Many thanks to all who attended 'land water darkness'!

Many thanks to all who attended my exhibition 'land water darkness' over the last month. The last day of the show was this past Saturday 4 October, with a steady stream of visitors, the last being someone who had lived in Copenhagen and had a strong interest in the Greenlandic people. So we watched the slideshow of my Greenland photos from 2008 and had a very interesting discussion. As I did with all of the visitors, except the day when the room was full for most of the afternoon - not quite the Matisse all-nighter at Tate Modern (see my review of this event here http://indigovioletlarkin.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/feeding-eyes-matisse-all-nighter-at.html) but very busy indeed for the size of the gallery, and impossible for me to talk to everyone personally, though I would have liked to!

In a word, thank you all for coming, for your attention, for your time, your questions, your responses, your interest, your enthusiasm. It has made it all worthwhile.

As for this blog, in the days and weeks to come I will resume posting all the changes to the exhibition over its month-long run, with some responses to some of the feedback as well, and answers to some of the questions that were asked. I will also continue reviewing some of the exhibitions visited, in my 'Feeding the Eyes' series. So keep this page bookmarked, and be sure also that news of my forthcoming exhibitions and activities will also appear here.

Feeding the eyes: George Shaw

 

Continuing the theme of approaches to landscape, in preparation for my forthcoming abstracted landscape photography solo show...



Recently have been enchanted with the thoughtful stillness of George Shaw's Coventry landscapes, peopleless and often read as melancholic because of the run-down nature of the postwar, post-energetic subject matter. The colours are made from a limited palette designed not for the landscape but for painting model airplanes, Humbrol enamels which imbue the surface of the canvas with the gloss of childhood memory, or the embalming of death. Shaw uses a soft touch and resists the urge to overpaint details with these hobbyist hues: the smallest branches of bare trees become a hazy halo consistent with brushwork elsewhere.

 

For me the most exciting thing about the paintings is the compositional balance so many of them exhibit: large squares balanced against small, each building becoming a network of squares dividing the canvas like the sections of a Mondrian. Often the foreshortened perspective of the ground, such as broken concrete slabs or a strip of paving, draws the eye in to the main part of the picture, where abandoned buildings crumble, or cookie-cutter suburban houses rest, all in a surprising luminous beauty enhanced by their mathematically precise geometrical structure that is the world of Shaw's paintings.



 



Seeing one in Cardiff at the National Museum Wales was a timely pleasure.

More info: Tateshots' George Shaw interview for the 2011 Turner Prize http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/video/tateshots-turner-prize-2011-george-shaw

George Shaw's 'The End of Care' is displayed at 'Wales Visitation: Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art' at the National Museum Cardiff, until 7 September 2014, admission free. http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/whatson/?event_id=7012

Photos: George Shaw 'The End of Care', 2013 (installation view and details). Photos by Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

Indigo Violet Larkin's exhibition 'land water darkness' opens at Gas Gallery / Oriel Nwy, Aberystwyth on 4 September. Private view 5 September 6-8 pm, sneak preview video screening as part of 'Stories by Gaslight' 3 September. Admission to gallery free; tickets for 'Stories by Gaslight' £5.

Feeding the eyes: Reuben Knutson's utopian images

Always happy to combine art and play (aren't they really the same thing?), I headed off to the opening of Reuben Knutson's interactive exhibition 'Utopian images of the past, present and future in a 1970's Welsh landscape', which shows at Aberystwyth University's School of Art until 12 September. The exhibition is the culmination of his PhD research in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, but as a longtime inhabitant of the School of Art, he is having his work is presented there.

The exhibition is in three parts: collaged photographic images in the corridor, a twenty-five minute film in the right hand exhibition space, and in the left, a series of overhead projectors (pictured) with a flurry of acetates that the public are invited to layer on the projector bases, and thus display on the walls. At the opening everyone was too shy to 'disturb' the exhibition at first, but this is crucial to its understanding. Archive photographs, reproductions of illustrations and period documents are interspersed with quotations from Walter Benjamin. And it is here that I will have to leave description of the exhibition, until a return visit allows me to see the film in its entirety, and digest the drawers full of images. The communities and events Knutson has researched promise to be extremely engaging, and are currently entirely outside my sphere of knowledge. So stay tuned...

More info on Knutson's exhibition

Photo above: Reuben Knutson, 'Utopian images of the past, present and future in a 1970's Welsh landscape', 2014 (installation view). Photo by Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

Feeding the eyes: Graham Sutherland

Only so much time can be spent looking through one's own back catalogue before visual refeshment is needed. Feeding the eyes, I call it. So last week a visit to the National Museum Cardiff was in order. The current exhibition in the contemporary gallery features five glorious late canvases by Graham Sutherland, as well as a glass case full of his found sculptural objects, and sketches inspired by these objects. All off bounds to the happy snappy instagrammer. However a lovely Sutherland lurks in the permanent collection, on the curvy wall featuring landscapes of Wales.

So now it's back to looking at my own permanent collection, in preparation for my solo show next month.

You want to take better photos? Look at paintings.

Above:
Graham Sutherland painting reproduced in catalogue ('Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World') as browsed at National Museum Cardiff. Photo copyright Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

Below:
Painting: Graham Sutherland, Mountain road with boulder, oil on canvas, 1940 (detail). Photo copyright Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

'Wales Visitation: Poetry, Romanticism and Myth in Art' is on until 7 September 2014, admission free.