Jazz Green : Artist Journal

Posts tagged ‘lichen’

more grey sky thinking, out of the blue

July 30th, 2010

more cloud gazing this week, torrential rain all day tuesday (a typically british summer’s day) – this was the view from the window at about 6pm…


a room with a view

i hadn’t really noticed how prominent these power lines were before; my days must be slowly draining of any meaningful structure if i get distracted by this visual discordance with nature’s billowy curtain… today when i awoke, i did, for a brief moment wonder what day it was, whether it was indeed saturday already, and that a day of to-do-tasks might await me, tasks which fuel so little enthusiasm as to be remotely filed and archived for just such rainy days…

i am now aspiring to be a full-time, working artist after receiving written confirmation of the non-continuation of the day job contract (a sad sign of the times) – perhaps it is for the best, every cloud has a silver lining, or is that silver-toned..? in the manner of the featureless, grey days i have been feeling somewhat melancholic and the vast canvas of the sky seemed to be a reflection of the reality of recent events…

i have an appointment next week to get some business advice and hopefully formulate a plan… thus, i have not been motivated to paint much, well perhaps for an hour or so, here and there, when the mood takes. it seems too self-indulgent to ‘just paint’ when real-life concerns pile up like the laundry, and then there has been the issue of the quality of daylight…

here are a couple of close-up images of lichenscape II in progress, taken earlier today…


detail of the surface of painting, lichen on stone textures

i had a rash moment of destructive thinking when evaluating this canvas (perhaps inspired by these photographic reframings, seeing paintings within paintings), deciding that i might cut up the canvas into nine smaller ones – the lack of a decent-sized space to work in is almost unbearable at times…

i have found that in attending to these two large canvases (the lichenscapes) it has clouded my creative process – i realise that i am trying to condense into these two paintings a subjective concern which would be better pursued over eight or ten (or even more) works… myriad other thoughts (too nebulous to be proper working ideas) also run through my mind, and then i have to remind myself to just focus…


another detail of the textured surface of a painting

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yesterday evening i attended the private view of the current exhibition rebirth. lorraine cooke, the curator, has done an amazing job in bringing this show together, i feel most privileged to have some of my work included in it. i realise that i am still reticent in ‘working‘ the private view scenario, as i slowly perused the exhibition – this is probably due to a) being very slight and thus am less ‘visible’ in a busy gallery crowd, and, b) a (now) love/hate relationship with the new dr marten boots; i walked to the gallery from the train station and worked up some fine blisters – such small injuries can really be the breaking of the spirit.

i also met and chatted with the artist veronica grassi – she has some quite beautiful textural, sculptural pieces in this exhibition. barbara leaney’s dogwood sculptures are also quite spectacular, as are the smaller, detailed works of the contemporary japanese artists included in the show. i urge anyone passing through the fine city of norwich to go and see the exhibition at art1821 – it is open until 8th september 2010 – you can also read more about the rebirth exhibition on art 1821’s website…

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to further the idleness of my daily observations, may i introduce my humble sketching kit (i always travel light, a habit instilled in me since inter-railing across europe)…


my winsor & newton sketchers’ box of watercolours


a tiny tiptree jam jar (for water)


an assortment of sketching pencils, mostly derwent & caran d’ache

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and a composite image of the sketchbookiness of the last few days, 21-29 july, 2010…


skies and clouds sketches


monday, mid afternoon, looking east across fields towards marshes, high up in the sky, grey centre… in graphite, pencil and watercolour…


wednesday, early afternoon… looking east, cooler, bright, clouds moving fast… in graphite and pencil…


thursday, late afternoon, slim, dark clouds moving laterally, about 5pm…

it is becoming slightly obsessive; i have a mild desire to master the morphing art of the skies…

and i penned another haiku poem, or an ode to a cloud…

a cloud
tarnished silver
darkened the weeping willows

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i am thinking of joining the cloud appreciation society, whose pledge is to fight the banality of blue-sky thinking…

click here if you would like to see my cloud drawings animation from last year, the art of idleness…

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last chance to see… textures, traces & elements at beyond the image gallery – the exhibition closes at 4pm on sunday 1st august 2010.

