8.9.08
My parents' garden
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...
Hither
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 at the New York Studio School
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
30.8.08
M25: Around London
Please follow link for more information on this show: http://www.ccandratx.com/index/en_UK/posts/m25-around-london_27.html
29.8.08
Homeward bound
Home again today...very tired but my head buzzing with ideas. Look forward to getting back to work in the studio. I took this image through the plane window somewhere over France this afternoon.
Ronnie Hughes
New England Drawing 94, 2007
gouache on paper, 29 x 24 cm
The Gradual Materialisation of Essence
Rubicon Gallery private view Thursday 4th September, 6-8 pm
continues until Saturday 11th October 2008
Rubicon Gallery, 10 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland
+353.1.6708055
Tuesday -Saturday 12-6 pm and by appointment
Ronnie Hughes’ new work springs from a two-month sojourn at the Albers’ Foundation in Connecticut in 2006 and by a further visit to the Vermont Studio Center. The intensity of these two New England residencies enabled Hughes’ practice to germinate in previously unimagined directions, focusing specifically on the process of drawing. The measured intimacy and quiet ‘slowness’ of these New England works are important factors for the artist and stand in marked contrast to much other contemporary art practice. The ‘drawing’ emphasis has since moved across and become a major determinant in the evolutionary process of Hughes’ paintings.
Hughes is interested in networks of analysis, methodology and interpretation. He feels that these new works share with their geographical source of origin a connection to a certain ‘enlightenment’ sensibility – a desire to uncover an underlying order in the apparent chaos of nature. The works take the form of corrupted abstractions that investigate, and at times conflate, various dichotomies e.g. natural/synthetic, order/entropy, abstraction/mimesis, nature/nurture. Hughes sees his activity as constructing (or, possibly, ‘exposing’) order within closed evolutionary systems that each conform to their own improvised sets of rules or conditions.
Robert Bordo at Alexander & Bonin
An exhibition of Robert Bordo's recent paintings, it's always raining, will open September 6th at Alexander and Bonin. Bordo continues to play with subject matter, both reducing and expanding upon the subjective language of painting. His new works highlight the ambiguity of content through an alternately humorous and self-conscious subterfuge.
Bordo's paintings directly reflect the natural environment around him as well as the ephemeral effects of light in his studio. He filters these elements through a rich palette and a conceit of subject interchangeability. There is a fluctuation between abstraction and representation. Erasure and the shifting of space and point of view exist both in observation and in the act of making a painting; as one plane is erased (by a storm of swiped paint or brushstrokes), another location is created, quickly apprehended and fixed in time.
Lyrical obtuseness and formalist paint handling work to both obscure and reveal. The edge-to-edge brushstrokes of Heatwave all but remove any recognizable images from the painting, while in it's almost raining, a line of small dots hints at a narrative. The combination of silent spaces and named places indicates narratives of location and intention, yet the landscape is altered, erased and cropped, creating a tension between lyricism, reality and the strangeness of the natural world.
Robert Bordo was born in Montreal and has lived in New York since 1972, exhibiting there regularly since 1987. He has also exhibited with Galerie René Blouin, Montreal and Rubicon Gallery, Dublin. In 2007 he was awarded a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. He is a professor at the Cooper Union School of Art.
Images of works by Robert Bordo as well as biographical and bibliographic information can be viewed on www.alexanderandbonin.com. For photographs or further information, please contact Ariel Phillips at 212/367-7474 or ap@alexanderandbonin.com.
23.8.08
Brother & sister
An image of my brother and sister....Kevin, me in the middle and Siobhan. It was taken the other day while in London...a rare moment together.
Speak, memory
Whilst away I have been reading Nabokov's extraordinary autobiography "Speak, memory".
It opens like this: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged - the same house, the same people - and then he realised that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events his very bones had disintegrated."
The day I flew to Cork from London, unbeknown to me, over one hundred and fifty people, many of them young children, perished in an air accident at Madrid airport. The plane was taking off and had reached the moment of no-return. For reasons as yet unknown the plane, hardly off the ground, plunged down again in waste land at the end of the runway becoming a ball of fire. Our existence which is so fragile, measured against the darkness around it becomes so strange...so full of beauty and dread.
