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"I have often tried to talk about painting but writing or talking about it is only an approximation, as painting is its own language and is not translatable into words."
Bacon painted on the reverse side of primed canvases. This was his favourite surface because of its dryness and the fact that it does not completely absorb the colour. Although he used pastels or acrylic paints for the ground, which is generally plain and flat, the figures are executed in oil colour, which dries far more slowly. This allows for greater flexibility, by making it easier to change things as the work progresses. Bacon applied the paint with a variety of brushes, and sometimes with his bare hands, or with such other brush substitutes as rags, sponges, combs, and even cashmere pullovers - whatever seemed to recommend itself at the time. 'I use anything', he told David Sylvester: 'I use scrubbing brushes and sweeping brushes and any of those things I think painters have used'. Parts of some pictures are painted with a spray can; in other cases, the colour is literally thrown on at random, or mixed with bits of pullover fluff and dust from the studio floor, and sometimes whole of the canvass are left bare. Here and there one also notices little circles of colour made with the caps of a paint tube or the lids of a discarded tin can; in the 1972 triptych Three Studies of figures on Beds, Bacon even used a dustbin lid to trace the swirling lines that surround two figures wrestling on a bed.
Bacon was concerned with two things here. First, the continual interruption of the painting process served to sustain a tension that might otherwise have been lost. And second, the unorthodox method of working the paint made the picture itself more interesting, by varying the texture and introducing an extra element of visual conflict. When asked by Sylvester why he used so many different tools, Bacon said: 'I use these other practices just to disrupt it. Half my painting activity is disrupting what I can do with ease.'
For several reasons, he preferred his paintings to be hung under glass. As well as protecting the surface and establishing a distance between the picture and the viewer, the glass helped Bacon himself to achieve a sense of detachment that prevented him from revising or destroying his own work. Above all, however, it had the effect of reducing the volatility of the surface structure and endowing the work with a stronger feeling of coherence and finality. 'I feel that, because I use no varnishes or anything of that kind, and because of the very flat way I paint, the glass helps to unify the picture. I also like the distance between what has been done and the onlooker that the glass creates; I like the removal of the object as far as possible'. (Sylvester, 1987, p. 87)
Bacon was a painter and nothing else. He produced few drawings, water-colours or gouaches, and no prints. He did not believe in making preparatory sketches, fearing that they would detract from the immediacy of the painting process. Instead he relied almost entirely on spontaneous inspiration. When he began to work on a picture, he did not really wish to know what the outcome would be. The tension and excitement of painting came from uncertainty: Bacon wanted the picture to take him by surprise.
Figure and ground
Perhaps 'the' distinguishing feature of Bacon's painting style is the disjunction, found almost throughout his oeuvre, of figure and ground. His human subjects are entirely dissociated from their surroundings, which are no more than a kind of stage set or backdrop, lacking all sense of solidity or intrinsic relationship to the actors. There is a fixed and fundamental sense of remoteness between people and the world they inhabit. Bacon's realism consists in expressing this feeling of strangeness or forgiveness via the means he deemed suitable for the purpose.
Except in the Van Gogh series, Bacon's foregrounds and backgrounds are featureless, neutral and static, where his figures are in a state of permanent agitation; their bodies, bursting with nervous energy, are racked by continual spasms of tension and pain. The ground exhibits an almost surgical cleanliness, sullied only, if at all, by the activities - or the sheer presence - of human beings.
Wieland Schmeid
Commitment and Conflict
1996
"Bacon always wanted his paintings to be mounted under glass and surrounded by traditional, heavy gold frames. In doing, he sought the connection this drew to his painterly predecessors, the serousness it brought to the endeavor and, above all, he reveled in the fortuitous reflection of the viewer superimposed in the painting, as each of us becomes complicit with the painter,as both protagonist and voyeur."
Hugh M Davies, Exhib. Ctlg. The Papal Portraits of 1953
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, 1999
SEE ALSO HUGH LANE GALLERY
Francis Giacobetti: Why do you paint? For whom?
Francis Bacon: "I paint for myself. I don't know how to do anything else anyway. Also I have to earn my living and occupy myself. I think that all human actions are designed to seduce, to please. I don't give a toss about that any more. But maybe at the beginning, I painted to be loved yes, that's certainly right. It's so nice being loved. Now I don't give a toss, I'm old. At the same time it gives you such pleasure if people like what you do. Today I paint very little, although I do paint in the morning because I'm unable to stop; or I paint when I'm in love, perhaps, but it's too late now, I'm too old.
"These days I look like an old bird. I'm nearly 82 you know, I'm losing my, eh, memory, I've been seriously ill for two years, I have suffered from asthma attacks since I was a child and it gets no better in old age. Asthma is a terrible complaint; when night falls you are never sure if you will wake up the next morning. It attacks the very foundations of life: your breathing. You always feel as if you are in remission, always ready to die.
"I should really live in the mountains, but it's impossible to paint in the mountains, at any rate for me. I need the city; I need to know there are people around me strolling, arguing, fucking, living, and yet I go out very rarely; I stay here in my cage. But I know there are people around me and that is enough.
