Jenny Saville
Voice of the Shuttle (Philomela), 2014-15
Oil on Canvas (dimensions unknown)
Royal Academy, London
29 January 2015

In "La Peregrina" at the Royal Academy in London, Jenny Saville RA has curated an exhibition to show the influence of Rubens on 20th and 21st century artists ranging from Picasso to Sarah Lucas.  As part of this personal response she has included a new painting of her own called "The Voice of the Shuttle (Philomela)" based on a myth depicted by Rubens (“The Banquet of Tereus”, 1636-37 Museo Nacional del Prado).

The large canvas is dominated by two decapitated heads, named Tereus and Pandion, floating above a tangle of limbs in the foreground of a blasted landscape.  Closer inspection reveals the words “jug jug” amidst the bodies in a spidery charcoal script and a child’s head on the ground to one side.  There are a few sparse abstract painted marks in the centre of the canvas in blue, brown and crimson but the majority of marks are monochrome in either charcoal or paint.  The background of the painting contains some random stains of very dilute paint.

In conversation with Tim Marlow, Director of Artistic Programmes at the RA, Saville explains that the work doesn’t directly quote from the Rubens painting but instead uses the source text from Ovid’s Metamorphoses for her inspiration.  This tells the myth of Philomela, a daughter of Pandion I of Athens who goes to visit her sister, Procne wife of the King Tereus of Thrace.  Tereus accompanies her on the journey but instead of protecting her, rapes her and when she threatens to tell her father he cuts her tongue out.  Imprisoned, Philomela weaves a tapestry that tells her story and sends it to Procne.  Horrified, Procne takes revenge by decapitating their son Itys and serves him to Tereus at a banquet.  When she reveals the head of her son, Tereus takes up an axe to kill the sisters, but the Gods transform them into birds and they take flight.  Procne is transformed into a swallow and Philomela a nightingale, because of course in nature the female nightingale is mute and only the male sings.

Without the title it would be difficult to decode the imagery in the painting, because although Saville uses text within the painting to reinforces her theme, e.g. the words Tereus and Pandion, we get no clues from the heads themselves.  They are actually from a photograph of the heads of two notorious brothers, Abel and Auguste Pollet, guillotined in 1909 for crimes including robbery and murder (no mention was made of rape). The words “jug jug” make an additional literary reference, this time to T S Eliot who in turn directly referenced the myth of Philomela in his epic poem “The Waste Land” and evokes of the call of the nightingale.

The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.

Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns). "The Waste Land" (Faber & Faber: London, 1972) lines 99–103

The final photographic source is the landscape, taken from a photograph of gaunt bare tree trunks in the devastated Chateau Wood, a portion of one of the battlegrounds in Ypres taken in 1917, which gives structural depth to the painting and provides a contemporary context.

Saville comments on the rarity of images in art to do with rape and how when talking about art “the issue of rape, the abduction of a woman’s body is never discussed”.  She acknowledges the difficulty of depicting rape in a painting and in this work uses a variety of sources to support her theme.  Perhaps best known for painting monumental close-ups of large nude women, Saville dispenses with any Rubenesque fleshy paint to savour, keeping the mood of the painting as grim as its subject.  The style adopted is a continuation of her relatively recent experimentation with pentimenti. These altered marks found in a traditional painting usually suggest that a correction of a pose was made in the under-drawing for the work.  Here they are clearly visible on the canvas and work in a totally different way depicting elapsed time as the artist strives to resolve the image and evoking the violent struggle in the tangled bodies on her canvas.  Although the face of the male perpetrator is hidden in melée of body parts, Saville has included as historical avatars the Pollet brothers, executed for their guilt 100 years earlier. This ensures the rape is not seen as a sexual impulse that has got out of control but as an aggressive and violent manifestation of sexuality. The introduction of the battlefield reminds us that rape was seen as an unpleasant but inevitable by-product of war that only recently was deemed a severe a breach of conventions.

La Peregrina is showing a part of the exhibition Rubens and his Legacy at the Royal Academy, London, WC2,

until April 10, 2015
(44-020-730- 8000; www.royalacademy.org.uk)

Peder Balke
Northern Lights, 1870s
Oil on Panel 20 x 10cm
National Gallery, London
19 January 2015

I was in the National Gallery waiting for my timed slot for the Late Rembrandt exhibition and thought I would kill time having a look at the free exhibition of the work of Norwegian painter, Peder Balke. An artist almost unknown outside of Scandinavia, that I had never heard of, using similar techniques to those I developed as part of my recent PhD thesis! One of those rare pleasant surprises that still happen from time to time.

Peder Balke was born on the Norwegian island of Helgoya and was one of the few artists to venture to the far North of his native land for inspiration. He explored the Arctic Circle and painted the frozen spectacle of the most remote regions of Norway for the rest of his life. His early style that offered him some limited success was represented in the exhibition, but the majority of works were from after 1850 when he had withdrawn from commercial painting to focus on a career in politics.

I have selected one of the latest and smallest works in the show to review. Measuring only 10x20cm, this small irregular shaped painting on a wooden panel epitomises the effectiveness of his technique. Balke sets the scene by applying thin washes to depict the sea and sky divided by simple opaque marks to create a horizon of bleak mountains. Into the night sky he conjures the spectacle of the Northern Lights by vertically scraping away paint revealing the white ground below. The reflection of the lights on the surface of the water and pictorial depth is accomplished by using this technique horizontally. A final flourish is the addition of four boats of various sizes with a few marks and erasures giving perspective to the painting and accentuating the loneliness and isolation of the drama. This tiny painting becomes a metaphor for the despair of the artist’s soul, his career as an artist forgotten and even omitted from his obituary.

