At Salon Schmitz for the hanging of the annual exhibition. Many hands make light work, but there were so many at it, Walter Dahn and his teams of helpers, that I simply stood at the side and drew them all working.
Aldous Eveleigh paintings and films Galerie Hoge Bomen Veurne Belgium August 2010
I went to Rome to draw for a few days and wandered around, stopping all the time to make quick drawings of scenes that caught my eye – just the particulars of that moment – knowing it will be different and won’t catch me in the same way next time I pass.
This is what I do when I go drawing. I go to refuel, to feed up on colour, shape and form. All the better to improvise with in the evolution of my invented paintings. This time, though, the plan changed. I came back and began to use the drawings directly, copying them to make paintings from. Just as artists returning from the Grand Tour once did. Only now Rome is another place where millions of people go to which changes the dynamic and with it my painting – different thinking makes different pictures – reasoning that, knowing so much, the viewer needs far less to evoke thoughts about somewhere that exists as powerfully in the imagination as it does in actuality, these pictures of Rome are much simpler in appearance than usual.
The minimal aesthetic I have adopted for this purpose stands in contrast to the denser, more complex “house-style” and “dubbed” paintings with their worked surfaces, layers and depths of half-hidden imagery. Recently, I have begun to experiment with expanding the choice of pictures in the exhibitions I’ve held. Rather than stick to one thematic selection the plan has been to group more sorts of work together. Partly, this is to test what is permissible in a culture of artistic freedom, but mainly, it is to bring the act of looking itself to the attention of the viewer.
Different kinds of pictures, each one, demands a different way of looking. To meet those demands, between expecting how something ought to be and investigating how it actually is, is the connection between my painting and the relation of art and life. Looking, in all its forms, exerts its continual fascination for me and how looking configures with thinking is really the subject behind all my art.
Looking: …from the glimpse to the gaze; looking to observe, looking to admire or dismiss, in disgust or delight; looking for spaces, solids, texture, weight…, anything tangible – where is something stretched, draped, taut or sagging? Looking to see the difference, looking to find qualities, means drawing such questions from ourselves not from outside. Connecting imaginatively in different ways brings us closer to the sense of how things are. What we look for we see – we always find what we are looking for… And when we draw from life we find it is never how we imagined, it’s always different, stranger than we think (it would be).
The Volcano and me!
Lots of people are gonna have their volcano stories, travel travails and ruined trip stories, stranded because of ash in the stratosphere stories…, mine is I went to Rome to do some sketching, Stephanie sent me there, as a birthday present, so as I could get stuck into some uninterrupted work and before leaving for the airport, she said to me from England, “Don’t worry if you haven’t done as much as you want to, you’ll be going back.” She didn’t mean the same day!
Considered getting a train but was so expensive thought I would wait to get the next available flight. Didn’t know Rome (and Madrid) was where everyone flying to Europe was going to be landing. When I realised the situation wasn’t going to improve very quickly I went back to the station. By then it was jammed solid and had to queue for seven hours to get to the ticket desk by which time the only way to get north out of Italy was by a much more circuitious route that by where of the fare had pretty much doubled.
Well, once I’d adjusted to things I got back to drawing but, apart from missing the teaching I was scheduled for, there’s an exhibition I’m taking part in, opening tonight in Cologne, and so here I am. Journey was fun, went to the morning market in Rome ‘n’ stocked-up with provisions, shared it out at lunch-time, in international company, as the train wended its way through Switzerland – a panoramic picnic – out of the window, alpine lakes, snow-capped peaks, flower-filled fields and apple trees in blossom… don’t get that on the aeroplane.
So that was all because of the old roman god, Vulcan, and his not wanting the northern Europeans to have Ariel carry them anywhere – or maybe it was Iceland’s revenge on those same governments who’ve done a Versaille-like number on the poor pöpulation there aiming to skin them forever for their banks’ financial meltdown. Sorry, slight deviation there from the story, will have to tell you later, about m’sketching trip to Rome.
Last few months…too busy to post!
Trixi and Dirk Mecky invited me to have a show at Salon Schmitz in Cologne in October 2009. When we discussed the exhibition, Trixi said she would like about 100 paintings in the show and that I should mix all the different sorts of work I do. With the help of my friend, the painter, Bolan Chen, who came over from Japan specially, we drove over to Cologne with over 250 drawings/paintings. Trixi and Dirk made an initial selection and the artist, Walter Dahn, advised on how the show should be hung. The main hanging space in Salon Schmitz is a long 20m x 5m high wall. Walter’s idea was to have a lot of space, with a few large oil paintings on the first half of the wall and a crowded hang on the second half. I was pleased with the result and hope to post some photographs taken of the show soon. The exhibition, which I called “Pics for Schmitz”, ran from 30 October 2009 to 15 January 2010.
The hang in Cologne meant I had quite a few paintings spare, which I brought back in October and hung in the Magdalen Arms in Oxford, which more about later.
On the way back from Cologne, after the Pics from Schmitz show ended, I left some of the paintings and dubbed photographs from the exhibition in Belgium with Galerie Hoge Bomen, Veurne, for my exhibition there in August.
My plan was to rehang the pictures in the Anchor & Hope with the work I had brought back from Cologne. The last hang I put up there looked very chic, a double row of elegant black and white box frames, closely spaced, holding a set of dubbed photographs of Istanbul that I painted for Gilles Blaize’s film “Dreaming Istanbul”. [Read more…]
Filming with Gilles and….
At the moment still trying to get on with paintings for Gilles’ film, Dreaming Istanbul, what with one thing and another, am having to work nights under the lights with the canvas (actually alternating between a photograph and a blue screen – as I’m doing each one twice) in front of the camera.
You know the technique, stop-motion, I paint a bit take a photo, paint a bit more ‘n’ take another photo and so on till the picture’s done and then when it’s played back as a film (at 24 frames a second) you can watch the painting grow and take shape.
There are 15 or 16 left to do – the animations break into the live-action as they did in Aldous in London like songs in a musical and the reason that I’m painting the images twice over is that the photograph I dub the painting on top of always has different qualities of tone and colour to the film’s which creates a visual discontinuity, a jump in the optical quality whenever an animation is about to begin, which if it doesn’t spoil the surprise is kind of irritating after a while. To get over this problem I paint the interventions that I put onto the photograph onto a plain blue screen which is later filtered out and turns transparent in post-production. So the idea is that there’ll be a smooth transition from the moment the frame freezes to the appearance of the first brush strokes.
Well, Gilles is onto that, poor fellow, he’s not just editing all the pictures into a fluid sequence but having to adjust them as well because now we’re doing this digitally instead of as before with a 35mm film camera (“It’s the way forward, Aldous.”) the Nikon D40 I’m using is always compensating for every tonal change I paint even though everything on the camera is switched to manual, so a patch of white paint makes the image go darker and a spot of black paint, lighter. Not to mention, tiny movements to the position of the camera (it’s fixed onto the wall at the top of the house) which means Gilles is also having to align the little bleeders. [Read more…]