Jazz Green : Artist Journal

Posts tagged ‘gerhard richter’

I have been playing with a few landscape digital photographs, having not pursued much in the way  of any painting or drawing this week…

A few filters applied here and there… playing with digital effects up to the point of image dissolution… i am interested in the notion of blindness or visual impairment and the many classifications and measures of visual acuity… rarely is someone completely blind… they may have an awareness of objects in space, a perception of distance, or a sense of light in determining day or night time… one assumes that the other senses are heightened in compensation – of hearing, touch, taste and smell..

these images mirror washes of watercolour or sepia ink blots on wet paper… or smoke drawings…

melting…

diffusing…

dissolving…

dispersing…

evaporating…

blindness has also become a metaphor for stubborness, weakness, ignorance or indifference… on not wanting to see… turning a blind eye, having blind faith, going up a blind alley, not listening to a blind word, effing and blinding, it’s so blindingly obvious…

I am not just seeing things; i have some ideas…

I could, in artspeak, say that in these images i am aiming to subvert or undermine a belief that landscape photography is inherently truthful… but when i really think about it, it’s about achieving emotional distance, separation, remoteness, seeking a form of liberation, acceptance, transformative and reflective… of one’s own memory to reality… even a memento mori… but, it seems too reductive and limiting to intellectualise from a distance; art is inseparable from one’s own experiences of life – there are gaps waiting to be filled. these are just my thoughts; here are some from others…

Anselm Kiefer: I don’t paint to present an image of something. I paint only when I have received an apparition, a shock, when I want to transform something. Something that possesses me, and from which I have to deliver myself. Something I need to transform, to metabolize, and which gives me a reason to paint.


Anselm Kiefer, Heavy Cloud, lead and shellac on photograph, 1985

Gerhard Richter: Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going, being lost, being a loser, reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.


Gerhard Richter, overpainted photograph, 1992

Andrei Tarkovsky: Any artist in any genre is striving to reflect as deep as possible a person’s inner world… [to tell] about the inner duality of a human being, about his contradictory position between spirit and substance, between spiritual ideals and the necessity to exist in this material world.

Tarkovsky – Solaris

the local lakes in winter recall Tarkovsky…

colour values

January 13th, 2010

looking at the paint colour cards in a diy hardware store always leads me to think how paint manufacturers attach emotional, subjective meanings to their palettes of colours (whose job is it? do they sit around a table and say yes, that shade of blue speaks crete? or we like the sound of tuscan sunset, let’s mix the colour to match). perusing the diy store’s colour charts  i felt i was on a virtual holiday as i came across coral canyon, niagara blues, delhi bazaar, celtic moor, sicilian summer, himalayan musk - the last confering bohemian values, artistic, refined, culturally aware, spiritually enlightened.. but i preferred the single word descriptions from another paint manufacturer: smoulder, wildwood, snowfall

so my thoughts naturally led to the colour chart works of gerhard richter, who, in around 1966 saw some colour charts in a hardware store and thought they made the perfect found or readymade abstract paintings, colour separated from any narrative or symbolic meaning (although as mentioned above, colour is marketed by its emotional association). as with much of his work, there are themes or concepts to which he periodically returns. from his first colour chart paintings of the 1960’s he revisited a systematic approach to colour once again in the 1970’s, this time using formulas to first mix and then arrange the placement of the colours, made more interesting in that the colours were mixed and graded very methodically but the placement of colours in a grid format were organised by chance, selecting numbers at random (much like the lottery draw).

in 2008 he returned once more to the colour chart theme, creating his most ambitious colour chart to date, 4900 Colours – 196 panels made up of 25 coloured painted squares each, which can be arranged or grouped in any sequence, from one very large-scale work to any permutation of small scale works (but any resemblance to lego would be unkind).


gerhard richter, 256 colours, 222 cm x 414 cm, oil on canvas, 1974

i wonder if there is any logical or mathematical connection to the 256 colour system developed for early computer monitors?

grids and squares, order and arrangement have been some of my artistic preoccupations over the years.. so, when thinking of some possible titles for the first few of these little experimental canvased collagraph prints, whilst adjusting the images in photoshop, i thought about the numerical values that are returned by the color picker tool, the combination of letters and/or numbers (hex, rgb) matched to a print swatch colour (such as pantone)…

a little time spent googling and i set about creating my own color code rule… sushi was returned as a first title, and it seemed quite suitable; a reference to nori (on reflection a better title), of japanese ceremony and etiquette.. curious as to how reliable this rule or the code would be, i tried it once more with another print/painting and it returned fjord, immediately conjuring up images of glacial paths and crisp norwegian landscapes (as with the colour swatches from the diy store)…

sushi  abstract canvas - art for sale
sushi, 2010


fjord, 2010

so i’ll be playing by the rules for a change…

to zen and back again

December 17th, 2008

some new works; in progress.. in the studio

ideas in progress - properties of paint, reference photographs, a collage.

works in progress - by british fine artist jazz green - textural abstracts on canvas

paintings in progress - eroded, textured surfaces, mixed media on canvas - by jazz green fine artist

i work out the composition by drawing with a range of textured mediums and tools, keeping it very neutral in shades of ochre, grey or sepia, seeing how light hits the surface, balance, contrast, the textural changes… depth of colour seems unimportant at this stage; i prefer them bleached out, faded, worn, tactile, blind surfaces… this winter i think i will refer to tarmac, dust, grit, putty, slate, steel ,brick, tarpaulin, bitumen, copper, lead and chalk for my palette…

and some reference photographs (cropped square) taken between march and july 2008…

fine art abstract photography structures buildings

and then, there are these to finish, my incidental paintings on plaster & wood panels…

i’ve been looking again at the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt

Sol Le Witt - scribble drawing.

not illustrating anything except their making, physical traces of programmed events..

BRICE MARDEN - Hydra version, painting, study for muses.

and Brice Marden’s symbolic and calligraphic Hydra paintings..

i stayed on the island of Hydra as an art student, courtesy of Athens School of Fine Arts..

and then Gerhard Richter’s Cage paintings..

Gerhard Richter CAGE no.4 painting. TATE Modern, London.

and my memory of the room devoted to them in the Tate Modern London..

the ebb and flow of active markmaking, the scrambling of data, motion blurred, obliterated and revealed, synthesized, reduced, condensed and yet expansive, unfolding like a kaleidoscope, the object’s transformation is the subject, literal associations are meaningless… then, returning back to the issue of landscape, it’s a signifier not signified, mirrored from, of shadows, remains, imprints, what has registered, passed by, gone before…

and what of the road to zen…? well, i attempted to draw a mindmap of buddhism in relation to the environment… it became all too convuluted and complicated with the many pathways and interpretations, but it begins with a selfless acceptance that impermanence, the transience of all things is the truth, joy is temporary, dependency is the cause of suffering, satisfying greed is short-lived, an empty gratification… that is, using a commonly used western idiom, you can’t have your cake and eat it… and so with art, it’s not about (possession of) the object, but what meaning you derive from it..

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The website of British Fine Artist Jazz Green MA RCA. Abstract landscape paintings, fine art photography. All images and text copyright the artist.