History simplifies. It reduces the past down to clearly distinguishable groups which are derived from but almost totally divorced from reality. In terms of painting it reduces the past into patterns, tendencies and styles. In truth paintings past  nothing like as linear in progression or clear in categorisation as we would like to think.

That said, there is no doubt that we now live in a time where the painterly (and wider)landscape is more diverse, fragmented and confused than ever. The lack of unifying concepts, clear agendas or singular centres has made sure of that.

Painting is most certainly alive, fererently so. But amoungst the chaos of its current existence what unites it. more importantly, for me, what ermege as common grounds from which a young practitioner can find some kind of pathway? 

 What is clear is that any pathway that mereges is tailor made ofr each practiioner. The potential streams of influence are so vast that we can hand pick the aspects which we choose to relate to, be informed by and take influence from.

 Amoungst contemporary uniqueness there are tendenceis which are continuous within paintings histories. As shifting permanents it is perpahs important to locate these first.

Style. Style has always been a central fascet of the painters fascination. The formal minutiae of the practise are inherantly important to any person who picks up a fl uid liqud intending to place it across a flat surface to create a ‘painting’. Style transcends subject matter, in that it concerns are regardlessof the what and why of our approach. This is not to say it is not directly related to this, just that it also has a certain autonomy. 

Every paintiner is to some extent look to continue, develop and find an appropriate ’style’. I use the word loosley. I don’t mean stlye in tersm of stylised. I just mean the consideration of space, the application of the medium, the use of colour, the formation of line and the combination of these parts to create a whole. We are always looking to consider these to find something of our time, of ourself, different to the past and which stretches the language of painting to artiuclate a variation of past messages. The particular details of this observation are not too important at this moment in time.

Beyond such a general trend there are more specific tendencies which seem to underpin much contemporary practise.

Multiplicity. It becomes very hard to locate yourself when there are so many different avenus being taken by painters. Many still continue directly from the 20th Century obsession with abstraction. From process painting, pure abstraction and continuations of expressionism. Others have full immersed themselves in the rebirth of image making, but this is then broken done into infinate subcategories. A list of stylistic labels would do us no favours as they general blind rather than describe. For me this very multiplicity of approachs is not a denial of a tendency but is a tendency in itself.

The return of the image after its death. The image seems to have been attacked and killed off from enough angles to make its return complicated. If the image, due to its over exposire, is dead and if iconography is now empty of meaning; then what use does it have in this new pictorial painterly landscape? A point Andy made the other day seems to ring true. That we have emptied images of meaning and thus using them seems to become about this emptienss is many ways. I am a little confused as to exactly what I mean here, I shall have to give it some thought.

I suppose this is, in a way, a follow up to your post the other day. More directly it is a response to an image I have just starting working on.

Many of my paintings sourcfe found imagery, staged photographic images and other photographic sources. Normally, however, the image is a fragment of a new synthetic construction. It is analysed and detached from cotnext and given a new location in a woder field.

So it is interesting when the odd image strikes me and inspires a failry direct translation from found image to final image. This was the case with an image I found two days ago of a young british 10m diver in the daily sports pages.

I knew almost straight away I wanted to use the whole iamge. Not to break it up, dissovle chunks or introduce it too a new set of surroundings.

 Initially I did two small drawings and then today I started working on a canvas, 40inch x30inch.

Fisrtly the enlarging of the image is going to give a new sense of heroism to the subject, but this is old, tired and obvious ground to go over.

What interests me is the chocies I deem necessary to make in the recreation of the image. No painter ever copies truthly, even if they want to. They are always forgetting, remering in a new way, fiddlings, shifting and moving the image towards a new altered end point.

Look at Manet’s work, in this instance his ‘Balcony’ painting of 1870. Look how geometric the coposition is, the rigid retangular nature (a direct descendant of David) in its organisation and linear composition. He reorganises what he saw(either in life or in a photographic image) sytemmatically giving it a new sense of order and structure. Its almost a form of purification.

I realised I was attempting to do something similar today, without even being consciously aware of it. Firstly I divided the canvas up, not as the orignal image was, but in a slightly altered structure. I made the height in which both the pool and the crowd sat in identical. Both were 15 inches high, making the two of them create a square (as the canvas is 3o inches wide). This then left 10inches, and a quarter of the height, for the space in which the diving board and diver would sit. Before I had even added in the specific infomration I had divided the space into a mathematical and balacned format, altering the less rigid structure of the photograph. It was intuative, which is what I find fascinating.

