All Things Bright and Painterly

Lee Campbell highlights his recent IN DISCUSSION series and the work of four UK painters Anja Priska, Mike Ryder, Alastair Eales and Sarah Kate Wilson. 

START.

Mother was convinced for 30 years that Joni Mitchell's hit "Yellow Taxi" went 

"They made paradise and went to Juniper Park" 

when in reality she sings; 

"They paved paradise and put up a parking lot" 

For Juniper Park exists everywhere that we can't reach. Climb aboard and watch it pass you by. Wave everyone now and then to what catches your eye….................... 

SEE ME.

BEGINNER LEVEL SHOULD:

Learn how to write and spell me. 

Learn the grammar of me.

INTERMEDIATE LEVEL SHOULD:

Convey me correctly or if you forget, try with conviction. 

ADVANCED LEVEL SHOULD:

Know how to elocute me with vim and vigour. 

Equip yourself de rigueur. 

Know when to use me and if you are being used by me. of me. 

Know how to speak me and be spoken at by The Audience using me. 

Have lessons on perfectly joining me up

Use me and know if you are being used by me. 

I (me) – SEE ME (The Word)

They – THE AUDIENCE (Consumers) 

I am SEE ME. I am to be seen and to be heard and to be written. 

I am the headline and the sideline. 

I am the sub-text, the pre-text and the context. 

I am the suffix, the prefix and the crucifix. 

I am the verb, the adverb, the advent, the address. The advert of a dress. 

I am the preposition in an improper proposition. 

The function, the female function and the malfunction. 

Catchphrase Paraphrase.

Catch a parachute failing. 

First words Last Words.

Love Mail Hate Mail. 

Life Threat Death Threat.

What is uttered as The Audience draws its last breath. 

Football anthems in the terraces as ten metre neon sky high. 

Yes or No? Love me or Leave me? 

The hook between the Verse and the Chorus. 

Fill in The Gaps. 

Mind The Gaps. 

Sit my learners on buses, trains and planes and watch me pass by from every angle. Stain me on the side of walls. Icky-sticky print me on windows and casually throw me together in a scrumply crunchied up action after being munchied with the stench of cod and chip fat to being feasted on by pigeons around litter bins in ickly-sickly absolute. 

Vive La Machine! Hear every single letter take shape with a banging clunk of every second on a British Rail station clock as you type me using a typewriter. Every single second and every letter that you press acknowledged. Your own personalised stamp of authority like the heavy blow of the post office stamp validating your parcels. 

That authoritative clunk! 

"A clatter machine,
What a magical sound, And full of noises, That spins us around" 

*taken from the song Cvalda by Bjork (2000) 

Quote and misquote. Learn your lines and forget your lines. 

The audience never noticed and applauded the scriptwriter. 

Na na na na na La la la la la 

Da da da da da Tra la la la la can give your listener just as many ingredients to cook their own beautiful creation in their minds as any a curious lyric. 

Spend days scripting messages to your beautiful love only to speak of tonight's curry, last night's mistake and tomorrow's weather. How absurd to predict. Anything else just falls short. 

Watch me hover in the sky reflected off bus windows thanks to Mother Nature. Maybe The Audience will numb themselves against my one by one telling them how to think, what to do and put their good faith in next. 

Blur me to illegibility as the bus picks up top speed. In my abstracted form, I appear like prizes on the conveyor belt of The Generation Game, now just colourful shapes, blobs and blips cruising past my audience with exceptions to catch their attention. 

All this See Me, all this Juniper Park. 

Let The Audience float in and out of me and my curious idiosyncrasies like an invisible modernist plane. Like a cloud dipping in and out of the sun. 

Let me be flaneur and observe like a restless James Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. 

