Gunnel Wåhlstrand at Parasol Unit, London

Today I nipped into London to catch the last day of the current exhibition at the Parasol Unit in Wharf Road. I'd never been there before but, as you can see, it's right next door to Victoria Miro. It was a beautiful space with a garden at the back that also had installations in it -- dozens of silver balls held captive in the frozen pond, and a Japanese-looking shelter which will help you fend off Seasonal Affective Disorder if you stay under its fluorescent light tubes.

But the reason I went was to see the extraordinarily beautiful indian-ink paintings of Gunnel Wåhlstrand, a Swedish artist. I have just taken some quick photos of pages from the catalogue, so as not to reproduce them too exactly, but you'll see how exquisite they are.

 The actual artworks are on a very large scale. They are incredibly painstaking reproductions of the artist's old family photographs, which is why they appealed so much to me. The particular poignancy to the artist of these photos is explained here.

The realism of the paintings is uncanny, but what I found interesting was the edges of the painted area where the realism breaks down into a looser sort of threshold between the painted and unpainted areas and you can see the individual strokes and tiny washes of ink. If it wasn't for this strip around the painting, you wouldn't really be able to tell that it wasn't just, say, a blown-up digital scan, so it's crucial that the viewer can see it.

     In the same way, there is often a small element in the painting itself which undermines the almost chilly perfection of the scene. For example, in the painting above, all the furniture fits like a jigsaw and the figures are unnaturally poised. All is still -- apart from the figure reflected in the picture on the right-hand side, who is perhaps waving at someone out of the window. It's an almost hidden point of freedom within the stifling interior.
  There was another painting, of a library, an astonishingly complex scene full of books and shelves. Students bent over their books and I noticed that some of these figures were blurred, introducing a disturbing note into the stillness. I guess that they must have been blurred in the original photo on which the painting was based and so have been faithfully blurred in the reproduction. But the blurring foregrounds the fact that this is not a painting of 'reality' but of a photo, at a remove from reality. It's what I particularly like about certain photorealist art -- when the apparent 'reality' you're looking at is subverted and you're forced to question what it is you're being shown.
     These beautiful paintings have really got under my skin.

Cooking up a creative storm

I just wanted to say thank you so much to Gina firstly for the really lovely cookbook she gave me as the prize in her blog giveaway. It's such a nice book and I'm already drooling over the recipes -- very many beautiful, seasonal things to make with minimal fuss -- just the sort of recipe book I love.
     I was actually able to pick it up in person as Gina was at her art group's exhibition at Art Van Go in Knebworth. I had a good chat with Gina and admired Spectrum's artwork and also met Jill from the Postman's Knock postcard swap and Gilly the Vintage Rock Chick (in her new jacket which I liked a lot). I even ate one of Gina's beautiful heart-shaped custard creams which I'd read about only hours before on her blog. It's a bit like Alice in Wonderland when that happens and you go through the mirror into your blogworld. I like it a lot.
     Although this shop is only about fifteen minutes' drive from where I live, I'm ashamed to say I've never been before, but it was great. Not only a very pleasant exhibition and workshop space but an amazing shop packed out with an immense range of art materials. I wanted a particular thing and thought I'd have a look for it while I was there, never dreaming they'd have it, but they did. I was impressed.
    I'm not going to let on what it was I was after because it was something I needed to try out a new idea, and this idea is either ridiculous or exciting -- either way, it'll be better if I keep it under my hat until I've had a go at seeing if I can get it to work. In my mind it's going to be my ENTIRE FUTURE as an artist, but if my previous 'big ideas' are anything to go by it'll actually be a case of acute frustration and lobbing some sorry effort in the bin. We shall see....

Doing my own (creative) thing

A couple of weeks ago I got rather immersed in responding to that "29 Ways to Stay Creative" video. It got me thinking: why not have a go at creating my own 'tips for creativity'? That question probably shouldn't have been merely rhetorical, because there are lots of reasons why I shouldn't 'have a go', chiefly not knowing how to make any sort of animation. However, I'm not one to let a small thing like total ignorance stop me, so I have spent an inordinate amount of time over the last few days trying to work out how to make this video and  upload it onto the web. It's quite interesting doing something completely 'blind' as basically you don't know what you aren't supposed to do, so strange things creep in. It even has music! Copyright free music!!
    

      Click here to see my 'Ten Tips for Creativity' video ...

"Far From Heaven"

As well as my disturbingly large 'to be read' pile, by my bed, I also have a 'to be watched' pile of DVDs, about thirty or so, which I just never seem to get around to watching. Most of them have been bought on impulse, perhaps because I spotted them on the 'People who bought that also bought this...' strip on Amazon, which I find very tantalising.