"I often think I am very stupid, I'm often surprised by my optimism. Very often, in fact; it's my nature; and with a nature like this I should never have painted. I should have been, I don't know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance.
"All artists are vain, they long to be recognised and to leave something to posterity. They want to be loved, and at the same time they want to be free. But nobody is free. Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar, you never know. Although for me personally it is not important, my vanity still tells me that it is. Painting gave meaning to my life which without it it would not have had".
Francis Bacon
Triptych inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus
1981 . oil on canvas.
each panel 78 x 58 inches
Private collection
"In a masterpiece of the eighties Bacon dealt with the dark events of the Oresteia myth. 'Triptych Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1984' is one of his most condensed and austere inventions, representing the Baconian equivalent of the tragic agon in three panels of powerfully condensed, hypnotic imagery. At left, the haunting and obscene symbol of the Erinyes, the Furies that relentlessly pursued a hallucinating Orestes for the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, dangles like an obscene bat-like creature in a cage structure.
"Although the action isn't speciafically bound to a particular scene in the Aeschylus trilogy, the central panel suggest the contorted figure of the fouly murdered Agamemnon, focusing on his spinal structure and jaw in the frontal plane, as if seen in x-ray vision. The ceremonial dais and a schematic throne can be read as the high position of the king who met his death at the hands of the gueen mother, out of vengeance for his own sacrificial murder of their daughter Iphigenia. The third panel evokes both victim and oppressor and may stand for the tragic hero Orestes as well as the undefined shapes and darkness of unformed life (the elan vital or libido), lifting the chilling painting to an even higher level of allegorical meaning. This inspired paraphrase of the action and possible modern applications of Greek tragedy translates into the recognizable Surrealist forms of metamorphosis and interiorized imagery."
Sam Hunter
Movement in the work of
Francis Bacon
Bacon's first reference to the photography of Eadweard Muybridge is to be found in Painting, a portrait of a male nude painted in 1950, more or less at the same time when Bacon became interested in Velaquez.
For many years these were his main reservoirs of ideas. His Papal sequence [ 1950 / 1951 / 1953 / 1961 ] can be seen as influenced by Muybridge's technique of portraying movement through a series of partial images - although in this case the subject-matter is quite different.
Bacon himself confirmed that this interpretation was correct, in conversation with David Sylvester he emphasised the key role of Muybridge in his artistic development, asserting that it was difficult to disentangle the photographer's influence from that of Michelangelo: the two of them, he said, 'are mixed up in my mind together'. Certainly, it would be impossible to imagine his work without these twin influences.
As his ideas evolved, he graduated from the serial portraits to the triptychs, which, from the early 1960's onwards, became his preferred medium for large-format painting. In the works that fall into the former category he portrayed a single figure at various points in a sequence of movement: one thinks, for example, of the pope paintings, or of the figure in the Man in Blue series of 1954, depicted against the background of an anonymous hotel foyer.
Three studies of the Human Head, 1953
This kind of connecting thread is lacking in the triptychs, which do not tell a coherent story. The figure may retain the same, or the pose may be similar throughout, but the separate framing of the three panels severs the narrative links between them: the thematic connection, if it exists at all, remains strictly implicit.
Bacon is not a story-teller, but a destroyer of stories. In the triptychs the action comes to a standstill: the dynamic is arrested, and the movement seems to have reached its goal. Everything has attained a state of inner stability - even though the Muybridge figures have to twist their bodies into all kinds of contorted poses to maintain their balance. They are saturated with movement.
Three Studies of figures Beds, 1972
This becomes particularly clear of one compares the portraits of the 1950's with their counterparts from the 1960's and 1970's, most of which are grouped into triptychs or - in some rare cases diptychs. The 1955 portraits of R.J Sainsbury and David Sylvester (man Drinking) are like snapshots: the image seems to be fixed at a certain moment. Although the figures are somewhat blurred, this is purely the result of manipulation by the painter, who has attacked the contours with the brush or rubbed over them with a rag.
This distances them from the viewer and makes it more difficult to see them; one looks at them as if through a wall of smoked glass. But they do not seem to move of their own accord, nor do the canvases have the appearance of film negatives that have been exposed several times in quick succession.
Three Studies for a Portrait
of Lucian Freud, 1965
In the 1960's, however, the heads themselves begin to move, as the figures twist and bend their necks. The painter is a mere observer, watching the events and endeavouring to record them. Thus the movements acquire the status of objective fact. The painter is no longer at liberty to decide whether a figure should be allowed to move or whether its outlines should be blurred; instead, his task is simply to document what is actually happening in front of his eyes during the painting process. This apparent striving for the innate verisimilitude and immediacy of photography is further underlined by the tripartite grouping of the portrait studies.
Bacon himself once explained the grouping in these terms: 'In the triptychs I get them rather like police records, looking side face, front face, and then side face from the other side'.
Studies of the Human Body, 1970
Bacon's figures are mobile, but they cannot move forwards. Their movements are in abeyance, as if they were revolving around their own axis. This is very different from the type of motion seen, for example, in Futurist painting.