The Audience live in a constant whirlwind of a billion See Me's streaming through their psyche. See Me accepts that he rarely leaches onto their memory unless I hit on their personal ideals of what is deemed suitable levels of taste, interest, desire, avoidance, horror, fantasy, comedy, love and death. For all of See Me's good intentions to reach out and touch The Audience, he falls prey to advertising giants who socially condition The Audience, informing them what is good and bad taste and what to avoid as it is not "right". Any See Me message can be discarded if it poses a threat to The Audience's beliefs or to their very existence. Rarely do The Audience enter into choices of accepting a See Me variant for purely functional purposes.Previous concerns are contradicted by new peculiar messages that catch our interest. The message offers us a shinier or quirkier alternative, to lift us out of the humdrum and banality of modern existence, like pop music transporting bored teenagers out of the misery and depravity of cold wet drizzly Britain as quoted by music producer Pete Waterman. We can fantasise like a down at heart Shirley Valentine of escaping a life of domestic gloom where our only outlet is talking to the kitchen wall. Yet running away to the sunshine (leaving behind other half Joe to fend for himself for a fortnight in Greece as in Shirley's case),can soon confuse us or pose a threat to our existence and may make us feel uncomfortable as they disorientate our accepted "norms", norms which can be hard to shrug off and in fact are the very thing that make us content even if they do appear slightly stalemate at times. Still The Audience can actually feel strongly attracted to this disorientation even though this may make them feel outcast. Having an awareness that their choices are never personal and always dictated due to social conditioning, The Audience may enter into a deliberate misreading of a See Me message in order to find what they believe to be their own personal code that no one else could possibly think of which therefore makes them feel special. Thus this Juniper Park society of almost deliberate misinterpretation thrives. 

In 2007, Susie Wild wrote in the Metro newspaper of my supermarket sticker installation "Juniper Park" at Chapter gallery in Cardiff "Together, they (the stickers) make up a bubblegum fairytale land not dissimilar to Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory with a surface saccharine innocence that hints at darker undertones... seemingly beautiful where all is not as it appears". The piece was inspired by my love of German Romanticist landscape paintings. The collage effect was directly inspired by my love of putting forms together in a "painterly" way ever since I had started a scrapbook of images ten years prior. Between 1993 and 1998, I kept a mammoth book of images from magazines, newspapers, in fact any printed matter I could get my hands on from all over the world. Blur's latest CD release glued next to an ad for a German car between Birds of a Feather over a plea for the abolition of slavery besides Madonna's latest reinvention. There was a never a hierarchy of images but I went with my gut instinct in the pages' composition. I glued the images together as if I was making a painting. I was fascinated with the image. The image of others and how we present ourselves to others. We live in a society of consumption where consumerism acts as a religion for many to feel value and worth through the products they buy and the lifestyle they choose to surround themselves with. 

This year I have seen paintings, read about paintings, discussed about paintings and got into heated debates about paintings without actually making a painting. Yet in my own practice I consider myself a "painter" as I take on painterly concerns in terms of composition and historical reference even though for the past five years I have been making installations and sculptural work and most recently performance. It is this notion of being "painterly" that fascinates me and is present within the work of many artists I have chosen to engage with this year in a series of discussions about fine art.

Anja Priska creates her own Juniper Park, a personal dystopia/utopia where mashed up-imagery co-exist together in an almost frenetic teenage visual diary. Her highly symbolic paintings both repulse and attract, acting as testaments of a society obsessed with the consumption of imagery in what can only be described as a contemporary update on the whole genre of still life painting but done through the eyes of a You-Tube, image greedy public where images are immediately shared with the world via various social networking sites such Flicker and Facebook.

"I paint things which are seductive, funny and sweet but are also things I am afraid of" explains Anja. Her colourful paintings act as self portraits of Anja's own compelling to consume such sugar-coatedness. Anja paints in her studio, lives in her studio and sleeps in her studio surrounded by paintings. The artist says she doesn't want a decoding within her work though I would like to find anyone who doesn't immediately start thinking of the metaphorical connotations of bananas, monkeys, cockerels and Animal from "The Muppets". Despite what the images may or may not represent, the seductive highly stylised graphic way in which Anja  painted  earlier works is met with a fresher and looser way of applying paint in those more recent.

These earlier works have the frozen flatness of a movie screen with bizarre depths of fields, weird angles not dissimilar to a surrealist college or a Monty Python animation and the same illustrative quality to that of Post-Reformation stained glass windows where details are reduced to the bare minimum to act as suggestions to the details. In more recent works Anja has lost the collaging effect in favour of the depiction of one or two central figures. Hanging in her studio during IN DISCUSSION 5 are all the paintings together, working like an installation. Painter Gemma Nelson's comment about how at night paintings have sex with each other and make a big mess, perfectly sums up the energy that her set has en masse. Above her bed are portraits of monkeys, possibly mocking humans as the real ones who are the stupid and passive consumers. The looseness of these brush marks are done with a playfulness and sense of enjoyment with a palette of similar hues and tones of the same morbidity and darkness as Karen Carpenter singing "Rainy Days and Mondays" or the sugary sweet but woeful "Close to You" or "Sing". Paired down images these may be, they have a heightened melancholy, sadness and pessimism. I immediately think of my favourite music video. Anja's illustrations have the same feeling of gloom as in the cartoon sequence in Pink Floyd's "Another Brick In The Wall". Throughout the discussion, Anja expressed her trauma in gaining the perfection that she desires. "Oh God we're all doomed!"  Kate Street comments. Yet the new work is a breakthrough. A painting is hanging drying in the middle of previous works. A couple of cheeky monkeys. She hasn't finished it apparently. Anja looks anxious to get it finished. There are a few paintings with NOT FINISHED in masking tape over them. Cheeky monkey painting is finished for me. One monkey is filled in, the other isn't.I like the one that isn't. I conjure up my own poetry on Mr Unfinished Monkey.

