Category: Uncategorized

Lockdown is being relaxed, but nothing is normal

Travel!

‘No deaths reported in our region for third day in succession’: the welcome words of the Wales Today newreader. Yes, I have travelled in a car from Lockdown Birmingham City to a Lockdown Pembrokeshire sea village in West Wales where the Irish sea rolls into the dark jagged cliffs and long quiet beaches.

The isolated walks are welcome reminders of the pleasures of big skies and landscapes that in pre covid times we enjoyed as holidays from city life. At the end of normal walks, the village café or pub would invite ramblers to enjoy warm hospitality and home cooked seasonal produce of fish from the sea and meat and vegetables from the fields. Today masked young people in front of makeshift serving tables run in and out to fulfil orders for sustenance, cooked in hidden backroom kitchens and served outside, come rain or shine. Pre covid, quiet and slow holiday isolation in contrast to city life was something to escape to. Now the city is quiet and slow, West Wales with vast expanses of land and sea seems an oddly similar experience. A neighbour tells me that a company in the capital city has told its 300 employees that they need never come into the office again: ‘work from home, wherever that may be.’ On the journey up an old Indian colleague from Birmingham reported he had sadly lost two relatives.  Even through current deaths are at zero the mourning of loss continues to be felt, now and for many years to come.

Museums under pressure

A tsunami of sad and angry tweets have followed announcements that the city museum has begun a period of staff consultation brought on by the lack of revenue from social distance preventing public attendance, public funds and zero commercial activity. The recent announcement by the UK government of an Arts support fund of £1.57 billion was a welcome a sign of recognition that cultural industries are core to a functioning society. Practically however, there are few methods in place to get the monies in place quickly enough, to prevent threats of redundancy to those that have kept our culture(s) alive. This situation is mirrored across the country.

Writing

Before travel much writing has been done: submission to the annual Ort gallery Schwarmerei (excessive sentiment) members show; applications for campus access to complete a print commission; revisions of an academic paper due for completion, annual 12 month research review and forward plan. They are demanding in their individual ways, but the forward plan is particularly challenging while looking out from lockdown. The ambition to make and create prevails, but a return to a pre covid creativity norm is unlikely, if not impossible.  ‘Lockdown has created an uncertain psychological mindset, ‘slowed’ research and led to questions of validity’.

My son and Mark Rothko

My son messaged me with a photo of a Mark Rothko framed print that he was considering buying. Son: ‘Aware of him?’ Father: ‘Yep! Amazing US abstract Expressionist. Massive dark colour canvases.  Some in Tate Britain next time we get to go.” Son: “Yeah recognised the name instantly, but couldn’t place it.  Feel like you’ve mentioned it before.” A few days later in in West Wales I came across the ‘The Rothko Book’ on the shelf in a bedroom the son had slept in many times. 

I txt’d the photo to him and leafed through the pages to be surprised by the amount of figurative works before the big colour canvases appeared.  I should not have been too surprised as many biographies of twentieth century painters including the super famous Picasso’s, Dali’s and Duchamp’s open with figurative drawings and paintings of family and local landscapes that were their early years subjects. I was reminded of this at the recent Bridget Riley exhibition in the National Gallery of Scotland where the last room was brilliantly dedicated to her teenage years painting in Cheltenham culminating in her copied painting of the classical red Italian renaissance portrait she submitted as part of her application to Goldsmith’s School of Art.   

Marcus Rothkowitz, b 1903 into a Jewish family in Dvinsk Russia. He followed his Father to the US in 1913, with his Mother and Sister. They embarked in Brooklyn, travelled to relatives in New Haven, Conneticut before joining his family in Portland Oregon.

He was influenced by his engagement with a number of US artistic movements over 40 years as he saught to give meaning to his paintings. Illustration, mythology, surrealism, symbolism. He took all in earnest and engaged closely with many peers and partner artists including Clifford Still and Barnet Newman until he began to investigate and experiment with colour and shape without figurative references. More of which when I have read The Rothko Book by Bonnie Clearwater.

digital drawing

Looking Ahead Link

The first announcement of Arts Council and DCMS support

https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/news/launch-emergency-grassroots-music-venues-fund

Thats it.

Restricted Realities

In previous weeks I have applied a format beginning with Covid virus updates. This week covid will be relegated to last on the list and a reflection on artistic responses to isolation will lead the way. Take Care.

Lookout Lockdown – Restricted Realities

Lockdown has encouraged many weeks of reflection, on amongst many considerations, the local environment. If one is lucky enough to have a garden then the natural world of animals, birds and foliage has become more apparent, or we have become more aware, than before covid. However the darkness and quietness of early mornings without the demands of a structured day ahead has led to slower rising. Hopes of getting up and out to work in the fine art silkscreen print room are overtaken with the restricted reality of lockdown and to ideas of digital drawing conceived as an amalgam of photography and digital printmaking that can be approached in isolation.

The self isolating bedroom has thick wall to ceiling curtains, pulled tight in the evening that create a disorientating waking into darkness. When the curtains are pulled open light enters the room and reveal looming trees of green, wafting in the breeze that become mesmeric. Confirmation that they and the outside world is still there is welcome. Seclusion is the nature of lockdown isolation. Outside is seen from inside. A quickly taken smart phone photograph of the view looking out though the window does not capture the ambience of a room that is usually left, once awake. The world is still there and the air moves, with or without the virus.