Whilst the division of the space into receding horizontal planes owes a debt to the compositions of Caspar David Friedrich; the use of simple motifs, freely painted on a surface unified by a minimal palette and his technique of removal of paint to effect light sets him apart from his generation of Romantic landscape painters. The fact that these landscapes were painted some 40 years after he had visited the far North made this idiosyncratic style both effective and appropriate to capture his memories of the sublime landscape. Contemporary painters such as Luc Tuymans (simplified motifs / palette) and Elizabeth Peyton (bold brushwork / the ground as light) have used similar approaches to signify loss and memory in their work. However, neither of them conveys the boundless isolation with their metaphors as consistently as Balke achieves in his late work.

An online book of my own works based on The Caravan as a motif is available should you wish to see how I arrived at a similar technique to that used by Balke in his later paintings.  Just proves that no matter how original you think you are, there is nothing new under the (Midnight) Sun!

Peder Balke is at the National Gallery, London, WC2,
until April 12, 2015
(44-020-7747 2885; www.nationalgallery.org.uk)

Dexter Dalwood

Double Portrait Camden Town, 2013Oil on Canvas 150 x 220cmSimon Lee Gallery, London20 November 2014

I have been looking forward to seeing new work by Dexter Dalwood for some time and my visit to his current show at the Simon Lee Gallery (until 24 January 2015) in London didn’t disappoint.  I was keen to see how his work has changed since his exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in 2010.  He still uses the collage technique in a similar way, not only using photographic sources, but also fragments or allusions to paintings by other artists.   This collage of ideas generates an image from which he paints an imaginary 'space', but the place in this exhibition is confined to London and the subjects are more strictly personal rather than historical moments of earlier works.

The paintings seem to be about personal memories and associations of past life and times in London.  But as Jorge Luis Borges [1] points out, memories are created in the present and meanings alter slightly with things added and taken away through each recall.  I read the paintings as referencing how this process of retrieval of memory involves thinking about a memory in a new way – rather than just being a faithful record of the past.  They are an assembly of scraps of information that reconstruct Dalwood’s memories morphed through experience rather than images of a static point in time.

Double Portrait Camden Town, 2013

Oil on Canvas 150 x 220cm

Dalwood has often said that you don’t need to get the references to enjoy the work and in a recent interview for Time Out [2] challenged anyone to try.  Whilst that may be the case, I feel that knowing the references helps both understanding and enjoyment of the work and as I like nothing better than a challenge, I thought I would make the attempt for "Double Portrait Camden Town".

Looking at the painting I see two possible references immediately.  The first is that the copper coloured background with the verdigris coloured blobs is a reference to the ‘piss paintings’ of Andy Warhol.  In these works Warhol was paraphrasing Abstract Expressionism in an ironic way by randomly spraying his screen prints with urine such that the copper sulphate paint oxidised.  The painting Dalwood has used is a 1982 portrait of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat who had an obsession with Warhol and later collaborated with him. His use of a double image of the portrait is suggestive of a Rorschach ink blot used by psychologists to determine underlying personality and emotional functioning. 

Basquiat, 1982 Black photo-silkscreen over oxidized copper

The second, if I am correct, has a clearer connection to Camden Town.  The chest of drawers at the bottom of the painting reminded me of the cheap yellow-brown dresser in Walter Sickert’s painting Ennui, 1917.  I initially thought that his Camden Town Murder paintings may be the reference but the only similar dresser I could find in this orientation was in Sickert’s Mornington Crescent Nude, Contre-Jour of 1907.  However, the connection may simply be that the location of  Ennui is Sickert’s studio in Granby Street, Camden Town.

Ennui, 1914 Oil on Canvas 152x112cm

In his Time Out interview, Dalwood tells us that the painting is partly “about where Verlaine and Rimbaud lived up in Royal College Street in Camden” [3] so Ennui may well be linked to this intention.  Ennui was a recurring theme running through French literature and poetry of the nineteenth century, both as a subject and a symptom.  It is linked with melancholia; a state of emptiness that the ‘soul’ feels when it is deprived of interest in action, life and the world and featured in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), first published in 1857, 16 years before Verlaine and Rimbaud moved to Camden.

Un Coin de Table, 1872 Oil on Canvas160x225cm

Les Fleurs du mal marked the beginning of Symbolism, where symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul, as a movement in France and was developed by Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine during the 1860s and 1870s.  The use of Symbolism in turn leads us to the two vases of flowers on the dresser.  I cannot place the source of the images for the flowers but the reference to their use may be to the painting Un coin de table, 1872 by Henri Fantin-Latour. It is a portrait of the Parnassus poetry group and shows the men are gathered around the far end of a table after a meal. Those present include: Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, but two figures are missing: Charles Baudelaire, to whom the painting was initially to have been a tribute, who died in 1867 and Albert Mérat who did not want to be painted in the company of the diabolic poets Verlaine and Rimbaud and was reputedly replaced by a bunch of flowers.

Dalwood says he “wanted to make a painting about the younger protagonist and the elder, the idea that someone is mentoring someone else” and I think that the pairings are evoked perfectly albeit differently.  He also draws parallels with the hedonistic openly provocative lifestyle of the two younger men but the connection of Warhol and Basquiat to Camden is more opaque and is probably personal the portrait of Basquiat coinciding with Dalwood’s time at St. Martin’s School of Art in London.  

So the titles provides the clue and the cool treatment leaves room for the viewer’s imagination and interpretation, but I still maintain that the experience of the work will be much richer for those viewers who can make the associations between the subject and the quotations from painting’s history - I just wish I could spot them all.

©blackdog 2014

[1] “Memory changes things. Every time we remember something, after the first time, we’re not remembering the event, but the first memory of the event. Then the experience of the second memory and so on.”

Jorge Luis Borges

[2] “There's no way any one viewer will get all the references. It's not a checklist.”

Dexter Dalwood

[3]They stayed at 8 Great College Street  (now Royal College Street), where a little plaque commemorates their stay between May and July 1873. 