Its as if we have a conversation with the photograph and the blank canvas. On the one hand we are looking to fulfill the mimetic function of recapturing the image. On the other we are aware of the abstract formal qualities of the painted surface. We desire to have harmony, to have balance. Its as if the dialogue between painted space and photographic images ensures we are honest to both truths.

 Since then the crowd has been drawn in and the diving board and diver. I now have a layout which will allow me to find a certain amount of autonomy in surface and colouration. Alloowing me to shift away from the specifics of the origianl source to capture what it is I think I saw in the original image. A sense of dramatic tension, a odd interest in the activity as a spectacle, of the audience inside and outside the cnavas interracting. I don’t wan’t to say too much more about this as I want to try carry working on this image without too much preconceived baggage or agenda. Mydesire to paint it has seen me skip a few ofthe normal stages of construction. I have no idea at this point if this enriches or empoverishes the potential outcome.

Francesca Woodman

In my first year teaching no artist has been referenced or spoken about by students more than Francesca Woodman.  She is neither as famous or as in your face noticeable as many other artists, yet something about her draws numerous people to her work. 

Woodman died at the tragically young age of twenty two, having only produced 800 prints. It would be wrong to assume that her fame or interest in her work is the by product of her youthful passing. Of course, as with Cobain/Keats and many others, it adds and projects a certain amount of meaning onto the work. yet the exists an autonomous power to her images that makes the worth discussing.

Woodman’s photographs explore many of the tricks of the trade familiar to student photographers. Double exposure, slow shutter speeds and low lights.  Technically her images are perhaps no more sophisticated than many a young photographer. But how she harnesses these devices to create her images is what stands her out. 

She becomes an actress in empty and eeeire interiors. The architecture becomes a stage which she does not just play on but through. Moving around so that she dissolves and fades into the worn walls.  What remains of her presence in the final image is no more important than what has been lost. Image a figurative response to Whiteread’s work. 

Francesca Woodman’s images seem to be about a struggle or attempt to disappear, to fade away. The architecture is both what traps and what provides a vehchile for some kind of escape. Slippery transient moments are paused. Figures, which seem to be metaphors of wider conditions, seem to resonate with our inherant concerns with the human condition. Rather than her young death being a tragedy which we project onto the images; is it not a case that her images articulate a particular understanding and struggle with the tragic which lead her to suicide. Either way, they are deeply moving image which, in my tired state, I have not been able to deconstruct effectively. 

It’s all lies. One belief system just replaces the other. When packaged prettily we buy into it. It’s only when we strip it of its pink veneer that we get anywhere close to the truth. This truth being just another lie in a constant, depressing game of ‘pass the parcel’. We started with a marvellous, large bundle of optimism and end with the reality of a crappy toy. We are filled with nothing but emptiness.   

Over the last two years Paul Crook’s painting has gravitated back towards figuration, away from a fairly pure form of abstraction. Such a shift always brings with it a certain fascination with the choices the artist makes in terms of subject matter. By which I mean both the iconography they harness and the nature of meaning they are grappling with.

Houses, petrol stations and the exteriors and interiors of cars are the recurrent visions of Paul Crook’s recent work. What should we make of this? A temporary deviation is necessary at this point to justify my mode of analysis.

The iconographic decisions of an image maker are both simplistic and complex. Simplistic in that they are driven to a particular sign or symbol by urge. A complexity exists, however, in the minutiae of an artist’s selection, the manner of their continued interest and the nature of their manipulation. The later need not concern the artist, all that matters in the instinct which drives them to using that symbol in their practise. This is not to say the maker does not have awareness of the complexities, just that they need not be suffocated by it. Its role is to cause activity, not paralysis. The fact remains that the values and nuances of the symbol are inherent in ever stage of the process, from selection through to manipulation. Most importantly, however, is the fact that the artist hold no omnipresent position in regards to the question of ‘why’, they are merely the makers of the ‘what’. Barthes’ inflammatory 1968 essay ‘Death of the Author’ is perhaps a little two dogmatic in its post structuralist manifesto feel. It does, however, bring awareness to the fact that the image is a multifaceted creation, defined by a number of contexts and producers, of which the artist is only one. The viewer image relationship is the most central in a field of unccentralised modes of analysis.

