ART FOR SYMPOSIUM'S SAKE

- OLD HOUSE NEW ART, IZMIR, OCTOBER 2012 - a seven day meeting and old-style-symposium drinking-party-whirl of new places and new faces.  Artists as symposiasts is new one on me and we are 20 strong.  In the main Turkish artists, from Izmir and flying in from Ankara and Istanbul and Canada.  We have a Dane, two Italians; twin sisters, one a painter the other sculpting; an Austrian, a Georgian and a German.  I'm the token Brit and for any painting contributions I might make, this is a new working time frame.  
My work takes longer than days, my creative processing is slower taking months in gestation, sometimes years, and as often months more in the making.  Producing several paintings in a week is unbelievably fast and only the dynamism generated by being amongst artists working together at fever-pace could allow me such profligacy.  
I am without the full and reassuringly complicated facilities that my studio affords, without privacy, and with no time to contemplate, to experiment or to fail.  
One of 20 crowded cheek by jowl into a beautiful old house ripe for renovation though please not for destruction and redevelopment, my allocated spot, the first floor lobby landing, is a thoroughfare and a meeting place.  So, I painted in public in the transience of a crossroad or intersection and almost without knowing it, crosswise, çapraz became the theme and titles for 5 of the seven paintings I tried in the week.  The other two, Sweet Miasma I & II, worked up while I made many new art-making friends making New Art in the Old House and enjoyed the boundless generous hospitality of our Turkish hosts. 

Izmir 2012
video by Oliver Feistmantl.... and a lot of friends who helped us to make this possible,...

KATILIMCI SANATCILAR, CEMAL DEMIR, DANIELA NOVELLO, DEMET BARLAS, ENIS AKTAS, KERSTEN THIELER KUECHLE, KEVIN JACKSON, KIRSTEN BALLISAGER, MISHIKO MAKHARADZE, MUSTAFA HORASAN, OLIVER FEISTMANTL, ORHAN UMUT, PATRIZIA NOVELLO, REYHAN ABACIOGLU, SELAHATTIN YILDIRIM, SEMA BARLAS, TARIK GÖK, TUNCAY TOPCU, TÜLAY CELIKEL, VITUS WOLFSTEINER,

BESTIARY

PLAIN COVER and The Occasional Small Etching

Mickey's Birds

Printmaking is a contrived and calculating way of picture making. It's guarded by mystery, masteries, and the mystiques of arcane almost alchemical processes and newly by clever software little understood by the artist practitioner.
I no more understand the science-art of viscosity resist printing Hayter-style than Photoshop, yet I work with both.
Etching, copperplate intaglio printmaking, is a dirty business of stop-out varnish and turpentine, meths and resin, ferric chloride and noir taille douce, oils and solvents and cleaners; those heady vapours; of grime, dust, and the poison of it all in today's safety-first expectations and health consciousness.
Acid and ink mar hands. Greyly intaglio finger prints mark me out a social pariah, a one who works in dirt, a user of hands not head, an apron-wearer, a copperplate printer, an artist with a trade so not a real artist at all.
Though no less contrived and calculating for all the sit down conveniences of the digital revolution, making prints is a cleaner dirty business now. Cleanly made print-fare for us clean viewing kindle-kinder, clean bar the spittle spray of frustration, the nail bitten repetitive strains and screen blinded, buttock weariness.
Printmaking is a publishing affair, one of promotion, production, distribution, and percentages, and still dirty enough in process and association to attest to the effort. Style is half about getting decorously grubby mixing it and doing a thing. And simply caring.

Asemic and post-literate drawing and photographs.

RECYCLING GREENS

Open publication - Free publishing - More art

R H I N O T

IN September (2011) 9 members of the artreview.com group PRAXIS initiated a collage each. We mailed our piece to the group member east of our location who added to the work and sent it east again for the next contribution.
The 9 collages circumnavigated the globe returning to the originator who completes the work and will post it to Berkeley CA for exhibition. PRAXIS is one of several 'Round Table Collaboration' groups whose collage-works will be on show in February.

Collage is cutting and pasting with scalpel and glue, scissors, and fiddly little bits of paper and not at all the cut-and-paste we've become accustomed to on our computers. In exasperation no doubt, some of us resorted to painting and why not?

RHINOT : Niki Hare. . . following Marty McCutcheon's The Spindle of Necessity, and further contributions from, Daniel McKeon, W.T.Richards and Ian Stopforth. The other four of the PRAXIS group in eastwards order, myself, Mike Hinc, Cora de Lang, and Pennie Steele, subsequently made contributions and we wait for the exhibition to see how Marty completes his collage.

At least one of our completed collages has arrived in Berkeley, and mine, in 3 parts from a last huzzah of scalpel frenzy, is seen below on its last transit to destination.


