Wilhemina Barns-Graham
Movement and Light: Imag[in]ing Time
Tate St Ives
2005
Essay by Mel Gooding
“I am interested in using abstract forms mainly insofar as they are derived directly from natural sources by means of simplification within the movement of the picture itself: painting is pattern…’ WBG in 1949
“What B-G sought to do was to quicken our apprehension and sharpen our perception of the visible world.” – this is what I want to do also is it not? Don’t all painters?
later work says MG sees the development of more formally abstract works with less derivation from natural forms and more direct use of the “resources of painting itself: texture, stroke, colour, and the relations, internal to the canvas rectangle, of purely painted lines, blocks, patches, quasi geometric forms. The contrast that had always been at the heart of her thematic matter, of solid form to atmospheric insubstantiality, of the static architectonic of rock, hill and building to the flux of wind, water and weather, were now expressed in terms of those formal elements. “
“both paintings derive their visual impact not from any subliminal memory of natural forms but from the disturbance created in the spectator by the play across the front picture plane of free floating, off-vertical black diagonals. The sensations – rather than impressions – of scatter, pitch and fall are induced by these foreground elements; behind them the eye finds no place of rest”…. He goes on... Both paintings are brilliant demonstrations of affective and suggestive colour, the one hot, nocturnal, interior, the other cold, winter daytime, out of doors.” P27
‘Colour is for Barns-Graham, like the drawn line, a means to seeing and discovering reality. The formal aspects of her later painting [-] are no longer abstract transcriptions of what is perceived, and her colours have no naturalistic descriptive function. They are, rather, purely pictorial elements whose dynamic relations to each other are analogies for those of the real elements in the phenomenal world.
Time is registered in changes of light and colour, in the speed of stroke and line, in the insubstantial transience of clouds and shadows.
B-G’s non-figuration is never of the formalist kind that claims autonomy from nature. It is essentially an objective art that seeks to reveal, by vivid resemblances, both the chaos and the pattern of nature: its endless movement in time, its degree of darkness, its variegations of light.
[her work] pictures a moment abstracted from the flux of time in its elemental essence.
Monday, January 14, 2008
JMW Turner Research notes
Notes on Turner in Venice
Turner and Venice, 2003, Ian Warrel
“the vaporous masterpieces he produced then have been said to represent the sawn of Impressionism. For me they suggest Debussy in paint, and it is Debussy’s languorous, limpid cadences that come into my head still when I remember my own original stay in Venice”
I love this reference as music is a part of the way I consider my own works. A comment made to me about my work relating to Eric Satie has stayed with me for years and is one of the best and most interesting compliments I think I’ve ever received.
Ian Warrel asserts that although Turner only spent a total of 4 weeks in 20 years in Venice, his venetian paintings account for a large amount of his work. The Venice paintings are often talked about in relation to their focus on the sea and the effects of light on water – however these are also present in many of his works painted in Britain. It was water and the sea in general rather than Venice that was his main focus/love.
“Venice is a city suspended in time” – this notion it is suggested comes from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818). It’s an interesting one this… does that quality come through in the work? I took some video footage in Venice with sound – must get it onto computer and use for a work… bells in the morning, not sure how I will use it, but perhaps the music element can be brought in somehow.
Turner often painted couplings – morning and evening of the same view, or two cities, hot and cold colourings… often series focusing on these opposites. Would it be useful for me to make a series like this? I do in many ways in the studio already, work in colour complemetaries…
P 25 “sense of a dematerialised reality, combined with a physical sense of the air between objects that is probably the most radical quality of the watercolours, though this too is common to much of his late work”
“this depicts Turner’s fundamental engagement with colour rather than form”
turner is said to have remarked to Ruskin “atmosphere is my style”
p 28 “ though movement is so often the ostensible subject of these pictures… there is surprisingly little evidence of discernable motion” it is suggested that this is due to the sense of Venice being suspended in time..
p66 In the late work the connections between the colour beginnings and the finished canvases is narrowed – works are layers of colour glaze and have little form
Turner and Venice, 2003, Ian Warrel
“the vaporous masterpieces he produced then have been said to represent the sawn of Impressionism. For me they suggest Debussy in paint, and it is Debussy’s languorous, limpid cadences that come into my head still when I remember my own original stay in Venice”
I love this reference as music is a part of the way I consider my own works. A comment made to me about my work relating to Eric Satie has stayed with me for years and is one of the best and most interesting compliments I think I’ve ever received.
