The secret is Shepp

With the majority of the painting work for my next exhibition completed, I should be relaxed, happy and feeling satisfied. Sadly, nothing ever is quite that simple. This morning, in fact, I woke early from a series of anxiety dreams. Suddenly, it seemed, nothing was quite right. My paintings were all too similar, the names I gave them yesterday were clichéd, or just too damned gnomic. No one would want to buy them. I wouldn't be able to paint the last few pieces as I had intended.

The paranoia and the anxiety rolled on and not much work got done. It took the intervention of Megan and her years of experience with these things, to turn me from that path. She also pointed out that if I didn't feel that way sometimes, then I would be an "asshole" and I think she has a point.

Maybe I'm a stuck record when I mention this, but being an artist is hard. It may well seem from the outside that it is easy, just turning up and putting paint on canvas, yet the reality is far from this. Those sharp jags of self doubt are just part of that.

A little while after being turned from the dark side, I returned to my studio and managed to paint. Making even one good mark was a victory and I managed to make plenty.

As ever, music plays a key role in my motivation, as well as helping to tune out external influences. This allows me to dive inside for material, or for energy, or whatever it is that I need to paint. Today I chose a piece of music that has played that role probably more than any other.

At twenty minutes long, Yasmina, A Black Woman by Archie Shepp is a long and winding piece of avant garde jazz, recorded on his visit to France in 1969 and it is perfect for painting to. The long passages, the ebb and flow, the moments of intensity and especially the rhythms, nothing else quite works as well. It takes me to the place I need to go almost every time.

Right now I have a painting on my board that is rough, harsh marks and odd spaces. It is a good way from being complete but it is a start. In a little while, Archie Shepp will return to my ears and I will move and I will paint.

Time, percussion, movement and light

Time moves onwards. Weeks seem to fly by and the long months I had to work on my show slip by quicker than I can comprehend. This has been a stretch of time that has been dotted with intense moments of painting, like bulging knots tied randomly in a long piece of string. In between those moments, I think and I plan and I prepare and I worry.

Those moments have stretched out now over seven weeks. Seven weeks spent working on my latest series, for Kevin Low and my joint exhibition in April at Union Gallery (regular readers will have noticed that I've mentioned it already). For all that the time has flown by, it has also been hard work and I can feel my momentum nearing its end. I have one painting currently on my board and three more that I plan to start. Reaching the end of these last four will be a relief, a break from the pressure that has been constantly on my mind since late November. It will not, however, be the end of my preparations for the show.

With six weeks to go, my vague internal estimate says it will take me almost approximately four weeks more weeks to finish all that I need do. Even though it is a very comfortable margin, I still hope to finish sooner because the sooner I finish, the sooner I can relax.

My recent move onto bigger panels has therefore been timed well. After over a month of working on panels of one square foot each, I was beginning to flag, finding the small space was becoming constrictive and so my desire to reach the end of this work was growing. Happily, the larger panels have rejuvenated me for my final push to the end.

As a consequence of both this increased area and energy, my latest paintings have become a good deal freer than the earlier, smaller ones. My marks are bolder and more expansive and, when the polyrhythmic percussive pandemonium of Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp or Sun Ra is filling my head, the world almost entirely slips away. Low winter sunlight is diffused into my studio through sheets of bubble wrap, taped over the windows to obscure the distractions of the outside world. In the light, with full ears and upon a paint-spattered pink bed sheet, I move and I paint and I lose myself in the work for a while. Nothing is better than this.

Soon those bulging knot moments of otherness will pass and my work will be hanging in Union Gallery. I hope the time keeps on speeding towards that moment, for I long to relax again, almost as much as I can't wait to see my finished work on the wall. Yet at the same time, those moments of loss of self, when I am simply existing in that almost sublime moment, are what I live for and I do not and never will want them to end.

Cash rules everying around me

On first appearances, the world of art and the world of banking would seem to have few similarities. However, on pondering the current show at the Fruitmarket Gallery, it occurred to me that there was at least one.

Showing until April 9th, Anna Barriball's exhibition 'Exhibition' fills both floors of the gallery. Walking in with no foreknowledge, we were at first perplexed and then, finally, made somewhat angry by what we saw. Two dimensional objects, such as a five pound note, coloured in with ink; pencil rubbings made of doors and windows; rolls of graphite or paint-covered paper placed against the walls; found photos spotted with ink; a whole wall of stencil-patterning.

Here is art that is made using techniques common to primary education, masquerading as interdisciplinary work where "drawings are also sculptures, sculptures are drawings". These are basic techniques being exhibited as elitist art and I was utterly disengaged by them.

