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Unit 1 

Geraint Evans Painter's Forum/ Painting in the Expanded Field 

Painting from the hand

 

Painting is kept alive for its commodity - The Art Market 

 

 

Krauss - sculpture is the stuff it is not e.g. everything in a room (furniture) that is not the room 

 

Gustavo Fares - talking about painting in terms of the negative 

 

After Modernist painting - Kraig Staff 

 

Raushenberg - seen more as sculpture than painting 

 

Lynda Benglis - spacial works - The walls become the support 

 

Kinsey - technology advancing in painting - printing 

 

Painting as instruments to test perception

 

Bill Morrison - referenced painting - film left somewhere and got spots 

 

Jeff Wall - Manet contemporary recreation - mirror - capturing the image - male gaze 

 

Niki Saint Phalle - Shooting Paintings 

 

George Mathieu - lyrical painting

 

Hans Namuth - Films of Pollock painting - gave them a different meaning 

 

Yoko Uno - a painting to be stepped on 

 

Shigeko Kubota 

 

Janine Antoni - mopping black hair dye on floor

 

Lubaina Himid 

 

David Reed - Painting expanded by taking things from other mediums 

 

Painting - emotion 

 

Ken Oshitii - paintings on screens 

 

Jessica Stockholder - physically immersive experience 

 

Richard Tuttle - contemporary materials 

 

Jim - tape 

 

angela De LA Cruz - traditional references to painting and destroying it 

 

Simon Callery 

 

Goya - I saw this / I was there written on art 

Painters' Forum: A Short Stroll in the Woods: Landscape Painting and Legacies of Conflict, Capitalism and Empire with Geraint Evans 

John Constable - British Landscape painter

 

Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, 2016 (Film)

 

 

American tribal paintings on skins - Kiowa 

 

West - depicted as a wild place 

 

The Sublime 

 

The Panorama 

 

Hurvin Anderson - drippy

 

Claude Monet - Weeping Willow 

 

Paul Nash - 50 drawings in muddy places 

 

Robinson in Ruins - Film by Patrick Keiller 

 

Marcus Harvey 

 

V and A Constable paint sketches 

 

Constable paintings - textured and worked into 

Mark Fairnington

Roots 

Detailed 

Brushstrokes - energy and anxiety 

Nature in motion 

Controlled and abandoned nature 

Transition 

Collaged photographs painted from 

Reveal Fictions 

 

Belief , faith 

What’s known and what’s believed 

Insect paintings 

Film camera collaged images making an insect 

Printing from the collage 

Insect portraits like Tudor portraits - interest on clothes rather than person 

Turned bugs around - back from the dead 

 

Insects fascinated surrealists - female devours male during intercourse 

Mantis - can live for long time without head 

 

All he knows about the insect is the painting 

What knowledge is embodied in an insect 

Detail implies a knowledge that isn’t there 

What happens in the making of a painting that generates new knowledge 

 

Memetic camouflage 

Evolutionary 

Reimagining the Victorians exhibition has his painting 

 

Tree hoppers - thorn bugs - no one knows why they end up looking like that 

 

Went to the rainforest 

Took photographs 

 

The Hummingbird tree painting or photographs from different angles of birds 

 

The Ancestors painting 

Birds seen altogether - Not realistic 

 

Paradise bird painting 

Birds without feet - used as money - Europeans came up w story that they never touched ground until they died 

Still life paintings 

 

Andrew Grassey - pointed at brushstroke and said it’s out of a Franz painting 

 

Someone said in magazine that it’s “painterly painting that can’t ever tell the truth” 

 

Works from National History specimens 

 

Warehouse SE London - taxidermy 

 

Earth seen as out there to be discovered at time collections made now Earth seen as fragile 

 

Kind of moth which only eats taxidermy animals - how did this thing exist before taxidermy ? 

