It's come round to that time of the year once again when I send out a post focused on artist's Christmas cards. A motley bunch this year that just proves how the festive season impacts on artists of all sorts, whether they are abstractionists, conceptualists or realists, nearly all artists want to celebrate the yearly ritual in some way or other. Hopefully by also pushing back into the limelight artists now often ignored or treated as second class because of their cross discipline approach, I can introduce, especially younger followers of this blog, artists that are well worth looking at, even though it could be argued that their time and approach to art making has now past.
John Wells
John Wells was an abstract artist who was associated with the Penwith Society of Arts, he shared his Newlyn studio with fellow artist and friend Denis Mitchell and was the co-founder of the Crypt Group. His tenuous connection to the Leeds Arts University is that he worked with ex-student Barbara Hepworth from 1950 to 1951. John Craxton
Known as a Neo-Romantic artist he preferred to be called a "kind of Arcadian". Although he travelled widely and lived in Greece for many years, I tend to think of Craxton as a very English, Blake and Palmer influenced artist. I've always had a soft spot for any artists attempting to bring back a mythic past and trying to mythologise the present and I think he has touched a sensibility that although will at times be denigrated as being too blinkered and unaware of wider global art forms, it will at other times be praised for its ability to look backwards and draw from older traditions. In fact the older I get the more I think can see what he was getting at, and being an Arcadian was a form of ecological awareness and a pointer towards a new understanding of animism.
Gary Hume
Gary Hume came to our attention as a YBA with a painting of a pair of hospital doors. The paintings were sized one to one with the originals and stood in a conceptually fascinating space between the readymade and abstraction and between realism and colour field painting (The Art of the Real). Hume says that he knows he's reached the end of the process when a painting "looks like it's always been there, rather than I've made it". It's a subtle distinction, and one that isn't always as obvious to the viewer as it is to the artist, but I think we know what he means. When we look at his Christmas card, it seems like it was always meant to be, better and less forced I think than the snowman sculpture that was at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park a little while ago.
Edward Bawden
Edward Bawden is another of those English artists that straddle the border between fine art and illustration. In Bawden's case he is mainly spoken about as an illustrator, but as a master of the linocut, he raised what was seen as a very humble medium to the level of high art and he had a distinguished career as a war artist. He was a great image maker and full of invention, the old 'he was too illustrative' critique is I think redundant now and he can just be looked at for his ability to construct a well designed image. In this case I like the fact that the lion family have taken great joy in using Father Christmas as their food and plaything. The best present for a lion at Christmas being a fat Santa.
Bruce Mclean
Bruce Mclean is probably known best for his use of art languages to mock the art world itself. However this provocative and probing approach covers up the fact that in reality he loves colour and image making, it is almost as if he cant quite accept this and has therefore always tried to appear to be a bad boy. His reference to the Christmas stocking partly irreverent but at the same time a love of the black, green and red of Christmas holly permeates the image. Emily Sutton
Emily Sutton has taken up the challenge left by artists like Edward Bawden and has continued to work in that pocket traditionally thought of as sitting between fine art and illustration. She had an exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park recently, see below, and she has made some very powerful animations about our need to rethink sustainability and how we think about our 'ownership' of the planet.
Enid Marx
Enid Marx was also a contemporary of Edward Bawden but she never received her Royal College diploma because her work at the time was judged to be too "vulgar". I would argue that it reflected her interest in popular forms and that she was rejecting certain aspects of the traditional definition of fine art. She went on to have a career that incorporated fine art, illustration and various design disciplines, and she is another artist well worth researching in terms of an idea of what an artist could be and do. My post on Fine Art perhaps pointing to the need to go back and re-think the definitions and distinctions surrounding fine art practice that we have built up. Christmas can often be a time of reflection and after a long career where I have taught across both fine art and design and still do; I strongly believe that the distinctions drawn between the various visual disciplines are a hindrance rather than a support. The tendency to 'atomise' concepts, so that in order to understand something we have to go through a very particular process of reduction, is something that has been developed from scientific thinking. However this leads to a situation where things are either one thing or another. It is either fine art or illustration, black or white, good or bad. The reality is that all is in flux, there are no defined edges between one thing and another, only the opinions of people that think that there is. It is in those strong beliefs that conflict is born, and people are punished for not belonging to one set of beliefs or another. At a time of heightened awareness of Christian charity, perhaps it's also a time to give more credence to those artists that had to make a living and still do, by developing a complex portfolio of work and like Michelangelo, having to at times follow the money, because if not they would starve. As someone from a working class background, there has always been a suspicion at the back of my mind and sometimes right at the front of it, that certain definitions and attitudes to art were driven by class. The men from the upper and middle classes that set out the perimeters and value systems of disciplines such as fine art, did not want to think about 'work' and what it actually consisted of; especially women's work. If the values of the working class had been embraced as part of the aesthetics of art practice, I'm sure crafting and manual skill would have been set much higher up on the honorific value scale and the fact that an artist had to make a living producing a much wider range of things than paintings or sculpture, would not be seen as a compromise, but as a celebration of the breadth of interests and abilities that an artist had.