So… why cars, houses and petrol stations? On the simplest level Paul Crook is painting what he knows, the familiar, and the everyday. Reason enough of course. In doing this he straight away aligns himself with a long lineage of ‘realism’. It is a Baudellairrian tradition which separates itself from the hind minded and distant subject matter of many earlier makers. T. J. Clarke, perhaps the most celebrated writer on Courbet and Manet,) would tell us that it very much an anti bourgeoisie, working class mode of practise. The over simplistic, methodologically flawed and inverse snobbery of Clarke’s writing need not be deconstructed here. Needless to say I think he is wrong. The choice to focus on that which is around us, in our own time and own place, is just a logical extension of a longer history which moved us towards this point. It’s the result of a freeing of certain creative restraints, nothing more revolutionary or subversive than that.

The method of deconstruction in the images, therefore, is not one of social or biographical context but a more primary form of research with the images themselves. The questions we ask when we view Paul Crook’s work are these, and in this order. What associations do we have with the subjects he choices. What does his manipulation of these images do? Finally, what does the relationship between these values seem to present in terms of meaning? That is the what, how and why of image making.

The houses speak to us of homes, but through their not specific nature they remain impersonal. Petrol stations speak to us about journeys, about the moments in limbo between two points. They are paintings which seem to deal with place, often a familiar but non specific place.

When we sit this realisation next to the romanticised view of paintings function, particular that of abstraction an uncomfortable reality is revealed. Painting is supposed to drag us from reality, to provide an antidote, a fleeting escape towards some utopian abode. It provides transcendence from the bland mundane reality in which we all seem to float. So when Crook presents us, in terms of subject, with what he himself admits is a ‘mundane blandness’, then a contradiction is created. The places he takes us are just those from which we wanted to escape. As such they are uneasy.

The petrol stations, for me, seem to take on a dark melancholy which talks to us about paintings own weakness and wider issues within reality. Painting frustrates in its promise for escape and then its denial of anything tangible. It leaves us in limbo. Pausing our road journey at a petrol station Crook’s work seems to articulate this frustration; lost between two points, never capable of reaching the end point. Beyond these self reflexive narrations of paintings eternal impotence in experience, it seems to resonate with more generalised frustrations. Those metaphorical uncompleted journeys we take, those lost in limbo pauses. The petrol station pieces seem aware of paintings ability to talk, without paradox, about itself and beyond itself. A chatty but silent orator.

What becomes of most interest is the discussion created between this subject matter and the manner in which it is communicated. It is at the root of all meaning in realist painting in particular. The realist tradition never illustrates the humble nature of its subject matter. That is always heroic elevation or unreal shifts. Think of Millet’s peasants, given a Michelangeloesque grandeur in their poses and a warming glow to the skies. Consider Manet’s painterly arrogance and plastic construction which transforms the everyday into the most multifaceted and complex of images. How about Courbet, high priest of the movement? His pedantic realism and Davidian compositional strength give his works a hidden level of artifice which control meaning. More recently we have Hooper’s cinematic lighting and staging of figures which is theatrical in its construction. They all focus on the real but transform it through the choices they make.

The more direct connections to Crook’s work can be seen in the photography of Martin Parr; the obsessive diarist of various nuances of British life. The tea cups, the tourists, the dinner lady, the parking space are all iconic images which sit somewhere between journalism and social realism. Such labelling does him no favours. What is true is that the over saturation, the nature of his framing, the grouping of his images are all devices to focus on the unique aspects of the everyday. The humble becomes profound. Parr’s work does, however, occasionally have the kind of downward looking patronised onlooker feel to it.

Crook’s paintings lack something that is central to many of the above. They are generally figureless. He presents us with a manmade stage upon which no clear narrative drama takes place. It is a similar sense to Michael Raedecker’s seminal works but removing the explicit sense of a pre or post narrative. We are left feeling an unease and incompleteness. They are not as explicit or didactic as any of the above. This elusiveness seems typical of much contemporary painting. It is not a cop out, but a celebration of paintings unique traits. Painting is not designed for the overtly political commentary; it is more poetry than prose.

