• one of the problems I face as a sculptor in stone is that while most people have an understanding of the process of painting few have the same of stone carving. Their understanding rarely goes beyond the Michelangelo accredited cliche of ‘finding the form within the block’ and ‘what happens if you knock the wrong bit off?’ or “you must be very patient’ (Im not patient – a good stonemason isn’t necessarily patient but is highly trained – you have to work fast to make a living!).
• this makes it hard to price one’s sculpture, find a gallery that understands stone sculpture, at least a little ( i have had work damaged by mishandling and even by wet paint), or find a market.
• I am lucky in that I have a teaching position that enables me to make sculpture. I have decided to focus on building a body of work that expresses the things I need to express. Uncompromising but I have spent 20 years acquiring the skills I need to do so by working as a restoration mason and carver.
• would I like to live by selling my sculpture? its not a straightforward thing. Right now I am working with tools and equipment rarely available directly to sculptors in stone. In order to make the work I want to make right now I need access to a big table saw. I am trained how to use it. Without it I would have to show my designs to others and get them to do the primary cutting. But the thrill of doing it myself, basically directly drawing in the stone in 3d and seeing whether or not it is a success or a failure, is a huge part of what I do and why I do it. If I ‘succeeded’ as an artist ie gave up the day job – I would have to do so to the extent of buying my own table saw. £80k. And hiring a space to use it. etc.  Also the tension created by balancing life, job, family, money and sculpture is part of the dynamic.
• Would I like to sell more? Money is always welcome of course. Recognition of my work as a thing of monetary value? All good for ones ego and self esteem! But the most pleasure I can get outside of making the work is seeing it all together as a BODY OF WORK as it is intended to be and offering it to the public, with or without my guide notes, for them to have their own experience of it. (And if one sells in a gallery then the percentage cut paid to the gallery that took a chance on showing my work comes as a great relief!)
• just listened to
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  The New Curators: Who Decides What’s Culturally Important?

  On BBC Radio 4.

   
• when we first discussed the curator in class I came at this with considerable prejudice which has dissipated since hearing the cohorts input. My feelings towards what i saw as an artificial layer of self-invented non-artists were of suspicion and irritation. Yet another Management Class between the worker artist and the consumer public that is not needed and in fact is a barrier to real communication. Like Gallery owners and Auction Houses commodifying creativity: not art lovers or even art understanders but niche marketeers playing percentages etc etc. 
• I now realise that as with everything there is a spectrum of curation ranging from enabling to controlling. Helpful.

On Pollock

There is a scaffolding to some of Pollocks work that the painting hangs off/onto that can be detected by staring at any given point whilst allowing the periphery to emerge in multi dimensionality out from the canvas and into/inside it. Stare at one shape, one line or one colour and the painting reveals itself, its rhythms, mechanics and layers of thought, non-thought, behaviour, response to internal landscape. In fact its only when one has scanned the surface, letting ones eyes run helter skelter around the lines and forms, finding nothing, and then focusses on any point that the universe of multi-dimensional electrical activity opens up in all its glory. Wave, line and particle and terrifying rhythms of dark matter and gravitational waves of the macrocosm and the ageless archetypes of the macrocosm.

 

)

Pollock No. 4 (1954) Above. whole figures, beasts emerge until I detect a twisting, squatting female form allowing itself to be seen by him (or him forcing his way through the undergrowth of the wild wood (The Unconscious) attracted by the sounds of goddesses and nymphs at play, to see her) three heads, buttocks exposed, menstrual blood gushing into the earth, its Diana/Artemis seeing him, Actaeon, seeing her, the Anima in all her terrible beauty and there is a price to pay. (In the myth Artemis transforms Actaeon into a deer and he is torn apart by his own dogs. Pollock died in alcohol related car crash – pursued perhaps by his own Black Dog). On the left 2 penis fish and a penis whale stare entranced, at worship. (or are they the severed heads of Kali’s necklace? see below). Jung suggested that a mans encounter with his Anima ( or the Woman’s encounter with her Animus) is the “masterpiece” of his development and central to the creative process. Pollock was interested in such matters.

Or is it Kali, Goddess of Destruction that is required for Creation often represented as being bathed in blood, many headed, bent at the knee and standing over Shiva

On sculpture

The sculpture i find is thin and spindly with no mass or volume. one view point. 3d paintings. of no interest to me. But I should look again.

De Kooning

cave painting and hieroglyph in particular of the female form – comparison with British Museum Ice Age Art (Netherland Neanderthal? ouch)

Rothko

7 paintings beautifully hung and lit on 5 sides they provide a backdrop for the visitors who move in the choreographed rhythms of a congregation observing a religious rite, pace pace pace stand stare adore pace pace pace its mesmerising. But i think Rothko would be appalled – he was trying to express human emotion, not have others consume his. Theres too much worship here to allow the paintings to speak.

Note: re-reading this I realise that to say “I think Rothko would be appalled” is a silly statement. What do I know about what he would think of it!?  However he did say “im interested only in expressing basic human emotions…The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.” (reference pending). Which suggests an interest in empathy and common humanity rather than the worship that this exhibition seems to cultivate. But dont all gallery exhibitions invite or deliberately design in, this sense of iconography and is this a good, bad or natural thing?

 

 

Top – Victoria and Albert Museum Cast Room undergoing works.

The casts, as artefacts that are not only valuable as secondary source reference and as a Victorian alternative to stealing the primary artefacts, but also as a primary source for students of the art of plaster casting, are crated up just to be moved around the floor of the gallery. The combination of the timber batten, polystyrene softening and casts make fascinating structures and a great literal representation of Form, Frame, Fracture. they are like sculpture turned inside out. And they’ve all huddled together – a new conversation.

However here is my FFF project so far:

Below – The Wasteland II (Pennant Sandstone) trial sculptures. April 2016.I think I have been resisting using my current practice to address this project – Perhaps I thought it was too obvious an interpretation to create the form within a frame and then smash off parts of the form. But in fact it gives me the chance to revisit this work that I had set aside after doing them as kind of trial/maquettes. The initial sculpture was conceived as a landscape, resonating De Chirico and H G Wells deserted structures at the end of the Human era in The Time Machine, as well as images of the great Mediterranean avenues of Beirut during the civil war 1975 – 90 when I was young.

And now seen again in Syria. Aleppo.

The Wasteland (Ancaster limestone 2014)

I had already decided that Form would represent birth, Frame life and Fracture death, but that the word Fracture was an open ended word that leads back to Form – Death and Life are inseparable. Here is Beirut now.

Rebuilt but underpopulated.

The Square by De Chirico (1914),

Strange similarities with the photo of Beirut Rebuilt. The photo almost out-Surreals the painting! The painting is full of Phallic dream imagery. This makes me think of the ruined buildings as phallic. In the Arthurian Romances (15th Century Europe) the land is wasted because the King is wounded. His wound is described as being in the groin or thigh, a metaphorical impotency. He was wounded by a boars tusk or by a spear thrust, both having phallic symbolism. Can the ruins of Beirut and Aleppo be seen to symbolise, or be an expression or a symptom of the impotency of those who are causing the destruction?