James Cambell

Ged Quinn
The Fall, 2006
Oil on Canvas 153 x 250cm
Saatchi Gallery, London
19 August 2010

I must admit I was a little disappointed with the Newspeak: British Art Now (Part 1) exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery, there was certainly some quality work, but overall it lacked the impact of the Sensation exhibitition at the Royal Academy in 1997.

One of the artists that did catch my eye was 47 year old Cornwall based painter, Ged Quinn. Several of Quinn’s large landscapes and still lives shared a room with Sigrid Holmwood’s pastich fluorescent paintings of early Van Gogh. Quinn draws on an even earlier source of inspiration, the feathered landscapes of Claude Lorrain.

“The Fall” is based on the Claude’s Arcadian setting for his 1668 painting “The Expulsion of Hagar” to which Quinn has added poet and dramatist Antonin Arnaud falling from the sky towards a ramshackle burnt out shed. The painting is clearly layed with meaning and the references from recent history becomes “blots” on the Romantic styled landscape. The shot down Antonin Artaud, the creator of the Theatre of Cruelty, is swathed in combat-plane camouflage refers to Lucifer's fall from grace in Milton's Paradise Lost. The shed is Thomas Edison's first purpose-built film production studio, the “Black Maria”, and it is decorated with Artaud's work. I must admit to a weakness to spending time trying to work out the references in his paintings rather than trying to decipher what the whole might mean.

In the Theatre of Cruelty, Artaud was trying to revolutionise theatre - figuratively burn it to the ground so that it could start again. He was trying to connect people with something more primal, honest and true within themselves that had been lost for most people. He believed that text had been a tyrant over meaning, and advocated, instead, for a theatre made up of a unique language that lay halfway between thought and gesture. This has interesting parallels with the theory surrounding the death of painting and provides us with the link to the film industry, where everything is false. Artaud believed in physical expression, something lacking in Claude’s “old fashioned” picturesque landscape painting. It is typical of the mediated vision of the ideal landscape that we all have in our mind's eye and is no longer radical, any power it once had has been bled away by mechanical reproduction.

A knowledge of the subject of the original Claude painting may provide a different interpretation, it shows Hagar and Ishmael being banished into the desert of Beersheba by Abraham. The original is set in the cool light of morning and is paired by a second painting (a pendant) set in an evening desert landscape when the archangel Michael appears to the sorry couple and leads them to a well, saving them from dying of thirst. In Quinn’s painting centuries have passed, Hagar and Ishmael long gone, the temple derelict and fragments of columns and pediments lying in the foreground, but the cool light of dawn remains. Is this the truth that Quinn wants to represent in his “Theatre of Cruelty”?

©blackdog 2010

Albrecht Dürer

British Museum, London
Not Seen
Melencholia I, 1514
Engraving, 23.7 x 18.7 cm

The idea of a melancholic as someone given to profound contemplation, was developed by the work of Italian philosopher Marsilio Ficino. Ficino not only rehabilitated the “Aristotelian” notion of the gifted melancholic , but expressly tied it in with the Platonic notion of “divine frenzy”, thereby laying the intellectual foundations for a new type of man, the “homo literatus” or tortured genius, pitched back and forth between the heights of rapture and the depths of despair. Albrecht Dürer gives a visual interpretation of Ficino’s ideas in his 1514 engraving Melancholia I. According to Erwin Panofski, the woman in Dürer’s engraving displays “artist's melancholia”; a figure being endowed with intellectual power and technical accomplishments of an 'Art', yet despairing under a cloud of black humor.

Representations before Dürer’s seminal work illustrated melancholia by showing a woman or a man asleep at their work.[1] Dürer's Melancholia though is super awake; her fixed stare is one of intent though fruitless searching. She is inactive not because she is too lazy to work but because work has become meaningless to her; her energy is not paralysed by sleep, but by thought. She is a thinking being in perplexity; not contemplating a lost object, but thinking about her insight into a problem that cannot be solved, resulting in impotence and gloom.

“The picture is at once immediately legible and deeply ambiguous. Seated on a step outside a narrow building with a ladder leaning against it is a winged angel. Her right arm rests on a book in her lap, the hand holding a compass; her left hand supports her head. Hanging from the belt of her long, rumpled skirt is a set of keys and a purse. Seated on a millstone to her right is a plump little putto bent studiously over a slate, and, curled up asleep next to the millstone, a scrawny-looking dog. Strewn about the ground are a variety of tools and instruments – a self-feeding furnace, or athanor, a polyhedron with a hammer lying beside it, a sphere, a set square, a pair of pincers, a plane, a handsaw, a ruler, three nails, and some sort of syringe. Fixed to the wall of the building are a set of scales, their pans exactly balanced, an hourglass with equal amounts of sand in each bulb, a bell at rest, and a “magic square” composed of sixteen smaller squares, each inscribed with a number so that whichever way you read the numbers (vertically, horizontally, diagonally) they always add up to thirty-four. In the background is a stretch of coastline overlooking an alarmingly calm lake or sea, and in the sky a comet, a rainbow and a batlike figure brandishing a streamer with the inscription “Melencolia I”. The scene is steeped in a lugubrious grey twilight” .[2]

In his analysis of the engraving Panofski describes the figure as being: lapsed into a state of gloomy inaction, neglectful of attire with her head on her hand (clenched fist), her face overcast by deep shadow and eyes raised in a lowering stare. He concludes that she is in a state of torpid dejection and careless desolation, a creative being brooding in idleness reduced to despair by insurmountable barriers to higher realm of thought. Thereafter, the posture and demeanour of Dürer's Melancholia became the touchstone for artistic depiction of melancholia. Lucas Cranach uses a similar posture for his four versions of An Allegory of Melancholy dated 1528, 1532, 1533, and 1553 and in each case a woman sits staring into space. A century later the frontispiece for the 1638 edition of Robert Burton’s text The Anatomy of Melancholy shows figures with their head on one side, resting on their hands.

