Docent Talk

An interesting day followed in which we spoke to the docents on the nature of the works in the exhibition. The range of topics covered the birth of creative inspiration to technical issues.

Stephen Paints a Picture

The exhibition opened Feb 27. It had an unusually fast turnaround from the original conception. The show had a "hook" in that it's origin lay in the combined project of Virgil Hammock's and mine which centred on a 20 part text of the conversation between us while working on a Virgil's portrait, and which was available as an ebook. As a result the exhibition contained working drawings and finished and unfinished paintings of the portrait, an exhibition of painting equipment and artifacts as well as the original note and sketchbook, and a good sized collection of recent figurative works. Further plans which will keep this alive as an ongoing project is the fact that the final picture will be completed in situ. We came to feel that this was a fairly original concept for a museum show in that it was not a static exhibition of pictures, focussed on the act of painting (art for arts sake) and would be of interest to a wider audience. 

Speech central

A view of the installation

Virgil and Meridith

James Wilson. Guildsman?

Family

Popup at the Beaverbrook

Virgil Hammock  is curating a show of my work at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton which is built around an unfinished portrait project we undertook over the past summer involving the development of an ebook of our conversations on art as well as the picture. Due to unplanned circumstances completion of the project had to be postponed, but the show is to be up for some time, and the plan is to complete the project in situ. It seemed a good idea to include some current figurative work as grounding, and guide for the finished portrait.

Installation shots below.

Virgil

Thanksgiving with Tom

I am spending some time in Halifax. Yesterday (Thanksgiving Sunday) went sketching with new friend Tom. Certainly a treat to meet and get to know an artist who had been a huge inspirational influence in setting my direction as a painter and helping me to make the decision to become an artist in the first place.

Tom's attitude, ideas and knowledge is as sound as the quality and source of the subject matter of his images. The truth to, dedication and core emotional values underlying what he does is refreshing counterpoint to the frenetic shifting values of the postmodern.  As well, the reinforcement of sense of place in art (and which Tom has, through his drawing on the specific, and through his influence on eastern Canadian art, certainly made manifest) is an issue which I have lately begun to feel challenges and impairs through its absence, a lot of emerging and current production.

Tom has a dry wit and a pleasant and comfortable nature which is refreshing. Even his occasional jibes and criticisms are delivered in a forgiving manner. He is a man comfortable in his own skin, and comfortable with the position he holds in the arts. One thing quickly obvious on first conversing with him is his knowledge of art history and his wide ranging appreciations. This is an area in which I identify completely; being understood as a "realist" painter does not limit one's own broad areas of influence, hidden or obvious.

I guess this is a funny time in my life. It seems that there is coming to be the closing of a large circle of experience; perhaps this is a necessary part of my path before moving on. I mean energy is restless and inspiration develops from and expresses new ideas, which are the result of change. It seems that through Virgil, and Tom I am beginning to see from a more mature position my struggles and enthusiasms of the last 3 decades. Not that there is the need to turn a new leaf, but a sense of the need to consolidate power and expression on a different plane emotionally.

So yesterday Tom loaned me some paint and a few brushes and we went out to the shore road and spent a few hours in the sun on the beach. I did a sketch of Tom painting. Some insight into his world and magic.

What is Correspondence

I was in correspondence with a good friend and fellow artist today, someone who's perceptive mind and ideas have always had a telling impact on helping me understand my own labyrinthine connection to what it is to be an artist. His statement "art is life for me- life is art" is so deceptively simple that it takes a minute to realize actually how profound that statement is. What is art if it is not the actual visceral core of one person's experience brought to a point of beauty and as a transmissible object of contemplation. Put all the crap aside- it is what is left over after the hype, efforts to achieve novel or noticeable effects, visibility via celebrity, and chasing the carrot of the latest novelty whether it is painting, conceptual art or photography. The moment of conviction- the point at which something fundamentally human is expressed is the moment when beauty (or call it magic, or mystery) is brought to life. And this is the depth of feeling one person has for and in, life. That is why some things register as art, and some things as novelty. Why some things fly and others only walk or remain stationary. Skill is that of the mind and not the hand, and it is the unwavering connection with that which is true and significant that makes art. The statement by Wilde "art is what is left over after everything else has fallen away" makes better sense if one considers what the left over bits refer to.

Teachers lead by example, but the learning is knowledge we build together.