Restricted lockdown reality makes one even more inquisitive of unaccustomed views seen by peering out of the prison window with its horizontal and vertical muntins. Looking out inspires the making of images to express the physical and emotive experience of isolation. Responses to the outside world over lockdown weeks has led to drawing out from photographs of the environment with increasingly non figurative window frames. Naturalistic drawings remain centre stage as the frames around them change, but retain their containing structures. The first drawing of the weeping tree in a trapezoid frame took many weeks to complete. The act of drawing became a meditation on the nature of the weeping foliage. It was contained by a stepped back simplified image of the window frames. In contrast to the detailed literal drawing thick dark ‘bamboo’ lines were over drawn creating a new dramatic frame to the forefront and on top of the greyed background. The addition of colour, in similar technique to under printed silkscreen layers, defined the contained drawing to the exclusion of the all other window framed images, leaving the focus on the one frame.

The tree is: Cupressus nootkatensis. More in Lock Down 4: http://printsanew.jonnieturpie.com/2020/04

With LL#1 complete additional images appeared in waking mornings. By shifting viewpoint to the right the highlighted leaves on the maple and plane trees next to the weeping tree became the focus for LL#2. A similar process of drawing and composition was adopted. However the literal image of the window frame was rejected and replaced with a simple structure to hold the trapezoid drawing. This became a much more abstract framework in the style of a silkscreen print with the application of flat colour in contrast to the drawn and coloured central naturalistic image and Bamboo black border. In following weeks a single growing creeper appeared on a lower window frame and was drawn with a simplified frame structure and the black bamboo over drawn frame. Latterly the weather changed and the rains came which inspired LL#3. The window glass no longer transparent, but holding the raindrops as patterns of light against the dark trees in the background. The cell coming closer and curtailing looking out. #LL4 took the same format of central drawing with bamboo black frame, however this is imposed upon an abridged framing structure. The central drawing is rectangular which emphasises the skewed angle of the framework. The drawing has white surrounds between it and the frames rather than being butted up against them, and hangs like a mirror rather than integrated into the frames. The framework edges are straightened off in the photoshop programme used to compose the multilayered image. Straightening is made with lines of white which have fine dark outlines. The effect is that each edge is ‘taped’ which is a very different approach to previous images that float unsecured on a plane . On the computer screen the taping is an abstract contribution to the image, but when printed it pins the frame and drawing to the paper, in contrast to the prominence of the drawing of the patterned rained upon glass.

14 weeks into lockdown the first four prints are completed and must be finally titled. ‘Lockdown Lookout’ was the original choice implying intentions to make images that inspire positive images made from the negative restricted experience of Lockdown. On review of the images, ‘Lookout Lockdown’ seems more appropriate as the intention is to put lockdown in its place and not be restrained by it.

Considering these titles raises questions on the imposition of Lockdown. Are we imprisoned? Are we being punished? Are we prisoners in caves gazing at framed exterior environments, unsure of what we are seeing? Unlike Plato’s cave we are not looking at illusory shadows, but although what we see is approaching a reality we are familiar with, the context in which we are looking is unfamiliar. Not free to see, but restricted by an agreed communal response to a threat. We do not converse with others. We receive worldly knowledge through media channels, television, radio, social media. Is our incarceration going to arm us with new knowledge to re-enter the worlds we knew, empowered to contribute to enhanced social understanding of a new world? These are contemplative questions considered as the drawings are made to reflect the visual realities presented in locked down waking moments. Having voluntary agreed to participate in imprisonment, to protect wider society we yearn to escape to return to a freedom of our western normality, where the air between the wafting tree and waking cell is not unknown and threatening.

digital drawing #BLM

Looking Ahead Link

15 weeks in and its beginning to really, really drag

Cases are down, GOOD. Deaths are down, GOOD. Optimism is down, BAD.

digital drawing

Digital Drawing continues to be daily a staple and making drawings with the hashtag #BLM is central to this structure. The drawing below is from the Grand Opening of the Fierce Festival last November in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery when we could meet, (hug!) and share the best arts in performance, politics and Pop.

Surface Tensions

I received an invitation to exhibit prints made during lockdown from the Printmakers Council to which I shared the analogue, digital, analogue print: Surface Tensions, with this description:

Prior to Lockdown, the abstract image began during testing of water and powdered lamp black ink on the gleaming glass printroom mixing surface. Its opacity was tested by fingerprinting on a scrap of cartridge paper which I photographed as it was so expressive. The image remained as a record in my digital photographic archives waiting to be revisited at this unexpected lockdown moment. I imported the image into photoshop and played with it until it ‘stood on its own’. As I do not have access to analogue print room facilities right now, I have had to conceive, trial and test new print techniques. The A3 inkjet printer I normally use for outputting photographic images for print planning was in need of a cartridge top up, and I began to experiment with digital printing techniques to preserve tactile marks. The finger ink image had a breadth of tonal and material marked qualities that offered an opportunity to test this digital to analogue print system. The image was proofed on a number of papers and once the image tone, colour and detailed marks were in balance, it was printed on coated textured Hahnemühle Digital German Etching paper.  

Made by hand, kept as photograph, printed with inkjet.  

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