It's not what you leave in, its what you leave out. 

Learn to know when to stop.  

Stop just before you feel it is finished.

Let the audience fill in the gaps.

Let them do the work. 

Anja also makes sculptures of the eroticised beasts found in her paintings. They are smaller spawns of the paintings and their unpainted glaze is the perfect paradox to all that colour. How menacing would they be if they were life-size or painted back into the painting in their minimal forms? Poetry can be found in symbolism, just give me room to breathe! Unfinished monkey painting has an unfettered energy as Annie Attridge so rightly pointed out with its delicious drips revealing the painting's history and outline of the fruit where in other works this would be filled in with paint to  the Nth degree. Anja clearly loves what she is doing with equal measure of both curse and bless in breathing life into images. Mark Jackson points out Anja could gain further poetry by titling them as bluntly and directly as possible, saying exactly what they are, "Woman in Yellow Dress, A Bowl of Fruit, Monkey with Female Breast". This seems to be a welcomed contrast to already highly loaded symbolism.

When I speak with other artists and students, I ask them  "Where is the energy within the work?"So often artists don't ever strip away the work to its barest essentials where the real poetry is found, where the works grabs the audience by the balls and gets them to that both compelling and repelling place. See "Paint Perform Political" www.artvehicle.com/feature/1.

One of the best artist announcements came in the Summer at IN DISCUSSION 4 in

Hampshire where painter Alastair Eales said he wished he could draw as well as he could paint. 

Alastair is a brilliant storyteller who had all the audience intrigued by explaining the historical underpinning to the paintings that he was working on for an exhibition that celebrated the mediaeval treasures of Winchester's Hyde Abbey (where King Alfred is buried). He can talk the hind legs off a donkey about his series of paintings inspired by Hans Holbein's portraits of King Henry VIII's unfortunate brides. Ali, like Anja, is caught between the paradox of abstraction versus figuration. Both try to reveal a poetry behind already highly consumed images in popular culture. Alastair  is interested in personalising the anti-personal and subverting the mass produced. He once explored cardboard as a way of subverting trashy materiality and used to make cardboard dens as he liked the sensation of being in a constricted and defined space and would hide in cardboard dens as a kid in various games he used to play in his native Cape Town. Such consideration to artificial environments is clearly present in how he approaches painting. Ali cites the hedonistic worlds of the theatre and the interior design magazine as being inspirational as both suspend belief and reality.The canvas is the constructed space and its edges supply the physical barriers.  Ali approaches painting in the same way as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg wanted to emphasise the hand-made human gesture in everyday throwaway graphics and imagery. He painted, then stopped and made digital images but preferred the happy accidents and slippages that painting allows so stopped and started painting again. Alistair is painterly in his approach. In the discussion, Ali presents us with a contemporary update of the Holbein classics by painting large circles over the surface. Everyone in the audience agrees that circles are universally recognised as mere decoration and don't need to be questioned and that the viewer always identifies with the figure in the first instance. I do not agree with this. The circles play a fundamental role in the make up of the painting. Their abstract quality allow the viewer to develop a poetry by their reduced form which may not be present if they were not omitted and the drama is also heightened by what Alastair refers to as colour "bounce" tension. A further set of paintings contain comic story book references such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and a cartoon of the  Beatles. Ali's collaging of the abstract competing with the highly stylised can be at times a little confusing. Here is an artist so clearly in love with paint that he is trying to get it all into the one canvas. When the abstract and the figurative do come together, Ali creates a glorious interplay. In one of his paintings, we see an outline of a face peekng out of the colour wash rainbow. The public and the private both exist here. In many ways Alastair is trying to preserve the images he loves by hiding them amongst a forest of painted rainbows and patterns. Kids fixate ideas on such cartoon characters and images and create stories about them and in this respect maybe he is trying to preserve innocence. We don't want to admit that probably many others had the same stories.Getting back to my original question, where is the real energy in Alastair's work? I think it comes from not just his animated character when he is passionately talking about his subject matter but in the piles of scrapbooks that laden his studio whose juxtapositions of image contain the same playful energy as Anja does when she enjoys painting. 