 

Takes 100s of photographs 

 

Interested in Girrafe heads 

Photoshopped drawing to make painting from 

​

Still life paintings- detail of thing described has emphasis 

 

 

Structures to hold up taxidermied animals 

 

‘The raft’ - based on Gericho’s painting - life is just about being held together 

 

Medusa ship run aground - crew built raft to put 150 people on (they got life boat) 

 

When they were rescued 15 people left - national outrage 

 

Steel structure built to hold up giraffe skeleton 

 

Horniman museum - wrap taxidermy animals in plastic - he liked this - idea of monkey/animal rather than image of monkey/ animal itself 

 

animal eye circular paintings of glass taxidermy eyes reflecting museum 

 

layering of fiction 

 

Paintings of living animals 

 

Bred to look a certain way 

 

Photoshop drawing - crude - space for painting to inhabit 

 

Silhouette 

 

Starts with gestural brown brushstrokes 

 

bar to rest hand on 

 

Life sized on white grounds 

 

title of paintings are names of bull 

 

Showed in New art gallery in Warsaw 

 

Whistlejacket by George Stubbs - inspo 

 

animated painting of horse 

 

tail stops just at the end of the canvas - recognises itself as a painting

 

painting too big for horse 

 

Horse called Bernard so name wasn’t dramatic enough 

 

image namer mistaked horse’s penis for udder 

 

 

Dutch botanical painting 

collaged photographs to create insect and flower painings 

Maria Sibylla Merian 

: travelled to Dutch colony of Surinam 1699

 

His prepatory collages are crude 

space for making of painting to command the image 

American sculptor David Smith 

Yamblem Hyssen dutch painter  - image originally presents itself as absolutely real 

lyrical movement through - poised 

successful when alive then forgotten 

National Gallery and Wallace collection and Dulwich Picture Gallery 

Closer you get to them - can’t decipher how they are made 

Paintings of dead leaves — emblematic of death 

 

Lovers eye paintings - brooches 

Fairnington painted his eyes on compact to open to show two eyes 

Eyes on round wooded panels 

of ideas of paintings coming into works 

painted sons in bath - one bit reminded him on Hulmer hunt painting with light coming through sheep’s ear 

Likes moments of correlation 

Moments where paintings become Surreal 

 

 

 

 

Welcome collection

disturbing 

death masks 

human body and medicine 

Henry Welcome 

Warehouses full of things he collected when he died 

Iron lung built by Welsh man for wife 

anatomical models 

prosthetic limbs 

things they wouldn’t show in museum - unethical 

wax heads with poles beneath 

 

He made miniature paintings turning objects into portraits 

 

Reminded him of Gericho paintings from Morgues 

: Scale model of raft used in painting 

 

Things poised between different fields of study 

 

paintings of cases 

characters in their own world - isolated in themselves 

Peculiarity of connections 

Ishaw museum 

old books 

national history books

religious relics 

Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama islands … 1747

: inspired title of his show 

4 books in collection - albert Sieber - snakes, 2 animals born together - before enlightenment - didn’t know how to categorise things 

Detail 

belief systems 

Relics with saints bones - presented in crafted cases - writing around them 

nail from the cross 

Conviction of making - reflecting a belief to something being true to thing it’s supposed to be 

fake relics used to be traded 

relic nibblers - pretend to kiss relic then bite bit off and take home 

model box - portraits of friends dressed up as ghosts inspired by The invisible mothers - someone had to be holding children still - mother wrapped in fabric so they weren’t seen 

 

Landscape painting for Cherryburn in Northumberland where Thomas Beuic born - woodcut maker and National history books 

Tail pieces - pictures of Northumberland life 

radical 

Fairington decided to show paintings in house 

Paintings around Cherryburn 

paintings from prints by Beuic 

photos 

Reflection or conversation about different historical representations of the land 

Worked out installation of paintings

Landscape paintings 

became larger 

Made in same way as insect paintings 

Perspective changes / warped space in his river forest painting 

Commission for someone who lived on hampstead heath - photographed - Sandy Heath - like prehistoric landscape 

Found out about history of place - used to be a mining place for bricks to the railway - public not happy - campaign - “a ghastly spot with holes big enough to fill the corpses of nations

Friedrich church - the heart of the Andes 

People would pay to see it 

 

 

 

Painting in National Gallery - portrait of tree stump 

Made portraits of tree roots 

From woods around south london - put clouds in background 

Inspo - Scape goat by Halmer Hunt 

pursuit of realism takes you into something strange, disturbing, quite Surreal 

Dutch 17th century sotto bosko - the undergrowth 

gothic macabre 

snake chasing or eating rats 

insects eating other insects 

Belief snakes and insects and slugs emerged from mud without reproduction

sill life painting 

Saco bloy 

Painting of tree root - made a landscape - Began to be portraits 

Folklore - the green man - natural world 

Photoshop drawing from different photos from different places 

put together like sculpture 

painting based off image 

That moment where the painting becomes a thing in itself - has its own meaning - couldn’t determine when it was made only after it was made. 