[1] According to Erwin Panofsky the commonly held view of the Melancholic was someone characterised as: Thin and swarthy, awkward, miserly, greedy, malicious, cowardly, faithless, irreverent and drowsy. Surly, sad, forgetful, lazy and sluggish, shuns the company of other men and despises the opposite sex. Only redeeming feature is a certain inclination for solitary study.
[2] Mark Hutchinson, The Art of Melancholy TLS 2005

Walter Sickert
Ennui, 1914
Oil on Canvas 152 x 112cm
Tate Britain, London
15 February 2008

The exhibition was of work by the Camden Town Group of painters, who “inspired by the work of van Gogh and Gauguin on the continent, introduced Post-Impressionism to Britain”. This may be the case but in my opinion the biggest influence on Sickert is Degas, using many of his themes such as the music hall and the domestic environment to justify a model’s nudity.

It is interesting that he made full use of titles to add drama to the paintings suggesting a narrative for the work that certainly engaged with life. Ennui is a good example of both his use of titles and domestic interiors as a setting for psychological tension. I have seen this painting several times now and still think it is one of his finest.

The canvas is one of his largest and is based on sketches of two models, Hubby and Marie, that he used for a number of his domestic interior scenes. The painting depicts the couple overlapped in a tight corner of a sitting room, their gazes are diametrically opposed. He looks out of the canvas to the right whereas she looks into the corner of the room on the left. Above her head a painting of a carefree woman ‘looks’ over a balcony into the room. They are both absorbed in themselves.

It can be no accident that there is a bell jar full of stuffed brightly coloured birds on the chest of drawers. The inference is that the woman is both bored and trapped and the title of the painting makes sure we don’t miss the point. It is a mood that has strong melancholic associations and one can imagine the despondent Marie as the protagonist in Alberto Moravia’s 1960’s novel La Noia who states in the prologue that “nothing that I did pleased me or seemed worth doing; furthermore, I was unable to imagine that anything could please me, or that could occupy me in a lasting manner”. This isn’t the melancholy beauty of the symbolists but a mourning of the loss of purpose (or perhaps freedom in this case) such that the melancholic person thus retreats into a state of inactivity, superbly shown by Marie staring into the corner with vacant mindlessness.

In front of her sits Hubby, leaning back in his chair smoking a cigar at a table with a glass of water, staring into what Virginia Woolf described as “the intolerable wastes of desolation in front of him” . His body language is of one set in his ways and the viewer perceives that the accumulated weariness is such that the situation isn’t going to change.

The tight interior space and the arbitrary crop of the fireplace and yellow chest of drawers give an almost claustrophobic atmosphere to the room and remind me of a photographic snapshot. The painting is built up of several layers of thinly scumbled opaque paint giving a very lively surface but I don’t think it contributed to the atmosphere of melancholia as it does in his earlier sequence of pictures with the collective title ‘The Camden Town Murder’ where the brushwork is much coarser and totally in keeping with the subject matter.

[1]Woolf, Virginia quoted in Walter Sickert: the Human Canvas 2004 Abbot Hall Gallery Kendal 62

©blackdog 2010

Vincent van Gogh
The Sower, 1888
Oil on Canvas 32 x 40cm
Royal Academy, London
10 March 2010

Unfortunately the recent exhibition of van Gogh’s letters, drawings and paintings proved to be so popular that it was difficult to even stand still in the press of the crowds in the Royal Academy. However, there were a lot of fine paintings on display and it was especially interesting to see them accompanied by his descriptive letters.

I had gone with the intention of reviewing his portrait of the stoic and melancholic looking Madame Ginoux (L’Arlesienne, 1888) but instead I was captivated by a small jewel like version of The Sower painted in the same year. It is a theme he had addressed several times before, originally inspired by the work of Jean-François Millet, a painter who idealised the ‘monumental’ work of French peasants.

This version is very much his own though, and shows the influences of Japanese prints on his style. In a letter to his brother Theo from around 21st November of 1888, Van Gogh drew a sketch of the Sower and described the colours he was using “Here’s a croquis of the latest canvas I’m working on, another sower. Immense lemon yellow disc for the sun. Green-yellow sky with pink clouds. The field is violet, the sower and the tree Prussian Blue”[1] . The faceless sower works on the left of a canvas divided by a pollarded willow, a motif that had appeared in a watercolour sketch from 1882. The landscape is schematic and flat, but a strong diagonal leads the eye to the huge yellow ball of the setting sun that almost becomes a halo for the working peasant.

The colour is laid on with short definite brush marks with all the energy of someone working hard against the clock. This energetic expressive brushwork not only adds to the vibrancy of the colour in the painting but also serves to dispense with some elements of ‘reality’ in order to highlight others, particularly the sense of twilight. The lavender touches to the fields provide a strong complimentary contrast to the sun making it jump forwards. But despite the strength of the yellow, there is a darkness to the image, as both the foreground subjects, the sower and the tree, appear as dark silhouettes. It is this combination of denial of detail and unusual colour choices, such as the lime green skies casting a sickly pallor over his homestead on the horizon that perhaps reveal a hidden truth about van Gogh’s version of reality and gives the painting its melancholic feel.

[1] Letter 772 (To Theo van Gogh. Arles, on or about Wednesday, 21 November 1888) http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let722/letter.html

©blackdog 2010

Anselm Kiefer
Karfunkelfee 2009
Gold paint, chemise, jesmonite, snake, brambles, concrete, acrylic, oil, emulsion, ash and shellac on canvas in steel and glass frame. 332 x 576 x 35cm
White Cube, London
30 October 2009

This was the first exhibition I had seen of Kiefer’s work in a commercial gallery. The work compromised a series of forest diptychs and triptychs displayed in glass and steel vitrines. The exhibition was titled ‘Karfunkelfee’, after a poem by the post-war Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann.

