draft 2008

Dance by Munch


Munch's Alpha and Omega

Alpha and Omega




Im pleased to say that the lyrical and atmospheric Illustrator Ms Laura Carlin is showing with us too.





and Astrid Chesney



Anna Bhushan


and Anna B

I have been an admirer of Anna's work for some time and am delighted she is exhibiting with us at Bristol - her work has that rare quality - one that captures the magical wavelength that animals hold - and like Munch's 'Alpha and Omega' drawings - the creatures and humans occupy another plain. More here too http://www.annabhushan.com/






Astrid









an early painting of mine -   at the RCA




mm/07 Haworth Moor Yorkshire



mm/07

The show in February will bring together a collection of artists and academics and their personal, intuitive responses to habitat and Landscape.The reflective work on display will range from Photography to Bookworks, Painting, Printmaking, Drawing, Collage autobiography & Prose. Landscapes of experience and recall.

On the evocative subject of Memory, habitat and recollection Marcel Prousts lyrical writing and Bachalard's book 'The Poetics of Space' are both often referenced as seminal texts by Visual Artists to give their works literate meaning and poetic context. Of our Contemporary writers on the human condition Alain De Botton writes the most warmly. Yet Visual Language is arguably the more emotive conduit for the evocation of memory and experience' than even the written word.


Dan Fern 'On the Road with BASHO 3' Diptych


Professor Dan Fern is a highly respected academic and teacher and has been a strong influence on a generation of his students. The creative ethos that he, Quentin Blake, Brian Robb and their dedicated staff nurtured at the RCA IIlustration department continues today throughout many British Art schools via their ex students, many of whom are now established academics and course leaders at Universities across the UK and Europe.



mm 99





'Frozen time'  Large Digital Print   ( 2008/mm )

Material Culture ; notes

Material Culture  Lecture notes:

As a race - Humans have the ability to poetically re evaluate perception through a state of almost neurotic and obsessive curiosity. Excavation occurs subconsciously before reconstruction - and so therefore there is never a 'construction' it is always a reflexive reconstruction of previous felt or read phenomena. Pure originality is a rare thing.

Beyond nesting and shelter building Humans create and materialise things as artefacts and objects - in response to our feelings. Rabbits don’t do this - Horses don’t do it - nor does the Whale - but Neanderthals did it – and we do it ... we manifest things beyond instincts and practicality -  we create things for ourselves and others - in response to our  emotions, imaginations and felt phenomenology. 

We have a unique access as a race to a trail of historical artefacts of our shared lived materiality - A museum trail. A Hansel and Gretel trail of bread left only by the active, enabled and fortunate - so what of the evidence lost by the disadvantaged and defeated? - what of the lost voice ? It is said that history is written and re-written by only the survivors - the victors - so what of the lost ? 

What if one day we may come to understand that the un-actioned or 'lost' threads of creative thought is still collectively active and within us somehow -  and may still therefore have been recorded - and if so then can it be accessed. Where are these tales now - do we still hold them subliminally in deep memory. The Ancient Greeks and many other cultures thought so. Anamnesis. Poppy Cock ? Maybe not. DNA memory of generational trauma is now being evidenced so it opens up a new paradigm in terms of ancestral memory. 

This is what has always interested me and fired the work I make - catching the unknown, the elusive - the in-between - the seeking out of the oneiric and speculative into a real material realm - into a poem or picture. It is viewed by some cynically as a shamanic approach - and yet for me it just seems a very natural and intuitive way of approaching things - and I think it is the case for many kinds of meaningful creative alignment - whether you write music or paint.  You relinquish or give up the intellectual control in the shallows and go further out to sea – tread the deeper water, and risk what’s further out.

So what we have here is not just another walled up country and not a shuttered room - but somewhere else - in between - border less - west of Pediment - between the rational thought and the practical act these liminal places exist - and even if you are not looking - they often find you. There is water there - iron, fire too. 


Discolysis

Visage / mirror mirror Lecture notes: 10. 4. 2008

As a race, humans, through a state of almost vain, obsessive curiosity, have the unique ability to poetically evaluate their own perceptions. Beyond nesting and shelter building, humans create and materialise things as artefacts and objects - often in their own human image - but importantly in response to feelings. Rabbits don’t do this - Horses don’t do it - nor does the Whale - but Neanderthals did it – and we do it ... we manifest things beyond instincts and practicality -  we create things for ourselves and others - in response to our emotions, vanities, imaginations and felt phenomenology.