Without reading about the work, I saw nothing here but surface; a gallery of superficial 'art'. After reading the exhibition guide, which uses several hundred words to say almost nothing, I felt no more disposed to the work. More to the point, the long-winded descriptions of the pieces in fact angered me.

Anna Barriball, Untitled, 2009.
Pencil on Paper, 218 x 134 cm.
Private Collection.

"Much of the large-scale work in this exhibition Barriball makes through a process similar to taking a rubbing of an object: pressing with pencil or brush onto paper attached to different surfaces, directly transferring the texture of a window, wall, shutters or door onto paper. The body of dense markings possesses solidity, weight and mass despite the weightlessness of materials like paper and graphite. The direct transfer of surface texture and folds and creases produced through flattening volumetric elements creates a very close representation, a fusion of abstraction and figuration."

Of the ten paragraphs in the guide, of which this is one of the shorter ones, there is little more explanation of the work than this. Barriball's techniques are laid bare in rather grand eloquent terms, that try to disguise what could be seen as rather infantile mark making processes. If anything, rather than serve as an intermediary, an explanation that helps the views to enter the work, the guide slams the door in our faces. Like the art, it simply says that if you do not know and use the word 'liminal', you have no place here.

This exhibition is a retrospective and one where the majority of the pieces are called 'untitled'. There seems to be almost no evidence of artistic development, over the ten year period covered. Looking at the work, and the overblown claims made against it, it all seems like an inside joke that is trying really hard to be clever. This is exclusive and arrogant work and there is nothing here for anyone beyond the elite of the art world.

A few weeks ago, I commented on more conceptual art that is currently being exhibited in Edinburgh. In particular, I was unimpressed by Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #1136, a large mural concept that has been licensed to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for eleven months (does anyone know if LeWitt works with Ikea?). At that time, a phrase popped into my head, which I kept to myself. That phrase, 'fashion art', returned to my head after seeing Barriball's work.

Fashion as we understand it in terms of clothes, is a superficial world. There is nothing beyond what you see on the surface. As a label, Fashion Art could be thrown at any art form, however this morning I want to throw it at Conceptual Art, because for me it seems the closest fit. When a piece of art looks bizarre or ugly to the majority, when it makes no impression on us, does not move us, when even the artist seems to have no explanation for it, who would call it anything but Fashion Art? There is no depth here, no meaning. It is not holding up a mirror to life.

The more I am exposed to the world of Fashion Art, the more come to I dislike it. Who is this work made for and who is buying it? It feels like a giant house of cards, waiting for the slightest wind to knock it over, when we shall see the emperor's new clothes for what they are.

Another place we may well see at least the first part of that horribly mixed metaphor is in our banking system. Yet it is not the house of cards in banking that first drew me to writing this piece. The similarity I see in banking and art is in the people who populate it. In both worlds, the mass of those working there are simply doing what they can do to get by. The motivations between the two groups may well be very different, but we all work and eat and live in the world. However, it is at the top of the ladder than I see the biggest similarity.

On both sides are groups of people, whose importance and renumeration are impossible to justify. It is hard to see why they are in the positions they are in. To many, it appears they have reached their positions by either bluffing their way to the top, or having known the right people and said the right things.

In both practices, the existence of these people bring their entire worlds into disrepute. They grab all of the headlines, as well as farcical sums of money, while at the same time having almost no connection to those that make up the majority of their worlds. It hardly seems to be a balanced system.

For some time, top artists have been thought by the masses to be in this unjustifiable position. Only lately have top bankers been recognised as being similarly located. At this time, following a seemingly endless cycle of banking crises, many are questioning why we have such 'top bankers'. In the world or art, where fewer and fewer artists are able to make ends meet, I think we need to ask a similar question.

Don't worry…

Since early last year, I have been exploring abstract painting as a means of self expression. All the work I have created since then has been, in one sense, a snapshot of a particular moment in time and the state of my mind at that moment.

When I began my current body of work for April's exhibition at Union Gallery, I had in mind an over-arching theme that would intersect with that self-expression ideal. That theme was borne on my flight home from Fayetteville in November. Leaving behind Megan there and heading back home, I had a feeling of being torn between two geographical locations and between two possible futures. This, I decided, could become a loose framework around which my work could be built.

In late December when I finally put paint to panel, that torn feeling still had coherence. However the feeling had diminished somewhat with the sad abandonment of the Fayetteville Artist's Alliance, which had been the town's main attraction, after Megan. The torn feeling was lessened even further, when Megan herself left Fayetteville to visit Edinburgh.