"On the Golden bridge, only he who might know the fairy’s secret word can win. I’m sorry to say, along with our last snow, it melted in the garden.”

Of the four huge works in the exhibition I have chosen the title piece to review. Karfunkelfee roughly translates as Carbuncle Fairy, an ambiguous figure from fairy tales who may be good or evil. As Kiefer explained in an interview with Tim Marlow, the word Karfunkel has two meanings; it is firstly a precious stone but also associated with ergot, a fungus that that grows on wheat and other crops turning them black. Human poisoning due to the consumption of bread made from ergot-infected grain was common in Europe in the Middle-Ages. Interestingly, ergot is known in German as ‘the tooth of the wolf’ and may be connected to the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowolf.

This would certainly be of interest to Kiefer, who since the 1970’s has made art that alluded to Teutonic myths, Wagner, and the Black Forest; an artist celebrating German history whilst acknowledging the guilt of its fatal collision with Jewish history that culminated in the Holocaust. Kiefer was taught by Joseph Beuys in Dusseldorf and both the use of found materials and the sombre palette are obvious influences in his work. Unlike Beuys though, his chosen medium was painting and like Georg Baselitz, he reprised the painterly style of expressionism, alluding to emotion in his work rather than truth.

Kiefer’s process is to start with a normal canvas and apply a 75mm thick pigment layer that cracks on drying and then place these in vitrines to make a threshold distancing the viewer from the painting. The background image is a forest on a hillside covered in snow and the trees are painted with dark slashing strokes. He adds items between the canvas and the glass of the vitrine that relate to the theme of the work, in this case a snake, Moroccan thorns, scattered teeth and an empty hooded smock. The result of these boxed in memories is not unlike a display cabinet in a natural history museum. Although there is an absence of figures, a human element is acknowledged through the inclusion of the floating empty hooded smock in the central vitrine. The perfect metaphor for the ambiguous Karfunkelfee.

The work has a portentous melancholy to it but I cannot help feeling that the symbolism is too overt, too carefully (artfully) arranged and that this reduces the force of the impact. This manipulation of his Expressionist inheritance in order to give an authorial mark of emotion risks the viewer doubting the psychological depth of the work (more message than feeling). [1]

[1]Paraphrased from Rosalind E Krauss in The originality of the avant-garde and other modern myths 1984 MIT Press 194

©blackdog 2010

Giorgio Morandi


Still Life, 1962
Oil on canvas 30.5 x 30.6cm
Tate Modern, London
1st June 2001

This was the first time I had seen his work and in all honesty I couldn’t remember any specific painting from the show, only the overall impression the body of work made. Consequently I have chosen a painting that was in the show, but that I have had chance to see at the National Gallery in Scotland subsequently.

The impression the Tate Exhibition left with me was one of incredible uniformity, each painting was a small still life and in one room the same objects in the paintings were repeated over and over. The palette throughout was predominantly muted colours and I have since learned deliberately referenced the colours of his home town, Bologna. Because he painted his bottles and boxes without any labels the arrangements were more about form than representation.

Although I went through the exhibition quite quickly and missed the immense complexity within the subtle variations of composition, I did spend enough time with a couple of paintings in the exhibition to appreciate their qualities of quietness and spatial harmony. I also remember preferring the later more abstract style of painting where the still life objects were arranged in a non-conventional way. So I was pleased to revisit this example of his later style in 2005, when I was more attuned to the quality of the nervous scumbled brushwork and the light that emanated from the surface. I was also aware of the significance of the tightly grouped objects that suggest to some the skyline of Bologna and to others family portraits.[1]

Looking at the work later I was also able to appreciate, in retrospect, that the painting was more about the idea than the things he saw, and that they were devoid of narrative. Yet he did paint from actual objects rather than from his imagination. The photograph of his studio shows a reconstruction of a typical set up for one of his paintings. Morandi once commented that 'For me nothing is abstract. In fact, I believe nothing more abstract, more surreal, than reality'.[2]

In this canvas I certainly felt there was more to it than the physical surface of the image, an aura which maybe because of my own circumstances at the time, I sensed as melancholic. It is something to do with the two black bottles cowering in front of the white vases, something edgy and uncertain. From a distance I find it hard to say whether I was feeling the artist’s intentions or if I was projecting my own sense of loss, but perhaps that doesn’t matter. I certainly didn’t see a skyline, but I did sense a family portrait where some of the members were lost.

[1] In fact I have since read that Darian Leader postulates in his book “The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression” that Morandi’s repetition and rearrangement of motifs might not just resemble family portraits, but also may indicate an arrested or stagnation of the mourning process


Leader, Darian The New Black 2008 Hamish Hamilton 30


[2] Quoted on Tate Modern webpage http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/morandi.htm

©blackdog 2010

Lara Viana
Mirror 2008
Oil on Board 47 x 40 cm
Domo Baal, London
11 March 2010

I have been following this artist since her MA show at the RCA in 2007and it was a pleasure to see her first solo show in London. There were many interesting paintings, most involving a melancholic theme, sympathetically hung in an interesting gallery space on the first floor of a London town house.

The one I have chosen is Mirror [1] and depicts an ornate frame of a mirror that hangs on a wall decorated with a floral pattern. A couple of substantial leaves intrude from the left of the image and it is hard to tell if they are part of the wall or in the space that the mirror occupies.

The frame itself is an interesting device in painting both dividing up the space and focussing our attention on the space contained by it boundaries. It reminds us that we are looking at a representation, drawing our attention to the artificial nature of what we see.

In this case what we see within the frame is ambiguous, it could be that because of the oblique angle the mirror is reflecting what is behind us, or it could be the artist’s representation of the ‘void’. What is important is that we are aware that it is a representation or ‘sign’ of nothingness and we have registered its artificiality. This transformation has important parallels in the mourning process where a mourner finds ways of representing reality, emptying it out and assigning the haunting aspects of the reality of loss to a representation. [2]  In other words this painting works on two melancholic levels; it is a depiction of the “void” or nothingness and it references the process of making the reality of loss artificial by inscribing the idea of the loss in a symbolic space.