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The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

Marcel Proust

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faux, the love of artifice

July 14th, 2010

some thoughts on the wider significance of the lichens… it seems quite simple – they signify life amongst the decay, a sign of gentle renewal, the circle of life, the quiet resilience of nature, all the more poignant when experienced within the context of a graveyard, existing on the very surface that marks and memorialises a death (as previously seen in these photographs – on looking and lichen, december 2009, and more recently the lichen drawings) – but that wouldn’t fully justify making art or paintings sourced from lichens, as the photographs might convey these ideas quite adequately, in the right context… it would seem there is a challenge inherent in objectifying the powers of nature within art – and artists have been doing this for some time…

it was quite difficult to focus on the quiet matter of some painting over the weekend due to the cacophony of resident noise, (i need not go into the finer details of the myriad power tools in usage, dear reader, except to say that the particular occurence of some petrol-powered hedge-trimming at 7.30am was not music to my sensitive ears)… so, my best painterly intentions went a bit awry… what did i create instead??


some alien biscuits or are they mutant cornflakes? some tentative lichen-ness experiments, which could do with being a little more crusty…


i attached one to the painting canvas…


shown here with the artist’s hand, to give an idea of scale…


just looking, through the lichen-ness…

this idea, of creating fragments to use in work goes back a little… in my mixed media collages of the 1990’s i re-created little bits of stone, rust, metal, etc, which were then assembled into the work – many people believed i had found these fragments – i had not, they were entirely faux… here’s an example from early 1997. you can see some of this older work on my collage art page…

i remember vividly making these little eroded fragments. i had a very small studio in a lean-to shed. in the winter i used a parrafin stove to keep it warm, and i suspended a metal oven tray just above the stove on which to dry out the fragments, i used handmade paper and would use sweepings from the concrete floor to create more random texture – probably a mix of brick dust, mortar, sawdust, dirt…

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speaking of artifice, here’s a tiny detail of my painting edgescape: algae, a work that precedes the current fungal fascinations by a couple of years… but is also relevant to mention in that it will be included in a new exhibition…

i am really pleased to have been invited to exhibit three of my large edgescape paintings (algae, corros and rost) with a new gallery in the fine city of norwich, art1821. they will be shown in an exhibition that has been planned in collaboration with the sainsbury centre for visual arts, focusing on japanese art and the environment. the exhibition at art1821 is called rebirth, to coincide with the sainsbury centre’s unearthed exhibition… (many thanks go to BM for helping me get my paintings to the gallery)…

the art1821 gallery has a charming ambience with its low ceilings and irregular, cobbled, whitewashed walls, situated in one of the city’s oldest ‘listed’ buildings in the heart of tombland, the medieval quarter of the city… in a curious way, these historical features seem to complement the showing of modern art (i saw some margaret mellis assemblage works on the wall), in the way that the sainsbury centre’s minimalist open-plan aesthetic, of the transparent, inside-outside architectural design (not much changed since the 70’s), brings a fresh-eyed perspective to a substantial collection of old world artefacts… (for those that do not know, the scva building was designed by sir norman foster) … i would really like to visit the unearthed exhibition…

i had just enough time to also quickly see the norfolk contemporary art show at the forum – did i mention that i have some work in this exhibition? whilst there i discovered that there is also a series of lunchtime artist talks (but i just missed one) and also a number of ‘artists-talking’ videos on permanent playback during the exhibition – i enjoyed watching a couple of these short video talks before i had to dash back… i am not involved in this, so anybody desiring to find out a little more about my art and inspiration may find something of interest in this very blog.

i have also just added a couple of new webpages to this website, of which this earnest ‘artist journal’ is just a small (but ever-evolving and expanding) section of it…  there is now a new page devoted to the recent/ongoing intaglio collagraph prints on canvas. here are four of the canvases currently on exhibition in the aforementioned norfolk contemporary art…


norfolk contemporary art 2010

my four i-con works, fjord, tuscany, havana & sushi, are displayed between an intriguing mixed-media assemblage by andy cairns – an artist who was also in the salthouse exhibition i was in last year, and whose work is mentioned in my little bloglet devoted to the salthouse 09 art exhibition – and also a rather small but perfectly formed susan gunn painting… i would like to see this year’s salthouse exhbition, landmark 10, but travelling is a bit problematic at the moment (with a knackered, soon-to-be decommissioned iron horse…)…

i have been thinking about a collective title for these small intaglio works on canvas, briefly considered i-cons (or eye-cons) and then decided upon eikons (from the greek, a symbolic or representational object) – it was still a suitably concise-sounding word – but an icon now also refers to little square computer symbols or visual shortcuts – but the variant, more archaic ei spelling also suggested a reference to the electronic internet… with so many con-nections, i was suitably con-verted…

everything is so e, i or ii these days, isn’t it… do you have an e-car yet? i once made a birthday card with a comical u-pod, using an apple-style umlaut, with party like it’s 1978 as the tagline, appropriating an image from a knitting pattern that i found in a charity shop, of a chap modelling an itchy-looking sweater with a (now) very retro, 1970’s sony cassette player – oh, how w-e laughed about the u-pod!!  but i-digress, i-had better just keep to the art (but it was quite artistic, in an ‘i made this just ‘4u’ sort of way)…