Formally Crook’s work also opposes many of the previously mentioned. They lack the openly heroic, and serious, nature in colouration. In place of Courbet’s dry formalism and Hooper’s theatrical lighting is pinkness. It’s a tooth rotting sugary pinkness, hanging like a veil over the images. Normality packaged in a pretty glow with a soft lighting which dreamily charms rather than arresting us with drama.

It is our tendency to read such formal content before marrying it to a dialogue with its subject. As such we enter a melody of colouristic games. The pink is the solo player, with little vignettes of yellow, green and blue appearing in various images. In Golden Mile (below) a trams façade glows amidst the mass of pink and blue. Thin washes of various yellows hover over the red base. The colouristic opposition causes an optical vibration, the red looking to push forward and the yellow glimmering above. The play of colours is harmonious and balanced. There is a colouristic pleasure to the works that almost allows us to totally detach ourselves, to be utterly submersed in the beautiful. This is the language and delights of someone who has made and viewed abstract works. Yet the empty and easy escape of some romantic abstract aesthetic is not open to us here. Just as we are about to be totally consumed in the colour we are reminded of content, it re-arrests us. 

This disjunction is not evidence of a painter who should be still making pure abstraction. It is the dichotomy between subject and formal content which provides the tension upon which the works succeed. The abstract path was too singular, too monotone and too uncomplicated. Whether art mirrors life or itself it should at least be looking to reflect the contradiction inherent in both. 

The contradiction is one created by the inevitable battle a painter has to have when faced with subject matter, rather than the total freedom of abstraction. The total freedom was always a lie anyway, limiting rather than extending our vision. Without a structure to play from or build towards we are lost.

The photographic images and sketches that Crook works from provide this. They give him the script or the sheet music from which to play. The image gives you givens and directions from which you have to make careful decisions. It’s the placing of a line, the shifting of a composition, the construction of a two dimensional shape to allude to a three dimensional space. Painters have been doing it for thousands of years, yet still it fascinates. Nothing much changes.

It is this structure which gives the work the rhythm along which the previous mentioned colour based melody can play. On first glance this rhythm seems classical and solid in its form. The geometry of the architecture, the format of the canvases sets up this presumption. A rectangular field filled with other rectangles which go both across and through the plane, a fluctuation being set up between these two spatial referents of flatness and depth.

A closer inspection reveals a far less rigid construction. They seem capable of falling apart. They appear, as they are, artificially constructed. Shapes which are walls are just shapes. They seem to almost dissolve back into the fluidity of the process from which they emerged. The lie of the illusion is revealed; just as the lie of the aesthetic delight had been denied. Instead we are left hovering between the two.

What we find is a succession of formal contradictions which seem to support many of the most instinctive associations which emerge from the subject matter. The visual sensation of viewing the works for any period becomes akin to the metaphor of being in limbo which both the petrol stations describe and painting specialises in. It brings me back to Keats’ ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn.’ The romantic poet celebrates and laments, in equal measure, the power and weakness of art. The eternally held decisive moment yet the moment that never happens. The lose of transience but the lack of life. In this case the frustrations are of the paintings inability to provide genuine escape, instead offering pretty passages into mirrors of the everyday. When fully digested the vicious inescapable circle of tangible reality, and most particularly its more mundane elements, is an uncomfortable realisation.

These messages seem to be the product of a process which follows Richter’s ideal, ‘before the idea came the deed.’ Its an ideology which looks to find meaning from the work rather than working towards a preconceived agenda and message. Crook is not setting out to impose a belief system upon the viewer, rather the choices made along the way create paintings which have a vocal autonomy.

The metaphysical conversations which emerge from the pink veils of Crook’s paintings are heroic, but not in the sense of being full of grandeur and self importance. It’s a quieter heroism, one which looks to be honest about painting and reality. This honesty is, surely, the best kind of a lie. 