This notion of loss and artificiality is reinforced by the paint handling which is a mixture of fast soft brush strokes (the wall) contrasted by more definite strokes for the objects (the frame and the leaves). The use of medium to deteriorate the top edge of the frame on one side introduces the notion that the image is of something half-remembered (she works from found photographs) and intrudes into the framed area where the surface of the paint is dragged into a blurry tonal ‘reflection’. The blur could denote a misted surface to a mirror but as I suggest above I think it connotes the ‘void’. The colours are muted and the paint thin and transparent, allowing the primed surface to shine through, illuminating the image.

I have to confess to liking her paintings a lot, perhaps unsurprising as her brushwork is very similar to my own, in particular her ability to make an image that evokes the half remembered, leaving plenty of room for our own narrative.

[1] Photograph courtesy Domo Baal London
[2] Leader, Darian The New Black 2008 Hamish Hamilton 100-105

©blackdog 2010

Michael Raedecker
Tipping Point 2007
Acrylic and thread on canvas 198 x 336 cm (3 parts)
Hauser and Wirth, London
27 September 2007

I always find the wood panelled rooms of this old bank building a strange space to exhibit large contemporary paintings. This show of a mixture of Michael Raedecker’s work was no exception. The subject matter covered the familiar modernist houses, flowers and ruins. The stand out piece for me though was the line of washing drying in the garden. An idea I had had for a painting, but beaten to once again.

I first saw his work in 2000 when he was nominated for the Turner Prize for his fresh approach to painting and his use of unusual materials, the same year as Glenn Brown. He combines thread and paint on the surface, using the stitching to give forms an outline and helps delineate the subject matter. Raedecker takes his images from such disparate sources as Dutch still life painting, photographs of modernist architecture, B-movie scenes and antiquated gardening catalogues creating images that look like film noir sets waiting for actors to come out of the shadows .

Tipping Point is a very large three panel painting that is so sparsely covered with shades of near white that it is hard to make out the banal subject of washing hung on a line. Without the embroidered description this austere image would be taken for an indulgent modernist abstraction. Yet by defining the subject matter on such a bleak surface, it raises disturbing narrative possibilities that nag at our consciousness. The shirts and sheets are blowing in the breeze but this isn’t a washing powder advertisement, this is our dirty washing hung out to dry. It is very difficult to convey in the photograph, but the subtle changes in tone create strange halos of light which radiate from the image making the washing looks like it is dirty. It is this effect that gives the painting its latent power; we note the absence of any human figures, but conditioned by contemporary film and television drama we know something bad is going to happen. The tipping point has been reached.

©blackdog 2009

August Strindberg
Purple Loosestrife, 1892
Oil on Canvas
Tate Modern, London
10 May 2005

I was surprised how much I enjoyed this exhibition, I found it both charming and melancholic and was interested to read that he was a Gemini and prone to mood swings. Strindberg was clearly influenced by Northern Romantic [1] landscapes, but had his own expressionist way of painting that relied more on the palette knife than the brush. There were many of Strindberg's dark brooding seascapes that shared a single man-made object at the mercy of the elements: a buoy in the midst of a stormy sea, or a startlingly white navigational mark against a tempestuous sky. Several paintings of lighthouses conveyed a similar mood reflecting his inner turmoil, but most interesting were his astonishing delicately painted pictures of wild flowers set against a very loosely knifed / brushed landscape. If these earlier solitary flowers are also to be read as symbolic self-portraits he chose very unappealing plants, thistles, toadstools, and "weeds".

Purple Loosestrife is typical of the genre, with the painting divided by a pronounced horizon and the plant a small element isolated in the landscape. The mark making is vigorous but the mood is serene and melancholic, he uses a buttery yellow thickly applied with a palette knife for the foreground gradually merging with a blue/white shoreline and then above the horizon line similar blues and whites for the sky but painted in a different style. He was clearly an acute observer of nature and the plant named in the title is painted with accurate botanical detail, causing it to stand out sharply against the loosely painted landscape.

These small flowers in the vast landscape reminded me of the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich that also use the shoreline as a metaphor for the daunting vastness of the world. Whilst it isn’t as dark as Friedrich’s Der Mönch am Meer, for example, it shares some of that painting’s depiction of the sublime; a boundless, silent, solitude. These qualities were typical of all these paintings of solitary flowers that were painted on the shore south of Stockholm and even more pronounced in some e.g. in Lonely Poisoned Mushroom (also 1892) there is no clear division between the land, sea and sky. I found myself reacting to the emptiness in these calm paintings much more than the violent seascapes, as at least in those there was the storm to provide a narrative!

[1]Strindberg wanted Bocklin's painting “The Island of the Dead”, to serve as the final image of his 1907 play The Ghost Sonata

©blackdog 2009

Leon Golub
Interrogation II 1981
Acrylic on Linen 305 x 426 cm
Irish Museum of Modern Art
19 September 2000

This was an immense exhibition of over 80 piaintings by this American artist and the first time I had seen his work first hand or in reproductions.

Totally unprepared, the shock of seeing so many of these larger than life scale paintings of oppression and cruelty was palpable. Golub's massive unframed canvasses depict scenes of mercenary killings, torture, and death squads. The show made me feel uncomfortable long after I had left and I could have chosen many individual works to write about, but this one stuck in my mind.

Like the other 38 large scale works it is on unframed but primed canvas that like sailcloth has had large eyelets attached to allow the work to be stretched. He works from an image bank of collected newspaper and magazine clippings and photographs of various body types, violent acts, and weapons. Then using these photographs as models, he draws directly onto the large canvas and then applies layer upon layer of paint, scraping back and reworking the surface in the process. The result is an expressionist surface where the figures, although unified by the process, lack any modelling making them as flat as the space they occupy.