Ian Warrel asserts that although Turner only spent a total of 4 weeks in 20 years in Venice, his venetian paintings account for a large amount of his work. The Venice paintings are often talked about in relation to their focus on the sea and the effects of light on water – however these are also present in many of his works painted in Britain. It was water and the sea in general rather than Venice that was his main focus/love.
“Venice is a city suspended in time” – this notion it is suggested comes from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1818). It’s an interesting one this… does that quality come through in the work? I took some video footage in Venice with sound – must get it onto computer and use for a work… bells in the morning, not sure how I will use it, but perhaps the music element can be brought in somehow.
Turner often painted couplings – morning and evening of the same view, or two cities, hot and cold colourings… often series focusing on these opposites. Would it be useful for me to make a series like this? I do in many ways in the studio already, work in colour complemetaries…
P 25 “sense of a dematerialised reality, combined with a physical sense of the air between objects that is probably the most radical quality of the watercolours, though this too is common to much of his late work”
“this depicts Turner’s fundamental engagement with colour rather than form”
turner is said to have remarked to Ruskin “atmosphere is my style”
p 28 “ though movement is so often the ostensible subject of these pictures… there is surprisingly little evidence of discernable motion” it is suggested that this is due to the sense of Venice being suspended in time..
p66 In the late work the connections between the colour beginnings and the finished canvases is narrowed – works are layers of colour glaze and have little form
Monet Research from L'Orangerie
CLAUDE MONET at the Marmottan and Orangerie museums in Paris
Personal notes from my viewing experience at these museums on a research trip toParis and Giverny
Marmottan
It’s interesting to note how much the paintings change over time – was it Monet’s eyesight? Natural development of the work? Boredom, experimentation…? All of the above?!
The later works have a completely different colour key, they are much darker and have a lot of maroon and yellow ochre, green and orange. They have a lot of more onvious brushwork too. Some still have the vivid violet colouring, like the colour of things at night/twilight., I prefer these ones I must admit (perhaps just conditioning or expectation of Monet?)
Many of these works here in the Marmottan feel like studies (yet are hung as finished works). There’s a sense of a rush about them, I guess a sense of hurriedness which is an interesting element of time to have in a picture. They move too, the weeping willow leaves flutter and wriggle more than anything else on the canvas. A couple of work seem more abstract (for lack of a better word). One called Glycines, a long horizontal piece that looks like wistaria, but has this crazy light violet colour that is taking over the canvas like some of the earlier works actually – like Gare St Lazare where the patches of steam from the trains is the same colour as the sky and looks like it is eating away patches of the picture.
I love the early works actually, snow landscape, train in snow, London in fog…they all reference nature/landscape/weather.
There is a lot of movement in the later works, but the colour seems really off, they don’t ‘sing’ they’ve become muddied to the point of losing something, some have an ‘ugliness’ that works, in others I think they’ve gone too far. People lap them up though seemingly without much thought. It’s a funny thing the tourist art circuit.
The movement comes partly from directional brushwork, but mostly I think it is from the very closely judged relationship between colour and tone that makes the works so interesting. It’s the ones closest in tonality that work for me – it’s colour then primarily that he’s so good at.
L’Orangerie, Nympheas series
And tourism killed the paintings…
It’s so hard to see these works amidst the crowds taking their photos and listening to their audio guides. There is a continual stream of people asking the guides “which is No 1?” like it’s a tour they have to do from start to finish. No one seems to actually look at the paintings. No one stops. I guess when you succeed with something at the level that Monet has – you fail in the end to do what you set out to. People don’t actually see these paintings, they visit them like a site and pose in front of them.
The works are like clouds of violet smoke which slowly reveal little bits of a picture, a perspective, a bunch of waterlilies. The lighter areas – reflected clouds on the water? – eat into the surface eroding the illusion of depth that comes and goes across the picture plane. This aspect of the works reminds me of the earlier little train steam work ‘Gare St Lazare’ that does the same thing.
