Composition and flow

The Picasso etching Le Repas Frugal (1904) demonstrates in two dimensions how the subconscious or intentional actions of the artist can assist the viewer’s eye around the composition without too much effort. The joints of the fingers and arms lead one’s eye from one character to the other and back again.

Whether a contrivance or not, it helps focus on looking at one’s own work, especially where the composition is complex – i.e. more than a few elements – as that complexity can mask understanding of the formal characteristics of the work. Sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska noted ‘The connoisseur loves one spicy cake, but the glutton requires at least six to stimulate his pleasure’ in comments about the virtues of the single statue over a group arrangement.

A few things to consider might be the balance of the forms within the composition – think about their relative sizes and positions, and whether they are similar in feel, or provide contrasts.

Moving from two to three dimensions, it could be found that things become easier; the extra dimension allowing one to see more as a result of having more viewpoints. In two dimensions, there seems to be a visual deceit at play.

How does a three-dimensional sculpture react when glanced at in a similar manner to our consideration of the etching? Does it encourage you to move around it following the masses, occasionally pausing and restarting, or are you stuck still, having to consciously decide which way to move around the work?

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska’s letters to Sophie Brzeska frequently conveyed his sculptural musings. In May 1911, he wrote:

The great thing is:
that sculpture consists in placing planes according to a rhythm
that painting consists in placing colours according to a rhythm
that literature consists in placing stories according to a rhythm
that music consists in placing sounds according to a rhythm

Whilst now 100 years old, these observations could suggest you might consider art forms you are less familiar with in a similar vein to one you are most comfortable with… as an aid to ‘reading’ the work; understanding why it grabs you (or perhaps does not).

Sculptors are all too frequently working alone and with no regular sounding board to give thoughtful consideration to works which spring into being.  Sculptural devices have been used for many thousands of years to increase the visual power of the three-dimensional object. Whilst it may appear formulaic, having a background knowledge of an understanding of sculptural form and mass can only assist rigorous objectivity; to help us realise which could be the emperor’s new clothes before they are made too public. Sadly, the vast majority of works of sculpture today do not rely on a sculptor’s formal understanding; those qualities of mass and space which might subconsciously link to some sort of instinctive response by the viewer are often absent, replaced by slickness, design and cerebral puns – or the wholly representational.

A practical exercise  - on composition and flow – links to this piece.  If you haven’t previously done so, please sign up for email updates and then request the password for the ‘List of Practical Exercises’ through the contact page.

To read more of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska letters, read Savage Messiah by H.S. Ede, originally published in 1931. For a time he was an assistant curator at the Tate and got to know many of the avant-garde artists of the day.  Kettle’s Yard was Jim Ede’s former home and he bought many of Gaudier-Brzeska’s work from Sophie Brzeska’s estate after her death.

On the tradition of pre-conceiving sculpture

This short clip is part of a Documentary film by Anna Thornhill. It features archive footage of sculptor Alan Thornhill working on a sculpture in Putney in 1989 and the resulting work, Exodus,  some 20 years later at Kingscote Park in Gloucestershire.

Thornhill’s self-devised method of improvisation using clay allowed him to abandon the use of the sculpture armature and build freely creating a matrix with pre-prepared clay ‘elements’. His concern was to manipulate the material, to find ways of making it stand up or hold together, and through adding and taking away, to see what came. This allowed things to enter the work which were far from intentional, and were later seen to echo some of the sculptor’s preoccupations at the time of making the work. This way of working differs from sculpture commonly produced from the maquette, which is based on an idea and is essentially designed or pre-planned, often factored up to a chosen size in a chosen material, for public display. Thornhill sees pre-conceived ideas as essentially deadening to his creativity.