Anyhow, I've been at home today with a stinky cold and it was the perfect excuse to finally watch one of these neglected DVDs. Almost at random, I pulled out Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven and stuck it in the player. I no longer had any idea why I'd got it and the cover didn't particularly speak to me (something about that headscarf) ... BUT ... it was absolutely brilliant and suddenly I'm a massive Todd Haynes fan and have been looking at what else he's done and it's all starting to come together.
     So, Far From Heaven. It's the most beautiful evocation of 1950s melodrama, in particular the films of Douglas Sirk, which, I now know, typically starred Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson and were about 'forbidden love' across the class divide.

Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in 1955's All That Heaven Allows

Far From Heaven isn't a pastiche, it's an homage, with every detail lovingly crafted and thought through. In the short documentary about the film on the DVD, it shows Todd Haynes' 'mood book' for the film, a fantastic scrapbook of source images, colour combinations, hair styles, fashions, furniture and so on. The film is a midcentury marvel. Haynes made a swatch of colours for each scene, to guide the designer and costume designer:

Haynes' swatch for the party scene

Set in Hartford, Connecticut in 1957, it's the story of Kathy and Frank Whitaker, who are, to all appearances, the perfect American couple. He's an executive in a television sales company and she stays at home with her two lovely children and her black maid (Mad Men must surely have been heavily influenced by the look and feel of this film, which predates Mad Men, having been released in 2002. Another film influenced by it is, I think, Revolutionary Road, 2008). I'm absolutely not going to give away the plot because it depends on an element of surprise and is really engrossing. Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid are perfect as this all-American couple who start to see cracks appearing in their dream existence.

The aspect of the film that really makes it exceptional to me is Haynes' use of colour. The dark blues and greens which betoken troubles seem almost Expressionist in mood:

In the director's commentary, Haynes mentions the 'indigo gels' that he used to get the intense blue of the moonlit scenes, and he says that he had two separate shades, one for the autunm part of the film and another for when it was winter. The seasons are gorgeously evoked in this film.
     The use of colour was most startling in the costumes, and I felt that Haynes had made the costumes chime so strongly with each other in order to push home the sense of absolute conformity in American society at that period. Here are Kathy Whitaker and her friends, no doubt all wearing 'this Fall's must-have shades':

so much green conformity, it put me in mind of the Emerald City (which may be a deliberate reference)

 

In the above shot, Kathy, on the right, is wearing a lilac scarf with her russet ensemble. It's the only note of colour that isn't red-brown. I think it symbolises the small element of non-conformity within her. Look, it's coming loose in the wind...

Oh, it's flying away!

the lilac scarf is almost the same colour as the sky, reinforcing the idea that it symbolises freedom

But someone has found the scarf...

You've really got to watch this film! It's about forbidden love -- more than one sort -- and the viewer is asked to make a direct comparison between these different types of desire.

I have a Montgomery Ward catalogue for 1957 and you can see from almost any page of it that the film is perfectly in keeping with the fashion and conformist mood of the period -- look at all the coats for the new season perfectly chiming together.
     Since 'discovering' Todd Haynes (about twenty years after everybody else), I've watched his first movie (made at film school), Superstar, in chunks on YouTube. It's a biopic of Karen Carpenter done with a variety of mixed media, but all the actors are played by Barbie and Ken dolls:

Karen Carpenter sings...

The dolls work well as sinisterly plastic counterparts to the 'real' Karen and Richard Carpenter and Barbie's insanely narrow form constantly reminds us of the impossible body image that Karen's anorexia drove her to try, hopelessly, to achieve.

    I also watched another Todd Haynes piece on YouTube -- Dottie Gets Spanked -- which was a 1993 made-for-TV short with, I suspect, strong autobiographical elements. It's not as naughty as it sounds. Dottie is a 1960's comedienne with strong debts to Lucille Ball. She has a raucous comedy show on TV, sponsored by Revlon, which six-year-old Stevie is crazy about. He sits right up to the black-and-white screen and draws picture after picture of Dottie with his wax crayons. The other children seem to sense that he is 'different' -- his two-tone shoes are the butt of the boys' jokes and the little girls disapprove of his trying to talk about Dottie with them. But when Stevie wins a contest to go to the TV studio in New York to meet Dottie his popularity suddenly increases exponentially. At the studio, Dottie is recording a sketch where she gets put over her husband's knee and the intensity of seeing this at first hand combines with other things glimpsed and understood as taboo to become the little boy's most powerful fantasy. His father disapproves of his love of Dottie and he wants Stevie to watch the football game with him. In his dream, little Stevie is King but he kills another child and is dethroned. The black-and-white dream sequences are pure Dr Caligari's Cabinet:

The grown-ups accuse Stevie of murder

Stevie understands that his excitement at Dottie's spanking is taboo and he suppresses it, burying his drawing of the spanking scene in the garden. It's pure Freud and seems to go a long way towards explaining Haynes the sublimating artist.
     Now I've ordered two other Haynes features from Amazon, Velvet Goldmine and [Safe], and no doubt these will be spending a couple of years on the 'to be watched' pile before I get round to them -- or perhaps they'll jump straight to the top. Todd Haynes is definitely my new favourite film director.

Couple of things

If you're waiting to book tickets to the David Hockney show at the Royal Academy, they've just released loads of new tickets. I got some!

I love Joanne Mattera's online art exhibition of spotty, dotty art, Connecting the Dots.

Charles and Camilla in the frame

I've finally finished my painting of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles in their car on the way to the Royal Variety Performance on 9 December 2010 (I can't believe it happened so long ago already).
     I did the painting as a kind of 'homage' to Richard Hamilton and his painting 'Swingeing London 67' which shows Mick Jagger and the art dealer Robert Fraser handcuffed together in a police van as they arrived at court on drugs charges in 1967. I've always loved that picture which actually exists in six different versions and is a mixed-media piece with screenprint elements and even metal handcuffs embedded in at least one version. Whenever I see it in an exhibition, it always makes me happy.
     So that's why I tackled this one. It's acrylic on canvas, about 30 x 20 inches. It was very exciting to paint. I did C & C inside their car first as they seemed to be one level of 'reality' in the picture. Then I did the weird reflected faces of the 'attackers', one of whom seems to be embedded in Charles' shoulder. Finally I did all the strange dashes of reflected light on the various windows which I really enjoyed doing.
     Quite often when I'm doing a picture, thoughts occur to me about it that I hadn't had before I started but which seem to reinforce the 'interest' of the picture for me. In this case, I thought of C & C in their perfectly lit 'cage' of a car and how this could stand for the Royal Family as a whole, kind of caged by their position in society where they're both protected and curated and, of course, hugely privileged, but also restricted and frozen by protocol and history and all the ridiculous fanfare that surrounds them. Meanwhile, the rest of society is moving on, breaking up and turning nasty every so often, changing, dazzling, evanescing, but the Royals just have to keep on doing their royal thing like waxworks. I'm not a Royalist, by the way, far from it. But I was very struck by this image and the understandable fear on C & C's faces. They were very vulnerable in this situation, in spite of all their bodyguards and bullet-proofed car. The car got separated from the rest of the cavalcade, a window was broken and Camilla was poked in the ribs (no doubt as hard as possible) with some sort of stick. The 'mob' were chanting 'Off with their heads!' -- was that a wittily historical reference or kind of obvious? The two of them must have been terrified.
     But beyond all of that 'meaning', I was really most interested in the intense colours in all the reflections.

Sketchbook surprise

me with my mum and dad

I almost fell off my chair yesterday when Jo at Fiddlesnips emailed me to tell me that my Brooklyn Sketchbook had featured on the Arthouse Co-op's blog. It was the weirdest thing to see an object that I had made on someone else's blog, with photos taken by them and their thoughts on it. It made my stomach churn a bit but I was really pleased. The strangest thing is that I actually follow that blog but had somehow missed this post, which was written quite a few weeks ago. So my book has been 'out there' all this time and I didn't even know.
     Meanwhile, I'm driving myself near to madness, trying to get on with a biggish painting (which needs daylight so only do-able at weekends), gearing up to try to write a book and now, as if I needed another project, I'm trying my hand at making one of those sort-of-slideshow-sort-of-animations like the 29 Ways to stay Creative, but it's taking an age to do and I'm not at all sure whether it will be any good.

Finally, the above is a screen grab of the home page of a cool charity project. It has a triangle for every single of the 16 million-plus colours that can be used online. You go on the site, Own A Colour.com, and you can make a donation to 'buy' an individual colour. Then you can name it and add a note saying why you've called it that. I have bought #209548 which is a green colour, and I've named it 'Audrey's Green'. It's the sort of shade of green that my mum always used in her paintings for grass and leaves. I used to say to her that it wasn't the right colour (too blue) but she loved it and carried right on using it. What did I know anyway?