With the loose framework that the torn feeling had provided now largely missing, I was left floundering. I knew that my paintings must mean something to me, that I needed the initial meaning as a connection, as a sort of internal badge of worth because without it I can all too often end up feeling as if I am simply moving paint around, making a decoration, not art and that is not enough for me.

Unfinished, untitled, not even dry yet, at 24x24"
this is the largest painting I have worked on
for months. (© Stewart Bremner 2012)

Yesterday, I set aside my worries, about both my self-imposed (false) framework and moving onto a large panel and began my biggest solo painting since July. I simply let myself move and, I think, maybe, that it is going to be one of the strongest pieces in my show.

In retrospect, my worrying has been a bit silly. I find my meaning, that internal badge, examining my mind state in the moments of creation. The idea that I was going to use one over-arching theme as a framework clearly acts against the spontaneity that my approach benefits from. It is little wonder, then, that I managed to tie myself up in knots.

With fourteen small pieces in a state of mostly finished and five more large panels to work on, my half of April's exhibition is coming along nicely. I've made some of the best paintings of my career and I've enjoyed the process of painting more than I even have before. If I can keep that in mind and stop bloody worrying, the show is going to be a killer!

A third of the way there

The studio, today

I've been working on my next show for over a month now, with a day or so over two months remaining until the exhibition opens. So far I have painted twelve pieces, of which only three are still in need to attention. Several pieces whose finalising was last week proving troublesome, have now been upgraded from 'most likely finished' to 'almost definitely finished'. It was a pleasure both doing so and being able to do so.

This afternoon I sat with all twelve paintings and watched. What stuck me was that my favourite piece has kept changing over the course of making the work. In the first rush, I created two strong pieces and then felt I had a slump. For a while I was worried that I would not be able to paint anything that would rival those first two. Today I realise that I have, almost certainly more than once. Indeed, I might even have made some better!

Another aspect of the work I've been pleased to note today is its evolution. I began this series with a narrow, if poorly-defined, theme. As the work has progressed, this theme has by necessity expanded. I have thus become less absolute about what I want the paintings to express. Changing in this manner chimes with a narrative that runs though much of my work (which I could, if I was feeling particularly pretentious, call a meta-theme): the meeting of order and chaos. In this instance, where before there was rigid order in a single narrow theme, now chaos it taking the dominant position (and I am attempting to keep up).

The style of the paintings has also changed over the month. Initially (at least in my mind), the work had some similarities to my later Hidden Messages pieces. Moving from this, the work at first change darkened and became more intense, before more recently becoming airy and lighter. Yet though all of this, I can still see a commonality, beginning with my normal orange, blue and black colour palette.

Next week, some large boards that I have on order will be ready. It has been a while since I painted on anything larger than one square foot and it is going to be a challenge to increase my scale. However, it is a challenge that I am am going to relish!

Inside, outside

In the past few weeks, Megan Chapman and I have visited more galleries in Edinburgh than I ever have in such a short period before. We have seen so much art in all of these galleries, that much of it has blended together. This in itself is telling, yet after writing big art thoughts last week, this week I am more inclined to  look inwards, rather than out.

There is now a little over two months to go before my rather important joint show at Union Gallery with Kevin Low. One of the effects of looking at so much art recently has been to pull my ideas about what I want to paint and how I want to paint in different directions. Given that I have already began working towards the show, this was not altogether welcome. So it was that, after a splurge of gallery visits last weekend, I settled down to get some painting done.

As it happened, I did not quite paint as much as I had hoped to. My unfocussed mind would not quite settle and so I resorted to the time-honoured technique of tidying up my studio and taking care of other necessary art-related tasks. Principally, this involved painting the wooden edges of my pieces.

One of my recently finished pieces, currently untitled.
© Stewart Bremner 2012; Mixed media on board, 12x12"

To begin, I painted the edges white, however I was concerned that this would cause them to blend into the gallery walls. Instead I tried using black, which seemed the most natural next choice. Again, there were some drawbacks. Both colours (or, rather, tones) worked well and, being unable to settle on one, I opened the debate up to the interwebs. I received many and varied responses, although as yet have still to make a concrete decision.

After discussing the edges on my work, attention in my studio turned to their fronts. I have so far began twelve paintings. Looking at them altogether, it is clear that only a few of them are finished. While there is potential in the rest, plenty of work still needs to be done to them.

I had thought more of my paintings were finished prior to this re-evaluation. Where in the past this finding may have worried me, presently I find that I am relishing the challenge. I've got two months to get this show right and I feel that the pieces I have finished are amongst the best I have ever painted.