Newfoundland Suite- Yellow Box Gallery

Sept. 6- mid Oct. 2013 at the Yellow Box Gallery, Saint Thomas University, Fredericton. A group of oil sketches from a series made in 2012 in southwestern Newfoundland. Curated by William Forrestall with text by Virgil Hammock.

Stephen Scott, as you can see from the paintings on the wall, has both a fine eye and hand. These small paintings speak elegantly to the long tradition of landscape painting. He is a plein-airist which simply means that he often paints directly from nature and that gives value to the immediacy of his art. Stephen is also an unabashed romantic and that, in this time and age, is a very good thing when so many of us are trying to be pragmatic about everything in our lives. One needs to step back and view the world in front of us as something wondrous; Stephen does.
Our relationship to nature has changed over the centuries from the fear of the unknown to the celebration of its beauty. Before the urbanization of European and North American society, nature could be a dangerous place where dark things could, and did, happen. Early landscape art reflected these feelings by showing nature as a place best avoided or as a background to human, generally religious, events and, at times, reduced to visual, stock, clichés. However by the mid-17th. Century, landscape painting came into its own as a reflection of the emerging values of humanism. During the 19th. and early 20th. Centuries, landscape painting came to optimize Romantic sensibilities. Today there seems to be little mainstream interest in landscape art perhaps because it does not fit readily into the Postmodern mode except perhaps as a vehicle for irony. Back to Stephen as a romantic--he paints landscape as a window to an understanding of nature, as a thing of beauty. There is no irony in these paintings of the west coast of Newfoundland, only his sense of that what was before his eyes waiting to be discovered by him and now shared with us.
© Virgil Hammock, Sackville NB Canada, Wednesday, 4 September, 2013. 

Running Down the Muse

One difference between literary narrative and that of the visual arts lies in literature's disambiguative function and its ability to formulate and engage patterns of emotion common to conflict and resolution, (or discord and harmony) which usually arrived at some form of resolution. Visual art relies on quick emotive response from the viewer based on visual and formal narrative constructions which are held in an arrested position (a permanent moment in time). The strength of visual art is its ability to maintain ambiguity or complexity, which is a directly experiential situation.

The development of tension in literature which contributes to a wider array of empathetic possibilities is sequential ordering of narrative turns, whereas in the visual arts such as painting tension either results from indications of struggle evident in the works' execution (providing a sense of temporal development) or in the manner with which the technical or formal means coalesce with or express narrative and emotional complexity. Its strength is in the encoding of an emotional core which can be grasped immediately.

My experiences in Sackville this summer have underlined and activated my concern not only with landscape painting through a revisit of a region with which I have had an early history and which I find envigorating, but as well a concern for the aesthetic function of art, and its referential qualities.

Alex Colville died this summer, and the experience of being in situ of his formation has caused me to reexamine the narrative and formal construction of emotive expression in his work. As well I have been working with Virgil Hammock on a project involving the production of a portrait, and attendant observations on the artistic process are being posted on Virgils' blog. virgilhammock.com  The experience of painting and discussion is leading me to examine the nature of painting as an object of active contemplation.

                   In progress

There is no single mythical characterization of a muse for the visual arts. There is a suggestion that artists were perceived as quite lowly practitioners somewhere below plumbers. The effects of the lack of this source of divine intervention and relegation to lower class status still smarts, leading to all kinds of compensatory behaviour. But from a more Jungian perspective often artists find a muse in the synthesis of anima and animus through the intervention and influence of the signifigant other, leading to the personification of the muse as typically female. Consider though the effect Leigh Bowery (a male dancer)on the painting of Lucien Freud. Freud's engagement with the sexual and physical aspects of Leigh's character found forceful resolution in the depiction of flesh which transcended stereotypical rules of gender engagement and transformed into pure art. In the work of Colville we see a more deliberate construction of narrative through formal means in order to present highly personal emotive constructions which find their power through the tightness of the artists' control of the abstract elements of representation. There is the sense of the work being not responsive but deliberate descriptions of his life.

The muse then is inspiration, and can be idea driven or responsive. Visual art is referential, and the strength of its connection to the referent (subject; statement) lies in its formal aesthetics as well as the intentionality and presence of the artists' experience. The manifestation of skill is perceived either consciously or implicitly, and is the ingredient which tacitly links to well established standards of beauty even highly challenging or seemingly chaotic invention.

The problem as I see it is when the artwork loses the strength of its position as an object in its own right and serves merely as a point of reference to an argument which is best conducted elsewhere.

Sackville, August 20th