His teaching and trustee role at the Frink School of Sculpture and teaching at Morley College, London has been influential to several artists and several continue to introduce his methods to their own students. For me, translating the ethos behind Thornhill’s working method to the carved block (where one cannot add material) has been hard but eventful. The block is turned any number of times when imagery starts to occur, before something hopefully more enduring finally resolves itself… or the block ends up as wood chips or gravel! My sculpture Block (right) was initially worked in the horizontal with landscape-like references for several months before elements of one figure gradually emerged. This exerted a sufficiently strong force to re-orientate the stone vertically from that point. This work will be at the Leicester Botanic Garden International Centenary sculpture exhibition between 26th June and 30th October 2011.

The film Spirit in Mass is available from www.alanthornhill.co.uk where his archive of works is also accessible. The Putney Sculpture Trail is permanently accessible to the public, with 9 works by Thornhill on the south side of the river between the Exodus sculpture at Leaders Gardens, The Embankment and Prospect Quay adjoining Wandsworth Park. It is a considerable body of work on permanent public display in our capital city and deserves to be better known.

Leonora Carrington on intellectualising art

It is sad to hear Leonora Carrington has died aged 94. Her recent sculpture (in the link, seen here in the exhibition which she lived long enough to see open), is seemingly interpreted from the imagery of her earlier paintings. For me, it does not have the power of her two-dimensional work or earliest sculpture. Nevertheless, for the British artist who lived in Mexico City for sixty years and was adopted as one of their own, there appears to have been a growing demand for it.

The Guardian journalist Joanna Moorhead is a relative of Carrington. She produced a touching film which was shown at the travelling exhibition at Pallant House Gallery and Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in 2010. Here is an excerpt from Carrington’s discussions with Moorhead:

Her admonishment of her great-niece about the intellectualisation of art is refreshing, and when I first saw this it made me question the similarities between true improvisational working and surrealism.

Surrealists set out to liberate the workings of the subconscious and disrupt conscious thought processes, by the use of irrationality and mystery. Paradoxically, perhaps that last ‘by the use of’ bring things back into the conscious, intellectual mind?

In a dialogue between Andre Breton and Andre Masson, the former referred to one of the precursors to the Surrealists:

A good question for an advanced examination for art critics would be ‘Does the painting of (Henri) Rousseau prove he knew the Tropics, or that he did not?’

Did the exotic paintings spring from the imagination, or from memory? It’s a nice quote, but actually irrelevant here as the imagery is still cerebral. It seems to have narrative rather than just feeling.

Sculptor Alan Thornhill has remarked that true improvisational working comes from instinct rather than intellect; form emerges ambiguously from an interplay with clay or paint, rather than being imagined and created as an entity. For the artist, keeping free from pre-planned ideas is difficult. Responding to form, mass or colour for its own sake must have an input from somewhere – but perhaps from another part of the brain that is free of ego and somehow more ‘honest’. Conceptual work survives on its idea, and for me often dies through its inability to survive on its visual appeal alone.

Intellectualisation springs up on the other side of the fence too. For the viewer and the art historian, there is a continual need to ‘get’ visual art, with the former often spotted – pursed lips; hand on chin – analysing the imagery in front of them.

Carrington standing up for purely visual values might suggest that the only two outcomes for the viewer of “art” could be summed up as: being moved by it… or not being moved by it.

The Guardian’s obituary on Leonora Carrington.

Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth

Never having visited Bournemouth, it was with some curiosity that I arrived at the Russell-Cotes to deliver 4 works to support a new exhibition based around their collection. Stripped – The Body Beautiful opens on 10th June (until 1st January 2012) and the gallery which houses the sculptures is painted a rich chocolate-brown which shows off the light stones well. The centre piece, Lewes Group was made from a 1.5 tonne block of limestone.

Their collection includes work by sculptor Kathleen Scott; Lady Kennett after remarriage following the death of her Antarctic explorer husband. Her bust of George Bernard Shaw seemed to echo the thoughts of a sculptor nervously waiting for Lewes Group to be man-handled down a narrow, steep cliff-side slope into an off-camber entrance on a small wheeled dolly,  but the professional R. Samson and Sons team coped rather admirably with their strange cargo.