so, in the small (ei-kon) works i inverted the process of idea/source to object/meaning by employing various processes and methods to determine a unique ‘identity’ for the work… they began as humble, small-scale textural experiments for printmaking purposes, drawing upon the visual signs of decay in agricultural outbuildings and the local environment – but then some analysis of colour and associated words, and their real-world connections or counterparts, led, inevitably, to the concept of pursuing some virtual travelling, an activity which gave rise to the titles, and thus gave the work a new, more global resonance and identity… those diy paint colour charts were just the start of it…

what’s in a title, a name? is it vital or important, is it meaningful, revealing, persuasive, or just a means of differentiation?  within the context of (or absence of) subjective art titles one might also mention the artist martin creed again, or mark rothko even, but i am just seeing a lot gushing red stuff, so let’s not go there today…

i really liked pursuing the open-ended nature of this sideline activity, that i would, in a vaguely lynchian way, create works that followed a more convoluted, non-linear course; the end became their beginning. it was also a deliberate move away from a series of strictly numbered works… the virtual travels also inspired the idea of starting a faux sketchbook… in that, if anyone cared to contemplate upon it, that the vast network of the internet is not just a window to truth & knowledge, but is equally a platform for some deliberate artifice & creative reinvention of one’s identity and sense of place in the world…

random fact alert! i actually graduated in the presence of the great david lynch! he was awarded an honorary degree by the RCA…

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a lichen drawing in a sketchbook, june 2010

i have also created a new webpage to show some of my recent lichen-esque drawings…

i really would like to pursue the idea of doing some larger versions of these – where does one get rolls of good drawing paper, and perhaps, more importantly, is it very expensive?? i probably have one too many ideological plates spinning (or they are just wobbling and are likely to shatter in a very messy, greek fashion) – the eroded circles/discs, the cubed/3d prints, the lichens and their various transformations, the green mould prints, dissolved image transfers, small etchings, virtual travel sketches…

now, i am even contemplating  growing fake lichens in my spare time…

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on achieving a perfect lichen-ness [part two]

July 9th, 2010

the lichen-ness continues, though not that much further on in the process…

lichenscape I (a working title) has suffered some surface erosion, in the manner of the real elements – i am not scared. many years ago a tutor at art college said that that one had to push the image-making to the point of almost losing it, right to the critical edge as it were, and then resurrect it – it would then embody some of the passion, tenacity and spirit of its making. this method of working is not for every artist; it is risk-laden and sometimes stressful, but ultimately liberating. for myself, the secret history of the surface, the discreet (or discrete) signs of erasure or slow accumulation of layered matter over time is at the core of what i do. it also denies the sterile nature of cool, perfectly-rendered abstract paintings. i have a rough plan, a road map, an agenda even, but i will take the necessary diversions to fully explore the territory of my own making.

just what is it that makes artists such as twombly, kiefer and hodgkin so different, so appealing? (to quote richard hamilton’s work entirely out of context) – answer – they lay bare the messy truthfulness of the painting process. i was reminded too of the two works of sequeiros and reigl in the tate modern – there is some evidence of denudation or guano here, not entirely out of place within the environmental context of lichens…

a very close-up detail of eroded surface textures…

my interest in surfaces continues even within the documentary process – i discover more found paintings. of course these are just reframings but they exhibit the same concerns and qualities that i seek within my abstract photography.

a few years ago i applied for a grant to support a found paintings project. i wanted to re-present my small paintings as found, or ‘reframed’ in the conceptual sense as large abstract photographs – which, i thought at the time, would question the authenticity of the photograph (its source) and the creation (or reproduction) of a painting. in short, i would create the paintings, but would disseminate the photographed, found surfaces as the final artwork, images that i had re-authorised through my own photography…

i made a brief reference to this idea in this blog post from february 2006 and earlier in december 2005 i wrote a little about my feelings on the rejection letter. yes, they politely declined my request for funding my research & development. it was, on reflection, probably a fair decision. the idea was just that, one in perennial incubation, it was not clearly mapped out how i would do it and why – but, now there are the means to create large prints and canvases on demand, which makes the idea still a possibility, albeit a costly one; it’s always a matter of time and money (of which i have little)…

and so, progressing on to lichenscape II…

which i contemplated and scrutinised quite closely today… here are a couple of close-up images of the surface textures…

i hadn’t, during the process of painting, referred directly to my photographs for compositional elements, but looking at them now i can see that i am edging closer to an impression of a colony of lichens…

but i wasn’t sure about the scale, the number, the shapes, the placement – it just looked a little busy, too cluttered… so, with a little jiggery-pokery i quickly manipulated the photograph to edit out a few elements of the painting… such a simple idea… here is the result…

then a quick play with a little digital effecting… a simple inversion and i uncovered some fungal mould spores, or is it bacteria, some rogue pathogenic cells, a deadly virus..? who knows what it is, but i’m not scared…

this reminds me of the dissolved, blind landscape photographs and the digital image transfers that i experimented with a while back – needless to say, those particular ideas are in cryonic suspension while the lichens take hold…

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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.