Stop in the mighty river

Art is such an ambiguous word that it can be open to almost any interpretation. Every artist has their own take on what it means, likewise curators and viewers have their own ideas and all of these ideas, on everyone's part, are likely to be altered by context. This morning, for example, when reading an article about art I realised that I had entertained a thought that was diametrically opposed to one I had earlier in the week. Less than an hour later, those diametric views have been forgotten and I find that I am unconcerned by their occurrence or loss.

Untitled, Arrangement with Black
William Johnstone, ink brush drawing, c. 1975

The idea that everyone has a role to play in defining art is very close to the subject of the current exhibition at the Talbot Rice Gallery. Beholder, which runs until February 18th, focuses on different people's perceptions of beauty in art and therefore comprises a very mixed show. It was refreshing to see such a variety of work in one place, even if personally there was no particular piece that represented beauty to me. Of course, in many ways that is the point.

Beauty for me, however, is a hard thing to grasp in the grey depths of winter and so it was consequently something of a surprise to find it lurking in the Scottish Gallery's William Johnstone retrospective. Until walking through their doors a few days ago, I had no idea that there was a local abstract expressionist contemporaneous to the big names of the field. (This probably says more about me than it does about the world of Scottish art.) There are some powerful pieces in the show, however it was in some of the stark ink on paper works that I really saw something special.

The most lingering effect of the show has been to give me the feeling of a connection to the past. Hitherto, I had been under the uninformed impression that abstract art did not have a local history, that it had taken place mostly within a small group of New York-based artists. I therefore saw myself painting in something of a rootless, borrowed environment. While seeing Johnstone's work means that I am still clearly not at the cutting edge of art, it also means that I am no longer quite so adrift.

Painting by Doug Randall

Another person whose art I encountered this week and who is similarly far from the cutting edge is Doug Randall. Doug is an impressionist painter from Fayetteville, Arkansas and a friend of Megan Chapman. This week Megan and I had our own late Christmas day and Megan gave me a small painting by Doug as my gift. It is one of my favourite pieces from all that I have seen in the past few weeks.

In a less personal way, both Megan and I were also very drawn to four textile pieces by Phoebe Anna Traquair, so much so that we visited them twice. As part of the permanent collection at the Scottish National Gallery, these works from the end of the nineteenth century are located in the furthest and darkest part of the gallery. Even in their dim corridor, they sparkle with richly-coloured life, made with an assured, painstaking hand.

These recent experiences have given rise in me to a different way of thinking about art. Both my work and Doug's have their genesis in eras before our births, yet we are by a very correct definition contemporary artists. Thinking about this and my recently-discovered local history, I began to see art as something like a mighty river, yet like a river whose delta is often springing new separate rivers, all flowing ever onwards.

The Progress of a Soul
Phoebe Anna Traquair, thread on linen 1895-1903

With this in mind, I thought further about Traquair's pieces, which do not appear to be from a particular period. In photos, she is clearly a Victorian lady (even if she acted little like that imagined stereotype). This idea of her seemed almost irreconcilable with her work and it gave rise to a further thought; that who we are as artists is of far less importance, within that great river, than what we make. We do not enter the river, only our art does. Art is all that is important.

The river of art, today, seems less about beauty than ever before. Whilst the Beholder show demonstrated that beauty can be found in many disparate art forms, the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art's Sculpture Show (that Megan and I visited last week), gave strong clues that beauty is no longer such an important element in art. Even less palatable than this revelation though, was a further one which suggests that in the world of art, the art itself seems to be losing its importance.

In one of the only rooms not to be currently housing the Sculpture Show, is Sol LeWitt's Wall Drawing #1136. The gallery notes that "drawings such as these exist as a set of instructions that are then carried out by a team at the Gallery who make the drawing themselves…"

The suggestion that the artist does not need to make their own art is unwelcome enough on its own, however that the artist need not even go near their work is worse still. More dammingly, the statement goes on to note that the piece, which is painted each time directly onto a gallery wall, will later be painted over. We can therefore be delivered into the unhappy conclusion that the actual piece of art is less important than the idea behind it. In many ways this interpretation of what art is for is the most challenging and potentially disastrous of all. When the idea becomes more important than the art, can we still actually call it art?

Back in that immense river, as the delta spreads, the main channel grows slower and weaker. Indeed, there are so many other channels now, that for all we know maybe what we once saw as the main one will soon wash up in a mud bank. Or maybe the time for such a simplistic vision has passed. It is an entertaining thought.

In the mean time, I'm going to keep on contributing to one of the less well-regarded channels. It may not be a fashionable one, but for me it is art.