 

 

 

 

Research happens in the studio at the point of making the painting 

Information contained in the way it is made 

Point where realism hanging onto its idea that you have to believe it 

New meaning created in the making of a painting 

:Hard to pinpoint this 

Practice defines itself as research 

How you describe your process to yourself in detail is most important 

Renaissance - moment in an image where something defines the realism - Carvo Cravelli - National Gallery - ray of light defies all the perspective of everything that’s in the image - pleasurable - can play with it 

Observation 

Gods envious of humans because they could die 

Turners drawings and paintings - details accurate - paintings baroque spectacles - different idea of looking different idea of audience as well 

Fairnington’s wife said the root paintings were all self portraits 

Understanding of how to make a painting not how the real world is like 

Fairnington drawings are all the things he can’t do in the paintings 

Sketch paintings or colour notes taken back to studios by some artists

Didn’t want it to be like public art that says “look at me i’m here”

Fairnington has different sizes of work for different places 

Simon Callery

Look at the world 

 

Don’t make copies of the thing you are painting 

 

surviving and painting 

 

What’s the role of an artist 

 

Young British artists 

 

Do it yourself! - exhibitions etc 

 

Got the attention of SATCHI gallery - at the time it was ‘New York’ style way of showing - white - rare

 

Works don’t operate as images - work as an experience - what is it like to stand in front of a painting? 

 

References to architecture 

 

Used a lot of lead white 

 

Lines 

 

scalpel polished paint and made luminous quality 

 

horizontal lines - illusion of depth - tradition of landscape painting - viewer has physical understanding of painting 

 

Large-scale paintings 

 

Quietness (contrasted with the loud/attention seeking movement)

 

Architectural elements of physicality - how columns get smaller at the top in Greek architecture eg

 

How to get people to move around the work 

 

Worked with archaeologists - experienced the landscape - Institute of Archaeology 

 

Circular narrative 

 

Romans brought straight lines 

 

Found it difficult to make paintings outside so he turned to photography 

 

Put his photos of the land in draws — each draw moves across the land in a large photo 

 

changes to horizontal line - relevant to digging deeper - going further back in time in archeology 

 

Material landscape and time 

 

Sculptural work called Trench Tent - Poured plaster to grab material of surface - stood the pieces up - landscape as material 

 

Residency - Research with archaeologist in commercial world 

 

Cicularity - paintings as a physical experience - thought about colour 

 

Sat and Drew the excavated pits - relationship between time and material 

 

Red works - called them Pit Paintings 

 

Wanted to open up the works - have interior spaces 

 

Materiality of painting - using wood 

 

Painting having body and landscape as a body which has been excavated - the viewer has a body which they feel through as well as see through 

 

Returned to flatness - rectangles you can see through on the side - evaporates weight of the work

 

colour

 

Layers of vertical forms forming a rectangle - making lines with canvas, sewing - like drawing - painting in a new way - Called Wall spines. He made some with paper - softness and sharpness. Putting colour together - weight. Thinking on how paintings can be robust.

 

North Wales excavation - listen to conversations around the trenches 

 

Made paintings in the place he was working in - landscape. Colour work. Feel and cut holes where he could feel things under the canvas - register the fact the painting was made in a place - not about showing what the place looked like 

 

Went into the urban environment with students and marked what he felt on the street eg cracks. Made stepped wall spine 

 

Spent time in Italy - history of painting - respect it - learnt about Renaissance. Made work in Italy - holes on ground. Dyed with red iron oxide. Softened canvases in the river - changed its physical quality. Wall spines. Deeper holes - can see interior more. Sturas - name of the river. Allow a painting to accumulate. Start producing material and allow the painting to find its own form. Use smaller bits left to use for other small works. 

 

Colour as a material. Waled with Tawny Wilker ? Tony Walker? Yellow exhibition - be free with forms. Other artist calls himself a painter but worked with wood. Interior. 

 

Inspired by excavating - could start with rectangle then accumulate and develop into something different - same thing happens w his work. 