We have a unique access as a race to a trail of historical artefacts, art, music. Our shared lived materiality - a museum trail. A Hansel and Gretel trail of bread left only by the active, enabled and fortunate - so what of the evidence lost by the disadvantaged and defeated? - what of the lost voice ? It is said that history is written and re-written by only the survivors - the victors - so what of the lost ? 

What if one day we may come to understand that the un-actioned or 'lost' threads of creative thought are still collectively active and within us somehow - and therefore have been recorded - and if so are they accessed - do we still hold them subliminally in deep memory. The Ancient Greeks and many other cultures thought so. Anamnesis. DNA memory of generational trauma is now being empirically evidenced so it opens up a new paradigm in terms of ancestral memory. 

This is what has always interested me, catching the unknown, the elusive - the in-between - the seeking out of the oneiric and speculative into a material realm - into a poem or picture. It is viewed by some cynically as a shamanic approach - and yet for me it just seems a very natural and intuitive way of approaching things - and I think it is the case for many kinds of meaningful creative alignment - whether you write, make music or paint.  You relinquish or give up the intellectual control in the shallows and go further out to sea – tread the deeper water, and risk what’s further out. This deeper excavation occurs subconsciously before a re-construction - therefore there is never a new 'construction' it is always a reflexive re-construction / interpretation of previous felt or read universal phenomena. Pure originality is a rare thing.

So what we have here is not just another walled up country and not a shuttered room - but somewhere else - in between - border less - west of Pediment - between the rational thought and the practical act these liminal places exist - and even if you are not looking - they often find you. There is water there - iron, fire too. 

evocation notes: 10. 4. 2008

There is a sense of connectivity when making work, links between the past, the present and somewhere else. This is common for many creative people. There are often ghosts 'at table' when I compose images and texts. Loved ones don’t go away, so the missing are often present and so it can be a complex emotive process to be involved in – evocation, it’s not light material (laughs) however it isn't melancholic - it once was, but not so now - it is much more accepted and understood – more emotionally mature.

As a young pup about eight or so on a primary school task I sat in open fields - a short walk from the original victorian primary school - we all spread out. I sat opposite the line of terraced houses pictured above - and I decided to draw the row of seven.

25 years later I came across this forgotten pencil drawing for the first time again  - tucked away in the cellar of the very house I had drawn - a house I had bought that year as a home. I had no memory of making the drawing until I came across it again that day.  I had sat and recorded my own future house unknowingly and then 25 years later discovered the drawing in a folio of old school papers whilst stood in the bowels of that very house. A good story.

Real time travel indeed ? I must post up the drawing.
(below) see stone wall detail & tree - as a record of time. 

Time



















There is fresh evolving research (as of 2005) about the possibility of DNA carrying ancestral memory - this now heightens the possibility of memory and experience not being just our own.

Is dormant memory locked within DNA triggered and 'awakened' in ourselves by perception - interaction - events?

Do we feel the memory of this encounter - experienced by our previous genetic family.

This affected genetic memory - of your Grandfather  - a fear of heights / PTSD  due to a War experience - and not just trauma but also strong positive experiences of discovery - which account for deep connections with certain landscapes, people, notes, as if 'impressed' into the DNA and memory. That the phenomenological experiences of one individual are recorded into the next generation - that is the question.

Once empirically evidenced this could open up transformative explanations for racial memory, deep time, senses of place - 'de ja vu' and strong connections between people. 

Plato, Proust & Bachelard knew this.

Mill Town Elegy 
(extract from Greenfield Fayre) 

For us there then,

The flagged alley held
Warm embrace. 

Timeless in our youth. 

And such it seemed that 

The whole firmament 

Slid by oblivious 

To our future state. 

A heaven to taste as 

Palettes mature.

notes 2008 : You are Welcome 

Drawings can be elusive. Dreamlike, (oneiric) thoughts of instinctive knowledge that through the expressive act of drawing become real observable material things - real Phenomena (in the form of the drawn visual outcome - they are rarely re-worked by me after the event but kept as they arrived - travel weary and worn, or  'sold as seen'. We know that 'Perfection' is a construct, a falsity. 

