Perimeters (cut), 2007 and Perimeters (silver), 2007
Fergus Feehily is an Irish artist based in Germany. He makes work which frequently combines or mutates different categories but usually manifests as painting or drawing in some form (more recently he has started to present certain objects on tables etc). He seems to deal with phenomenological questions in a very specific way, constantly inviting the viewer to see things in a fresh light by carefully moving the goalposts of our expectations. Wonderful work...have a look at his website here!
One of my favorite paintings by Pierre Bonnard (Bonnard interests me increasingly as the years pass) L'amandier en fleurs, 1945, oil on canvas, 55x37.5cm, Musee national d'Art Moderne, Paris.
A selection of recent drawings are now on view at the Drawing Center's online viewing program in New York. Follow this link and use the search facilty.
Yesterday morning, while out for a walk, I took this photograph. Does the world around me inform my work or is my vision of things in the world (how I see things) influenced and transformed by the visual experience of my work? Probably both things occur...there is a very dynamic interplay of this kind during the process of making and viewing drawings or paintings. An example; the way we see an interior wall bathed in light or shade has been transformed after Vermeer.
Here is a new drawing; coloured pencil on paper, 32.5x25cm, 2008. Like some recent paintings it employs a kind of mesh into which forms are embedded. Space subjugated to time!
This afternoon I travelled the twenty odd kilometres into Bilbao by train in order to purchase materials from the art shop "Amaste" and to have some new drawings scanned. I've always liked the way the world presents itself through a train window; flickering images, reflections, things glimpsed for a moment then lost again, debris of the contemporary world strewn by the side of the tracks etc.Here are some fragments of my afternoon taken with my mobile phone camera:
Mudanza, 2007, oil, ball point pen & acrylic on linen, 105x85cm
Revising my digital archive of paintings. Here's a painting made last year entitled "Mudanza". I like this one; its sparse airy structure, wind, moving clouds etc, shadows and demarcations......I wanted to make a painting with a "coastal" feel.
This painting appeared in an earlier post. It has been slightly modified...now completed it is entitled"Transition (interior-garden)" 2008, oil & enamel on canvas, 60x50cm.
Another friend and colleague, Sherman Sam has an installation of paintings and drawings in a group show of contemporary artists based in London called "M25 around London". The venue is the "CCA Andratx", in Mallorca.
Andrew Bick is currently showing his new paintings at Galerie Von Bartha in Basel.Pity I wasn't able to attend the opening; by all accounts it's a wonderful space and the work must look stunning there. Here is an image of a painting from the show called "trauser-shirth faded projected variant"...
The group of mesh/lattice paintings that I mentioned in an earlier post have been given the "family" name of "Territories". Here are some images of recently completed Territories II:
I marvel at the way nature slowly takes over a garden; the subtle order of its design slowly undermined by incidental, unplanned growth. Order and disorder. Another image of my parents garden in Ireland. These purple flowers hovering in our field of vision as the garden stretches away behind them...
Here are some images of a small recent painting entitled "Hither", 48x35cm, oil and enamel on linen.I was working towards a structure which evolved organically and was made up of scattered colour planes. There is also a contrast between the thinly painted areas and the more built up areas. Again it's an image very much inspired by the layered quality and experience of certain gardens.
Nick Miller Ben Bulben Craggs with Birds 2008 oil on linen, 72 x 66 inches (183 x 168 cm). Courtesy Rubicon Gallery, Dublin
NEW YORK STUDIO SCHOOL OF DRAWING, PAINTING AND SCULPTURE 8 WEST 8TH ST. NEW YORK NY 10011 212 673 6466 FAX 212 777 0996
Nick Miller: Truckscapes, Paintings from a Mobile Studio, opens at New York Studio School September 18 “Miller’s prickly, symphonic rectangles of line, tone and surface are startlingly, visually alive” – Peter Plagens * NEW YORK, July 2008 – This coming fall the New York Studio School will present the debut New York exhibition of the renowned Irish artist Nick Miller, opening September 18 and running through October 25. His “truckscapes,” so-called because they are painted from a specially modified telecommunications truck that serves as his mobile studio, respond to a unique Irish landscape in a way that is at once compulsive in its heavily worked detail and galvanizing in its gestural freedom. London-born Miller lives and works in Co. Sligo, the rugged, picturesque Yeats country in the north-west of Ireland. He conceives of his landscape paintings as “portraits” of his surroundings rather than topographical or atmospheric studies, and as exercises in intense dialogue between observation and the act of making. Miller has pursued interests in different traditional genres of representation, including the figure, portraits, and still life, as well as landscape, adopting modes of working in each case that seemed appropriate to his particular interest. His desire to work from direct observation in all the weathers that Ireland can throw at a plein air painter led to his custom modifying a commercial truck, enabling him to take his improvised studio into the landscape. The elevation of the truck afforded spectacular views over the hedgerows and walls that would ordinarily obstruct a painter working at ground level, while the safety of the truck enabled him to work at a scale reserved for a studio, and prohibitive to someone working in the elements. Nick Miller: Paintings from a Mobile Studio is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by David Cohen, Gallery Director at the New York Studio School, who curated the exhibition. A comprehensive website, www.nyss.org/nickmiller, includes the essays by Cohen and the 2007 essay by Peter Plagens, and a video on the artist by Bill Maynes. For further information and press images please contact David Cohen at 212 842 0212 or at dcohen@nyss.org. All works in the exhibition can be viewed at http://www.nyss.org/nickmiller and are available for press use. * Peter Plagens, “Nick Miller: Drawing Life from Landscape,” in Nick Miller: Truckscapes - Drawings from a mobile studio, 1998-2007, Rubicon Gallery, Dublin, 2007