The interrogators of the title are not specifically located, but through the device of flattening the image plane with the red oxide ground and cropping the legs, a continuity of space is suggested between them and you, the viewer. This breakdown of the gap, the enlargement of the protagonists and the direct eye contact they make suggests not only their power, but also makes you feel involved and complicit.

This ability to take the viewer into areas restricted from the public gaze took a dramatic shift with the images of torture that came out of Abu Ghraib in 2004, making Golub’s images of Mercenaries posing for the viewer/camera seem prescient. However, this need to expose the suppression of similar kinds of torture by the state is not new in art and Goya’s Disasters of War series of etchings from 1808-20 are clearly an influence on Golub’s work as might be Max Beckmann’s 1919 painting The Night.

Unlike those works and despite a process that implies loss (the painting and scraping back of the image, eroding and reconstructing the image) I don’t find the image melancholic. Is this something to do with the denial of the victim’s identity? Perhaps the victim as a sacrifice allows him to become a scapegoat and we fail to identify with his suffering.

These are not images to be seen in a book, as the predominant aura comes from the power of the mercenaries and their invasion of the viewer’s space and the work requires the audience's participation to make it complete. Consequently, whilst we may deplore the torture, part of us is relieved that it’s not us under the hood, and the knowing looks of the men drive home our complicity in the almost pornographic action. Maybe that’s the inherent sadness of the image, not man’s inhumanity to man, but the fact that like hard core pornography it is supposedly done for our benefit?

©blackdog 2009

Euan Uglow

Lemon, 1973
Oil on Canvas, 19 x 33cm
Private Collection
Not Seen

In July 2003 I went to see the first public exhibition of the work of Euan Uglow since his death from cancer in 2000. Disappointingly this painting of half a lemon was not included in the show. It is quite unsual in that most of his work whether of nude models or still life involved a dynamic pose. The artist notoriously placed his models in geometrical and sometimes stiffly contorted poses and since he sometimes took up to five years to finish a painting and only ever painted from life, his models had to keep such poses for considerable lengths of time.

There is a sense of harmony within the image, not just about the placement of the lemon on the grey shelf, but also the weight of the graduated yellow in relation to the size of the background. The lemon is strongly lit from the right and his planes of colour give a suprising degree of three dimensionality to the flat surface.

I have seen a lot of Uglow’s paintings and drawings and this looks typical of his method working. Taught by William Coldstream at the Slade School of Art in London, he used little registration points and tiny painted crosses to help the drawing process. It is worth noting that his obsession with accuracy ran to marking these reference points on the skin of his life models and that they had to keep these marks between sessions. These marks always remain in the finished painting, revealing the history of its making by a prolonged process of looking hard.

He sometimes took up to five years to finish a painting and only ever painted from life and the marks become a record of the temporal aspect of painting. This recording the passage of time is taken a step further in a little painting I saw in his exhibition at the Holburne Museum of Art, Bath called Diary of a Pear, 1972. He placed the tip of a pear at the exact centre of a perfect square, but he painted so slowly that the pear rotted, and the tip drooped. So each day he began a new square with a new centre point and a series of marks showing where the tip had once been. He has said in interview that he “isn’t interested in producing pictures; but in personal research”

Perhaps because of this perfectionism his paintings seem to lack emotion and whilst I find them technically interesting I don’t feel that they have a melancholic aura, even when the subject is a lonely half a lemon.

©blackdog 2009
 
Post Script:  Just a note to regular readers that from December onwards I will only post on the first Sunday of each month.  Other commitments prevent me from continuing to post weekly.

Ferdinand Hodler
The Night (Die Nacht), 1889
Oil on canvas 116 x 299cm
Kunstmuseum, Berne
Not Seen

Hodler was 37 when he made this autobiographical painting on the theme of sleep and the fear of death, ten years before Sigmund Freud published “The Interpretation of Dreams”. Both the central figure and the man top right are Hodler himself, while the female figure seen from the back on lower right is his wife, Bertha Stucki (this is the only time she appeared in one of his paintings).

All the figures appear to be naked and are draped in black sheets, but despite it being “night”, the scene is so well lit that the figure cast no shadows. The figures in the foreground sleep peacefully; those in the background less so. The contented couple bottom right can be contrasted with the man and two women top left who seem slightly less at ease. In the middle lies a terrified young man (Hodler) who has woken up with the figure of death placed squarely between his legs.

Hodler had good reason to be preoccupied with dying, having grown up amidst grinding poverty and having witnessed the slow death of all his family from tuberculosis. His father died when he was 7, his mother when he was 14, his stepfather when he was 17, and his four brothers and one sister all died between his eighth birthday and the time he was 32.

The painting was completed after a serious psychological crisis and marked a break with realism of his earlier work, linking him with the symbolist movement then spreading throughout Europe. Hodler named his take on symbolism, "parallelism", characterised by large format paintings, with monumental stylised figures and a repetition of forms that provides a sense of harmony within the composition. It was this striving for a sense of unity in his work influenced his decision flatten the picture surface; painting the figures with sharp outlines (softer edges would imply depth), no shadows and no perspective.

Whilst I haven’t actually seen the painting I find it hard to believe that the work will have a melancholic aura, despite the content of the painting and the ideas behind it. The stylised treatment seems to rob the image of any deep psychological content leaving just the theories and sensibilities that were “of their time”, but don’t speak to me.

©blackdog 2009

Michaelangelo Merisi da Carravagio
The Burial of St Lucy, 1608
Oil on canvas 408 x 300cm
Museo di Palazzo Bellomo, Syracuse
Not Seen

In 2005 I went to the National Gallery in London several times to see a wonderful exhibition of Caravaggio's late paintings, from the period when he fled Rome accused of murder in 1606 until his death whilst returning to Rome from Naples four years later.