The “photoreal” paintings (this has to be placed into inverted comma’s because there not really very close to photoreal at all, a lack of descriptive vocabulary on my part) are images of hope.  G. Richter spoke about his landscape paintings as a speech which is beautifully crafted and emotionally stirring but which ultimately says nothing ie. they speak about the object of the photo rather than the romantic landscape depicted.  The intention of Figure/Fragment (I’ll use this as an eg.) was nearly the same.  I used the photo as a device for objectivity which in turn negates the emotional content of the image, the romanticism of the image, of what is essentially a very tradtional view of the woman as object, looking longingly into the distance.  However, painterly aspects intrude on the image and thus the painting becomes about the efforts to balance, to unify, the whole.  Hope enters the image in my failure to extinguish the painterly elements and attain objecthood.  For a painting of this type to work beyond the photoreal works of Richters the necessity is for the image to straddle the gap between his landscapes and his abstracts.  It was suggested that his abstracts were the paintings which dealt with this declamation without substance, however, Richter rejects this notion, suggesting that the abstracts are about finding new ways to create an emotional response, rather than simply the declamation of past techniques at the death knell of painting.  This is life affirming stuff.

Thinking here about your mini essay on post-modernism tom.  It strikes me that Robert Rauschenberg really is one of the truly significant post-modern practitioners, and that I need to read so much more on him.  Its bizarre, he put together collages of random objects, and stated that he didn’t look for any meaning in what he placed together, but that the viewer would find his own lyrical connections, how the hell is this good, how the hell is it art, but yet it is!!  its the true avant garde, precisely because its rough, uncompromising and relentlessly indefatiguable(?!?).

the need for a return to craft- craft as art/art as craft/craft in art.

  This is a potentially misleading opinion and you was right to immediately place the idea under scrutiny.  The great painter of the present will incorporate a range of techniques to produce his/her work, dipping into a wide range of contrasting subjects found in both high and low culture, juxtaposing these often in the same work.  Indeed, one of the catch phrases that can be most commonly applied to post-modernity is disharmony. How one object seems to not quite fit reasonably with another, causing a friction.  Of course these frictions have been played out since painting began, think of the simplified colour and form exercises in abstraction, look at earlier scene paintings and you will see the same abstract awareness of form and colour, then think of lyrical associations that contradict the overall aesthetic, Titians wonderful little dog in the flaying of Marsyas is a good example.  The art of making a painting balance is tricky enough, but the greatest artists have always seemed to add the tension of disharmony into the mix. So how is this Post-modern disharmony different?  To say it is self conscious (one of the most common descriptions for Post-modernism) would be wrong, this effect has always been consciously sought after.  Perhaps it is better to say it is more sought after.  The line with which painters in history dared not cross, which would in essence make the visual enjoyment of the picture disappear has been drastically moved, that is to say, it has always been moving, but with the advent particularly of Manet, Cezanne and then Cubism, along with the publics gradual acceptance and now love of these works, we are able to break our images apart even more than ever.  Because of this, a whole range of analogical meanings can be expressed more deliberately than ever before within the breaking apart of a pictures harmony.

I am digressing, so I’ll return to the original point of craft in work.  It is a dangerous point to make because it can become easily misconstrued that craft can be art, and it becomes even more dangerous when we take into context the post-modern/duchampian idea that anything can be art.  So how do we make a defined, reasoned explanation that craft is not art?  Just in the same way that not all painting can automatically be called art just because it is a painting;  I suppose it comes down to the nature of why the work was produced -it has to be socially and artistically self-aware- is the outcome at once present and eternal?  The difficulty is that, when producing a painting, to be too ‘aware’ is to place the idea before the deed, and this outcome can only produce bad painting.  There is no easy answer, but an artists day-to-day concerns must feel present within the work.  This means that a painting of some nice mountains in Wales does not constitute Art although it may be a very nice painting, but if the paint is handled in some particular way or an object is placed in the landscape which results in a cutting lyricism then the image may indeed be Art.

 So, I move onto the Peter Doig show that is currently on in London (until end of April 2008) and the issue of craft and art raises its ugly head again.  There is no doubt in my mind that the show I witnessed was produced by a supreme master of the medium in question.  He really knows paint.  And equally there were some singular works which stand out as being profoundly emotive pieces, so why, on the whole, did I leave feeling slightly cold?  The answer is a fairly simple one, his oeuvre is just a bit too easy, I didn’t feel like I came out of the show having seriously questioned anything about myself or the world, I didn’t feel different at all.  And this harks back to the fact that his paintings give you what you want, there isn’t enough tension within them.  There’s visual tension, of the formal variety, but there was no tension in the subject, and if you’re gonna produce figurative works, you’ve got to include both in order to be seen as a great artist.  It is common place to advertise the outsider-ness of an artist, and Doigs retrospective certainly didn’t disappoint, there has been reams of writing on how he bucked the trend of the yBa’s, producing painting when there was no excitement surrounding it, the fact of the matter is, people never stopped painting, they just didn’t get famous for doing it.  Living in Trinidad, a true outsider, his works speak directly of this.  The single figure in splendid isolation.  They’d become almost like a sad cliche if it wasn’t for his painterly excellence, of which he really does excel at.

