Something is still not quite right

'Below the surface' at the SSA
(bottom row, third from right)
Photo © 2013 Megan Chapman

Today I picked up my painting from this year's Scottish Society of Artists Annual Open Exhibition. Days like this are often ones of mixed emotion. There is an understandable sadness in taking work down and returning it to storage or the studio. We make our art to be seen and so taking it away from the eyes of the public is never a happy event. Added to this is the inference that the work has not sold, which has attendant to it worries about worth, as well as worries about paying the bills.

On the other hand, something precious we made is being returned to us. This may not seem like much consolation, however it is better than simply being depressed about all of the above.

The SSA show, which I was finally able to visit last week, was an excellent exhibition. With a wide range of painting, sculpture, drawing, printing and photography, it showcased what has clearly been a strong year in Scotland's creative arts. I truly felt honoured to be part of such a fantastic show. I was particularly pleased to note that conceptual art was at a minimum, with more of a concentration on objects that had actually been made by artists (which pleases me greatly). I believe this exhibition is one of the best I've seen in the RSA building for some years.

Sadly, not everything about the exhibition was great – lack of space was a glaring problem. The walls were crammed full, with many pieces so high up that it became very hard to see them. This was especially exasperating, because the calibre of work this year was so high.

Then there was the number of works on show. The SSA had again to team up with Visual Arts Scotland and the Royal Scottish Society of Painters in Watercolour, in order to be able to meet the costs of holding their annual exhibitions in the RSA. This meant that between the three exhibitions, there must have been around a thousand works on show. There was no way to take them all in on one visit – although with the exhibitions running to only three weeks, one visit was likely to be all that most could manage.

Clearly there is a problem here. The expense of hosting an exhibition of new Scottish art in the very building that was built to showcase Scottish art has become so prohibitively expensive, that no one of the three main organisations that represent Scottish artists are able to show on their own. It is a very sad state of affairs.

Being an outsider to the organisation-level part of the art community, it appears that the RSA is being difficult in this instance, although there is every possibility that I am making an incorrect assumption. However, what is clear to see is that the building is not used all year round, with it often standing empty for a month or more at a time. 

Is three exhibitions in three short weeks really the best that can be done to represent our thriving and vibrant artistic community in our capital city? The City Art Centre also stands partially-empty for months on end. It is quite dispiriting.

On which subject, let me briefly mention the current exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery. Whatever is in there just now, is of the usual Fruitmarket standards: insipid, uninspired, meaning-free dross, spread thinly around what is a lovely space. I left, as usual, feeling dispirited and wondering what the hell is going on with art.

I'm glad this combination only happens once a year. To see such great work over-crammed into one gallery, mere minutes from another that is empty in pretty much every sense is not something that I'd care to experience more often.

That sleep after flying thing

It's actually longer than this

After flying one fifth of the way around the planet to arrive back in Edinburgh yesterday morning, there was something of an interruption to my sleep pattern. When I finally got my head on a pillow, I saw with my eyes that the time was around nine o'clock in the morning, while my body told me that it was actually four o'clock and that it had been awake for twenty-one hours. Body confusion followed and sleep became a bit tricksy.

This is why from around three o'clock this morning, I began thinking about ways of making glass negatives and cyanotypes and browntypes and building my own pinhole camera and making large negatives and creating art based on my Elegy paintings on tracing paper to turn into cyanotype prints (which are sometimes called blueprints) and building a medium-format enlarger and maybe a new project with Dr Craig and studio spaces and houses and traffic and a new painting and the cupboard and the time and the light coming around the window and then it was time to get up and then inexplicably eat three cheese rolls for breakfast.

So. I might have some vague plans to do something at some point, however until the jet lag is gone, I'm going to aim low and not expect much to get done.