Whilst the painting I have chosen is one of his late works and his greatest in the opinion of some critics, it wasn’t in the exhibition. So until I make the journey to Sicily my analysis remains based on reproductions of the original and a first hand viewing of The Raising of Lazarus which is of a similar scale and painted in Messina in north-eastern Sicily a year later.

Caravaggio arrived in Syracuse on Sicily's south-east coast on the run from a knight he had offended in Malta. Here he painted this immense canvas depicting the burial of the early Christian martyr, Saint Lucy. Lucy had been buried in the catacombs on the outskirts of Syracuse and the church built on the site was undergoing restoration in 1608.

It is striking particularly for the high vertical format with the empty upper two thirds of the painting almost abstract apart from the shadow of an archway. In the foreground Lucy’s prone body is framed by two gigantic near naked gravediggers and behind them a confused band of mourners and onlookers. On the right are two shadowy figures, a Bishop giving his blessing and a soldier in a cuirass. Tellingly the digger on the left looks to the soldier for direction on where to put the body, not to the Bishop giving benediction, nor to the deacon glancing down at Lucy.

The whole painting is in thin luminous yellow, amber and brown earth colours with the exception of the bright patch of red showing on the Deacon’s robe. The burial is lit by a raking light from the left and we can just make out the gash in Lucy’s neck where she had been stabbed in the throat after being denounced as a Christian. Her face is thrown back and with one arm clasped to her side and the other outstretched the pose recalls the painting of Sleeping Cupid (this was in the exhibition and looked as if it was a painting of a corpse) that he had just completed in Malta.

Whilst I could have chosen most of the paintings in the exhibition as displaying melancholic characteristics, I am most interested in this one because of the composition. The diminishing line of mourners cleverly expands the spatial depth but it is the space above the frieze of figures weighing down upon the corpse with a stillness and silence that contrasts the busyness of the civil proceedings. As far as I know this is the earliest use of this device for such an effect and contributes immensely to the psychological charge of the image.

©blackdog 2009

Wilhelm Sasnal

Tarnów Train Station, 2006
Oil on canvas 100 x 140cm
Hayward Gallery, London
14 October 2007

I thought the selection of Sasnal paintings picked for the ‘The Painting of Modern Life’ exhibition at the Hayward was excellent and I especially liked the three shown in the downstairs gallery; this view of Tarnów train station, Gas Station 1 and Gas Station 2.

It was at Tarnów station on Monday, 28th August 1939, that a German saboteur left two suitcases packed with explosives in the luggage hall. The bomb exploding killing twenty people and is probably one of the first actions of World War II.

The catalogue suggests that the image depicts African immigrants and guest workers arriving looking for work and draws parallels with the human cargo carried on Polish railways during the second world war[1] . Whichever association Sasnal intended the image has an inherent melancholia that evokes a deep sadness.

It looks like the painting was completed in one session, wet-in–wet. There is a variety of brush marks with thin blended areas complementing thicker passages. What looks like some kind of brutalist sculpture in the foreground, is actually some bushes. These are painted upside down and the paint is allowed to run. The figures in the foreground are against a background of swirling grey brush marks that seem to ooze from the window! A small area of watery sunshine relieves the monotony of the sky behind the station building.

This painting (as is the case with most of Sasnal’s work) is an excellent example of how the removal and abstraction of information through the process of painting has added to melancholic aura of the image.

He works primarily from photographs and whilst the contemporary view of Tarnów station that I have shown isn’t the one that Sasnal used, it does show just how much he has simplified the detail. I find it odd that he missed out the main portico altogether.

The catalogue suggests that this resistance to detailing is tailored to the ‘leaching of individuality’ as capitalism gains more of a foothold but also notes that the effect is to open up the image ‘to new potential meanings as viewers fill in the blank spaces’[2] . I certainly agree with the latter premise, especially as I am conscious that I have a tendency to include too much detail in my own work.

[1 ]Herbert, Martin Rehearsing Doubt ‘The Painting of Modern Life’ Catalogue Hayward Publications 2007 p44
[2] ibid.


©blackdog 2009

Rezi van Lankveld
Pieta, 2005
Oil on Board 78 x 65 cm
Not Seen – Private Collection

I have seen work by van Lenkveld at The Frieze Art Fairs in London, but unfortunately I haven’t seen this particular painting which I believe is now in a private collection.

Van Lenkveld works on paper, wooden panels and on canvas but essentially her process is the same. She places the support on the floor and pours tonally similar paint until the surface becomes a pool of colour. The image is coaxed out of the meeting of the two colours with here brushwork helping the serendipity along.

In Pieta her process is slightly different and very similar to the one I use myself. The base colour has been brushed vertically down the panel and then it looks as though the second colour has been replaced with glaze medium. Using brushes loaded with medium she has worked into the image teasing the marks into the semblance of a figure.

The head of the reclining figure is thrown back so that we see the underside of the nose, the jawbone and the exposed neck. The chest is a fusion of marks made by dabbing medium into the paint and the legs fold to the right hand side. The figure is wearing a pair of light coloured high heeled shoes done in a similar way to the chest. Vaguely discernable attendant figures are on either side, both less detailed than the subject and the quick brush marks and areas of light tell us little about what is happening. The ground that the paint is applied to plays an important role, it becomes a dynamic absence. Something that is “lost” but still present, seen through the thin layer of paint, as though the image was projected onto it rather than painted.

All her work fluctuates between figuration and abstraction in this way and the viewer’s perception shifts uneasily between the pictorial representation and the process by which the image was made. In my opinion it is when this disillusionment is finely balanced that the work evokes a sense of melancholy. Despite the muted colour schemes and sombre palette, if either the image is too obvious or the process too dominant, then the work doesn’t strike the note of sadness for me.

©blackdog 2009