Sunday, 10 November 2024

Curtis Holder at Leeds City Art Gallery

Seki Lynch, coloured pencil on paper, 150 × 123 cm, 2024

An exhibition of Curtis Holder's drawings, ‘Silent Echoes, Spoken Truths' has opened at Leeds City Art Gallery. Curtis has been an artist in residence at the gallery and the exhibition documents his time in Leeds meeting and drawing people. 

On his website Curtis states about the exhibition; "The title of the exhibition reflects the deep – yet often unspoken or overlooked – past histories and emotions of people of the Global Majority in Leeds. It highlights the process of bringing their voices to light with the sharing and revealing of personal stories through dialogue and drawing. "

The sitters for him have also chosen works to accompany the exhibition they felt emotional towards or saw themselves reflected within. I was particularly interested in the exhibition because not only have I followed his work for a while, but one of his 8 sitters is a friend of Sue and myself, so I can get a sense of how as a person someone has been 'captured' by Curtis' work.

As I walked into the main exhibition space I was immediately taken by the portrait of Professor Emily Zobel Marshall. She is an expert on the trickster figure in folklore, and she has also established a Caribbean Carnival Cultures research platform, which I was fascinated by as I am a long term Chapeltown resident, the area of Leeds that hosts a West Indian carnival every summer.  
The media Curtis Holder is using is central to how these portraits communicate. His main material choice is coloured pencil on paper and sometimes acrylic gouache is used to give solidity to certain colour areas, drawing therefore being central to his visual thinking.
These drawings although made of thin eel like crayon lines, also feel as if they are woven out of fine threads. The fine lines of crayon colour spread out across the white paper and gradually these they find form and as they do so they mass together and as the mass comes into being, the colour range begins to optically blend and what was a quivering network of open lines, gradually becomes a soft mass, a quivering entity that is very slightly out of focus. The process of finding the figure also means that we are given alternative possibilities, hands are in several places, a profile might be suggested and then a more frontal image pursued and pushed further towards a particular identity. Earlier or alternative suggestions are usually made in red crayon, which suggests that all of the images start that way, and indeed there is a red shift in the final colour range. The coloured pencils are kept pretty sharp, and the weight of his hand is such that he can keep that sharpness for a long time, i. e. that he is not pressing very hard, thus allowing his hand to sweep across the paper with a sensitivity to the paper grain. I was reminded of Cézanne's struggle to depict his 'petit sensations' and Curtis Holder I suspect is also fascinated by those small shifts in perception that are constantly happening.  If he is to become sensitised to the situation he is looking at, he needs to keep his crayons active, all is therefore rhythmic movement and to capture this, the hand needs to dance with the eyes. 
He is.a past winner of 'Portrait Artist of the Year' and I did ask him about some participants use of cameras and iPads, a practice that he also finds very strange, it feels on the one hand disrespectful, the artists rarely looking at their subject and on the other hand, what the artists are doing is making images of images, rather than having to deal with the reality of getting to know another human being over a period of time. Portraits should be about intimate connections and listening to the feeling tone of others, not copying a mechanical image.

Professor Emily Zobel Marshall

It's interesting to look at how Holder's approach is then realised within individual portraits. The portrait of Professor Emily Zobel Marshall is a particularly sensitive combination of the sitter's chosen stance, (hands on hips, staring out into the space she occupies, body very erect and alive with potential) and his application of drawing technique to capture this. Her hair and its interwoven relationship with Holder's approach to the seeking line, became for myself a 'punctum'. (I'm thinking here of Roland Barthes use of the word, whereby he would become attracted to a specific detail in a photograph and this would have a powerful impact on his reaction to the rest of the image.) The fine searching lines of crayon become strands of hair. There is a wonderful synergy between the massing of individual lines and the massing of hair, the one effectively becomes the other, the open energy of the mark making becomes the slightly unruly face framing hairstyle. I am what I am, says both the hair and the crayon mass that represents it. What is then fascinating is how these marks then go on to construct the face. 


Rembrandt: Margaretha de Geer 

If we look at a Rembrandt portrait, we can see how he treats facial detail, in such a way that we are given a fluidity of emotional engagement, interwoven with a fluidity of paint. Bone structure is clearly in place, but the paint flows over it, in effect therefore forever animating our relationship with the sitter, who is always coming into being, the paint never settling down and therefore remaining alive. The dark space of Rembrandt takes us into an awareness of the sitter's deep psychological inner world, while the interlacing lines of Holder's drawings emerge out of white paper and vibrate with an energy that suggests a more lively inner state, one that in the professor's case is reflected in her stance, suggestive of action, and a confrontation with the light of day, rather than an interiority moving back into the dark. 