Postmodernism.

As Dick Hebdige pointed out (“A report from the Western Front: Postmodernism and the ‘politics’ of style” 1986-87) Postmodernism has become a catch all term capable of being appropriated to describe an almost limitless range of things. We apply the phrase to the styled approach of contemporary painting, the design of a building, sampling and scratching in music, 9/11, the nature and development of technologies such as television and the internet, the manner in which a text is deconstructed, the interdisciplinary approach of new University courses, the destabilising of subject matter, the lose of subject, the implosion of meaning, the apocalyptic paranoia of a generation of post war baby boomers, the collapse (semi collapse) of sociological hierarchies, the lose of structure, the flattening of the political landscape, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the lose of place, responses to Einstein’s theories of relativity, the quotative and pastiche, the non existence of history and seemingly anything to which in contemporary culture which is mildly ironic. At worst it is meaningless, at best utterly confusing in its complexity. Despite this it continues to be the word of choice for many commentators looking to tie down something intangible about the present.

By its nature Postmodenrism is obviously defined by modernism. This throws up certain complexities in itself. In art historical terms alone modernism is a dichotomy. On the one hand it refers to Greenbergian notions of art for arts sake, of the closed door on association and an entirely formal, Kantian mode of meaning. On the other it has a Bauddelairian history, referring to the notion that art should celebrate the heroism of modern life, a realism explicitly about the here and now in which the work is produced.

Despite these contradictions it is possible to notice common trends across all disciplines in terms of the modern condition and the values it celebrates. It is a condition for absolute values, for the singular belief which needs to be empirically measurable and preferably tangible. It craves certainty as a notion of understanding. It allows for shifts in beliefs systems, such as the destruction of religions overbearing power, but insists on new systems to replace the old. Thus we end up with capitalism, in the West at least, which put economic structures as a mode to judge relative value. It fights for reason, certainty, progress and the new. It is a way of thinking which is capable of justifying the barbaric, reasonless, mass murder; and its manner, of the First World War battle fields. (As such Dada reaction to WW1 with its focus on irrationality can be seen as the early seeds of post-modern thought)

Modernism articulates linear progression, vertical hierarchies; singular centres and sees time as a horizontal line moving forwards and upwards. It is seen in the clear ordering of history in museums, denying the reality of the past as a mass of atoms lost in chaotic confusion. It looks to give this, and everything, the same definable and measurable coordinates that it presumes physical space has. It gives things values which can be ordered, such as ascribing notions of greatness to artists who we place into a Canon.

Postmodernism is thus the shift from this safe ground, which for ease of analysis we should falsely see as homogenous. We can loosely, although inaccurately, locate this shift as a result of tensions and rumblings in the 1950’s and 60’s. Think Cold war, Vietnam, student protests, human rights movements, the growth of literature on women’s rights, social and political unease, the threat of nuclear war, developments in theories of relativity and the attempted deconstruction of social hierarchies. Each of these events is an attack, or the preparation for an attack, on our previous nature of existence.

The foundation of the above occurrences provides a platform from which to undermine the singularity and uncertainty of much modernist thought. New approaches demanded an inquisition. ‘Feminism’ challenged the gender biases of the west. Non western approaches showed up the ludicrous imperialistic values which form simplistic and western cantered binary oppositions such as the civilised vs the primitive. Our place as the forward thinking, monarchal power above the backward and basic ‘other’ was attacked. Marxist approaches called into question the bourgeoisie’s position of power which created repetitive social structures of separation and status. New historians highlighted the artificial nature of linear and logical historical systems. The falsity and constructed nature of our reality was revealed.

