Saying it with a postcard

I've signed up for Hertfordshire Open Studios for the first time this year. It will take place throughout September 2014 and I feel both excited and apprehensive -- I will be expected to do artist-like things for any visitors (the website where you sign up strongly recommends that you offer demonstrations while your studio is open). That would be quite challenging.
     For now, I'm trying to prepare in good time and part of the preparation is to make some work that people might like to buy without spending a lot of money. I'm working on a series of limited edition digital prints which I'll frame. More on these in a moment.
     Because I'd signed up for the Open Studios, earlier this month I was invited to meet up with other artists whose studios are nearby. We met at a pub. I was, as usual, rather excitable at this prospect. I got to the pub quite early and had to do that thing of walking around, trying to guess which person or group of people was the bare bones of the get-together. It felt a bit like going on a blind date. Nerve-wracking, but when I got to the far end of the large pub and saw a big table with two women sitting quite far apart I guessed that this must be it -- or they had just had a row. I got the right table! Soon there were ten or eleven of us and although there was the usual awkwardness of meeting a group of people for the first time, it was enjoyable. At a certain point someone made a move to hand out their cards and suddenly everyone did the same, there were a few minutes of happy card-swapping and the ice was definitely broken.
     So the get-togethers are going to continue fairly regularly and hopefully friendships will grow out of it (actually some people already knew each other but I didn't know anyone). And the next meeting is coming up already. Last time we discussed something we could do the next time we met and we decided to each bring a postcard of something that has a bearing on our art -- an image of a favourite artwork, whatever we want. This will be a treat for me but it's hard to choose which one to bring: I'm obsessed with postcards. I have about 100 old postcards that I've carefully 'curated' for special qualities I see in them (potential for the sort of art I want to do in relation to them) and I frequently sort through them, again rather obsessively, looking for things I may have missed in them the last time I looked. I was telling my Dad about this activity and he described it as 'forensic', which I think is a very good word for what I'm doing.
     So my postcard for the meet-up is going to have to be a Richard Hamilton. A fortnight ago I went to see the Hamilton retrospective at Tate Modern. I've long counted Richard Hamilton among my top ten favourite artists (along with Richter, Rauschenberg, Peter Blake, David Hockney, Warhol, Marlene Dumas, Eric Fischl, David Salle, Wilhelm Sasnal). I've followed him through quite a few different phases of his art, some I've liked more than others, but the work that I do like, I love. I agree with this art critic that he has been lumbered with the title of 'The Father of Pop Art', almost entirely as a result of the collage he made in 1956, 'Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?' and that consequently his work as a whole has perhaps been over-valued, in the sense of taken to be more significant than it is, so made to carry a heavier burden of importance than it needed to. But it was very good to be able to see his work brought together and set out chronologically. It was exciting to see, in moving from one room to another, elements of pop culture almost literally breaking in to Hamilton's rather ascetic, pale, barely there academic paintings about perspective and movement. Suddenly, there were spacemen, baseball heroes and JFK, patched in to a new set of pale academic paintings. Popular culture can be seen shouldering its way in to his art in the early sixties.
     The best part of the show, for me, were the paintings and prints based on postcards. It was wonderful to see them in the flesh when, previously, I think I've only seen them in reproductions. These have been a true inspiration to me. They were done in an era when enlargements had to be done using cumbersome equipment -- no scanners then -- and when Hamilton took a postcard of Whitley Bay, a little seaside town on the North East coast (quite close to where he had a teaching post at the time) and blew up a detail of it by stages, it was an experiment to see how far he could push the process before the 'real life' image broke down into abstraction. He made this foldout work, using a roughly A5-sized reproduction of the postcard, which shows the steps:

I've got the same postcard that Hamilton used:

The area he honed in on is about two thirds of the way down and two thirds of the way across:

This is Hamilton's print based on his close-up:

Bathers, Richard Hamilton, 1968

Over the past few years I've done quite a number of large mixed-media pieces based on old postcards, for instance:

All the above four pictures are about 3' x 4'.The idea was to isolate a 'drama' that was not so apparent in the original postcard, by masking out other figures and objects. I left a ghostly hint of what was once there underneath the pigment. In the third picture down, 'Hyde Centre', most of the right hand side of the original image was taken up by a large tree. I masked it out and recreated the building behind it.
     But currently I'm working on a series of digital prints, as mentioned above. In these I hunt for hidden details and make them into a new 'postcard'. So, for instance, below is a print I've made from the same postcard of Seaton Carew as the first of the above four pictures:

I've found a little girl who looks as though she might be running away. I don't want to upload too detailed a photo of any of my prints because they're digital, and so the image is the artwork -- hence the photo of this one framed, to protect it a little from being reproduced willy nilly. I'm working on lots of different images, but you might have to come along to one of my open studio days to see them properly. I like the quality you get when you go deep into the original image to mine its secrets. Anyway, I hope people will like them. And this is what I'll be talking about at the pub next week, clutching two postcards, one of Whitley Bay and one of a Richard Hamilton blow-up taken from it.