Stimulated by the discoveries of photography and film, the Futurists sought to make movement visible by portraying it as a series of fleeting images, arranged in a staggered sequence. The movement clearly points in a forward direction; in Bacon's pictures it turns back on itself and revolves around a hidden centre of gravity.
This kind of movement in stasis, which leaves the figure rooted to the spot, has been described by Alexander Gosztonyi. In his two-volume treatise Der Raum 1976, Gosztonyi writes: 'Francis Bacon transposes movement into the very form of the body. Movement is a form that all bodies possess. The bodies are animated by hatred and love, sympathy and antipathy, and seek a movement that fits their individual requirements - for example, a circular movement, which is the most perfect type of motion.'
The interesting thing about this comment is that it refers to the first Francis Bacon, the Elizabethan thinker, essayist and statesman, from whom the painter Francis Bacon claimed collateral descent. In the face of such a coincidence one is tempted to begin philosophising oneself, but I shall resist the urge to indulge in speculative musings on the correspondences that lurk beneath the surface of reality.
For the painter Francis Bacon, movement has a far more concrete meaning. Instead of dealing in abstract ideas about matter and energy, he is interested in the movement of human life, and the residual trace or mark which that movement may leave when it comes to an end.
He describes this interest as follows:
'I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory trace of past events, as the snail leaves its slime. I think the whole process of this sort of elliptical form is dependant on the execution of detail and how shapes are remade or put slightly out of focus to bring in their memory traces.'
2/ Jackson Pollock
On the floor I am more at ease, I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around in it, work from the four sides and be literally `in' the painting.
-- Jackson Pollock, 1947.
Pollock, Jackson (1912-56). American painter, the commanding figure of the Abstract Expressionist movement.
He began to study painting in 1929 at the Art Students' League, New York, under the Regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton. During the 1930s he worked in the manner of the Regionalists, being influenced also by the Mexican muralist painters (Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros) and by certain aspects of Surrealism. From 1938 to 1942 he worked for the Federal Art Project. By the mid 1940s he was painting in a completely abstract manner, and the `drip and splash' style for which he is best known emerged with some abruptness in 1947. Instead of using the traditional easel he affixed his canvas to the floor or the wall and poured and dripped his paint from a can; instead of using brushes he manipulated it with `sticks, trowels or knives' (to use his own words), sometimes obtaining a heavy impasto by an admixture of `sand, broken glass or other foreign matter'. This manner of Action painting had in common with Surrealist theories of automatism that it was supposed by artists and critics alike to result in a direct expression or revelation of the unconscious moods of the artist.
Pollock's name is also associated with the introduction of the All-over style of painting which avoids any points of emphasis or identifiable parts within the whole canvas and therefore abandons the traditional idea of composition in terms of relations among parts. The design of his painting had no relation to the shape or size of the canvas -- indeed in the finished work the canvas was sometimes docked or trimmed to suit the image. All these characteristics were important for the new American painting which matured in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
3/ Frank Auerbach B i o g r a p h y
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Frank Auerbach Rarities Now In Stock
1931 Born in Berlin
1948-52 Studied at St Martin's School of Art, London
1952-55 Studied at the Royal College of Art, London
2003 Lives and works in London
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
1956 Beaux-Arts Gallery, London
1965 Marlborough Fine Art, London
1978 Hayward Gallery, London (Arts Council of Great Britain)
1982 Marlborough Gallery, New York
1986 British Pavilion XLII Venice Biennale (Awarded the Golden Lion)
1986-87 Kunstverein in Hamburg; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Centro de Arte Reina, Sofia, Madrid
1989 Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, Amsterdam
1991 Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
1995 National Gallery, London
1997 Marlborough Fine Art, London
1998 Marlborough Gallery, New York
2001 Retrospective Exhibition, Royal Academy, London
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS:
Arts Council of Great Britain; British Museum; Los Angeles County Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, London; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Tate Britain; Yale Center for British Art
Frank Auerbach Painter & Printmaker
Detailed Biography
At the age of 8, in 1939, his Jewish parents sent him to school in Kent to avoid the political situation in Germany (on the eve of the 2nd World War and after 6 years of the Nazi Party being in power). That was the last contact he had with them.
After the 2nd World War he acted in small parts in several London theatres and in 1947 attended painting classes at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute . The following year he attended the Borough Polytechnic Institute before entering St. Martin’s School of Art, where he met Leon Kossoff and Phil Holmes.
In 1952 Auerbach studied at the Royal College of Art with Joe Tilson, Bridget Riley and Leon Kossoff after being judged unfit for military service. In 1954 he acquired Gustav Metzger’s former studio in Camden, London. He continued participating in David Bomberg’s drawing classes at the Borough throughout 1954. The following year he left the Royal College with a silver medal and first-class honors
1956 saw his first one-man show at the Beaux Arts Gallery. Around this time he began painting a series of building sites and Julia Yardley Mills (JYM) began to model for portraits. In 1958 he married Julia Wolstenholme. Son Jacob was born.
At the beginning of the 60s, Auerbach began studies of great works of art, which included Rembrandt’s Deposition and Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia. In 1966, he began a series focused on Camden Palace Theatre.