Hans Fiebusch
I have a long and enduring fondness for Hans Fiebusch because he was the man who painted the mural that filled the back of the stage of Dudley Town Hall. Every school speech day and prize giving event was held in that august building, as well as it being a venue for pop bands, (the Who played there in the mid 60s) and all sorts of other Dudley events. A European exile, he had his work displayed in the nazi "Degenerate Art" exhibition, but for myself he will always be remembered as the first artist to made me think about the business of art as a career. I would sit staring at his large painting trying to work out how he did it, a welcome diversion from whatever else was going on in the school prize giving event. I could see that there was a looseness and sureness about the way he went about depicting things, an approach that made you want to be there in his presence, I felt he had left his gestures in that painting just for me to see. Now long painted over, I wonder if it is still there under many coats of white emulsion? Hans Fiebusch's work is often to be seen at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester and whenever I am in the area I always drop in to see if one of his paintings or prints is being exhibited and I'm always impressed at the level of his professionalism, he gives the same high levels of visual attention to the making of a Christmas card as he does to a religious painting, (there is one of his religious paintings in the nearby Chichester cathedral), and that would seem to me to be a worthy epitaph for any artist.
Ben Nicholson
When I came to Leeds and began teaching at the college of art Nicholson was still a well respected artist, although as Patrick Oliver said, his work suffered from a certain 'thinness of line'. He was instrumental in bringing the European tradition of contemporary art into a post-war England and made it palatable to an isolated country that had had little involvement in the dynamic changes that had been taking place across the whole of the rest of Europe between the wars. His work on 'Circle' the International survey of constructive art also opened up ideas about how art could be seen as part of a much wider set of principles that could be applied across the whole of design and architecture, as well as be seen as an approach to how to live one's life.
Barnett Freedman
A prolific commercial designer, Barnett Freedman was another of those mid 20th century British artists that straddled design and fine art. A war artist, if you look at his image of a 15-Inch Gun Turret as used on HMS Repulse from 1941, you wont see a better image to illustrate the idea of humans and their relationship with machines. He stated in 1945, "If you see a man turning a wheel, you can tell immediately whether he cares for machines or not. If he doesn’t, he looks separate. But if he understands and loves them, then he and the machine have a strange look of being one.” As someone who was many years ago trained as an overhead crane fitter, (I never did finish that apprenticeship), the feeling of being clustered around a machine and making sure it worked, can be almost religious. I know its not a Christmas card but if I did receive this image for Christmas I would treasure it.
Barnett Freedman: 15-Inch Gun Turret: HMS Repulse
Albert Irvin
Albert Irvin was a friend of Harry Thubron's and was influenced by a similar group of artists to those that were involved with the development of the basic design course at the old Leeds College of Art. Harry Thubron moved from Leeds to Goldsmiths which was where Irvin met him, as well as him being introduced to Peter Lanyon in the early 60s and other St Ives artists such as Terry Frost. Irvin's work was always cited as something to emulate when I began teaching at Leeds and so I took a great interest in how he was working, in particular he was often cited as someone pushing what were then the new acrylic paints to their limits. Leeds staff at one point going down to his studio and reporting on how he was using water sprinkler systems to keep his large paintings moist, so that he could overcome acrylic's tendency to dry too quickly and keep working on his images for much longer times.
Jeremy Deller
Consistently lifting pop culture, from wrestling to raving, into fine art, Deller gave us a definitive 2020 Xmas card. We all knew it had been a bad year and in many ways as an artist he nailed it.
A curmudgeonly Xmas to you all
As this year nears its end I'll probably put up just one more post after this one, hopefully something more positive for the new year. My Xmas greeting above being the essence of a Christmas hat being sucked down into an alien body, an image that has emerged out of my long rumination on interroception, less Christmas cheer, more Xmas seer. I do have a feeling that the whole world has become alien to me or unrecognisable at the moment, and like Jeremy Deller, don't really think a happy Christmas is really possible this year, but the new year is fast approaching so.....
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Happy New Year
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