It opens like this: "The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for (at some forty-five hundred heartbeats an hour). I know, however, of a young chronophobiac who experienced something like panic when looking for the first time at homemade movies that had been taken a few weeks before his birth. He saw a world that was practically unchanged - the same house, the same people - and then he realised that he did not exist there at all and that nobody mourned his absence. He caught a glimpse of his mother waving from an upstairs window, and that unfamiliar gesture disturbed him, as if it were some mysterious farewell. But what particularly frightened him was the sight of a brand-new baby carriage standing there on the porch, with the smug, encroaching air of a coffin; even that was empty, as if, in the reverse course of events his very bones had disintegrated."
The day I flew to Cork from London, unbeknown to me, over one hundred and fifty people, many of them young children, perished in an air accident at Madrid airport. The plane was taking off and had reached the moment of no-return. For reasons as yet unknown the plane, hardly off the ground, plunged down again in waste land at the end of the runway becoming a ball of fire. Our existence which is so fragile, measured against the darkness around it becomes so strange...so full of beauty and dread.
Studio Visit - Sherman Sam
While in London I had the pleasure of visiting Sherman Sam's studio in Camden Town. He's making some very intense small scale oil paintings on wooden panels. The colour in them seems quite unusual...indeed it is difficult to think of other artists who might share a similar territory. His drawings are superb too...
Knockmacool
I am now at my parents place in Knockmacool, West Cork, Ireland after staying a few days in London with my brother and his partner. Shortly before leaving my studio I was working on this painting...it's about 60x50cm, oil on canvas. I was trying to create an image where there is a hint of a deepening interior space which seems to collapse in on itself. I will report soon on my time here...watch this space!
12.8.08
On the move - Chris Martin
Chris Martin, Untitled, 2004
Away from the studio until the end of the month...I will be travelling to London and on to Ireland, spending time with friends and family. Hope to post while on the move...watch this space! I would like to draw your attention (if you don't already know his work) to the New York artist Chris Martin,here's a link to Mitchell-Innes & Nash where he showed earlier this year. Very physical urban paintings, I like very much how the surfaces function. A great pity we have not seen more of this artist in Europe...
8.8.08
Zone
A strange idea: the past and future in my work don’t really exist. Chronology doesn’t exist. Everything I have made only exists in the sphere of an eternal present (which is not even a “present” as there is no past or future to give it logical sense) – The temporal space in which my work has been made could be seen as a kind of zone. The works I made five years ago were not in reality made in the past but are being made “over there” in a certain area of the zone…in another area the works of ten years ago are coming into being. In a dark mysterious area the works of the future are already emerging. A bright agitated area is the location of works being made now. The surface of this zone is not stable….it’s almost liquid. The different areas mutate as they move and slide slowly over this surface and in some cases merge into each other; thus transforming the different areas and how they are perceived in the zone.
Getting lost in the whole!
Browsing an earlier publication on my work from 2000 I came across these lines from a conversation with Andrew Bick, still equally relevant regarding my recent work:
AB: Drawing or painting, object or image, do these things matter, if so how?
PF: Objects in themselves tend to get lost in the world of things, the image (or I prefer to say the space of painting) tends to get lost in itself. This getting lost in itself is what interests me though it is dependent on the physical qualities of painting. There is no hierarchical structure in my work, I mean, for example drawing and works on paper are an integral part of a whole and have an equal value to the large paintings. As you know there are essential elements of drawing in the paintings and aspects of painting in the drawings, in fact I find it problematic to create two apparent aspects to my work, when in reality they are different parts of a whole…
2.8.08
Esta tarde...
This afternoon, working on the lattice/mesh paintings. Wet into wet - the corrections are fast. Getting light into them. The discarded, the forlorn, the everyday - finding some grandeur in that.
1.8.08
Comic dimension
"every really great thought must aspire to totality, and this tension invariably brings with it, in its very greatness, an element of caricature, a suggestion of self-parody."
Claudio Magris - Danube
Claudio Magris - Danube
28.7.08
27.7.08
Dennis Hollingsworth
The L.A. based painter Dennis Hollingsworth has a very good blog that I recommend, he has kindly let me post this very nice recent video footage here; a little taster...