Thanks-Gods-for-that I'd thought as I finished my piece. I thought that again after I photographed and packaged, put up online, and once more when I had queued up and finally mailed the packet.
TsGsforTHAT, although it's not over. Next there is the showing and attendant documentation and promotion - in some sense the 'real work' starts now.
Each collage has had 10 manifestations. The initiator's, who also concludes the work (2), and each group member's take (+8 = 10). 9 pieces will be the outcome and the 9 have 90 manifestations in total. There might be slide-shows and videos marking the progress of each piece.
Some of the works held up quite well to the process, others amalgamated, separated, and transformed utterly developing into mutli-panel spreads. At times, some were reduced to over-layered homogenous muddles. All transcend the method and the sum of the parts.
I have a new insight into my online Praxian friends. I know their work in the virtual world and through this project have seen passing it under my hands with collage after collage.
In the transition from virtual to real not all of the insight has been easy. Some of my group were slow or backed the pieces into pairs. Some tried too hard, others sought to dominate by their contributions, and some seemed to crave nurturing. I probably annoyed them in turn. Online, It is so simple to ignore these factors. Judging by their input to PRAXIS and other social and art networks, some use the virtual world as a central plank in their operation as artists.
And none of the above is 'bad'. We were not actors in a company, or musicians, none of us are performing artists. All of us function solo and artists are meant to try hard, to dominate the work with their ideas, and we all need and can give a bit of nurturing, it's just that when you collaborate creatively a lot of shit skims to the surface.

Pigeons, or Doves - painting in anger.

Mickey Raymond, 81, mover and shaker at Colefax and Fowler lives in stately home style in a spacious bungalow in Tangier's Marshan, the plateau west of the Casbah, the hill before the Old Mountain where it gets truly Surrey-like, beyond and above which are the palaces of the King of Morocco, the Saudis and the Emir of Kuwait, and those of their wives.
The Marshan is a district of faded grand residences, one-time legations, a football stadium, hospitals, schools and the King's Tangier town house or 'office', where York Castle crumbles, the Phoenicians entombed their dead and the hip hang-out Cafe Hagh tumbles down the shady northern cliffs facing Tarifa and Spain.
Mickey's bungalow is at the eastern city end as the hill plateaus out and Tangier reestablishes back into more hectic hilly familiarity. He is hedged between a print works and an apartment block but once inside you'd not know. His seclusion is absolute, the calm disturbed by a grandfather clock and a visual assault of furniture, furnishings, pictures, murals, and objets d'art, that should but fail to preclude elegance.
Each piece and every detailing, kitschy or fine as maybe, stands alone on examination.
High windows open onto a shady and entwining garden that utterly deceives in belying its tininess.
How such a densely arrayed mish-mash fails to be the mad grotto of an eccentric is Mickey's miracle.
It is the canny gaps between the pieces that form and define Mickey's gift, and it is on two such gaps that I've been invited to paint.
I think, 'Is this wise?' On Mickey's part, wise, to crowd the space further. Wise of him to ask me, wise of me to contemplate the task and agree.
Mickey is not a scary man. Generously hospitable and urbane, he is shruggingly tolerant as you have to be to live in Tangier, but in truth he scares me a little. He is of the suave, alert, well educated, society-monied establishment that I am not. Colefax and Fowler, designers to an age and class that may have a resonance in the dreams of my parents and grandparents, are unknown to me. He refers to places I know only on the map and to folk, nay, personalities I don't know of at all. If he's testing me I'm failing but what the heck, money isn't involved and they're his doors that he wants me to adorn.
Mickey doesn't know I haven't picked up a paintbrush in anger for two years.
I tell my friends, and they tell me 'You can do this'. I have brushes, packed in a reflex for a journey that had no painting intent, and the same friends supply me with the rest of the kit.
Crowded and surrounded at Mickey's I blunder around trying to water colour wash with acrylic on a vertical surface. Astonishingly this works although it is not a recommended method and had no right to work at all. I always was a crap painter. I know nothing about and mistrust acrylic paint, I know nothing about painting opaquely impasto, or on panels, or vertically, but in two sessions and two entertaining lunches cooked and served by sweet smiling Fatima, Mickey is pleased as punch and I'm astounded.
The work is done, and now I see what he wanted and why. Freshly painted they may be, but the new panels sit in the overall scheme as if meant to be there all the time.
We are more relaxed now, both more confident and Mickey Raymond isn't finished yet.
A Noel Coward CD plays through a happy third session while we ponder the angle of light and nuances of green for trompe d'oeil roundels.
Fatima pats me lightly on the back as she serves us lunch, approvingly I believe, and drinking a lovely Moroccan wine I marvel at what has happened here.
Before I'd moistened a brush, Mickey Raymond saw it all.

re-title 'the last days'

I am leaving re-title.com.

I’ve no evidence that anyone visited my re-title.com page - ever.

