiff. Consisting of recent works and the highlights of the MA degree show work (with the exception of those pieces that have already sold). The space will be open in the normal Milkwood opening hours 10am – 5pm Tuesday – Saturday. In addition there will again be an opening event planned for Friday the 30th September 5pm – 8pm. I will be in the basement with my dominoes (Anblickspiel- see below) inviting people to sit and play a game with me. There will also be an opportunity to buy prints of selected works, while stocks last,…as well as an opportunity to buy the originals of course! .  Hopefully you will all come and relax and enjoy an evening with the artist.