 The Russell-Cotes is dramatic, exuberant and the variety of styles envelops a veritable cornucopia that is now a mixture of both private house and public museum. Created by two dedicated collectors, it of national importance and has Government funding under the Renaissance programme to transform our regional museums.

Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum is open Tuesday to Sunday and Bank Holiday Mondays (closed Good Friday & Christmas Day)  from 10am – 5pm. Sadly it now has an admission fee, but there is a lot there to see to justify it. Russell Cotes Road, East Cliff, Bournemouth  BH1 3AA

The Environment Series Heads

In 2006, the first of the ENVIRONMENT SERIES portrait sittings began as a logical extension to the invitations to people whose work or stance I admired. The head of Lady Philippa Scott, with her husband Peter Scott a formidable partnership for wetland conservation from their Slimbridge home, had been one of the earliest heads in 2007.

The Environment Triptych emerged by 2008 – busts of three ruthlessly authentic, holistic thinkers – the writer Richard Mabey, moral philosopher Mary Midgley, and Gaia theory-originator and independent scientist James Lovelock. The heads had a relevance individually but the interplay of the three heads plinthed together seemed to add something; perhaps emphasising the sitters’ diverse efforts in influencing human behaviour and our interaction with the planet and its other organisms.

The Temple of the British Worthies at Stowe is an exedra created as a monument to the  ’men of letters’ and ‘men of action’ – the thinkers and do-ers of the day in the 1730s. I started to think about extending invitations to some of the environmental do-ers of today. In 2009 heads came about from sittings with Tim Smit who masterminds the Eden Project, the sculptor Peter Randall-Page whose international reputation has been inspired by organic form and Chris Rapley, the climate scientist whose has given leadership to the British Antarctic Survey and The Science Museum. Gordon Murray is working on ground-breaking passenger transport with holistic thinking from his Formula 1 automotive design roots. After the birth of our second son, I started to plan again in 2011 and during May the al fresco sitting (picture) of Riverford Organic founder Guy Watson took place at Wash Farm in South Devon.

The terracotta heads which emerge seem to represent several things. Firstly, as individual works by a sculptor (although I personally see these intensive day-long sittings as ‘drawing in clay’ – they are lively portrait sketches, under life-size after firing, capturing that point in time).  Secondly, as historical markers for the intense time spent with these people in the midst of their busy creative period. All have been persuaded to sacrifice valuable time to sit calmly for 6 or 8 hours in furthering this project. With a simple barter of time and the removal of the commissioning arrangement normally necessary to create portraiture, great things can happen. They are of their time rather than looking back on it. The latter is often seen through the marking of somebody’s contribution to life by a formal bronze bust, perhaps on their retirement – or passing.

The investment in time and travel is ample return for the privilege of interacting with these people for a short while. Sculptor Isamu Noguchi said in 1932:

It was a communion with people I was interested in. Portraits were a gregariousness.

…which sums up things for me – they provide energy to sustain my solitary periods of carving. And one day they will be exhibited together or acquired by somewhere that really cares about what the developing work represents.

In the meantime new clay heads come into existence and the series gradually grows. You can see more of the portraits as they are archived here.

The human clay: Compton

It was magical to discover that the painter I studied with at The Frink School (and recently visited in Edinburgh) Ruth Addinall, had come across artist Mary Wondrausch‘s wonderful book Brickfields and corresponded with her.

Wondrausch’s slipware has a historical resonance and is in the V&A Collection, but her broader talents have resulted in a house and garden to rival Charleston for colour and placement – her pots, her plantings, her paintings, historical kitchenalia and rustic European pottery… underpinned by her historical research on our relationship with food and writings exploring such curiosities as potted Char, salt and spice containers. We have recently planted a Quince tree as a result of the strength of one visual motif emanating from the Pottery. I dropped by recently to find a BBC film crew there – I hope that the results will encourage more people to discover her Picasso-like rumbustious diversity.