1978 saw his first retrospective by the Arts Council of Great Britain for Hayward Gallery, London. In 1981 his work was shown at the New Spirit in Painting show at the Royal Academy, London. Five years later, he was chosen for the British Pavilion at the XLII Venice Biennale. Won the Golden Lion Prize with Sigmar Polke.
In 1995, the National Gallery exhibition : Working After the Masters focused on Auerbach's studies of works in the gallery over a 30-year period. 2000 and the Artists of CORNER Udstillingen invited Auerbach to be a guest artist at their annual exhibition in Copenhagen.
2000 and the newly-opened Tate Modern displayed a room of his pictures. The following year a film by Hannah Rothschild and Jake Auerbach documented the locations and sitters in Auerbach’s work.
Also in 2001, and to mark the artist's 71st year, theRoyal Academy had a retrospective exhibition of his work.
SELECTED BOOKS & CATALOGUES
Frank Auerbach, Robert Hughes, Thames and Hudson, 1990
Frank Auerbach Paintings and Drawings 1954-2001, Catherine Lampert, Norman Rosenthal & Isabel Carlisle, Royal Academy Publications 2001
4/ Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin (born 3 July 1963) is an English artist of Turkish Cypriot origin, one of the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs), also known as Britartists. She has succeeded in equalling, if not surpassing, Damien Hirst among the YBAs in terms of notoriety among the general public. A drunken outburst on a Channel 4 TV discussion, and My Bed — an installation in the 1999 Turner Prize exhibition, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed with used condoms and blood-stained underwear — both caused a media furore. Emin's art takes many different forms of expression including painting, drawing, video and installation, to photography, needlework and sculpture. There has been an ongoing dispute with previous boyfriend, artist Billy Childish, particularly over the Stuckism movement.
Early life
Tracey Emin was born in Croydon, but brought up in Margate. She has a twin brother, Paul. Emin's father, an ethnic Turkish Cypriot, was married to a woman other than her mother and divided his time between his two families. He owned the Hotel International in Margate, and, when the business failed, Emin's family suffered a severe decline in their standard of living, circumstances which have featured in a number of works. Around the age of 13 she was raped or "broken in" as she describes the then-current term.
She studied fashion at Medway College of Design (1980–1982), where she met expelled student Billy Childish and was associated with The Medway Poets. Emin and Childish were a couple till 1986, Emin selling his poetry books for his small press Hangman books. In 1984 she studied printing at Maidstone Art College, which she has described as one of the best experiences of her life. In 1995 she was interviewed in the Minky Manky show catalogue by Carl Freedman, who asked her, "Which person do you think has had the greatest influence on your life?" She replied,
“ Uhmm... It's not a person really. It was more a time, going to Maidstone College of Art, hanging around with Billy Childish, living by the River Medway. ”
In 1987 she moved to London to study at the Royal College of Art, where she obtained an MA in painting, though she has described this time as a very negative experience. Her influences included Edvard Munch and Egon Schiele; later she destroyed all her paintings from this early period, and for a time studied philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London.
[edit] Britartist
In 1993 Emin opened a shop called simply The Shop in Bethnal Green with fellow artist Sarah Lucas. This sold works by the two of them, including T-shirts and ash trays with Damien Hirst's picture stuck to the bottom. Lucas paid Emin a wage to mind the shop and Emin also made extra money by agreeing to write letters to people, one being Jay Jopling, who became her dealer. During this period Emin was also working with the gallerist Joshua Compston.
In 1994 she had her first solo show at the White Cube gallery, the leading contemporary art gallery in London. It was called My Major Retrospective, and was what is now seen as typically autobiographical in her work, consisting of personal photographs, and photos of her (destroyed) early paintings, as well as items which most artists would not consider showing in public, such as a packet of cigarettes her uncle was holding when he was decapitated in a car crash. This willingness to show details of what would generally be thought of as her private life has become one of Emin's trademarks.
In the mid-1990s she had a relationship with Carl Freedman, who had been an early friend of, and collaborator with, Damien Hirst and who had co-curated seminal Britart shows, such as Modern Medicine and Gambler. In 1994 they toured the US together, driving in a Cadillac from San Francisco to New York, and making stops en route where she gave readings from her autobiographical book Exploration of the Soul to finance the trip. En route they "belly surfed" in San Diego and watched bears in Big Sur.
The couple also spent time by the sea in Whitstable together, using the beach hut, which she uprooted and turned into art in 1999 with the title The Last Thing I Said to You is Don't Leave Me Here, and which was destroyed (along with her "tent") in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire.
Everyone I have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 by Tracey Emin (1995). An interior view of the work.In 1995 Freedman curated the show Minky Manky at the South London Gallery. Emin has said,
“ At that time Sarah (Lucas) was quite famous, but I wasn’t at all. Carl said to me that I should make some big work as he thought the small-scale stuff I was doing at the time wouldn’t stand up well. I was furious. Making that work was my way at getting back at him.[1] ”
The result was Emin's famous "tent" Everyone I have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, which was first exhibited in the show. It was a blue tent, appliquéd with the names of everyone she has slept with. These included sexual partners, plus relatives she slept with as a child, her twin brother, and her two aborted children. Although often talked about as a shameless exhibition of her sexual conquests, it was rather a piece about intimacy in a more general sense, although the title invites misinterpretation. The needlework which is integral to this work was used by Emin in a number of her other pieces. This piece was later bought by Charles Saatchi and included in the successful 1997 Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy of London; it then toured to Berlin and New York.