Previously many disciplines had attempted to exist in isolation, celebrating their own uniqueness. The associations between each discipline and of each to wider values was denied, suddenly we were demanded to open the door for cross disciplinary discussion. The hierarchy, isolation and value systems of every facet of existence had been fractured to the point of bankruptcy. A paradigm shift was demanded. A multicentred reality was created. The post-modern era had arrived.

The implosion of our values has led to a position where anything goes, where new means of production and consumption are demanded. It embraces the constant evolution of new media. It promotes a knowing pastiche, a subversion of types, a quotation of what has gone before, a denial of originality, the death of the author, the denial of meaning. Irony, humour are too the fore.

Movements, schools and styles are a thing of the past, to an extent. A painter might perhaps have a closer link to a scientist or musician than another painter. Our field of reference and influence is democratised, all barriers have been dissolved. All logical structures are eroded.

Freedom is a strange thing. Without the past frameworks we can feel lost. When we can do anything, in any way, about anything than a ironic creative paralysis runs through our veins. Instead of having found a utopian liberty we are actually lost, maples; floating in unknowingness. Fundamentally this is where we are today. Lost and grappling for something to trust and believe in, aware how flawed a desire that is. We know we need rules and structure else we dissolve into nothingness. Equally, how can one be set free when there is no longer a controlling devise to be set free from. Totally freedom suffocates.

It is also worth mentioning Gerhard Richter here, a most eloquent and intellectual of minds. The postmodern human arrogantly dismisses ideologies. He speaks of some idealistic ultra democratic process. Yet having or wanting no ideology is an ideology in itself. This is suitable paradoxical.

“The idea as a point of departure for the picture: that’s illustration.  Conversely, acting and reacting in the absence of an idea leads to forms that can be named and explained, and thus generates the idea.  (’In the beginning was the deed.’)

“No Questions Asked”

The website, My Name is Ferdinand have asked me to answer the following questions to post in their section, ‘NO questions asked.’ So here goes. Have a browse through their website, its a really interesting venture.

http://mynameisferdinand.wordpress.com/

Okay, the questions and answers:
My name is?
Tom de Freston
What is art for?
I sometimes really do wonder if its for anything. It always seems to be one of the last additions and first subtractions in various cultures. This surely makes it the least necessary and most dispossable. Perhaps thats a bit cynical.

I certainly don’t believe arts purpose is that which is outlines by curent educational, institutional, governmental and museum theory. It is not just their to serve some measurable sociological venture. Such instrumental ideals are utterly flawed.

 Art can’t live int he losed roo idealism of Modernism but its socail impact is both indirect and unmeasurable by empirical and statisitcal means. When art is only shown or taught about becasue of its ability to have such a role, then we are missing the point.

I digress. Art’s point? To make sense of things from a particular vantage which need not be constrained to answers. To move clsoer to an understanding of our place in this world, both present and historical.
Which types of media do you work in?

I paint. This is then filtered through an interest in collage, found imagery and some computer based stuff. But primarily it invovles taking various substances and laying across two dimensional planes.

Who or what was your first artistic influence?

I want to say something terribly impressive, but im pretentious like that. But I think my first artisitc influence was my brother. He is quite a bit older and I have never lived with him. When he visited my Dad in Colyton one year I saw him drawing some chess pieces. Memory seems to suggest this led to me wanting to draw him. I remember getting this real buzz out of the ability to move a pencil across a page, to create lines, to make shadows, which could be builot up to look like this thing that stod in front of me. Its quite a basic fascination but the realisation of the mimetic power of a pencil amazed me. I suppose I was about eleven.

 In terms of first artistic influence I remember falling for John Bratby’s work when i was quite young. The headmaster of the school I was at owned a number of his works.  Chunks of paint arrogantly pulled around to capture kitchen sinks and mundane domestic still lives. I am not sure how much I like him now. But all the things I liked about his work, subject matter, approach and style, do seem to reoccur in many artists I like.

And your most recent?
Matthias Weischer, Daniel Richter and Neo Rausch have been a major influence since Andy directed me otwards them and Charlotte Mullins book on the figure in contemporary painting provided a great starting point.

Last ngiht I went to Brian Graham’s new show of works. I wrote my dissertation on his last show ‘Layer by Layer’. The remit of our discussion for the dissertaion spread wider than expected. He made me realise the importance of subject matter, the need to keep eprsisting and believing, the importance to follow your own goals not what you feel you should be painting and a belief that it is actually possible to start creating images which get somewhere near that unseen/unknown point on the horizon you are heading for.
Are you in it for the money?