 

Making work in contact with landscape 

 

Iron oxide pigment - softness to canvas and pigment comes off a bit when you touch it - called Red Mantel 

 

Got rougher in his works - holes you can see through to the wall 

 

Iron based and Mars based pigments 

 

open side work with covering that sits over it 

 

You can make things and the rest is all potential material for work - openness to process 

 

 

 

 

How to tell if a works successful - see how people react with it - the experience of it - if they walk around it. What is different to the experience of painting to other things ? 

Work itself is like a relic from the making experience - like finding an artieact excavating 

 

Looking at painting - seeing the knowledge rather than reading it 

 

Colour of earth can be amazing

 

Colour as a medium and a material 

 

Pigment is earth, it’s metal, it’s burnt wood 

 

Objective - ask the fundamental questions - why do archaeologist want to dig a hole? - why do I want to watch them and listen - misinterpretation is allowed as an artist and should be valued 

The visions of the self - Gavin Edmonds 

Rorschach test and other other psychological things 

 

Children’s cartoon’s - screen shots 

 

cartoon Donald Duck - leaving home and parents are dead 

 

Reason why you pick an image which would seem different when you look back 50 years later 

 

Pathos images 

 

Warburg - autobiographical reflex 

 

Complex Trauma 

 

Warburg - we project onto images 

 

Oppenheimer - his father owned the painting Wheatfield at Sunrise by Van Gogh 

 

Oppenheimer atomic test 16 July 1945 “brighter than a thousand suns”

 

We can link the painting and bomb 

 

 

Recognising yourself in things 

Things coming alive that aren’t alive 

 

Freud and the uncanny

Free Association 

Dream Analysis 

 

People giving context for what you’re doing 

 

Beth Cavener 

 

Animals 

seeing yourself in animals?

 

Conrad Jon Godly -impasto 

Frank Auerbach 

 

Helen Frankenthaler 

 

Tracy Emin - Hunter’s Moon - scream heard in gallery from film which links all works and the sculptures - film of her sitting on the peer screaming - Edvard Munch - autobiographical - using herself in ‘The Scream’ by Monk 

 

Materials and how they will interact 

 

Inside the Freud Museums: History, Memory and Site-responsive Art 

 

The Ancestral Temple: memory and mourning in the work of Song Dong - The Art Life 

 

Memory box 

 

Painting and materials to tell a story 

 

Anselm Kiefer - weighing down on you - smell of paint - alchemy in gold and change in corn sheaths 

Visions of The Self/ Jenny Saville on Rembrandt 

“There are moments in a painting and on certain moments you turn up the volume”

 

 

Bacon uses a limited ground with impastoed paint and that comes directly from Velasquez(/ Velasqueth?) and Rembrandt. 

Unit 2

Painter’s Forum: Weak Painting - Alex Bacon in conversation with Prof Daniel Sturgis

Nina Camell - gum that melts over duration of the exhibition 

 

Pamela Rosencranz - exhibitions that stimulate the senses - room with Evian water and drugs 

 

 

‘Weak’ painting - critical and political values 

 

Weakness - mutual, minimal, dematerialising - point of work - embraces our alienation from labour ….

 

Flatness of painting - Michael E Smith and Robert Rauschenberg - use flattening our and 3 D objects - front of painting monochrome then back has objects which are provocative 

 

Rauschenberg - uses whole 3D eagle

 

Michael E SMith - within page 

 

Rauschenberg dirt painting 

 

Warhol - Oxidation painting 

 

Yoko Ono - step on painting 

 

 

Steven Parrino - explores necrophilia in sculptural works - pioneering element of weakness in work. monochrome.

 

Josh Smith - whatever made in the rectangle reads as a painting 

 

 

Materiality 

 

Daniel Buren - ready made into painted object - stripes - 60s and 70s - can show lack of meaning in painting or sad show of loss of it 

 

Robert Smithson - send you out of the gallery into the world 

 

Weakness in painting as a challenge to the system - ‘slacker’ art 

 

None of the artists in this lecture are painters - painting format 

 

Weakness not being a critical term - philosophical or aesthetic way 

 

What painting can do is limited 

 

What is the new positivity?