Ficus carica L
For as long as I can remember I have always loved being in the shade of trees in the summer. The play of light and shadow, the gentle sound of the leaves in the breeze...a timeless thing. Fig trees seem to grow in abundance here in the area where I live. Along the sides of roads or railway tracks, at the edge of fields and in many gardens. The Fig (Ficus carica L) is believed to be indigenous to western Asia and to have been distributed by man throughout the Mediterranean area. Remnants of figs have been found in excavations of sites traced to at least 5,000 B.C. The fruit of this tree is truly wonderful in every way; the dark green and purple skin, its deep red flesh when opened and that very distinctive flavour. Here's a fig tree I found the other day in Llanteno, Alava on my wanderings and under which I took refuge from the afternoon sun...
24.7.08
Wasquehal
Eugene Leroy's garden at Wasquehal... gardens & light....paintings as woven light perhaps...
Kelly - Leroy
Browsing my library: kelly's La Combe III & Eugene Leroy's Avec une Cuisse....the colour in Leroy really is something!
23.7.08
Glimpse
The uniqueness of a painting is also its great fragility; it rests on the infinite possibility of everything you have not done - of all the other paintings that could have been made but weren't.
All this effort, expense of energy - so much is unseen, unknown, not only for the viewer but for myself. The final result; a glimpse, a compression...and that is what you are truly left with and what matters.
All this effort, expense of energy - so much is unseen, unknown, not only for the viewer but for myself. The final result; a glimpse, a compression...and that is what you are truly left with and what matters.
22.7.08
Slowness
Is it (painting) to do with extreme slowness or extreme speed? Two extracts from Milan Kundera's
Slowness:
"She posseses the wisdom of slowness and deploys the whole range of techniques
for slowing things down"
"By slowing the course of their night, by dividing it into different stages each separate from the
next, Madame de T. has succeeded in giving the small span of time accorded them the semblance
of a marvellous little architecture, of a form. Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty
demands, but so does memory. For what is formless cannot be grasped, or committed to
memory"
Slowness:
"She posseses the wisdom of slowness and deploys the whole range of techniques
for slowing things down"
"By slowing the course of their night, by dividing it into different stages each separate from the
next, Madame de T. has succeeded in giving the small span of time accorded them the semblance
of a marvellous little architecture, of a form. Imposing form on a period of time is what beauty
demands, but so does memory. For what is formless cannot be grasped, or committed to
memory"
21.7.08
Loops
Some new paintings by another colleague based in Berlin, David Rhodes. Both paintings are 120x90 cms. acrylic on canvas, 2008.
16.7.08
Six part memory
Today my very good friend and estimable artist Andrew Bick sent me images of a commision he has recently completed for a new building in London. I have posted a couple of these images here and a text by him about the piece. I look forward to seeing it myself when I visit London this summer...
Six Part Memory
Andrew Bick
This work is made of six sections of perspex box with an opalescent [milky] face and sand-blasted sides. The back support is plywood. Depending on how far away from the surface the inner elements of painted wood and perspex are, varying degrees of focus and colour intensity are achieved. The source for the piece is a small drawing that is now placed in the northern lobby entrance of the building. This drawing has been partly quoted in the structure of the piece, which then starts to take on a life of its own. Several aspects are designed so that they cannot be apprehended in a single glance, the varying tapers on the left and right edges reflect different colours on to the stone supporting wall. The shiny surface reflects details of the marble feature wall and light fittings; different conditions of daylight and artificial light penetrate the surface differently revealing less or more of the interior elements; fluorescent perspex inner surfaces pick up variations in the light spectrum; drawn diagonals and interlocking triangles and circles echo aspects of the architecture; carefully constructed systematic elements of proportion counterbalance apparently hasty scribble with marker pen… There is no single reading, viewpoint or right way to look at this piece, rather it is designed to have a contemplative function that contrasts to the busy environment in which it works. It should continue to look unexpected after repeated viewings, and its totality as an image may be almost impossible to commit to memory.