In 2009 I was searching for a source of local clay in Compton parish to work on a head of the former curator of The Watts Gallery, Richard Jefferies. This head is presently on loan to the Gallery which re-opens on 18th June 2011 after a multi-million pound restoration. Delivering the sculpture, it was clear just how important this collection is and the quality of both the restored and new spaces which house it and the light which permeates them; a remarkable blending of the old and the new. With the Watts Cemetery Chapel (below right) also thought by many to be of international importance – Compton is clearly a cultural hotspot nationally, but plenty have still not come across its riches.

Mary Watts started the Compton Pottery (which made the terracotta tiles for the chapel) using clay found at Limnerslease, the house next to her artist husband G.F. Watts‘ studio. Whilst this seam may have been exhausted, it seemed important to use local materials for this contemporary head, and I chanced upon the Brickfields Pottery after perusing OS maps and traipsing along stream banks searching for suitable material. On meeting the redoubtable Mary Wondrausch OBE, the plan became more complicated. The potter kindly mentioned a bag of clay quarried from work on the foundations of her house that I could have… but I left Compton feeling that it would be sacrilegious not to use the material for a sitting with the remarkable person I had just met.

However, the story is not complete. The small sack of Compton clay fortunately permitted both heads to emerge… and the careful hollowing of these terracottas before firing has left just enough clay for a third – suggesting the Compton diptych ought eventually to become a Triptych in the same manner as the 2008 Environment Triptych (left) featuring the scientist James Lovelock, philosopher Mary Midgley and writer Richard Mabey.

Please do contact me in confidence if you know someone with strong links to Compton who you think has been especially contributive to life and might provide a balance for the two existing heads.

The heads will be exhibited as part of a solo exhibition at Surrey University’s Lewis Elton Gallery from 14th November until Christmas 2011. There will also be a Surrey Sculpture Society evening lecture at the University given by Jon Edgar on Weds 23rd November at 7.30pm, with a late opening of the exhibition beforehand.

Angel of the North

En route for Scotland for sittings with sculptor Ronald Rae and Founder/Director of Yorkshire Sculpture Park Peter Murray as part of my sculpture series of heads, I was privileged to spend a few hours with Fenwick Lawson, an artist whose work is less well-known internationally than it perhaps should be. After training at the Royal College of Art under John Skeaping (at a time when Jacob Epstein was working on a major commission in the spaces there), he eschewed a potentially lucrative alliance with a top Gallery early in his career to maintain his independence and resist being requisitioned to London. He subsequently was an important force in setting up the Sculpture Department at the Newcastle School of Art, and became Principal of the Polytechnic it became.
His sculptures are often named with a religious connection, but have a human presence far beyond. After experiencing the warmth of the seven figures of ‘The Journey’ (right) cast in bronze for permanent display in the city centre – remarkably wholly financed by public subscription – I read up on St Cuthbert. The sculpture evolved from the story of monks’ escape from Lindisfarne in 875AD through fear of Viking invasion. Undertaking an epic journey across Northumbria carrying the coffin of Saint Cuthbert, they eventually settled in Durham in 995AD; the Cathedral was built as a shrine to the saint. This sculptural group does not need its narrative – it seems to hint more universally at community spirit and working together, but its formal positioning also suggests parallels to the imagery seen in one of the scenes of the Armed Forces Memorial at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire.

The beechwood Pieta (left) presently in Durham Cathedral would grace a hill if cast in bronze for perpetuity in the weather… and would cope admirably at its near human scale to those prepared to approach it rather than lazily view from a car window. The Pieta – a mother and her dead son – would be equally at home in somewhere like Wootton Bassett, as a memorial to those who have been returned from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Public sculpture has largely changed from something that primarily involves the physical manipulation of material, to being led by the idea. The Arup and Partners/Gormley and Cecil Balmond/Kapoor designs at Gateshead and London’s Olympic Park respectively seem rather distant emotionally, in comparison. But they are big, which is always something.