Freedman's interview with her appears in the catalogue. Other featured artists were Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Damien Hirst, Mat Collishaw, Gilbert & George, Critical Décor and Stephen Pippin. Emin now describes Freedman as "one of my best friends". He is now her tenant, living in a weaver's cottage at the back of her 450-year-old Huguenot house in Spitalfields, East London.
[edit] Fame
Although these early events caused Emin to be well known in art circles, she was largely unknown by the public until she appeared on a Channel 4 television programme in 1997. It was an ostensibly serious debate show about that year's Turner Prize, and Emin appeared completely drunk (she has said this was caused by painkillers she was taking for a broken finger), swearing, insulting the other panel members and saying that she wanted to go home to her mum (she then left).
Two years later, in 1999, Emin was shortlisted for the Turner Prize herself and exhibited My Bed [1] at the Tate Gallery. There was considerable media furore about this, particularly as the sheets of the bed were stained yellow, and the floor surrounding it had items from her room such as condoms, a pair of knickers with period stains and other detritus including a pair of slippers. The bed was presented as it had been when she had stayed in it for several days feeling suicidal because of relationship difficulties.
One lady came to the exhibition with cleaning materials and had to be stopped from tidying it up. Two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, jumped onto the bed with bare torsos in order to "improve" the work, which they thought had not gone far enough.
[edit] Work
[edit] Monoprints
Emin's monoprints are a well documented part of her creative output and represent a diaristic aspect and frequently depict events from the past for example, Poor Love (1999) which relates to a traumatic experience after an abortion or other personal events as seen in Fuck You Eddy (1995) and Sad Shower in New York (1995) which are both part of the Tate's collection of Emin's art. Often they incorporate text as well as image, although some bear only text and others only image. The text appears as the artist's stream of consciousness voice. Some critics have compared Emin's text-only monoprints to ransom notes. The rapid, one-off technique involved in making monoprints is perfectly suited to (apparently) immediate expression, as is Emin's scratchy and informal drawing style. Rarely displayed alone in exhibitions, the monoprints are particularly effective as collective fragments of intense emotional confrontation. Emin has made several works documenting painful moments of sadness and loneliness experienced when travelling to foreign cities for various exhibitions. Emin herself has said,
“ Being an artist isn't just about making nice things, or people patting you on the back; it's some kind of communication, a message.[2] ”
[edit] Painting
There is a complex history of Emin's relationship with painting. In the late 1980s, Emin completed an MA in painting at the Royal College of Art where the expressionist works of Munch and Schiele informed her early paintings.' Emin subsequently stopped painting and destroyed all the artworks she had ever done after suffering from what she has described as her 'emotional suicide', following an abortion. Photos of Emin's destroyed early paintings were part of her first White Cube solo exhibition My Major Retrospective in 1994.
In 1996, Emin locked herself in a gallery room for fourteen whole days with nothing but art materials, paint and empty canvases in an "attempt to reconcile herself with paintings"[3] Viewed through a series of wide-angle lenses embedded in the walls, Emin could be watched, stark naked, shaking off her painting demons. Starting by making images like the artists she really admired (i.e. Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch, Yves Klein), Emin’s two-week art-therapy session resulted in a massive outpouring of autobiographical images, and the discovery of a style all her own. The room was extracted in its entirety, and now exists as an installation work titled Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made (1996), was an "installation including 14 paintings, 78 drawings, 5 body prints, various painted and personal items, furniture, CDs, newspapers, magazines, kitchen and food supplies.[4]
In May 2005, London's Evening Standard newspaper highlighted Emin's return to painting in their preview of her When I Think About Sex exhibition at White Cube commenting that, "Emin has come up with something really surprising - some paintings. The four small self-portraits are her first work with brush and paint since she left the Royal College of Art in 1989. They are restrained: opaque, almost washed out gouache watercolour paint on canvas. The content, though, is of a distinctly lusty nature - the portraits focus on Emin's, shall we say, nether regions. Another series of works are a group of painstakingly drafted drawings of Emin, once more wearing nothing but her birthday suit. She said: 'For this show I wanted to show that I can really draw, and I think they are really sexy drawings.'"[5]
In November 2006, Emin showed interviewer Kirsty Wark of BBC Four some work-in-progress for her 2007 show at the Venice Biennale. These included large-scale canvases with paintings of Emin's legs and vagina. Emin's recent focus on painting may surprise some critics but this is in fact a natural progression that has developed over the past few years. Starting with the Purple Virgin (2004) watercolour series with their strong purple brush strokes depicting Emin's naked open legs, leading to Emin's paintings in 2005-6 such as Asleep Alone With Legs Open (2005), Sexy Old Lady (2005), the Reincarnation (2005) series and Masturbating (2006) amongst others, these works herald a significant new development in Emin's artistic output.