I also think of a Rose as a good analogy -  that there are other lifeforms - on the flower and petals - seen by some as imperfection ? Yet this is all part of the holistic natural truth of the Roses beauty. The natural cycle and authenticity of the whole - with no eugenics or weeding - so I see this philosophy for drawing as a sort of re-wilding of ones own more primordial thoughts. Allowing them to be expressed and to be welcome 'at table' - to counterbalance the more learned and sophisticated manors one has to apply socially. 

The more cleansed and managed a society or bio-culture becomes then surely the less natural or honest it is ?

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Nabokov : "I don't think in any language. I think in images. I don't believe that people think in languages. They don't move their lips when they think. It is only a certain type of illiterate person who moves his lips as he reads or ruminates. No, I think in images, and now and then a Russian phrase or an English phrase will form with the foam of the brainwave, but that’s about all."

-- Vladimir Nabokov from a BBC Interview (1962) included in "Strong Opinions" (1973)

Greenfield / Ebor Altitude studies  

Whilst studying for my own first degree I submitted young 'super-natural' ecological short stories and poems for my dissertation with an accompanying essay  - the essay was on the spirit of Northern European Landscape and its relationship with Lorca's Spanish theory of Duende  - the work of Munch, Casper David Friedrich and our own Yorkshire Poet Ted Hughes and the Irish Poets Yeats and Heaney) and also oddly the American 'Landscape' Paintings of Pollock, Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn.

'Duende' is a concept we have no singular word for in the English language. (Lorca defines the duende 'el duende de que hablo' as 'oscuro y estremecido') The word has magical dark and melancholic roots but also celebrates Life and growth.

In my very early teaching career at Cambridge Ruskin school of Art I delivered a lecture on 'Artists books' I promoted the idea to students that by making personal autobiographical work and placing it into a new context we have the creative capacity to reveal layers of memory and to transform and recycle past experience for others - stories for the child and new narratives for all ages - the passing on of historical experience, opinion and tales''

Lorcas's concept of 'Duende' suggests a dark resonance and beauty - a state of connectivity and consciousness . In German to have 'Einfühlung' is a similar linguistic encapsulation of Duende. Goethe, defined Duende in the music and playing of Paganini, saying: "mysterious power that we all feel and no philosopher explains." Whilst this 'feeling' is often translated as a 'passionate' and dark force it is an articulate attempt by Lorca to encapsulate the transient reception of evocation - an intangible and elusive transmission from the elements and our empathy with it as artists - how we listen and absorb the 'sounds' from the earth and in essence how we - like a conduit - receive and portray it.  MM 2006

(What of the 'magnetic moment'  (Magnetite bio-mineralization inside the human brain - Gold is present too , is this how we sense. Magnetite is found in all the body’s tissues but it is highly concentrated in the meninges and brain). Q. what of the empathetic transference, fusion and counter- transfer-ance in psychoanalysis)

A dismissal or negation of the famous void (Derrida's void). 
A form of friendship with ones Jungian self. Interestingly some corners of this psychic space are not re-visited once it is felt that these narratives have been successfully navigated and preserved - expressed in either text, sound or drawing - they no longer own such priority once the knot has been expressed.

Authorship helps navigate away from potential senses of absence or disenchantment, away from ones own anthropocentrism. It placates the illusions and negativity that we can feel from status anxiety etc. Creative Practice can steer us away from 'the Other' toward levels of contentment through reflexive engagement - observing what is occurring -  learning - remaking and re-owning things presently - in the present tense. 

Preserving these observations ‘seen’ or perceptions ‘felt’ in a drawn act - as an expression of visual or sonic language or text etc - is an entanglement of sensory observations from the present and of the past - depicted and preserved into one capsule – and therefore the work may become an expression of immediate experience - and even if the work has a natural involvement with the historical past - the work is paradoxically born out of knowledge and feeling gained in the present - therefore it is a recording of that present moments perceptions and not an echo.

As a result the work when successful helps define a more acceptable personal state  - a new paradigm - the friendship or 'fellowship' that Orwell talked about - important today amidst the plethora of simulated 21 century commercial and social media stimulus that is both heterogeneous and conflicting.

notes: may be repeats

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The Photograph below is a panel from 'Limen' series - 20 photographs of The West Riding and a blog which was shown at UWE gallery Bristol - in my 2008 exhibition exploring 'Concepts of Home'/ gender/ habitat / liminal space

Creativity celebrates a wider concept - like Anamnesis - like  'Survivance' (Gerald Vizenors philosophy for Native Americans re owning their cultural pride back from the shame of American guilt.