Fenwick Lawson’s archive can be seen at www.fenwicklawson.co.uk

Oscar Nemon – Frink School link

Another historical link to the The Frink School of Sculpture is the sculptor Oscar Nemon.  Rosemary Barnett, Frink School Founder and Director, was once apprentice to Nemon. The website is worthy of a look, and Oscar Nemon’s daughter Aurelia Young regularly lectures on her father’s life and work. There is a forthcoming talk in Hampshire on 23rd June 2011 – or see http://www.oscarnemon.org.uk for other announcements. 

A seated statue of Sigmund Freud by Oscar Nemon is now in a prominent position on Fitzjohn’s Avenue, London. Nemon’s bronzes of Sir Winston Churchill are now to be found in Bletchley Park, Chartwell, Churchill College Cambridge, the Cabinet War Rooms, The Guildhall, and the Houses of Parliament in London, St. Margaret’s Bay, Dover, in Westerham, Kent, at Windsor Palace, in Brussels, Copenhagen, Luxembourg, Monte Carlo, Moscow, Paris, Zagreb, Israel, Quebec, Toronto, Edmonton, Fredericton, Halifax, Kansas City, Hyde Park, New York State, Canberra and Mexico City.

Modern British Sculpture – Mission Creep

When travelling abroad, workers’ canteens yield culinary delight as the bill is small and the richness of the experience unexpected. Expectation grows in proportion to resource committed. Thus, I thoroughly enjoyed the Modern British Sculpture exhibition at the Royal Academy. It was a no-brainer; I entered free with an RA Friend, and my expectations were directed to the vision of a long overdue natter. And those cakes and sofas beyond The Friends’ Room door.
The curation of the exhibition was a masterpiece – a ballsy, creative act in itself by Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson that overpowered the work itself. Thorny questions posed and answered through interpretation on one shared view of the development of British Sculpture. More than a little of the space was occupied with works which weren’t real, or weren’t British, or weren’t Modern – but they were helping ‘place’ works which were.

But I’ve realised I’m not really interested in how sculpture is ’developing’. I’m just interested in experiencing work that isn’t arid or cold. And for me, there wasn’t much of it around. So where the work is thin on the ground and nobly staged it doesn’t leave much possibility for richness or ambiguity, or for finding hidden treasures. For those wanting intellectual mind-massage with their three-dimensional form, then we live in a great age. But slogging on a train up to London, one wants to have an enriching visual experience rather than read interpretation and essays. Or why not just stay at home, interrogate the web and buy the catalogue online?

The real reason for the apparent disdain of the average visitor is the paucity of works of recent sculpture anywhere with which we genuinely warmly engage with and which affect us in ways more subtle than the easily won shock arena. One-trick pony imagery and those relying on sheer size – or their borrowed surrounding landscapes – will not retain monumental status when shorn of these associations; they will not endure.

In his 1931 work The Meaning of Art, Herbert Read documented three stages of experience. Firstly, the mere perception of material qualities. Secondly, the arrangement of such perceptions into pleasing (or dissonant) shapes, associations or patterns – these together fulfilling the aesthetic sense. The third stage seemingly appears when such an arrangement of perceptions happens to correspond with emotion or feeling; where expression can be felt and which can affect us – which is the bit that I hope sometimes creeps into my own work, in some unforeseen way… and that I hope to find occasionally on such jaunts.

The cakes were good though. And the 4000 year old Sumerian duck-shaped weight. Although the latter was mere supporting cast.

Sculpture stimulating the creativity of young people

Looking back to Summer 2006, this short film reminded me just how essential it is to be working with children from time to time. Jigsaw worked with several Herefordshire schools for those with special needs. We introduced elements: Fire, Water and Wind, and young people responded to aural stimulus. The results were fresh and lively: this picture shows some of the studies from listening with eyes closed and working with clay.