They’re peaceful works for the most part, quiet and restful. There is not a lot of movement, although it’s very hard to get a real sense of them, they underwhelm at first viewing this time. The colour is mesmerising in moments, but the draftsmanship seems clumsy, annoyingly so, is this deliberate?
Initially I didn’t like the works in the first room, but after a while in the second space which is dominated by mauve and so restful, so similar, so pretty – the return into the first room with its stronger and slightly jarring colours is surprisingly refreshing. Even the autumnal work I first thought was muddy, actually I really like. Why? Because it has guts. It has ugliness which it needs. It has autumn – decay, sticks and stalks where flowers bloomed. It has a lot of movement, flickering loose brushwork.
It irritates me slightly though that the paintings and made up of panels and the joins are really visible. They are obviously painted separately and some joins don’t meet up. I guess that must be deliberate?
For my own work I’d like to make them seamless. They need to be all in one piece. I will put works together to make a large environment, but each needs to stand alone as a painting.
Personal notes from my viewing experience at these museums on a research trip toParis and Giverny
Marmottan
It’s interesting to note how much the paintings change over time – was it Monet’s eyesight? Natural development of the work? Boredom, experimentation…? All of the above?!
The later works have a completely different colour key, they are much darker and have a lot of maroon and yellow ochre, green and orange. They have a lot of more onvious brushwork too. Some still have the vivid violet colouring, like the colour of things at night/twilight., I prefer these ones I must admit (perhaps just conditioning or expectation of Monet?)
Many of these works here in the Marmottan feel like studies (yet are hung as finished works). There’s a sense of a rush about them, I guess a sense of hurriedness which is an interesting element of time to have in a picture. They move too, the weeping willow leaves flutter and wriggle more than anything else on the canvas. A couple of work seem more abstract (for lack of a better word). One called Glycines, a long horizontal piece that looks like wistaria, but has this crazy light violet colour that is taking over the canvas like some of the earlier works actually – like Gare St Lazare where the patches of steam from the trains is the same colour as the sky and looks like it is eating away patches of the picture.
I love the early works actually, snow landscape, train in snow, London in fog…they all reference nature/landscape/weather.
There is a lot of movement in the later works, but the colour seems really off, they don’t ‘sing’ they’ve become muddied to the point of losing something, some have an ‘ugliness’ that works, in others I think they’ve gone too far. People lap them up though seemingly without much thought. It’s a funny thing the tourist art circuit.
The movement comes partly from directional brushwork, but mostly I think it is from the very closely judged relationship between colour and tone that makes the works so interesting. It’s the ones closest in tonality that work for me – it’s colour then primarily that he’s so good at.
L’Orangerie, Nympheas series
And tourism killed the paintings…
It’s so hard to see these works amidst the crowds taking their photos and listening to their audio guides. There is a continual stream of people asking the guides “which is No 1?” like it’s a tour they have to do from start to finish. No one seems to actually look at the paintings. No one stops. I guess when you succeed with something at the level that Monet has – you fail in the end to do what you set out to. People don’t actually see these paintings, they visit them like a site and pose in front of them.
The works are like clouds of violet smoke which slowly reveal little bits of a picture, a perspective, a bunch of waterlilies. The lighter areas – reflected clouds on the water? – eat into the surface eroding the illusion of depth that comes and goes across the picture plane. This aspect of the works reminds me of the earlier little train steam work ‘Gare St Lazare’ that does the same thing.
They’re peaceful works for the most part, quiet and restful. There is not a lot of movement, although it’s very hard to get a real sense of them, they underwhelm at first viewing this time. The colour is mesmerising in moments, but the draftsmanship seems clumsy, annoyingly so, is this deliberate?
Initially I didn’t like the works in the first room, but after a while in the second space which is dominated by mauve and so restful, so similar, so pretty – the return into the first room with its stronger and slightly jarring colours is surprisingly refreshing. Even the autumnal work I first thought was muddy, actually I really like. Why? Because it has guts. It has ugliness which it needs. It has autumn – decay, sticks and stalks where flowers bloomed. It has a lot of movement, flickering loose brushwork.
It irritates me slightly though that the paintings and made up of panels and the joins are really visible. They are obviously painted separately and some joins don’t meet up. I guess that must be deliberate?
For my own work I’d like to make them seamless. They need to be all in one piece. I will put works together to make a large environment, but each needs to stand alone as a painting.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)