Background detail: Professor Emily Zobel Marshall

In the space around Emily Zobel Marshall flowers are growing. These echo the ones on her dress, which have been reinforced by the use of acrylic gouache. By being liberated from the dress fabric they appear to grow out of her body, perhaps ghosts of an idea she might once have had. they are made out of the same red crayon lines that she emerges from, an earlier form that like a fossil tells us much about the past. As my gaze flits back to the face, the line of a cheek bone reasserts itself, a sign of a firm skull underneath the soft woven texture of line mass. Her dress has red flower heads painted into the line matrix, this change of media, changing the speed of read, making this fabric more of a holding frame for a body standing proud. Her lips are firm but perhaps, because of the moving lines within which they sit, they are also on the edge of a tremble, after all, the lines of dancing rhythm, like all tricksters, never do quite stand still, they never do create unyielding solids, and as they search the figure out, they perhaps also reveal something of a person's fragility as much as their solidity. 

Because I know Doctor Rommi Smith the poet, performer and writer, I wanted to see how Curtis had managed to depict such a dynamic character. 

Doctor Rommi Smith

The first thing you notice is that she has many hands. Constantly moving hands create waves of flowing energy around her. In the drawing she has three heads and all revolve around the yellow V of her shirt front, or is it a blouse? Unlike the Emily Zobel Marshall portrait, Rommi's body does not extend down to the bottom of the image, it dissolves in a swirl of marks, as if the waving hands are also breaking her image apart, wiping it away as they gesticulate her thoughts, or try to reinforce an utterance. The hands become like birds about to fly away and have their own independent lives, an idea that could only emerge from a drawing technique that uses marks that flow so fluidly over and through the spaces of the white paper. These intermeshing lines opening out the types of spaces perhaps only seen by birds as they fly through a thick set hedge. 


In the portrait of Rommi, arising out of the mazy energy of the crayons' application, there is a strong suggestion of spirituality. This is reinforced by the slightly upwards gazing head, a gaze that looks inwards as much as out. There is a tap on the chest given by the one hand framed in black, a tap that says, "Yes its me, I'm here", the central figure trying to reassure us that she is the one we need to listen to, not those others half formed in the background, not those ghosts of past selves.



In this portrait the punctum for myself was the one line that dropped down from the drawing to touch its bottom edge. A spindly line that the whole drawing is balanced on. Suddenly I became aware that underneath all Rommi's swirling energy, fierce pride and powerful intelligence, there was a thin line that somehow held it all together and that she was more fragile than I had thought. 

Rommi Smith: detail

It is Holder's technique that lends itself to these types of narrative. The flickering marks will always suggest a certain fragility, their smoke like haziness can so easily be read with some sort of spiritual implication, but therein lies the fascination of the technique and its need for careful control. The drawer has to finally establish enough coherence within the matrix of lines to convince the audience that some sort of likeness is emerging, not perhaps a fixed likeness, but one that still looks how the sitter appears. This is a likeness as a verb rather than as a noun, a capturing of moments, rather than a moment, which for myself is far more incisive than a photographic copy. It is only in conversation that we get to know someone. In my own work I prioritise conversations as a way to find out what others think and feel, and sometimes these conversations also become portraits, very different in feel and ability to the work of Curtis Holder, but they have given me enough of a similar experience to know how important the one to one experience is to the creation of a necessary empathy if a portrait is to have any real conviction. 
Alongside the room of large scale 'finished' portraits which were excellently framed and set off against a wonderful dark blue is a room devoted to Holder's small studies. This room is essential viewing if you are to get a feel for the full range of his ability. 

Curtis Holder: Study

I was particularly taken by a small study of a seated man. It reminded me of my old colleague Peter. He has recently had a wonderful exhibition of his photographs, some of which occupied the same space as the drawing I was looking at. Whether it was of him or not doesn't really matter, because the drawing says things about the human condition as a whole, which is why I think Curtis is such an important artist. His drawings go beyond portraiture, they signify something in their very nervous search for truth, that says things about how fragile and yet full of energy life is. The image of a seated man tells us that whoever it was sat for a while had a very particular life force, one expressed through their face, their hands and their body as much as their words. My only reservation about the display was the use of the square magnets, a device that stops holes being put into the paper, but which visually intrudes into the paper space. Such fragile and sensitive marks need to be read unimpeded by any other visual interference. On the other hand it was a brave act to not put these drawings under the cover of perspex sheets and by doing this I really appreciated the close proximity this gave to the act of their making. 

The exhibition is open from 08 November, 2024 until 13 April, 2025 and if you can get there don't miss the Stuart Croft exhibition that is on at the same time, the films are extraordinary and deeply thought provoking, this is an excellent time to visit.