 

The weakness of signs as a condition in Modernity 

 

 

The signal of the monochrome feeling differently from different artists 

 

Why do artist’s feel the need to return to certain languages - the semiotic seems relevant 

History eg abstraction - doing something different at different times 

 

 

Josh Smith - approach in ironic way but doing something different in the end 

 

 

 

Ad Reinhart - shades of black 

 

Generational shift - what these signs can mean 

 

 

Charles Meek - lots of things to say and different ways of saying it 

 

Black square - language of painting - weakening of signs - world condition is difficult - how to make something out of it - the challenge - more to say and do when it’s more challenging - provocation to work harder and do more 

 

Queer subjectivity - monochrome 

 

Memorialising 

 

Often artists can throw out histories in provocative ways 

 

Gillian Carnegie - TATE 

 

 

 

Black and Black

 

Keith Coventry

Jane Harris 

 

Ad Reindhart

 

Joan Snyders 

Wayne Binitie 

Iceland trip 

 

Drilled into ice 

 

What do fragments of ice tell us about the Earth?

 

Geothermal Heat

 

 

Photographic Series

 

 

Way of documenting 

 

Glass with consistency of sugar - hung them up and photographed them - looked like ice

 

Oldest ice in the world taken to Cambridge 

 

Ice core 

 

H worked with an archive and photographed the ice 

 

Bubbles of air in ice - air trapped in the Earth 

 

 

Vapour Series

 

 

 

Vapour sculpture 

 

Form of collapsed air bubble floating on middle of lagoon in Venice - would have sound in the middle - this was a pitched idea but he didn’t get it 

 

 

Liquid Series

 

 

 

Unclear whether it is a photograph or painting 

 

Photographic series - has glass on the surface

 

Hot reds to darker colours 

 

Ice melts because of magnetic storms 

 

Lines and glass in works 

 

Pollen in glaciers trapped in ice 

 

pollen used in his works 

 

Lines of longitude and latitude 

 

Watermelon Snow - fungi grows on the ice - makes ice melt faster because of plumes 

 

Violence in the way we let ice melt - violence in mark-making with palette knife 

 

Light bounces of polar plumes in Iceland - atmosphere pure so people think they’re hallucinating 

Recorded sounds of ice melting and made painting evoking it 

 

Gave friend of block of ice and made used his hair to paint on window with water from ice 

 

 

Solid Series

 

 

Made solid ice-looking sculptures 

 

Volcanic ash melted into glass 

 

fragility - you cut your fingers carving them or they look cosmetic if carved 

 

Blown glass vessels - The bacteria glowed at night - from the Indian Ocean 

 

Heat controlled room - can interact with antarctic material in a room - Antarctic ice cut out and put in middle of room - can understand climate change 

 

One side of room with ice melting away and other side antarctic air in glass. Sound inside. Some people relaxed to the sound. Materiality of climate change etc.

 

Polar Zero film - sound and vision 

 

Questions

 

 

 

PHD question was about what does solid mean ?

 

Covid happened - looking at secondary sources 

 

Delphi - breath air in from the ground and have visions - priestess says your future 

 

What’s scary is the speed in which the world has changed - make it poetic, not boring, engaging 

 

Breath of visitor sublimed - became part of the ice in his exhibition 

 

Ice photographed in place that housed the ice - British Antarctic scientific labs - clinical - extractors 

 

Interested in sound of Carbon monoxide being released - wanted ice to melt and photographed it 

 

Uses glass fritte - looks like sugar 

 

Wolfgang - scent that makes the work 

 

You can’t think through one Modality alone … think through all the senses 

 

Come to a dead end — this point takes you somewhere 

 

Found his subject in Iceland 

 

Showing work at Cop - politicians - power - Art reminded politicians about what is special 

 

Michelangelo and Da Vinci didn’t separate art and science 

Reading Group/ Hito Steyerl - The Wretched of the Screen 

·   My Answers to Questions 

 

 

 

 

   Broadly what is the essay they chose from discussing overall?  

 

A Thing Like You and Me:

 

The rise and fall of The Hero 

 

The Hero as a subject and an object 

 

Subjectivity and objectivity 

 

History 

 

Fetishisation of a thing 

 

Image 

 

Contemporary society favouring the thing over the subject? Aesthetics over content?

 

 

 

·      What are the key ideas explored in their chosen section of the essay? 