More stars in cars

This is the latest of my paintings of celebrities caught in their cars (Lindsay, Britney and Paris out on the town in LA). It's quite large: 100cm x 50cm. Painted in acrylics on canvas. I've put a thin wooden frame around it because it's going to included in the Open Exhibition at Letchworth Arts Centre from October 3rd, along with my picture of Dannii Minogue in her car. I wonder if people will get the paintings?
     This one (and the Dannii one too) was quite hard to photograph because of all the dark areas -- they tend to catch the light in a weird way and look whiteish. Hopefully they'll look better in the flesh.

A few new paintings

I'm trying to get some paintings and oil pastels done as I hope to hang them all in our local gastropub next month. I'm still exploring the idea of revisiting the moment when the photo that Richard Hamilton's 'Swingeing London 67' was based on, by finding other photos of the same or similar moments and doing paintings based on them. The latest one is above -- it's quite big, 100cm x 50cm, all painted in black and white.

The other three I've done recently, by contrast, are highly coloured. They're oil pastel over digital prints with that ghostly effect that I like so much where elements I've covered over show through.

I haven't had the last one framed yet.

I've made the beach deserted to show up the four figures more. It's funny because in the original photo that red canopied structure was solid with bodies sheltering from the sun and now it's empty.

Catching up

part of my homage to Richard Hamilton's 'Swingeing London', 

acrylic on canvas, 40 x 50cm

I've been pretty invisible on my blog recently but I haven't been idle. I don't have too much time around the edges of my job, so I've been trying to use it more productively. I've been continuing with what's turning into a series of paintings of people being intruded upon in cars and other vehicles. First there was Charles and Camilla getting mobbed on their way to the Royal Variety Performance. Now I'm edging closer to the painting that is inspiring this whole project, Richard Hamilton's 'Swingeing London 67 (f)'. I've been back to some of the original paparazzi photos of Mick Jagger and Robert Fraser handcuffed together in the police van in 1967 and have painted my own version -- the first of several I'm planning to do, all different. I painted this one in black and white, which is a good challenge.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 23cm

I've also done this one, which is smaller scale, in sepia tones. I like the image because you can actually see the camera taking the picture reflected in the car window.

Skater Girl, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 23cm

Third is this little painting which is the first in what will be a short series of sunny skaters.
I recently joined the countywide artists' forum (Hertfordshire Visual Arts Forum) and it is already proving valuable as they email through lots of opportunities to submit work to exhibitions. Some of these are really tantalising, some less so.
     I am very happy to be able to report that my friends Ben Fletcher and Karen Pine liked the portrait of themselves that they very kindly commissioned me to do. The whole thing was highly enjoyable. I started off feeling that I needed to find out a little more about Ben and Karen to inform whatever approach I was going to take. As they're both psychologists, I thought it would be interesting (and fun) to turn the tables on them and do a psychological 'experiment' on them. I devised a questionnaire and printed out three copies. They had to fill in one copy each, separately, seal it up in an envelope and then complete the third one together. The idea was to explore individuality vs coupledom with a view to making that a theme of the portrait. Obviously it wasn't a serious 'experiment' in any real sense but the answers they gave me were genuinely fascinating, revealing an incredible closeness between the two of them. My original idea was to do a painting of the two of them, a single image, but split across two canvases. Each of them would dominate one of the canvases but there would be a strong pull between the two halves as they would naturally make up one larger picture. However, when I went to visit Karen and Ben to do more research and take some photos, they told me, in the nicest way, that they were hoping I'd do something other than a painting... Yikes! This turfed me out of my comfort zone but turned out to be a good push in another direction -- directions, even, as I ended up making two pieces for them.

Ben and Karen under their trees, mixed media, 20 x 29cm

The first is a montage constructed inside an enamel dish. The main individual elements are painted in soft pastel.

Ben and Karen represented, various objects in perspex drawers

The second piece isn't figurative but nonetheless represents Ben and Karen. It's a set of five perspex drawers (from the 60s, I think), about 18 x 12 x 18cm. Each drawer contains objects relating to an aspect of Karen and Ben's personalities or their life together.

It was very exciting, not to say nervewracking, showing them how I had portrayed them, but they could not have been more positive. It was unbelievably thrilling when they liked both pieces. I won't forget that feeling for a long time.

The last thing I've made recently is a completely redone version of a little book I made to go with my explorations of old postcards. It's called 'Incidentals' which refers to the people who are captured on picture postcards without their permission.

It's just struck me that it's a little bit like an arty version of Where's Wally. You get the full postcard and then a 'hidden' (or just small) person or persons, plus an imaginary monologue of what's in their head/s. It pleases me anyway. I could spend my whole life delving into the world of old postcards.

Final final thing to catch up on is that Dora and I finally made Scandinavian Kitchen's recipe for Kladdkaka and it was absolutely delicious. It looks like brownies and it is similar, but more chewy and with the slightly different flavour from the Scandinavian cocoa powder. Highly recommended, as is the Scandi Kitchen blog.

I'm stuck into another 'inside the car' painting now, featuring Danni Minogue...

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.