Doing the do

I've tried to start this post countless times since Friday, when I was supposed to write it. Each time I got no further than around two sentences before grinding to a halt. Maybe I couldn't quite focus, or maybe every idea was a bit thin, a bit lacking in substance. Whatever it was did not matter, it simply kept on happening. At the same time, whenever I got to thinking about painting, I realised that I could in fact be painting. Which, in many cases, was what I ended up doing.

Now while painting may seem on the surface to be a good thing (remember, every day of painting is a day of victory), my unfocussed mind proved something of a hindrance. I painted, yes, however I painted oddly, as if I were someone else. With an unfocussed mind, I allowed older methods to direct my hand and they proved far to controlling and… reasoned. This has left me with the task of undoing a certain amount of my work, to try to push it to where it needs to be, not where it is.

All that aside, since Wednesday I have started three new paintings and totally reworked an earlier unsuccessful one that had been stagnating for months. I also varnished six more panel paintings and re-varnished all fourteen of the paper pieces I made last month.

It has been a curiously busy few days. The amazing thing in it all is that I have no reason for doing this. There is no exhibition or competition imminent that I am working towards. I am doing what I am doing because it is what I do.

The ballad of an artist

Today is a day that each year, traditionally, I do not lift a hand to do any work. This year marks a difference – I have spent time in the studio and I have painted. For all that it is my job, painting is also something greater. It means more to me than pretty much anything else, because it is all I have ever wanted to do.

Not that painting is some unachievable goal, some fantastically difficult to attain dream, unlike my boyhood ambition of going into outer space (blame Star Wars) which seems quite laughable now, not least in the face of my dislike of being in motion. No, painting is something that can and should be a part of my life, considering how long I have, well, longed for it to be so. Yet for a considerable time it was not a desire that I was willing to admit, for to admit such was to make a necessity of trying to make it real. Fear was then and, of course, still is a dominant force. (Is there anyone who can say otherwise?)

I had no intention when I walked into my studio this morning of spending time reminiscing, or reviewing my place in the world and yet here I am. As an abstract artist whose work relies upon self expression, events such as this are not uncommon. I'd go as far as to state that they are pretty much part of the job.

I have been calling myself an artist for some years now and I have tried to live up to that title. In many respects I believe I have succeeded, in others I know that I can and should do better. I try not to pressure myself, however I am my own boss and so there is often little choice. After all, I have quite a comfy and tempting sofa and someone needs to keep me from fully exploiting its potential. I recall a genuinely brilliant maths teacher I had at school, who was of the opinion that the best mathematicians were the laziest, for they always work to make the simplest and therefore best explanations. I am not certain that the same can be said of artists.

Today, standing in my studio, I looked at the paintings I have worked on in the past month. There are four that are mostly finished and one that I have just begun (my fingers are ingrained with pigments as I type). I realised that I am not painting 'for a reason', as was more often than not the self-imposed necessity of the past. For most of my life as an artist, I was always working for an exhibition, a gallery or a commission. Presently, I have none of those things to work towards or for. I am painting, simply, for me. This is who I am and this is what I do. Painting is not just part of my life, it is what I do. I am a painter. I do best when I remember this.

It might seem like a rather ordinary revelation, yet it is one nonetheless, at least to me. Painting is not just something I do when I need to, it is what I do and it seems there is really almost no reason that I can't do it every day.

Where it will go

If I had a vague idea about what I would paint when I began to work on my own again, it probably was not what I have been painting for the past week or so. In fact I'm not even sure that I had planned to paint at all at this point, nonetheless I went through the motions of setting up my studio and priming some panels. Somehow, following that, I started to paint.

(work in progress)
Mixed media on panel, 12x12"

If I had any idea at all about what I would paint when I began painting on my own again, I thought it would be something perhaps softer that what I had previously painted on my own. Something with more defined shapes, translucent and organically geometric. This did not happen.

