Jazz Green : Artist Journal

Posts tagged ‘perception’

on losing focus and seeing things

May 22nd, 2010

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…

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from white snow to grey earth

January 12th, 2010

for a few days, i found the transformative power of the bleak, white wilderness both beguiling and oddly unsettling, thinking for a moment (as i observed and sketched) that it could stay this way for a long time, that i must re-adjust my vision and any perception of colour, in preparation for the colourless days ahead.. and the dazzling whiteness seemed similar to the glare of a desert landscape, a neverending space, and yet disorientating in its cool erasure of the usual geography, the familiar blurred, and buried…

the snow had swept up into little scarp-like drifts along some of the high ground…

and a back road meandering between the flat fields slept soundly beneath a clinical white blanket of snow, comforting or suffocating…

i made my small mark within the white landscape, creating a path i would not otherwise make..

and then the true greyness of the landscape emerges, sodden and soiled, and ragged at the edges, but marking a clear road ahead…

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Perception, memory, insight

July 26th, 2006

I am currently one of the selected artists exhibiting in the Suffolk Showcase at the BSE Art Gallery. The exhibition runs until 5th August 2006. Apparently, nearly 500 works were submitted from around 200 artists, around 50 of which are exhibiting in the final show. I only submitted one piece in the belief they would only show one if given a choice. The £1000 Artist Prize was awarded to an artist (name escapes me) whose most bizarre work was a video of an ant circumnavigating the rim of a large tub of peanut butter, a piece simply entitled Equator. I am not sure if I get the full message, since my interpretation of this piece is that it suggests the physical expanses of the world which we inhabit are offset by our perceptions of its boundaries – clearly an ant’s world is somewhat smaller than a human one, and its persistant circling is either a feat of ant endurance, boredom, or just plain delusion. I would like to have seen the ant disappear into the peanut butter, but perhaps the (not so) shrewd editing is designed to give us the impression that this ant has no interest in the peanut butter inside, but is enjoying the rollercoaster thrill of the outer ride – an ant with an insane lust for lving life on the edge! The crunchy, oil-laden goo, which incidentally cannot be seen in the video (an empty tub methinks and the brand of the tub is Meridian yet another clue?), will no doubt provide some nourishment for the ant but it will also lead to a very sticky demise. Ah, I get it, it’s about gluttony and temptation, the moral quandaries of life – but for me the bigger question looms over such conceptual work – it’s interesting to watch, is it art? It poses more questions than answers, so that any evidenced artiness is actually created by me (and the other viewers) of the work in the multiple meanings and interpretations – but such is the way of all art. I wonder what the selectors saw in this piece, and what were they honouring in awarding the artist an (conditional) artist award?

At the private view, I was able to have a brief but engaging conversation with one of the selectors for this show, the artist Roger Ackling. He asked if I was familiar with the work of Hamish Fulton a contemporary of his, who I initially confused with the other acclaimed artist who uses poetry in his work – Ian Hamilton-Finlay (sadly died earlier this year). It’s always difficult to talk about one’s own work, but I had to explain that in my work I wanted there to be a visual resonance, a time/space to aid contemplation, since their material substance can only offer glimpses of a (natural) source. I was somewhat irked that my piece of work had been bunched-up with the other so-called abstract works – there was only a 4-5 inch clearance around it. He agreed that the work needed a physical breathing space and also observed some emotional detachment in its construction, as if the work had no desire to acknowledge a physical prerequisite (hence my non-descriptive titles). I was minded to recall the words of Aldous Huxley in the The Doors of Perception, in which the author describes his acute fascination with the material folds of fabric in his clothing, rather than the wider surroundings of the room in which he conducted his mescaline experiments.

Ackling, in his opening speech to the gallery gathering, talked of all art registering whether or not it had been selected for this or any other show. I am intrigued by the idea of visual things merely registering at first, perhaps taking time to surface fully, needing to be revisited at a later date, their significance only coming to light after some quiet deliberation.

On the drive back from the private view at around 9.30 pm, with the sun behind me and an open view of a near clear and gently undulating road ahead, all the deserted laybys that I passed appeared very tranquil and beautiful places, drenched in the honeyed light of a descending sun, compact pockets of wilderness interlaced with the scattered remains of agricultural crops left to seed naturally and die back, microcosms of an adapted nature, each exerting themselves right up to an unforgiving and polluted highway. Only yesterday, whilst cycling near the river, I witnessed a large curl of abandoned carpet in a hedgerow, its hessian backing successfully blending into a backdrop of sun-dried hues of pale brown and beige of the faded flowerheads and wisps of long grasses. On both of these occasions, it was fated that I could do little more than observe and acknowledge – the battery of my small camera was flat, and so what resonates now is an everfading memory. Although it is conceivable I could return to these locations, I now rather like the softness of the experience – registering as thoughts and lingering as memories rather than needing to capture a full-blown, truthful and detailed image on film. Therefeore, I am listening with interest the programme The memory experience currently being aired on BBC Radio Four…

Edgescape #19 – mixed media on panel

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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.