No more shall I be listed re-titled in oblivion - a paying but spurious ‘inventory’ item. I won’t be there should anyone be looking.

What did I expect?
Did I expect gallery curators, lovers of the arts, investors, art-consultants and critics to review my re-titled oeuvre and be wowed, wooed, and clattering my cyber door-knocker?
Yes, I suppose I did.

This, as I was aware of at the outset, is a quite unrealistic hope.
Equally unrealistically, I’d hope to win the lottery by purchasing a ticket. I may as well have expended 2 years-worth of re-title fees in buying lottery tickets and might have reaped more reward.
It’s a hoping conceivability.

Am I bitter?
No, but I’m leaving re-title and separations are never straightforward.
De-re-titling my cyber facade is no simple matter. The re-title.com logo and link is bedded in this blog, my website and across my social networks.
Each one must go.

I wonder, while I paid for the listing, ‘whether more people linked to re-title.com through me than the other way around.’
Ha.
Well, bitter-me!
until 15 September . . .

Shooting Out the Lights

A various party had been invited to meet the new couple: the old aristocracy was represented by Lord and Lady Pentreath; the old gentry by young Mr and Mrs Fitzadam of the Worcestershire branch of the Fitzadams; politics and the public good, as specialized in the cider interest, by Mr Fenn, member for West Orchards, accompanied by his two daughters; Lady Mallinger's family, by her brother, Mr Raymond, and his wife; the useful bachelor element by Mr Slinker, the eminent counsel, and by Mr Vandernoodt, whose acquaintance Sir Hugo had found pleasant enough at Leubronn to be adopted in England. Daniel Deronda, George Eliot.

I like lists . . . but not the Rich List which I've mislaid that shows an increase of billionaires on the previous year. Ms Spec Savers is well on the way, or may be one, and 'Ma'am, can you see well enough to buy a painting?' The billionaire abundance seems paradoxical as if money itself huddles for warmth against the financial chill.
Tweeters and bloggers have been busy with insurrection, revolution and billionairedom but insurgents, counter-insurgents and the Newly Very Rich don't move in my circles.
Scarlet is right, it has been quiet on some blogfronts. I had thought that it was me having a phase of non-virtual busy-ness aka disenchantment with virtuality, and whilst I'm not throwing off the shackles of petro-colonialism or making mega-dosh, it has been a busy year. Busy seeing money scuttle away to safety, busier still being broke and far too busy to be blogging-around what with all the news we've been having.
Our newly adopted good Arabs have been tweeting and blogging like demons and getting killed for their pains, biting the bad Arabs in the bum, most of whom we or our once favourite enemies the USSR have been supporting, arming and trading with quite happily for decades, and other naughty naughty Arabs are biting us (for supporting, arming and trading with our nurtured, nay newly abandoned and re-defined bad Arabs) and are getting killed as well. None killed get a trial. Bum biters got killed and to hang with due process.
We've had the wedding which went according to sun shinny plan. Crowds crowded and the perfect girl next door got her prince while we look at those next door to us and wonder.
AV, that electoral reform that was sham reform bit the dust. To give credit where credit is due, to Mr Clegg, there is no further electoral reform in the offing.

Not reforming, not quite revolting yet and not rich, tweet, back to the blogging, back to lists.

I prefer lists like Eliot's above, and Fitzgerald's Nick's list of Gatsby's house party guests. (abridged)

From East Egg, then, came the Chester Beckers and the Leeches, and Doctor Webster Civet, who was drowned last summer up in Maine. And the Hornbeams and the Willie Voltaires, and a whole clan named Blackbuck. And the Ismays and the Chrysties ( or rather Hubert Auerbach and Mr Chrystie's wife ), and Edgar Beaver, whose hair they say, turned cotton-white one winter afternoon for no good reason at all.
Clarence Endive was from East Egg, as I remember. From farther out on the Island came the Cheadles and the O.R.P.Schraeders, and the Stonewall Jackson Abrams of Georgia, and the Fishguards and the Ripley Snells. The Dancies came, too, and S.B.Whitebait, who was well over sixty, and Maurice A. Flink, and the Hammerheads, and Beluga the tobacco importer, and Beluga's girls.
From West Egg came the Poles and the Mulreadys and Cecil Roebuck and Cecil Schoen and Gulick the State senator and Newton Orchid, who controlled Films Par Excellence.
A man named Klipspringer was there so often and so long that he became known as 'the boarder' - I doubt if he had any other home. Also from New York were the Chromes and the Backyssons and the Dennickers and Russel Betty and the Corrigans and the Kellehers and the Dewars and the Scullys and S.W. Belcher and the Smirkes and the young Quinns, divorced now, and Henry L. Palmetto, who killed himself by jumping in front of a subway train in Times Square.


Go Henry. Another tick off the list.