When I came to paint on my own again, I fairly attacked the panels, beginning three paintings that are hard and more uncompromising than any I have painted before. It has taken me by surprise, although perhaps only really the first of the three. After hacking away at that first piece, I approached the second and third with a small degree of premeditation. I knew, by then, where I was going with this work.

(work in progress)
Mixed media on panel, 12x12"

What I do not know at this point is whether these paintings will lead to a full series, or if they are simply something that I need to get off my chest, a small aberration, before I begin something with more longevity. Only time will tell.

Of the three pieces I have began, only these two are close to a finished shape. Next week, perhaps, I will have more. We shall see.

It's not all plain sailing

Sometime near the beginning of this week, I finished the final square painting I intend to make for Kevin Low and my upcoming show (Worlds Apart, Union Gallery, April). I was left with the last panels I planned to paint on, both large and empty rectangles. I've been painting exclusively on squares since September and in that time I have come to love the shape. I found then that facing again a blank rectangle was oddly unnerving, enough so that I soon began to doubt if I could do anything with these panels.

Megan suggested that I ended the series where it was and show only the square paintings. She told me that I had created some strong pieces and they will make a good show. I was of course thrilled to hear this, nevertheless I had a plan and I did not want to change it. I also really did not want to stop painting so soon. In these last few months, I have felt more confident than ever in my work, at the same time I have really, properly, enjoyed it. Stopping, therefore, was simply not an option. I knew also that if I did not paint on these 'last two' then I would be left unsatisfied. Despite this, with their different shape as well as the strange gap that had opened in my work flow, something would be different in these pieces. Upon reflection, I realised that I had here the perfect opportunity to create a postscript to my series.

It's been a frustrating week.

Still, I was unable to make a mark. I could not visualise what to paint or how this would function as a postscript. As the days passed, my frustration grew and so I sought again the advice of Megan Chapman, art soothsayer. She suggested that rather than using the motif of two elements apart, I could try moving them together. It was exactly the kind of can't-see-the-wood-for-the-trees idea that I needed to spur me back into action. I realised that it would also, if handled well, function as the postscript I was looking for.

After a little more thinking and planning and some rough sketching, I began to paint. My thinking and planning and sketching, however, had not quite resolved my format problem. I found that what had been successful on a square, would not work on a rectangle. It was not a happy discovery.

My initial idea would not cohere – the proportions were both ugly and clichéd, they moved horribly all over the panel and my marks were becoming oddly jarring. I simply could not make what I had in my head work in reality. Eventually, I completely scrubbed out everything and re-coated the panel with white gesso. I was back at the start. This was a hard decision, although one that I had no choice but to make because it had became clear to me that I could easily have spent days chasing paint across the panel, without reaching any conclusion and getting more and more irritable.

At half past eleven the next night, sitting on the sofa with the barren panel in my line of sight, if not in my attention, an idea slipped in from my subconscious. After several days of mulling, and one false start, something solid was pushed from one part of my brain to the other, with red flags, alarms and plenty of impetus. There was a clear message: 'paint this now!'

It was late and I resisted. Yet I knew I could not let the idea slip away and so I got up and made a few graphite guide marks, that I told myself I could pick up in the morning and then I sat back down. A moment or two later, I thought that I should mix in a little oil, just to give it a bit more shape, to move it closer to the new idea. I got up and added some oil and then a little more graphite. Then I made a few more marks and then a few more again. At this point I decided to put on some music. Soon, I knew that I was not going to go to bed when I had intended. I was very glad not to.

After all of the anguish, frustration and irritation, part one of my postscript is now well on its way to completion. It has been a more difficult than anticipated week of painting. Even so, I would not change any of it. I've painted and I've moved on, I've learned more. I also, as it happened, varnished a lot of paintings, sorted out their edges and put hanging on the back of them, but that is another story.

Part two of my postscript looms nearby, blank and hungry. I turn in my chair as I write this paragraph to stare it in the empty eye. That bugger is not going to give me any grief. It knows its place.

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.