[edit] Photography, neon and sewn
Emin has produced some notable photographic works throughout her career including the striking Sometimes I Feel Beautiful (2000) and The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here I (2000) and The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here II (2000). The later two photographs are thought to have been originally envisioned by Emin as a diptych although they are often exhibited/sold separately. They depict a naked Emin on her knees inside her famous beach hut sculpture The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here (The Hut) (1999).
Emin has also worked with neon lights. One such piece is You Forgot To Kiss My Soul (2001) which consists of those words in blue neon inside a neon heart-shape. Another neon piece is made from the words Is Anal Sex Legal (1998) to complement another Is Legal Sex Anal (1998).
Emin frequently works with fabric in the form of embroideries, tapestries and patchwork quilts with detailed needlework. Emin herself has said that she collects fabric from curtains, bed sheets and linen and has done for most of her life. Fabrics that hold some emotional significance to her, Emin keeps and collects to later use within her work. Many of her embroideries are made on hotel linens for example. Emin's use of fabric is diverse, from her grandmother's chair work "There's A Lot Of Money In Chairs" (1994) to the large appliqué blankets like "Hellter Fucking Skelter" (2001) to smaller scale works like "Always sorry" (2005) and "As Always" (2005), Emin has created a personal style that appears throughout her sewn work.
[edit] Films
Emin featured with her then boyfriend, Billy Childish, in Quiet Lives (1982) (11 mins, 16mm, written and directed by Eugene Doyen), once available with Cheated and Room for Rent in A Hangman Triple Bill, also known as The Hangman Trilogy, Hangman Films. Quiet Lives is discussed in an article on Childish's films in No Focus: punk on film (Headpress, 2006): "The implicit subtext of the insane love of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the Moors murderers, and the public nature of the difficult relationship shared by Childish and Tracey Emin makes Quiet Lives a unique, parallel-text document."
An autobiographical work is the film, CV Cunt Vernacular (1997), in which Emin narrates her story from childhood in Margate, through her student years, abortions and destruction of her early work.
Top Spot (2004) was Emin's first feature film. Taking its title from a youth centre/disco in Margate (but also a sexual reference), Top Spot, draws heavily on Emin's teenage experiences of growing up in Margate, and features six teenage girls who share their stories. It is also regarded as Emin’s poem to Margate, mixing DV footage and Super 8 film into lyrical montage. The natural beauty of the sea and the sunsets is linked with Margate’s more manmade pleasures, underscored with a selection of 1970s songs that formed the soundtrack to the artist’s own adolescence. It was shot during the summertime in Margate, London, and Egypt. It was given an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Censors owing to the instructive nature of a scene in which a teenage girl commits suicide. Emin responded by withdrawing the film from general distribution, though it has since been broadcast by the BBC. A DVD of the film was released in 2006.
[edit] Books
Strangeland (2005) was Emin's long-awaited memoir. It is divided into three sections, "Motherland", "Fatherland" and "Traceyland". It is written in the first person and conveys an unvarnished look at her life from childhood. Jeanette Winterson wrote, "Her latest writings are painfully honest, and certainly some of it should have been edited out by someone who loves her."[6] Emin's editor for Strangeland was the British novelist Nicholas Blincoe.
5/ Andy Warhol
Andrew Warhola, better known as Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 — February 22, 1987), was an American artist, avant-garde filmmaker, writer and celebrity. Warhol also worked as a publisher, music producer and actor. He had experience in commercial art, and was one of the founders of the Pop art movement in the United States in the 1950s.
[edit] Biography
[edit] Childhood and early career
Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Forrest City, Pennsylvania. His parents, Andrej (Andrew) Warhola (whose original surname was Varchola, he changed it after emigrating to the US) and Ulja (Julia) Justyna Zavacka[citation needed], were working-class immigrants of Rusyn (Ruthenian) ethnicity from Mikova, in northeast Slovakia. Despite stories circulating about Warhol's father working in coal mines, Andrej Warhola actually worked in construction in Pennsylvania, and the family lived at 55 Beelen St, in Pittsburgh. The family was Byzantine Catholic.
In third grade, Warhol came down with St. Vitus' disease, which affects the nervous system causing involuntary movements and is thought to be a complication of scarlet fever. This disease changed his appearance and, as an adult, he became somewhat of a hypochondriac, developing a fear of hospitals and medical doctors. Because he was at times bed-ridden as a child, he became an outcast among his school-mates and bonded with his mother very strongly (Guiles, 1989). When in bed he used to draw, listen to the radio and collect pictures of movie stars around his bed. Looking back later, Warhol described the period of his sickness as very important in the development of his personality and in the forming of his skill-set and preferences.
Warhol showed early artistic talent and studied commercial art at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In 1949, he moved to New York City and began a successful career in magazine illustration and advertising. He became well-known mainly for his whimsical ink drawings of shoes done in a loose, blotted style. These figured in some of his earliest showings in New York at the Bodley Gallery.
[edit] The 1960s
Campbell's Soup Can 1968It was during the 1960s that Warhol transformed himself from an advertising illustrator who made art, into one of the most famous American artists alive. In many ways, Andy Warhol and his circle helped define the decade.
