Last day of 'land water darkness' exhibition at the Gas Gallery - Saturday 4 October 2014

Tomorrow (Saturday 4 October) is my last day for this exhibition which has run since 4 September. I will be in the gallery upstairs from around 1pm until closing at 5pm, after which the exhibition must come down. There are more photos on display than ever, so if you haven't been for a while - today over 30 new photos went up, most of which are mixed media pieces with aint and/or ink. Everyone welcome, look forward to meeting you!

The Gas Gallery / Oriel Nwy is located about 50 metres left of the rail station, or parking is at Matalan and cross the road. Look for the red brick building with a huge glass front.

Exhibition preparations: painting the walls

Monday 1 September - day -3

The exhibition space is mine! Previous work has been taken down... and hundreds of tiny marks are now visible on the white walls, and must be painted over.

 

The use of a paintbrush in the hand is always pleasurable.

The more marks are painted over, the more marks become visible.

While working, I am put in mind of an artist called Hiwa K. Kurdish, he attended art school in Germany before coming to the UK. He began by painting all the marks off the white walls.

He did this every day. When he returned from a week's absence, someone else had taken over his space and there was blue paint everywhere. Patiently, he began returning every square centimetre to pure white.

Eventually they called him in and demanded to know when he was going to produce some work. His response was to continue painting the walls, even though they didn't realise this was the work. Oh, and he hung a pair of rubber gloves off the clock.

They threw him out.

Hail Hiwa K, for making us notice the minute, the medium, the surface, the Forth Bridge-ness of the life without mindfulness.

All photos copyright Indigo Violet Larkin 2014.

More on Hiwa K at http://hiwak.net/ 

For those not familiar with Scotland's Forth Bridge, the idea is that as soon as the worker finishes painting it, the work needs to start all over again in a never ending cycle.

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: Cezanne and Monet at the National Museum Cardiff

This blog is a warmup for my forthcoming solo show this September at the Gas Gallery / Oriel Nwy in Aberystwyth. In the spirit of thinking about landscape, here are details of two of the paintings I saw in Cardiff last week.

There is always more to learn from Monet and Cezanne.

Above: Paul Cezanne, Provencal Landscape, c. 1837,  photo by Indigo Violet Larkin

Below: Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral, Setting Sun (Symphony in Grey and Pink), photo by Indigo Violet Larkin

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.