Thursday 25 September 2014
Friday 6 June 2014
Mark di Suvero at Chrissy Field San Francisco
Recently on a trip to San Francisco I was able to see the SF MOMA installation of a number of
Mark di Suvero sculptures at Chrissy Field, a reclaimed military base, on the shore of San Francisco Bay. The installation was striking in many ways: its stark contrast with the grassland and the sea, its harmony with the Golden Gate Bridge, its resonance with the surrounding construction work and the multiple cranes that echoed the forms, its framing of the city skyline off in the distance and the bold shapes and colours of the massive steel works themselves and how they framed the vistas and drew your eye to the sky above.
Saturday 26 April 2014
Cambridge/Paris March 2014
On March 20, 2014 we flew to
England and spent three days with our son, Emmett, in Cambridge and on March 24
we flew to Paris and were there until
Sunday March 30, 2014. It was a
wonderful trip and it ended up being about family, food, art, and the beauty of
the physical world both rural and urban.
It was a much needed trip and was
in many ways regenerative and helped to lift
the dark stain from my vision of
life after a long, hard winter in Toronto.
Here are a couple of exerts from my journal.
Saturday March 22, 2014
Cambridge, England, Regent Hotel room 106
At the Fitzwilliam museum I felt
happy, alive and excited by what I was
seeing. It was as if the dread,
despair, the darkness, all shut off at once. I noticed it when I walked into the small room with
the modern pictures; a Morundi landscape, three Picassos, a Howard Hodgkin, and
others including Modigliani. I felt glad to be looking at art with real
pleasure and intensity. And I loved that museum. So many surprises and
masterpieces like Titian’s Venus And The Lute Player and a Breughel I used to
show when I lectured on Art History. I looked at Caneletto in a way I hadn’t
previously and photographed many things allowing myself, without thinking, to
just be present amongst all that amazing art. And though there were security
guards, young women paying only moderate attention, all the work was accessible
and I could move within inches of any piece and there were no crowds or
barriers and the work felt close and close to the source from where it sprung,
in Europe mostly, just a short hop across the channel. Five Poussin paintings
done in Rome and bought by a British lord for L2000 and then given, years
later, by an heir to the Fitzwilliam. And they were there close at hand and in
the next room Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Sisley, Degas and Stanley
Spencer painting John Donne Entering Heaven.
There were two Fantin-Latour
small studies of everyday object; a cup and saucer, a vase and Monet on the
coast painting sea stacks that looked like Newfoundland.
Earlier there were arms; guns and
swords, rifles and armor all made with such skill and attention to detail.
And later a few ceramic pieces
that made me think about hand-building some
pots back in Newfoundland and calling Deb W. to see if I could use her kiln.
pots back in Newfoundland and calling Deb W. to see if I could use her kiln.
We were there a few hours and I’d
had no idea of what to expect and the constant surprises only added to the joy.
Two de De Stael abstract paintings, not very good but present, the confidence
of the artist making them work.
After we walked to Granchester
mostly through fields and along the River Cam. It was a wonderful walk through
classic English countryside, flat and fertile with birds singing and ducks and
swans on the water. People were out with kids and dogs, on bikes or running
under big Constable skies. It was a fine way to land after the high of the
Fitzwilliam. And we ate at The Green Man pub, ancient but happening in the way
pubs can happen and Em and I had burgers and Sarah fish cakes and we all had
beers and it was such a treat. From there we walked to The Orchard for coffee.
Virginia Wolf and her crowd used to hang out there and the Cambridge students
will sometimes punt up the river after a formal to have breakfast there still
dressed in gowns and tuxedos. We walked back to town after that.
Em is coming over at 8:00 PM and
we will figure out dinner. Last night was delicious at a place called Pint Shop. It was busy with reservations but
we got there early and they gave us a table for a few hours. Em and I shared a
whole chicken and Sarah had cauliflower and spinach gratin. We drank a bottle
of 2009 Corbiere from grapes grown
high that was 80% granache and 20% syrah and it felt like it was new an alive.
Our server was a Polish woman, training for a body building championship and
she was taught with no excess flesh anywhere. From there we went to The Mill, a
pub on the river, and that too was a treat and one of the few times I had sat in
a pub or a bar and had a drink for a long time. After quitting smoking it
became difficult.