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Thursday, 7 November 2024

David Reed's drawings

David Reed has a very particular relationship with drawing. The drawings he produces are central to his creative process, but they not only help with the development of ideas, they actually document the creative process itself and as well as that they comment on it.  His drawings effectively create thinking spaces for his paintings.

 
Painting #543

Working Drawing for Painting #543, 2004–2006

Working Drawing for Painting #543 Page 2

Working Drawing for Painting #550, 2005-2006

David Reed: Painting #550

Alongside precisely dated questions on painting technique and artistic decisions, there are comments on visits to studios, private notes and colour tests. When viewing his working drawings it is as if we were witnessing a transparent painter's mind. 

The drawings he produces begin as a painting idea begins. They then accompany the idea as it gestates, document it and comment on it ; creating a thinking space in which painting is discussed as to its potentiality and its place within the long history of painting itself.

David Reed, «Working Drawing for Painting #649», 2015

David Reed: Working Drawing for Painting #661, 2016: Mixed media on graph paper.

Painting 661: Vice and Reflection

For those of you who paint, rather than draw and perhaps dismiss drawing as something that is not necessary, it may well be worth your while looking at David Reed's approach. I realise it is not for everyone, but in some ways it is not unlike Edward Hopper's use of drawings to document his work. 
Edward Hopper

Both artists reflect on their process, Hopper once it is finished and Reed as it begins, but drawing for both is a form of documentary evidence, especially of things that are usually lost in the activity of an image's making, giving each artist an opportunity to write about the process of image making as well as to make drawings that reflect on painting.

David Reed: Colour study 6

Edward Hopper: Study for morning sun

I tend to think of Reed's drawings as large sketchbook pages, but there is a difference between the sketchbook page and the sheet of a preparatory drawing. One is scale of course, but perhaps more important is the fact that a drawing on a sheet of paper can be pinned or blue-tacked to the studio wall. Because I am often working in ceramics or printmaking, I find sketchbooks a better option, because I don't have a permanently set up studio to work in, having to go to specialist workshops to get work finalised. Neither way is right, but at some point as an artist you will probably have to consider how your thinking process operates in relation to the final outcome.

Frank Auerbach's studio

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Friday, 1 November 2024

Escaping from the cage

 

I am still searching for a more significant way to visualise what I'm thinking about. I'm always trying to find new links between my various interests, my butterfly mind is looking for ways to visualise embodied thinking, but at the same time is trying to respond to the fact that I have always enjoyed reading graphic novels and comics, but then I begin thinking about the fact that the quantum universe is vital to our understanding of the invisible worlds that surround us, and then there's what I understand as the Wyrd, whereby all the events of your life are interconnected by some sort of invisible thread, and this perhaps is something also vitally important to the establishment of my practice, and I still haven't worked through the full implications of Abstract Expressionism....... I'm lost in the fact that the interconnection between matter and energy is realised every time a leaf unfurls itself, but also in the way we use our external senses to perceive, this alongside the role of interoception, unfortunately makes for a flow of everything and a conceptual grasp of the importance of nothing. At least the realisation that all is flux and that being and doing are far more important than naming and fixing, keeps me in a permanent state of wonder.

It's always good to find a fellow traveller who has also been puzzled by what its all about, even if that person is so famous that they have become a cliché

In 'The World as I See It', Einstein wrote:

“A human being is part of the whole called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. . . . The true value of a human being is determined primarily by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self . . . . We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”

Calaprice, A. (2005) The New Quotable Einstein Princeton: Princeton University P. 206.

It's good to see that Einstein also thought that our personal experiences, thoughts and feelings, should be understood as interconnected with everything and not separate from the rest of the world. As he puts it, the optical delusion of consciousness is a kind of prison for us, and in being caged, we tend to build cages for other things too. We fall into our own traps, still not recognising them as the cages they are.  


We make cages both for ourselves and other creatures. 


We have gridded the world

We have tried to develop the cosmic grid

We have also gridded ourselves

A caged mentally ill man

We have invented the grid of control, both as a formal principle and as a construction made of real metal bars. This is a high-functioning understanding of consciousness, and it emotionally aligns us  to the unforeseen implications of our own actions. As the philosopher Epictetus taught;

“In our school, we picture the philosopher’s goal more or less as follows: bring the will in line with events, so that nothing happens contrary to our wishes and, conversely, nothing fails to happen that we want to happen. Pursue it, and the reward is that neither desire nor aversion will fail in their aims; and we will fill all our roles in society—as son, father, brother, citizen, man, woman, neighbour, fellow voyager, ruler or ruled—without conflict, fear or rancour.” 