 

Bowie as the contemporary hero in 1977

 

Bowie as fetishised object/ image 

 

Bowie as a product - a ‘post gender’, ‘post-human’  image which can be reproduced countless times

 

‘an image and nothing but an image’

 

The immortality of a hero but through its image which can be reproduced, re-used and remade - he had lots of reincarnations of different characters or personas but this essay focusses on more of his aesthetic heroism

 

Images can be destructed and damaged - pixels etc but his ‘substance’ will remain the same thing - hero 

 

He will remain immortal as he will be remembered after death through images - Greek heroes from antiquity typically had a tragic or triumphant death where they died with honour and their memory became immortal but the death of the actual character and burying of their body is essential in this formula. They were then remembered through word of mouth - their story being passed on and their legacy. Also their son taking on their name, for example.

 

 

 

·      How do these ideas relate to each student's perspective/research (make connections, bring out your own reactions, comparisons and insight)

 

My practice is very much concerned with the image and beauty and the thing (usually a tree). I would say my paintings are often more concerned with the object rather than subject - perhaps my trees are fetishised like Bowie - they become beautiful spectacles. In a time where we are in the midst of an eco crises, my paintings perhaps catalogue natural beauty which might someday be destroyed prematurely. I have recently been imagining the destruction of Earth due to an eco crisis and how images recording its beauty could be taken to space to preserve their memory in a space ship. I am interested in androgyny and rock stars and trees also hold an androgyny. In the bands I follow image undoubtedly holds an appeal and often a sexiness. I like the empowerment of pure aesthetics in this essay - an image being allowed to be an image and put on a pedestal for it rather than for its academic or historical context as a subject. Although I take many ‘immortal’ photos in my practice and paintings of trees perhaps immortalise them, I am usually depicting a sense of my own mortality in comparison to the tree. When I think about it I am constantly repeating things through photographing them. Yet I feel I often try to avoid repetition in my practice - I don’t make 2 copies of the same painting as I’d find it boring. When I paint the trees image is often altered through the human hand and materials; I like using materials I can loose some control with an have ‘happy accidents with’ - this balance of control and lack of control is central to my practice.

 

 

 

·      Consider some contextual analysis: how does this essay relate to its context  (e.g. political, cultural, technological, other art, gender/feminist, philosophical or other)

 

Political movements changing - heroes changing - ideas of the image - subject/object changing - ends on a note of contemporary society favouring the thing over the subject? Aesthetics over content?

 

New genders emerging constantly - Bowie represented ‘post-gender’ and ‘post-human’

 

We are in a rise of images with things like Instagram - image reproduction and use of spreading the contemporary hero, or celebrities is seen daily. Old pixelated images and old photographs alongside new photographs are now held by most people. Now you can edit images further on photo shop etc.

 

This essay mentioned the feminist drive for women to become subjects rather than objects. I feel women or celebrities are now feeling empowered on social media by objectifying and fetishising themselves through images on social media. Is this a new wave of feminism?.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

 

Steyerl, H. (2012) 'A Thing Like You and Me', The Wretched of The Screen, pp. 46-57. Available at: https://ual-moodle-sitedata.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/43/14/43140b9981f2bbfbc2a790f04f3a26b07d8f3239?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3D%22e-flux_Hito%20Steyerl_15.pdf%22&response-content-type=application%2Fpdf&X-Amz-Content-Sha256=UNSIGNED-PAYLOAD&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIA2PCH3OG65JHUZNKL%2F20240211%2Feu-west-2%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20240211T210459Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21541&X-Amz-Signature=c0c25c25ab252925c1ef051728ba52b5148dc7c19662e0fb9a4528f512f0bfb4 (Accessed 11 February 2024).

Reading Group - Hito Steyerl 'The Wretched of The Screen'

Loiuse Borgeouis 

 

Andy Goldsworthy wall in forest 

 

Solaris 

 

Root system/ fungi communication underground with trees 

 

Trees and perspective 

 

Images of work could be taken to next section 

Gavin Edmonds Eva Hesse 

Eva Hesse reflects on what she makes and what she says 

 

Contradictions in her art 

 

She’s still got something to work out, she doesn’t know what the answer is 

 

Learning to let go 

 

‘a really big nothing’ 

 

Hesse and Leonardo 

 

art and psychoanalysis Maria Walsh 

 

Edmonds backs up ideas with research 

 

Edmonds - dreams are like newspapers of what’s going on in your body 

 

Art work is acting out what has happened in your life 

 

Give sources to tutors - things you’re interested in 

 

Stream of consciousness writing 

 

 