It was during the 1960s that Warhol began to make paintings of famous American products such as Campbell's soup cans and Coca-Cola, as well as paintings of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Troy Donohue, and Elizabeth Taylor. He founded "The Factory", his studio, during these years, and gathered around himself a wide range of artists, writers, musicians and underground celebrities. He switched to silkscreen prints, which he produced serially, seeking not only to make art of mass-produced items but to mass produce the art itself. In declaring that he wanted to be "a machine", and in minimizing the role of his own creative insight in the production of his work, Warhol sparked a revolution in art - his work quickly became very controversial, and popular.
Warhol's work from this period revolves around American popular culture. He painted dollar bills, celebrities, brand name products, and images from newspaper clippings - many of the latter were iconic images from headline stories of the decade (e.g. photographs of mushroom clouds, and police dogs attacking civil rights protesters). His subjects were instantly recognizable, and often had a mass appeal - this aspect interested him most, and it unifies his paintings from this period. Take, for example, Warhol's comments on the appeal of Coca-Cola:
“ What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it. ”
—The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; from A to B and back again, 1975, ISBN 0-15-671720-4
This quote both expresses his affection for popular culture, and evidences an ambiguity of perspective that cuts across nearly all of the artist's statements about his own work.
New York’s Museum of Modern Art hosted a Symposium on Pop Art in December 1962, during which artists like Warhol were attacked for "capitulating" to consumerism. Critics were scandalized by Warhol's open embrace of market culture. This symposium set the tone for Warhol's reception - though throughout the decade it became more and more clear that there had been a profound change in the culture of the art world, and that Warhol was at the center of that shift.
As an advertisement illustrator in the 1950s Warhol used assistants to increase his productivity. Collaboration would remain a defining (and controversial) aspect of his working methods throughout his career - in the 1960s, however, this was particularly true. One of the most important collaborators during this period was Gerard Malanga. Malanga assisted the artist with producing silkscreens, films, sculpture, and other works at "The Factory", Warhol's aluminum foil-and-silver-paint lined studio on 47th Street (later moved to Broadway). Other members of Warhol's Factory crowd included Freddie Herko, Ondine, Ronald Tavel, Mary Woronov, and Brigid Berlin (from whom he apparently got the idea to tape record his phone conversations). During this decade, Warhol also groomed a retinue of bohemian eccentrics upon whom he bestowed the designation "Superstars", including Edie Sedgwick, Viva, and Ultra Violet. These people all participated in the Factory films, and some, like Berlin, remained friends with Warhol until his death. Important figures in the New York underground art/cinema world (e.g. writer John Giorno, film-maker Jack Smith) also appear in Warhol films of the 1960s, revealing Warhol's connections to a diverse range of artistic scenes during this period. By the end of the decade Andy Warhol was himself a celebrity, appearing frequently in newspapers and magazines alongside Factory cohorts like Sedgwick.
[edit] Shooting
Valerie Solanas, a marginal figure in the factory scene suffering from paranoia, turned up at the studio on June 3, 1968, and shot Warhol and Mario Amaya. Earlier that day Solanas had been turned away from the Factory after asking for the return of a script she had given to Warhol. The script, apparently, had been misplaced. Warhol was seriously wounded by the attack - he was declared clinically dead at the hospital, and barely survived. He suffered physical effects for the rest of his life (he had to wear a corset, for example, to support his abdomen). The shooting had a profound effect on Warhol's life and art. The Factory scene became much more tightly controlled, and for many this event brought the "Factory 60s" to an end.
Solanas was already something of a cult figure in New York before this event. She had previously founded a "group" (she was its only member) called the "Society for Cutting Up Men" (S.C.U.M.) and authored the scabrous S.C.U.M. Manifesto, a radical feminist attack on patriarchy. She appears in the Warhol film "I, A Man". Over the years, Solanas's manifesto has found something of a following. (The philosopher Avital Ronnell wrote an introduction to a new edition of the S.C.U.M. Manifesto, published by Verso Press in 2004.) Solanas was arrested the day after the assault (coincidentally, the day that Robert F. Kennedy was shot). By way of explanation, she said that "He had too much control over my life."
[edit] The 1970s
Compared to the success and scandal of Warhol's work in the 1960s, the 1970s would prove a much quieter decade. This period, however, saw Warhol becoming more entrepreneurial. According to Bob Colacello, Warhol devoted much of his time to rounding up new, rich patrons for portrait commissions — including Mick Jagger, Liza Minnelli, John Lennon, Diana Ross, Brigitte Bardot, and Michael Jackson. He also founded, with Gerard Malanga, "Interview" magazine and published "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol" (1975). In this book he presents his ideas on the nature of art: "Making money is art, and working is art and good business is the best art."
Warhol used to socialize at Serendipity 3 and, later in the 70s, Studio 54, nightspots in New York City. He was generally regarded as quiet, shy, and as a meticulous observer. Art critic Robert Hughes called him "the white mole of Union Square".[citation needed]
[edit] The 1980s
Warhol had a re-emergence of critical and financial success in the 1980s, partially due to his affiliation and friendships with a number of prolific younger artists, who were dominating the "bull market" of '80s New York art: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel, David Salle and the so-called Neo-Expressionists, as well as Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and members of the Transavantguardia movement, which had become influential. In 1985, Andy Warhol was selected as one of the Absolut Vodka artists, and several of his paintings incorporating the Absolut Vodka bottle in it were used in advertisements, bringing his art to the attention of a broader audience.