One of the defining characteristics of the Stoics was an unwavering commitment to focusing only on what was in their direct control—their will, their actions, their effort. This taking responsibility for your own actions and becoming aware of the things that you cant control and thus not bothering with those things, seems pretty grown up, but it suggests that discipline is central to how we ought to live our lives and in that very conscious control, it seems to me that we sow the seeds of Fascism. Dictatorial leaders, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, and the subordination of individual interests for the perceived benefit of the group, are all possible outcomes that can begin, simply with the decision to 'take back control'. 

From Doctor Strange

There is a very different type of control exhibited when you begin to dance. You need to emphasise with your partner, and to pick up the rhythm that is now in place and the controls you need are ones of refinement in response, the fine tuning of yourself to the world, rather than the iron will of self determination. I see dancing as process for an animist connection with the universe; can you waltz with the seas, tango with the stars and twist to the trees?

Cosmic dancing

The image that opens this post was one I made as I thought about how we might attune ourselves to the wider universe and of responses to both micro and macro visions of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. It was also an attempt to capture a moment within a cosmic dance that can be both planetary and human in scale, a thought that is both related to our clinker like internal architecture and the dark external sea within which we all float. This being a flow of forces that are as much a homage to the figure of Eternity as initially drawn in the Doctor Strange comics of the 1960s, by Steve Ditko and then by Gene Colan; as a reflection on the universe that was derived from the Chinese God Pan Gu’s gigantic corpse. In death his eyes became the sun and moon, his blood formed seas, his hair grew into trees and plants, his sweat turned to rivers, his body became soil and human beings, most interestingly, evolved from the parasites that infested Pan Gu’s body. A reminder if there ever was a need for one, that we are not some God's favourite children. 

The image of Pan Gu allowed Chinese thinkers to develop images of the universe that were in some ways like a Russian doll. I. e. that the macro and the micro are both connected and in many ways mirror each other, in a similar way to the climbing of a mountain being for a human like crossing a man's back is to an insect. I have remarked in an earlier post that several cultures at different times in history have come to a conclusion, that there is an analogy between the human body and the structure of the cosmos. In European traditions the head is analogous to the coelum empyreum or highest heaven. The chest to the coelum aethereum which is occupied by the planets and wherein the heart is analogous to the sun and the legs to the dark earthy mass (molis terreæ) which supports the universe. This layering of meaning is useful, as it allows us to find moments of epiphany in the everyday. The Chinese word for 'spirit', 'shen' offers us another way to think about how this idea might work. 'Shen' can be translated as 'spirit', but it has three distinct spheres of meaning. The meanings differ in degree or realm of application, but not in kind. 'Shen' is at a human scale, our "spirit” or “psyche" or the life force. 'Shen' is at the scale of our environment, and refers to the invisible 'spirits' that surround us; things intimately involved in the affairs of the world, but beyond the human realm. These spirits are associated with objects like stars, rocks, trees, mountains, and streams; they exercise a direct influence on things in this world and provide an animist framework for everyday life. 'Shen' in its third meaning can be translated as “spiritual”; in the sense of things beyond us inspiring awe or wonder and it cannot be comprehended through normal concepts. 

The fact that these three fields of meaning (“spirit,” “spirits,” and “spiritual”) can be traced to a single word has important implications, it indicates that there is no unbridgeable gap separating humans from gods or nature. All are composed of the same basic stuff, 'qi', and there is no ontological distinction between them. I would hope that this awareness allows us to grasp moments of epiphany in our everyday lives, that it helps us to create deeply meaningful and rhizomatically interconnected structures and gives to existence a flavour that wants us to taste life in its full potential.

For myself the cage of consciousness is that of perspective. 


The single eye, the tunnel of looking that is epitomised by the camera, is my idea of a visual trap or cage.

Advanced perspective is often compared to the photographic viewpoint. 

The screen of the camera is not unlike the grill through which you look into the prison cell

The camera viewpoint fixes the world down

Perspective lines pin down the world, just as as we do when we pin down a butterfly

Every photograph hides within it a holding grid

David Hockney was well aware of these issues when he decided to work on his photographic 'Joiners' which challenged the traditional perspectival spaces that had by now become the norm when people were thinking about how the world looked. A multidimensional viewpoint challenges the conventions of representation.

David Hockney: The Desk: 1982

However I'm very aware that an artist's work is very unlikely to change the viewpoint of a mass of people who now seem to use the selfie as a way of confirming their own existence. At first I found it a mild annoyance that people would step in front of paintings and get themselves photographed in front of them, but then I realised these moments were being treated not unlike the butterfly being pinned to a board; they were collected, owned moments, that you could stack up and place in a vault somewhere, to be added up and counted, rather than experienced and enjoyed. 

I must get out and walk about and draw more. When I do, all these worries quickly disappear. 

Moments

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