Philadelphia, Little Rock, Edinburgh

Don't let them rob you of the only thing you know
and You know your problems ain't exactly new
at 110 Church Gallery in Philadelphia
 © 2013 Heavy Bubble

This week, I have seen photos from the two exhibitions my work is currently featured in. On the west side of the Atlantic, the lovely people from Philadelphia's 110 Church Gallery are very good at documenting their shows. I've borrowed one of their photos from their current show Natural Selection for this post. It is really nice to see my paintings in their space, as well as the people attending the exhibition opening. You can see more here – including my name on the window!

Below the surface at
SSA Annual Open
© 2013 Pat Bremner

On the east side of the Atlantic, my mum visited the Society of Scottish Artists Annual Open Exhibition 2013 – apparently their 116th such exhibition – and sneakily grabbed a couple of photos of my piece, 'Below the surface' on the wall there (thanks mum!). Quite why the SSA and the RSA before them both think that my work looks best next to the floor is a something of a mystery to me. Not that this strange coincidence matters, because I'm thrilled to have been selected from among what I believe have been record high numbers of entrants, to be shown in two such prestigious exhibitions. I can't wait to soon see this one with my own eyes!

We took the quiet roads
Mixed media on canvas, 76x101cm
© 2013 Megan Chapman & Stewart Bremner

Also this week, Megan Chapman and went on a two hundred mile journey to deliver all of our remaining joint paintings (and three more of Megan's) to Boswell Mourot Fine Art, a lovely gallery in an upmarket area of Arkansas' state capital, Little Rock. There are only eight of our joint paintings remaining for sale in the world and, as hard as this is to believe, this will be their first time in a commercial gallery! We've got high hopes for their future! (I think, possibly, this also means that I am maybe, sort of, kind of, represented by a gallery in the US – however I might be over egging the pudding now!)

East Davidson
Cyanotype on paper, 6x6cm

I've been in Arkansas for two months on this trip, two months that have flown by. When I arrived here, I intended to take it easy, after a very full and busy year and I absolutely managed to do this: not only have I not so much as lifted a paint brush, I hardly even posted here. I did, however, manage to fit in some analogue photography experiments, shooting on film every day of my visit, hoping to document the typical American town that I once again found myself in. I even tried making some tintypes and a series of cyanotype prints, including the one here.

In the middle of next week, I will be returning to Edinburgh and, once I do, I suspect that I had better knuckle down. It may well be time to get serious (again)!

Two more new shows!

Below the surface
Mixed media on panel, 2012

Today, two new exhibitions that include my work open, on two different continents!

In Edinburgh, Scotland, the Society of Scottish Artists Annual Open Exhibition 2013 contains my painting, 'Below the surface', from my current series Elegy for the end of an empire. The opening reception for the show was last night, which I was unable to attend due to currently being in Arkansas! I'm very much looking forward to heading along to the exhibition when I return to Edinburgh in a few weeks. I hope all of my friends and family at home will take a moment to pop into the show and check it all out – if it is anything like last year's, it should be great.  

You know your problems ain't exactly new
Mixed media on paper, 2011

Meanwhile, on the same side of the Atlantic as I, two paintings from my paper series Post Process are featured in Natural Selection, a five-person group show at the 110 Church gallery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 110 Church's space looks amazing and I only wish that my budget (and time) in the States would extend to a visit. Sadly, it won't. If by any chance you are in the Philadelphia area, please do stop by and tell me how the exhibition looks (or even grab a few snaps of it, if you're allowed!).

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Society of Scottish Artists Annual Open Exhibition 2013
March 1-26, RSA Upper Galleries, The Mound, Edinburgh, Scotland

Natural Selection
March 1-29, 110 Church gallery, 110 Church Street, Philadelphia, PA.

Mind the gap

There's been a long gap. This much is entirely evident. Simply looking at the previous entry below will confirm that the gap can almost be measured in months, although the gap in my mind is longer. That latter gap measures just how long it has been since I last felt engaged as an artist. More to the point, it measure how long it has been since I last felt like an artist. It has been quite a while. As I write this, I am resisting the urge to look back over the last few months of entries, to measure the gap.