Eva Hesse rope piece 

Maria Bartuszová

Vampire 1895 Edvard Munch 

Delcy Morelos 

On Paint, Materiality and Meaning by Geraint Evans 

Michael Stubbs: A portrait of the Artist 

 

 

Painting on floor

 

Varnish 

 

vinyl  stencil 

 

pour paint onto stencil 

 

Embodied painting 

 

embodied painting in relation to digital disembodied computer screen 

 

explosion / chaos 

 

Interested in American abstraction and Pop art : Andy Warhol and silk screen printing 60s 

 

Collision between abstraction and Pop 

 

Optical depths / multiple narratives 

 

opaque / transparent planes 

 

 

 

 

Surface materiality 

 

surface merges seeing and touching 

 

alchemy 

 

sensual object 

 

physical process 

 

phenomenological ideas

 

perception 

 

 

 

Isabelle Graw 

 

 

 

Paint mark is like an autograph - charge - points to the author that’s present as a ghost 

 

liveliness - life and labour of artist and their life 

 

Hands ability to leave a record 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon 

 

Intense sensation in marks - Deleurs 

 

Francis B - difficult to know how some marks go straight through the nervous system and others tell a narrative 

 

Paintings live on their own 

 

Malleable - not knowing - paint itself has a sense of agency 

 

Deleurs - a violence of reaction and expressions

 

 

 

 

James Elkins 

 

 

 

Analogy between alchemy and painting - transformation - pigments and oils into something of cultural value 

 

 

 

Self- portrait of Rembrandt - Skin as paint paint as skin - self-portrait of painter but also a portrait of paint - (Sensual description of the paint)

 

 

 

 

Kazimir Malevich 

 

 

 

Primal act of paintings

 

 

 

Gerhard Richter 

 

 

Scale of work 

 

blurred 

 

paintings from widely-used photographs 

 

 

 

Francis Bacon

 

 

Photographs to paint from 

 

Refused to paint from life - needed absence to feel the person - paint freely 

 

 

 

Michael Staniak 

 

 

Digital age 

 

The screen is a normal part of his life like having breakfast 

 

 

 

Ken Okiishi 

 

 

screens used to paint on - greasy ginger - like marks of paint

 

 

 

Dan Hays

 

 

systematic paintings 

 

stills from cameras 

 

Sources them as found internet images 

 

paintings laborious - look like pixels 

 

 

 

Laura Owens 

 

 

Painterly gestures 

 

impasto paints 

 

layers 

 

screen-printed aspects 

 

 

 

Simon Callery 

 

 

Materiality 

 

Physicality of process 

 

Canvas as a mere support 

 

Paintings and canvas as a physical material 

 

 

 

Sam Gilliam 

 

 

Bevelled edge paintings

 

stained w acrylic paint

 

creases - structure 

 

chance - left to dry on studio floor 

 

occupy space - physical encounter with works - Drape paintings - adapt to each exhibition space 

 

References to his African-American heritage in titles 

 

 

 

Frank Bowling 

 

 

References identity 

 

different identity beyond American abstract expressionists 

 

Self-made wooded contraction - tip/tilt/twist whilst paint poured onto it from heights up to 2 metres

 

taped canvas to board 

 

painted alone 

 

agility and movement in making 

 

 

 

Oscar Murillo 

 

 

Canvas important to meaning of work 

 

Politics of migration 

 

world is something that’s upside down 

 

birds - migration 

 

 

 

Michael Armitage 

 

Lubugo - bark cloth before its primed 

 

Rejection of cotton / linen

 

African Heritage show  through materiality 

 

 

 

The Grand Robe made by an artist from a Central Plains tribe - made on buffalo skin 

 

 

 

John Mulwurndjul 

 

 

Natural materials like earth pigments and bark, wood, fibre string

 

 

 

 

Chris Ofili 

 

 

Dots 

 

colour 

 

elephant dung 

 

 

 

Anselm Kiefer 

 

 

materiality 

 

scale 

 

image 

 

encrusted surface 

 

ruin 

 

desolation 

 

scale 

 

experienced in bodily sense 

 

 

 

Jean Fautrier 

 

post-war 

 

starting again 

 

building materials 

 

 

 

Frank Auerbach 

 

 

 

Frankenthler poured on floor on unmprimed canvas 

 

 

 

Yves Klein 

 

 

Work presented as if sitting there - found like in art material store 

 

Ontological step where all that exists is the materials 

 

 

Anish Kapoor 

 

materials there like pigment rawly 

 

 

Wolfgang Laib 

 

laboriously collected pollen and laid on floor 

 

he sprinkled it on the floor 

 

 

 

Jackson Pollock 

 

 

movement of arm and shoulder 

 

first to work on floor ?