The question of form
One often hears that what makes an artist significant is that he or she has something to say…but what does this statement really mean, if anything? What does a Rembrandt self-portrait say? What does Miles Davis’ Blue in Green actually say? What speaks of course is form itself...something unfolds in the experience and creation of form itself. In German theological tradition the alto voice was considered the very symbol of that of the Holy Ghost…Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cantata Widerstehe doch der Sünde, BWV54 is an extremely moving embodiment of this. The urgency and emotional force are delivered by an extremely precise articulation of form. The conditions that allow this kind of advanced art form to come into being are complex and all manner of factors must coincide, some arbitrary, others the result of an intentional focusing of energy. But it is perhaps the incidental elements that fascinate most. William Bowyer Honey the author and gardener wrote: “It is a familiar experience to find one’s greatest aesthetic enjoyment…in something incidental, the by-product of another activity…In many gardens …planted for a practical utilitarian purpose, such experiences are very precious, and the joy taken in beauty of form and colour may be all the keener for its incidental character.” What still remains almost impossible to analyse is just how these energies of form operate. Historically recent developments such as informalism and formlessness only distract us from the real question; what is it about form, in the purist sense, that can engage us so powerfully and spark the quick of being? Nowhere is this question more evident than in certain kinds of advanced music or painting where forms come into their own and are at the same time lost yet thrive in abundance. Everyone is familiar with the experience of being possessed by a particular musical motif - even in the simplest melody of popular music - which can provoke a deep emotional response or longing. For a painter the same kind of lingering obsession with a certain form or forms provides a constant source of fascination, especially with forms that have arisen incidentally or unexpectedly during the process. For me it is when form is under extreme pressure that painting begins to reveal some of its secrets. The problem of painting needs to be maintained…it is not to be overcome. There will always be an un-resolvable tension between the different forms in a painting; surface as form, support as form, figure and ground as form, colour as form etc… all jostling and in conflict with each other. And the speculative politics that might arise from this conflict is one of limits; limits which will define territories within which one can act with the greatest of liberty.
Phoenix
A totally barren place...devoid of life, where no human being has ever set foot. What will we project onto it with our minds? The image itself, a curious composition, verticality with the horizon at the top…and that horizon which fills us with fear & dread.
15.7.08
Esta tarde...
Hard day. Slow day. Two extremes inexorably linked: material density – pure reflection.
That’s at the core of things but how do I manifest that in the paintings?
14.7.08
11.7.08
9.7.08
Again La Rochefoucauld
"Some beautiful things are more dazzling when they are still imperfect than when they have been too perfectly crafted"
La Rochefoucauld - The maxims
La Rochefoucauld - The maxims
Reflections
A few years ago one of the main qualities of my paintings was the experience of each one of them as a whole, as one unit, self-contained. Since then there has been a slow shift towards giving more importance to the details and the parts. This has created a greater tension (and fragility) between the surface elements and the painting as an object. I like this, especially when the painting seems to be on the brink of disintegration and an obvious energy becomes manifest. And though I have certain reservations about the artist in question, I came across a similar idea (and more articulately expressed) in a recent catalogue text for Tomma Abts’ exhibition at the New Museum in New York by Jan Verwoert: “The work is therefore visibly not about the tasteful balancing-out of pictorial relations. It is about staging the structural conflict between the dynamics of aggregation and disaggregation by calling the legitimation of unitary forms into question, by putting it at stake” – the complete text is titled: The beauty and politics of latency: on the works of Tomma Abts.
8.7.08
Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson 1572-1637
Reading through my current notebook this afternoon, read this again by Ben Jonson (it could be part of a description of an ideal painting): "so ramm'd with life, that it shall gather strength of life, with being" ....wonderful!
Drawing
Setting, 2008, coloured pencil on paper, 34.5x31cm
I have had some problems uploading images of new works on paper to my main website, so I will post a few here for the time being, starting with this one...
Paris - Zhejiang
If provincialism is the failure to see and act in relation to wider horizons, then globalisation is provincialism on a global scale. Just outside of Hangzhou in East China's Zhejiang Province lies a partial recreation of Paris complete with Eiffel Tower and the Champ de Mars.
4.7.08
2.7.08
Esfuerzo
François de La Rochefoucauld
The pleasure of painting often masks its strenuous nature. It requires a particular physical effort – the body is indirectly reflected in my paintings through traces –
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