My work stems from combined observational and imaginative drawing. Unpremeditated layers of meaning and narrative accrue, weaving together a response to personal and socio-political circumstances. On a recent residency at Dumfries House this process took on the nature of performance art, working before the historical heft of a stately home and taking it on like an inadequate matador. Drawing in the midst of things, the street, is perhaps part performance and yields a unique energy. It is from this that I have sort to make work for this show. Michael Johnson on Artstack.com
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My work has been described as ‘views from a surveillance camera.' I use the removed observation to try to portray the conflicting feelings of detachment and intimacy that come from living and working in a busy city, such as London. Inviting the viewer to catch a snapshot of figures as they move through public spaces, or the brief passing of strangers. Work for this show is focussed on people in and around Liverpool Street Station and Brick Lane, as they go about their daily business and titles are taken from snippets of overheard conversation. https://www.sarahloweart.com/ A stones throw away from my studio in Stockwell is what many people think is quite an ugly church, but I think it’s magnificent. With it’s pebbledash rendering and dilapidated appearance, it’s under threat of demolition. I’ve featured it in quite a few paintings recently along with neighbouring buildings and shops. As a starting point for my work, I use my everyday experiences of people, events and, in many of my paintings for this exhibition, my local environment. I guess they all become metaphors for something or other and the more successful paintings seem to connect a sense of time and place with feelings and the physical sensations of how they’ve been made. http://www.grantwatson.co.uk https://www.instagram.com/grant_watson_paintings/ A group of paintings in this show describe a red tower near the Thames Barrier. It has appeared in other paintings in small ways and seemed garish and functional but sometime last year I saw it differently. As I work from life, for this series I stand in a dusty road full of lorries carrying waste, with workmen passing, which I also mean to record in time. I was in Siena a year ago and really loved the architecture and the way it is used by artists such as Simone Marini and Sasetta. This, and the colour of the red tower itself which is quite sienese, may have fixed my attention to it. The 11th in our series of blogs from the 'Urban Contemporaries' comes from Michael Major and his take on the urban experience. 'How to whittle down a years work to ten paintings proved tricky. It wasn’t intentional but they grouped themselves by locality. I like them. They look good together, small paintings but heavy with paint'. More information about Michael's work can be found on our website home page and his website http://www.michael-major.co.uk The urban is where we all live in ‘the West’. Even people who live in the country really live in the city, because it’s the norm, it’s on their screens, it’s where their news comes from, it’s where all the stuff comes from. Even when turning your back on it, it defines the activity itself, it controls the turning. The human condition – it’s a pompous phrase but I can’t think of a better – implies the urban. Narratives of all kinds cross each other more the closer you are to the denser areas of population. London carries on glowing with the overload of it all, filthy, glorious. I am currently doing a PhD, trying to understand what I have been up to in the past thirty years. Also this year I am curating an exhibition with Francesca Ibbotson Flowers in Duneen, Ireland, called ‘Wash 2’, judging the Hermione Hammond Drawing Prize at the FBA, having a solo show at Studio 1.1 on Redchurch Street, London, and I am a British Council fellow at the Venice Biennale, pursuing my own research and stewarding the British Pavilion. www.charleswilliamsartist.com @Swiftcharles #wearebuildinganewandbetterworld My main interest in the urban setting is silence. One almost never finds real silence in cities, but now and then I come across a scene that evokes an atmosphere of silence – by which I mean an atmosphere of stillness, reflection, intimacy. This might arise from a figure sitting apart in contemplation, a certain arrangement of objects, or an unexpected confrontation with oneself in the reflective surface of a shop window. I find these moments all the more powerful for their contrast to the noise and activity that surrounds them. They have a starkness and immediacy that seems to lend itself to pictorial representation. I imagine the framing of the composition as, in a sense, the border that separates one moment with its particular thoughts and feelings from the chaos of the world. http://susannedutoit.com |
Urban ContemporariesUrban Contemporaries are a group of figurative painters exploring themes about the modern urban environment. Archives
April 2019
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