Last year was a very busy year for me artistically. I created two bodies of work (one of which may potentially be ongoing) and co-created another. There were also quite a few shows. Somehow, in the darkening winter months, as 2012 wound to a close, my train seemed to jump its rails and slowly grind to a halt. Looking around now, those rails don't even seem visible, as if a heavy snow has fallen, blanketing the ground and covering the tracks. Perhaps the tracks weren't even there and in the way of a dream, the track was actually one in a forest and I've wandered away from it and the falling snow has erased my footprints. Lost in a forest, all alone.

Is this some form of artistic block? At present, I doubt it. In my mind a block of that kind is associated with a desire to create but not the inspiration, nor the necessary ability to do so. I could be wrong.

Where I am, instead, is lost in that snow-frosted forest, where no desire to create exists. I wrote earlier that I don't feel much like an artist, when the truth is that I don't feel like much like anything. I am currently a void. This is not a feeling I particularly want to share. Avoid a void. Nonetheless this empty, in between place is where I am.

While I know that making and sharing art is what makes me who I am, it is not something that I can simply force into being. I know full well that there are processes I can engage in, stepping stones I can stumble over, that will take me back to that place, yet even those are too much to ask.

Snow. Void. Blank. Empty. Flat. This is part of the circle, the revolving circle of creation, the snake eating its own tail, revolver eternal. I do not like it here.

This week

This week has been a week of flying above the endless, northern hemispherical blanket of thick cloud, whitely shining above, darkly shading below, blue skies and glaring sun seen through small mottled windows. This week has been a week of crossings, the crossing of an ocean and the crossing of half a continent. It has been a week of four airports, uncountable departure gates, suitcases and carry-on luggage. It has been a week with security and immigration and customs and security and boarding passes, body scans, seats by the window and in flight entertainment. It has been a jet lag and head full of the cold week. A week of looking around and seeing more sunshine in the winter than I am used to, almost three more hours a day and coughing my lungs up and sneezing endlessly, nose running, sleep slipping. It has been a week of remembering how to be me when I am not being that other me and taking it easy while my body adjusts to a six hour time difference and sucks down vitamins and herbs and tries to run out a winter cold. This week has been a week when I returned to America, to Arkansas, to Fayetteville. This week has not been a week for art. I'll see what I can do next week!

The rest is just detail

Split, mixed media on panel, 50x76cm / 20x30in

Just like the start to every year in recent memory, this one seems to have arrived rather sooner than is believable. And now we're living in the teens and that seems, well, a bit odd. Do we now have to start being grumpy and staying in beds far too late? I hope not!

Anyway, enough of that silliness. First up, I am very happy to announce that I have completed five new paintings. With the exception of Split, which is shown above, these pieces were all ones that have been in progress for a few months. It seemed for much of that time that I might never find a resolution for these pieces, so that they could take their place as part of my Elegy for the end of an empire series. However I persevered, stopped being precious the parts of these not-quite-right paintings that I liked and managed to make them work.

By a thousand cuts
Mixed media on panel, 30x30cm / 12x12in

Finishing these pieces was a good way to round off a very full year and it was a year that was my most successful as an artist (so far). I'm planning, this year, to build on that success and although I haven't exactly worked out quite how I am going to do that, as far as I am concerned that part is just detail.

Some of the details that are already in place are three exhibitions that will be including my paintings throughout the month of January. As I have already mentioned, I currently have two pieces on show in the Snowflake Salon biennial in Philadelphia and one in the prestigious RSA Open 2012 in Edinburgh. Added to this, soon, will be six pieces in Edinburgh's Union Gallery. Their new exhibition, It's The Little Things, begins this Thursday, with the opening from 6-8pm. Sadly I won't be able to get along to the opening, as I will be 4,300 miles away, once again visiting Fayetteville, Arkansas!

My flight there leaves in a little less than 60 hours. As you might imagine, I have a lot of preparing to do for my trip and so I will bid you adieu now and be back here in a week time, a long way from here! Adieu!