Mid-Summer 2009,  I walk into Mike Ryder's solo show  in South London to be pleased to find works installed with the same sporadic distancing as in his past photographic installations. Mike's work has a similar approach to Ali's in preserving this bygone nostalgia by constructing paintings and photographic work which try to expose the poetics in the mass produced and mass obtainable. Mike, like the other 3, loves paint. He clearly loves the stuff to represent life's idiosyncrasies and peculiarities. My favourite piece is not a painting but a photograph Mike has disrupted its glossy surface with marker pen. Not immediately apparent at a distance but on closer inspection its still flinch-worthy when you realise the photo has been interfered with and are not sure what is photograph and what is interference. It is this simple jarring that sets up a simple yet effective arrest for the viewer. In other works Mike makes the interference more dramatic with vivid use of colour and form, as in the case of the bus and the aeroplane.Yet I prefer the more discreet mark.Like the superheroes and childhood characters Mike regularly appropriates in his paintings, he also likes to promote himself in a variety of ways pre-show. Before the opening of Too-Rye-Ay, he produced a series of online flyers advertising the show where different typefaces are placed behind and in front of previous works. He adopts a superstar status in  the world of Mike Ryder and its eclectic variations. I like this as he takes his paintings into different forms which invite us to consume his work in the same way as a mass billboard poster. The digitised image appears flat on the computer screen, and so with the seductive surfaces that he paints obliterated, he  beckons us to want to see them in real life thus making the reality of viewing the work in the flesh even more desirable.  The ten year scrapbook I once kept is no more. I digitally photographed every page before destroying the epic paper beast.

Anja, Mike and Alastair all use the act of collaging in either the preparation to a work or in the work itself. Sarah Kate Wilson clearly understands the complexities of play and juxtaposition, of collaging forms, as she demonstrated with her recent solo show  Lunar Rainbow at John Jones space in London, where paintings were hung amongst balloon bouquets, swings and dens of coloured balls. Her paintings have a bright gorgeous glow with abstract forms competing with actual objects which have been selected for their "paint-like" quality. In amongst her jazzy patterns,blobs and drips, these objects are combined  to heighten the fact that paint is just as ephemeral and temporal as the junk shop materials she weaves into her canvases.

I first encountered Sarah's work at the John Jones space. It was a big painting installation. Sarah clearly also understands the performative act of painting and I feel the balloons and other paraphenelia that co-exist with the paintings act as signifiers to what she wants to achieve in her paintings.The swing signifies the shift between two realities, static and still and the balloons, the shift that can occur in volume and depth. Such performative triggers in time will no doubt manifest themselves back into her paintings. A few weeks later I saw Sarah's work at the Slade where she is currently studying. Her paintings had grown in confidence. She had grown in confidence. It was inspiring.

The paintings had a further excessive bombardment of colour and pattern, in places loose in other parts controlled but there were several collages on the walls which through their immediacy gained a heightened tension  with the speed of their production allowing for a more expressive and concise gesture. Sarah should be celebrated for her intuition in colour and form tension in what she describes as "a million things in the world fight for your attention". 

All that See Me, all that Juniper Park. 

END. 

Anja Priska's IN DISCUSSION was held in November 2009 and included guest speakers Mark Jackson, Phoebe Cope, Gemma Nelson, Kate Street, Annie Attridge,  Charlotte Young, Faith Edwards, Liselotte Boegh Mathiasen and Thorbjorn Andersen.
www.anjapriska.com

Alastair Eales' IN DISCUSSION was held in September 2009 and included guest speakers Laura Taylor, Miriam Bance, Sarah Davenport, Metod Blejec, Jon Ridge, Adam Lewis-Jacob and others

Sarah Kate Wilson ,Lunar Rainbow, John Jones Project Space , 12th October - 13th November 2009
www.johnjones.co.uk/the-project-space/past/sarah-kate-wilson-.aspx
www.sarahkatewilson.com

Mike Ryder, Too-Rye-Ay, Tank Gallery, London, August 2009
www.mikeryder.co.uk

Lee Campbell, Juniper Park, Chapter gallery, Cardiff, January 2007
www.chapter.org/8346.html

Lee Campbell