Don’t be silly. Anyone who is in it for the money, certainly who paints, probally does not have a very good economic brain. There are so many easier roots to making money if that is what drives you.

Money, though, can’t be ignored. If I start making a decent amount form my paintings then that obviously means I can focus more time, energy and money into its production. So there is no point in living ina totally idealistic world which ignores the sytem we live in. 

I certainly would never make work with money as my soul aim. I don’t do commisions as such. I make art in attempt to reach for some particualr values, which whilst I am not always sure what they are, are central to my practise. The moment this is displaced for some production of an object for money alone then I may as well be doing something else. I would sooner be teaching another day in college, and getting paid, then churning out some work of art I dispise to get a few quid.

Politeness or rudeness, which do you prefer?

Politeness in life, although I am perhaps too polite at times due to weird social paranoias. Perhaps somewhere inbetween in my work. I certainly would not like the idea of my work being called polite, but eqaully I don’t think it is brash or rude. Perhaps it is rude in that occasionally it makes me promises or offers up solutions then never follows them through. That annoys me and seems rude.

I thought I’d put up a post, to let you know that i’m still alive and to try and have a think about what i’ve been up to.

Well i’ve been at a meeting all day today where different people have been talking about the roll of art in the public realm.  which really dosn’t have much to do with painting necessarily but was interesting non the less.  leo fitzmaurice did a talk, he’s an artist based on merseyside who’s getting an international reputation,  he was speaking about one project where he and a group of artists moved into a tower block in liverpool that was due to be demolished.  so only about a third of the tower had residents in it.  he and a group of other artists lived there for 5 years building up a dialogue with the residents, learning about them as individuals, their fears about moving away, the upsides and downsides of the tower blocks, and really became a mediator between the housing agency and the residents, all the while creating work that responded to what he was experiencing.  he spoke about how it started off as a purely selfish act of basically getting loads of free space to work in, but eventually became a very much symbiotic venture between the artists and the rsidents, and the brief for the artists was that there was no brief.  they could choose to interact or not with the people around them and could do whatever they wanted with the view to having an exhibition near to the end.  but essentially they all ended up responding in one way or another with their surroundings, basically i found out that through years of neglect the population of liverpool has droppped from 1m to 450000 in the past 40yrs or so. in the past 2yrs the population has dropped a further 6000, and this was supposed to be a boom time for the city.  quite simply everybody is going down south for work.  and this is the reason why tower blocks are getting demolished, because they cannot be filled and thus sustained.  i think its fascinating because certain housing regeneration drives are now seeing artists as being central to their push to hault this mass exile.  basically, artists can offer creative responses to persistent problems, they can offer the ideas which can give a place that has lost its identity, the possibility of a new identity.  I can’t really remember everything that was said because i was being talked at for 6hrs, but i think this outlook can, if managed properly, become an incredibly positive drive for areas in need.  artists in general naturally gravitate towards those outsider areas, the cracks between the pavement so to speak and so if they are given  the proper liscense to be creative and then there are people put in place who understand the risk/gain effect of trusting and managing the artists initial intent, rather than jumping through the hoops of expectation and dumbing everything down for mass appeal, the artists then naturally begin to fill void spaces with potential.  the success seems to be acheived by opening up a dialogue between the community, the artist, the counsillors etc, not just taking the easy option and making something empty and vacuous for mass anaesthesia.

so i now wanna go live in a squat in liverpool, fancy joining me?  although i’m not sure how painting, which is such a bourgoise practice by the nature of its construction would fit into this ideological tirade. perhaps we can work on two fronts.

 the rest of this past week i have been in schools making lanterns for a parade we had on saturday.  kids are pretty damn amazing.  but i haven’t been able to do any work for my show, which is now upon me, and i’ve suffered a crisis of confidence.  spent the last few days so depressed that it was the greatest effort to even get out of bed, speaking to people or looking someone in the eye was just a chore i couldn’t face doing.  i don’t know why this happens, dunno whether its a chemical imbalance or that i just deal with things in the wrong way, but i know i need to work my balls off to get the pics up to scratch in time.