Sunday March 23, 2014 Cambridge,
England, Regent Hotel room 106
Emmett is 30 today. Born at St.
Michael’s Hospital in Toronto around 3:00AM.
Earlier I had gone to the lounge for a
while to smoke a cigarette and watch David Letterman whose guest that night was
Bob Dylan. One of his few TV appearances. Much has changed in hospital life and
in ours as well. Emmett is now an architect with a Masters from Yale and is
currently a fellow at Cambridge working on an MPhil studying the Smithsons and Brutalism in architecture. One of the
great wonders in life is one cannot know or anticipate what will happen to
their children, who they will become as adults. The child I think has more of
an idea, an instinctive game plan not articulated or shared until it actually
starts to take shape.
Today we met up at 12:00PM with a
visit to the outdoor market and St. John’s College, through the park and over
the river to Kettle’s Yard a contemporary art collection. There is a house and
a free standing gallery building. We visited the house first which was
originally four separate cottages slated to be torn down but recued and
renovated and joined together by Jim Ede (1895-1990) where he and his wife lived
from 1957-1973. Jim had been a curator at The Tate Museum and he befriended a
number of artists while working there including Ben Nicholson and his wife Winifred
and he acquired their work and the work of other artists and the house was
conceived as place where he and his wife could enjoy the art and share it with
the public and in so doing they opened their house to public every afternoon.
It is a special place and the
experience moved me deeply in that it touched on ways I had felt many years ago
when I was falling in love with visual art and the artist’s way. It was like
visiting a person’s house in France who had artists as friends and then getting
to know the artists as I did in Vence in 1968. I talked to Em and Sarah after
about art and the pure experience of seeing it and being inspired to consider
taking that route in life and how the decision had nothing to do with career or
money or fame.
Some of this is what I try to get
at in THE WAY OF ART. Today was a reminder. The house full of
drawings and sculptures by a young French artist, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who I
had not heard of who died young at 27. He had so much promise as could be seen
in the spirit and vision of the early drawings he made. (I would encounter him
again at The Pompidou in Paris a few days later which sort of confirmed my idea
about the quality of his work.)
No one I first met in France was a
big name artist. They all just worked at their art and hoped to be able to get
by. Kazimer Glaz epitomized for me the essence of an artistic vision making
beautiful paintings in tempera and gouache on brown paper bags because he could
not afford good paper or canvas and these paintings still hold up today. Jim
Ritchie restless and relentlessly making work day in and day out in sculpture and
drawing, Roussil, David Logan, Mathew Percival, Eddie Plunkett. The life, the
spirit all came back to me today.
The gallery show was mostly Ben
and Winifred Nicholson and a couple of friends and once again I was taken with
Nicholson’s work and was able to see his vision taking shape and it was a
vision of substance and he was courageous in his struggle to break free of
convention especially in English painting in England and become the painter of
pure elegant abstraction that he became. His work looks so much better in
person than in reproduction. The depth is there, the weight. And Winifred,
though more conventional, could really paint and had a quirky, personal take on
representation.
Saturday 22 February 2014
Sunday 8 December 2013
Recent Photographic Work
During the past six months I have been working on a series of photographic images that combine photographs I have taken of the landscape in rural Newfoundland with paintings I have done there in my studio. The paintings, as I have mentioned before, were not conceived of as landscape images but as the body of work has grown there is no denying the influence the landscape has had on the iconography. Over five years I have taken perhaps as many as twenty thousand pictures from more or less the same point-of-view on the east side of my house and that series has documented in detail what is visible throughout any given day with changes in the light and the weather. This is not a new concept. Monet first began to paint in series from a fixed point-of-view as far back as 1870 recognizing how the changing light influenced what was visible. He was interested in grand structures like Rouen Cathedral which he painted many times and mundane forms like the hay stacks in the fields near where he lived. His approach to painting was called Impressionism. With the photographs I am still surprised by what I see at different times in the day and through the different seasons. Some of the images are beautiful and resonant and others just capture an aspect of nature like the height of the tide in October or the texture of a cliff face at dusk. In juxtaposing an image of the landscape with an image of a painting I began to see how I could create a unique image and one that was unabashedly modern in the now classical meaning of that term with its implication of a flattened picture space as the painted image defeats any illusion of depth that might occur in the photograph.
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