Feeling subconscious - Non focal awareness
Digging through the top soil ; notes ; 2009

When Herman Hesse wrote that 'Every man or woman is not only him or herself for he or she is also the unique particular, always significant and remarkable point where the phenomena of the world intersect once and for all 

and never again'

Hesse is not saying we shouldn't embrace our shared social sisterhood or brotherhood etc nor is he claiming 

that we should ignore our collective strengths as a closer knit society or humanity. He is stating that personal experience - though often shared - is always unique and particular to the individual - we are all different due to a myriad of circumstances, responses - the quirks and nuances of an individuals genetic make up within the 'self'. 

Using this unique auto biographical experiential voice and knowledge is vitally important for any Artist, Musician, 

Author etc if they wish to make work that has genuine authenticity and honesty - and crucially if we wish to share it as a visual 'opinion' / subtle experience - OR indeed to 'raise the volume' and make societal work that supports, subverts or criticises society. 

This 'voice' should also be applied to any smart creative school or Institute that seeks to cultivate and harbour creativity. 

Seeking to emote new knowledge takes risk and deeper levels of self awareness beyond the superficial, aesthetic skills - it requires digging deeper - down through the strata of surface turf that can stifle intuitive germination - stifling original ideas and concepts. Digging a little deeper through the top soil is necessary if we wish to 'Practice or Teach' Creativity. This is Authorial Practise.

The Academization of the Arts School is concerning - by that I mean the esoteric turf of intellectual and analytical theory within the Creative Arts and Humanities - performance tables - a striving for funding, institutional careerism and academic approval as opposed to simple teaching. 

Don Marquis the great American poet and writer said something along the lines of - to publish a line of poetry is akin to throwing a feather down into the grand canyon - ( ie; there will be no grand resounding echo)

Now I may have added the last bit -  but Marquis' truth can also be applied to the act of producing a drawing, doodle or painting -  or playing the fiddle  - or indeed to any non commercially commissioned creative practise. It is akin to whispering to ones reflection in the mirror - not an act after approval and with no aspiration attached to it other than the doing. Making at its best and most honest is most often just performed as a statement of existence - an individual or collective act of being.

Like the megalithic hand stencil in Werner Herzog's the cave of forgotten dreams film. a statement of preservation. ''I am here'' .... and if the work survives ''I was here'' (the hominid hand on the cave - or the 'graffiti'  on the alley wall) - like Larkins desert island discs quote too.

*noumenon's original meaning is "that which is thought"  Kant evolved it towards 'an object or event that exists without sense or perception'. Just semantics really ?

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Wir Pflügen Und Wir Streuen

Ongoing 'Migrations' drawing Palimpsest series ; migration across doggerland, across europe , migrations from Star Carr to Snod Hill - from the south then to the north - from Florence to kimberworths smog - the sagas of families - often now scattered ("Wir pflügen und wir streuen" ) Drawn Songs: Torch songs / Protest songs all

Drawings below from Ballads and Plays series - torch songs 'Glove and Feather'











Travellers (Wycollar)

Nomenclature

The naming of parts
They are Pointing
Look

Romanechite
Of Romaneche

The shadow in the mantle
The lightning overhead
Tomita hasn’t come yet
And Elvis isn’t dead

Before your life
A Thylacine crossed here
Through that ford in the river

Tar melts beside cobble
Vinegar is applied to the head

And through the plaster wall
Love comes a
Drumming drumming 

All in time for bed

Duene Michels 

'

BA Creative Practice Fine Art Level 5 
Lesson notes and your Level 5 contextual task for next week:

evaluate the following quote = write 350 - 400 words and notes or so and please use some other supporting quotes with your own insight from your own reflective intentions.

"Paintings are there to be experienced ( they ) are not to be reasoned with, they are not to be understood, they are to be recognised." John Hoyland 1979 : Painter 




Recommended Books / film for this month : 
'To be and to have' One of my all time personal favourites - the beautifully real observations of the small child and the teacher - set in a tiny rural French school 'Etre et Avoir' (read reviews) o

.

There is a sense of connectivity when making work, between the past, the present and somewhere else. This is common for many creative people. For me there are often ghosts 'at table' when I engage and compose these images and texts. Loved ones don’t go away, so the lost are often present it seems and so it can be a complex emotive process to be involved in – it’s not light material (laughs) however it is not melancholic - it once was, but not so now - it is much more accepted understood – more emotionally mature.