Celebremos

(currently untitled)

Fantastic news: all three of the paintings I have in the current show at Union Gallery have sold and a fourth painting has been commissioned! I'm really, really excited – the show could not have worked out any better for me. As luck would have it, I was even working in the gallery on the day that three of the four sold and I was able to put out red dots on my own work. Several days later and it is still too soon to evaluate what this means to me. In fact, it feels like the news has not sunk in properly. A few words float around in my head: joy, confirmation, confidence, relief, gratitude.

I also painted this week and was able to revise and finish a painting that I started way back before things got crazy. I'm slowly making my way back into painting again and it feels very good.

A question of chemistry

The collaborative series Megan Chapman and I have been working on really took off this week. Initially, our collaborative process was more tense than enjoyable and we had doubts about the project. Sensibly, we took a few days away from Megan's studio, during which time we talked over our painting process and agreed a more relaxed set of rules. We returned to the studio with some trepidation, yet were more than pleasantly surprised by what we found there: the first piece we had painted was revealed as being very nearly finished. It was so much better than we had hoped for, in fact quite a complex piece and, after making only slight additions to it, immediately hung it in the Vault Gallery at the Fayetteville Underground, where we sat and looked at it for a long time.

Fired up by the success, we began another painting and, over the week, completed three further pieces, with a one more piece in progress. The newer paintings are bolder than the first painting, reflecting the more confident and relaxed approach we have taken to them. Each one is a curious blend of our two hands, with hints towards both of our styles for those with sharp eyes.

This week has been some of the most enjoyable experiences I have had in a studio. It has truly been a collaborative process, where often four hands are moving over the canvas and, at times, two brains are acting as one.

We are planning to a further four or five pieces in this series, which we have named A question of chemistry. Come back next week and see how things progress!

We took the quiet roads
© 2011 Megan Chapman and Stewart Bremner
Mixed Media on Canvas, 30x40"

A strange currency
© 2011 Megan Chapman and Stewart Bremner
Mixed Media on Canvas, 40x30"

A fearless humming across the wires
© 2011 Megan Chapman and Stewart Bremner
Mixed Media on Canvas, 30x40"

An unexpected update

I thought I would find you here, 60x48"

We returned to the studio today. As soon as we walked in and saw that first collaboration piece, it was obvious that it was very nearly finished. A little time later it was. We also started two more pieces. A full update will come on Friday…

Mirror world

This week has been a pretty eventful one in art land. The biggest news was the opening of my and fellow photographer Craig Munro's joint exhibition iteration/span at the Fayetteville Underground in Arkansas, USA. This is not just my first exhibition of photography but also my first international show and it has been very exciting. We were invited to do the show by Megan Chapman, a studio artist at the Underground who is responsible for much of programming of their galleries' exhibitions. 

I also spent part of the week painting in Megan's studio and was able to complete nine new works on board. These pieces, collectively titled Mirror World, reflect on my first fortnight spent in a familiar and yet quite different culture.

Everything seems bigger

Familiar from afar

Gradual acclimitisation

Here comes the stride

I say tomato

I've heard this one before

They say it's the same

This land is your land

Up close the weave is different

Stranger in a strange land

Introduction to the mirror world (acrylic and graphite on canvas 5x5")

This week I have become a sort of visiting artist, or more exactly photographer, as I spent the week preparing for a photography exhibition in Fayetteville, Arkansas. That show, iteration/span, will run through May at the Fayetteville Underground and is now more or less ready, which meant there was time to make a painting for an exhibition in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Called 5x5, the show is a fundraiser for the Tulsa Artists' Coalition which also runs throughout May and is made up entirely of 5x5" paintings, all selling for $55 and opening in May 5th. My piece for this show reflects on the dislocation and strangeness I have experienced during my first week in Fayetteville, in a world that is at once familiar and yet often subtly different.