 

 

 

Gerhard Richter 

 

 

Squeegy paintings 

 

bodily gestures 

 

pop art 

 

inspired by Andy Warhol

 

 

Andy Warhol 

 

Jason Martin 

 

 

Zebedee Jones 

 

dragging paint 

 

he was deaf 

 

sense of distancing 

 

 

Park Seo-Bo 

 

 

nature 

 

spiritualism 

 

 

Ha Chong- Hyun 

 

meditive 

 

sense of things being reduced 

 

The Back-pressure method 

 

 

Nobuo Sekine 

 

 

rejecting traditional views of representation 

 

engaging with world as it is 

 

Showing natural properties 

 

 

 

Lee Ufan 

 

 

Paint lines

 

cobalt blue pigment 

 

discipline 

 

raw mineral 

 

 

Alexis Harding 

 

 

grids 

 

paint sliding 

 

active material 

 

 

Peasant paintings 

 

 

mushroom pigment 

 

egg tempera 

 

 

 

Sigrid Holmwood

 

pigments from selected plants and painted with them 

 

bio-social history 

 

 

Damien Meade 

 

The physical 

 

Glenn Brown 

Karel Appel 

Bram Bogart 

 

Painting from human ashes 

Critical Reflection in Unit 2 and Beyond/ From Testing Beyond Subject to Making Public with Anna Bunting-Branch

Te Palandjian 

 

 

 

Grounding - walking barefoot 

 

Moves in sand - makes casts from the mould of the shape 

 

Actors practicing lines - weaving net at same time 

 

Dead cactus plants 

 

Carry on making/researching over the summer 

 

Residency - Campbell Hector 

 

Types of research

 

 

 

The archive (Kew Gardens) 

 

Letting yourself wonder 

 

Critical Reflection 

 

 

Unit 3 short essay 

Crit session or methods meeting on interests - mind maps 

 

 

Expand your network

 

 

Make connections between your studio practice and another discipline - try looking at your work through this lens

 

Do an interview with a researcher or collaborator - writing the questions and responding to the answers are two important forms of critical reflection. Can use Teams and record it - gets a transcription. Can use phone.  

 

Visit a site and write about your experience - site writing: Jane Rendel - responding to a place or landscape 

 

 

Engage creatively 

 

 

Try using different forms of writing (you do not need to write an essay)

 

Experiment with audio recording, video editing or image and text collaged together - like a zine 

 

Consider how you might use performance to embody your research 

 

 

Group task: Kew words 

Types of Research

 

 

Experiential - experience a site in nature - document in photos, videos, text 

Movements of the body - primary and secondary sources - people and film 

Narrative - situation - Narrative already made - screenshot from film - ambiguity to the audience 

Private views 

Colour schemes - liquids can represent environment, experience 

Materiality 

Perspective 

Site-specific 

 

Forms of critical reflection 

 

 

 

Site-specific

 

Audio recording 

 

Video 

 

Note taking 

 

Documenting an experiment 

 

 

When are we doing critical Reflection 

 

 

 

 

Gathering of fragments - the clarity comes from bringing it all together - make and introduction and conclusion around this 

 

Collaboration - group reflection

 

Exhibition reviews and writing from “I” when it comes to subjects of Identity 

 

Review landscape she is looking at - history of it, perceiving it currently - can be sectioned into parts. Landscape document - photos. 

 

What is it to review work of another artist/space  - use the “I” when describing what it is to you. Later can build in context. It can develop at different times. 

 

 

When does work become public - group activity 

 

 

 

Social media - finished work or progress pieces before the final piece 

 

Exhibition 

 

Archive/ document - show in person - exhibition 

 

Finished in studio 

 

Critical Reflection - group activity

 

 

Throughout in head 

 

Notes doing experiment

Reflect on Final piece 

 

In Crits 

 

 

 

 

Things that could help my Critical Reflection

 

 

 

Once a month - find threads that are relevant - summarise and pull put key points

Esther Mahboubian Robertson
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