With added relish

Over the past month, my painting journey has involved not only painting every single day, but also an awful lot of thinking about art and talking about art and then thinking some more about art. A cycle of thinking and talking and writing, with intense burst of painting mixed in. It has been a head-bending time, as I've grappled with concepts that I have both never considered and avoided, as well as creating paintings that I had never expected to. I've uttered surprising statements and watched amazed at some of the shapes flowing under my brushes.

Those brushes have become notably freer too, perhaps even more painterly, as I move further and further from my controlled, graphic nature. I've become more familiar with my materials, with the various consistencies and tones of my acrylics and the way their mixed pigments split in water. I've also began to re-discover materials I had not used in many years – pastel, oil pastel, oil sticks and hard pencils – which I have been adding to those acrylics to give texture, depth and shape.

My goal in all this is to capture something of the changes to my manner of thinking, my manner of perception, that I have spent the last few years working to alter to the positive. The underlying framework for each piece therefore becomes an interpretation of how I see the world and myself, of the past, the present and the future. More specifically, the pieces become a reflection of my state at the moment that my brushes, pencils, rags, roller and pastels move on the paper.

The three pieces I am sharing today, all as yet unnamed, are the first three finished paintings I have completed to my satisfaction in quite some time. It is only this week that I feel I have finally got to where I wanted to get and that, right now, is only the beginning. I do not know what will come next but I am looking forward to it with relish.

Letting go

This week has seen more discussion about art take place than in any other of my life to date. They stemmed from one fairly short painting session on Sunday afternoon, when something finally happened.

I was working on the larger piece I documented here last week. It had the piece down was on the floor and, along with a box of pencils, I was down there with it. My intention was to add some lines to the piece. Once I had started, my hand steadily became more and more free. The lines became less controlled and my began to jump around and across the canvas. Soon, in a frenzy of sharpening, flying hands and pencils I lost myself in the work. Finally. I stopped trying to exert conscious control. I let go…

A little while later, when the music I had on stopped playing, I sat back on the floor, panting, heart racing, head swimming. I was shocked, sickened, frightened, shaking and later, when I calmed down some, I knew that I had finally taken my first true step into art.

Gone from stewart bremner on Vimeo.

Simply, I had to talk about it. During one conversations, with my friend the artist Megan Chapman, I was challenged to paint a bunch of quick, throwaway pieces. Megan's idea was that by making these pieces, they would help negate some of my entrenched ideas about what art should be and how it should be made.

The challenge made was to paint at least one piece a day for nine days on cheap printer/copier paper and that no piece would take more than an hour. I was somewhat reticent about the idea to begin with and was rather unwilling to try. However, using her wily American ways, she 'double dog dared' me to do it. I was too amused to do anything but accept. Below is one of the pieces from day one, when I painted three.

'Day #1, Piece #3' - acrylic, ink and graphite on paper

Reawakening

(Untitled work in progress) 30"x20"

The new year has seen some small resurgence in my painting and with it something of a direction. After a year of re-building it does feel like now I am getting somewhere and it seems that what I need to do now is paint, more and often. Luckily I have quiet a large supply of older works that are going to be good for painting over, they'll provide good texture as an base layer. This was one such old painting and small sections of it can be seen under the unbleached titanium that makes up the background colour of this unfinished piece.

New year, new work

A couple of the recent pieces I have been working on have been put aside for a while. Instead I started a new piece (top) and totally worked over an old piece.

A million magic crystals

Until a few days ago, these were two finished paintings. I hacked them apart and started again. They may be heading somewhere new. They may not be. It is too early to tell. One thing for sure is that they look different to the last few paintings.

About to be writ again

Stop thinking about what you don't have and enjoy what you do (20"x16")

Insert self improving message here (16"x12")

Two more that might well be finished, although I'm not fully certain. The top one may have too many colours.

Unmolten

There has been more painting going on here than there has been for a while. This piece is one of the newest ones and it is going somewhere a bit different. It is at that exact stage where it looks like it could be finished now but I know needs something more.

Pale rider

Another ongoing piece. This one very rough and very early.