[edit] Sexuality
Warhol was effeminate and openly gay, rare for artists of his stature at the time. Many people think of Warhol as "asexual" and merely a "voyeur", but these notions have been debunked by biographers (such as Victor Bockris), scholars (including Richard Meyer), by Warhol's own writing, and by the overtly campy and homoerotic nature of his work itself. Throughout his career, Warhol produced erotic photography and drawings of male nudes. Many of his most famous works (portraits of Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, and films like "My Hustler", "Blow Job", and "Lonesome Cowboys") draw from gay underground culture and/or openly explore the complexity of sexuality and desire. Many of his films in fact premiered in gay porn theaters. The first works that he submitted to a gallery in the pursuit of a career as an artist were, in fact, homoerotic drawings of male nudes. They were rejected for being too openly gay.
In Warhol's book about his life and career in the 1960s, "Popism," the artist recalls a conversation he had with the film maker Emile De Antonio about the difficulty he had being accepted socially by the then more famous (but closeted) artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. De Antonio explained that Warhol was "too swish and that upsets them." In response to this, Warhol writes, "There was nothing I could say to that. It was all too true. So I decided I just wasn't going to care, because those were all the things that I didn't want to change anyway, that I didn't think I "should" want to change ... Other people could change their attitudes but not me"[1].
[edit] Religious beliefs
Warhol regularly volunteered at homeless shelters in New York, particularly during the busier times of the year, and described himself as a religious person. Many of his later works contain almost hidden religious themes or subjects, and a body of religious-themed works was found posthumously in his estate. Warhol also regularly attended Mass during his life, and the pastor of his church, Saint Vincent's, reports that he visited the church almost daily.
Warhol's brother has described the artist as "really religious, but he didn't want people to know about that because [it was] private". Despite the private nature of his faith, in Warhol's eulogy John Richardson depicted it as devout: "To my certain knowledge, he was responsible for at least one conversion. He took considerable pride in financing his nephew's studies for the priesthood".
[edit] Death
At the relatively young age of 58, Warhol died in New York City at 6:32 a.m. on 22 February 1987. According to news reports, he had been making good recovery from a routine gallbladder surgery at New York Hospital before dying in his sleep from a sudden heart attack. The hospital staff had failed to monitor his condition and overloaded him with fluids after his operation, prompting Warhol's lawyers to sue the hospital for negligence. Prior to his diagnosis and operation, Warhol delayed having his recurring gallbladder problems checked, as he was afraid to enter hospitals and see doctors.
Warhol is interred at St. John the Baptist Byzantine Catholic Cemetery in Castle Shannon, a south suburb of Pittsburgh. Yoko Ono was among the speakers at his memorial service at St. Patrick's Cathedral.
Warhol had so many possessions it took Sotheby's nine days to auction his estate after his death for a total gross amount of over US $20 million. His total estate was worth considerably more, in no small part due to shrewd investments over the years.
[edit] Works
[edit] Paintings
Andy Warhol's iconic Marilyn MonroeBy the beginning of the 1960s, Warhol was a very successful commercial illustrator. His detailed and elegant drawings for I. Miller shoes were particularly popular. These illustrations consisted mainly of "blotted ink" drawings (monoprints) - a technique which he applied in much of his early art. Although many artists of this period worked in commercial art, most did so discreetly. Warhol was so successful, however, that his profile as an illustrator seemed to undermine his efforts to be taken seriously as an artist.
In the early 1960s Warhol tried to exhibit some of his drawings using these techniques in a gallery, only to be turned down. He began to rethink the relationship between his commercial work and his efforts to be taken seriously as an artist. Instead of treating these things as opposites, he merged them and began to take commercial and popular culture more explictly as his topic.
At the time what we now know as Pop Art was an experimental form that was being adopted independently by several artists (e.g. Roy Lichtenstein) who would later become synonymous with the movement. Warhol, who would become famous as the "Pope of Pop", turned to this new style where popular subjects could be part of the artist's palette. His early paintings show images taken from cartoons and advertisements, hand-painted with paint drips. Those drips emulated the style of successful abstract expressionists (e.g. Robert Rauschenberg). Eventually, he pared his image vocabulary down to the icon itself - to brand names, celebrities, dollar signs - and removed all traces of the artist's "hand" in the production of his paintings.
To him, part of defining a niche was defining his subject matter. Cartoons were already being used by the artist Roy Lichtenstein, typography by Jasper Johns, and so on; Warhol wanted a distinguishing subject. His friends suggested he should paint the things he loved the most. In his signature way of taking things literally, for his first major exhibition he painted his famous cans of Campbell's Soup, which he had for lunch most of his life. Warhol loved money, so he later painted money. He loved celebrities, so he painted them as well.
From these beginnings he developed his later style and subjects. Instead of working on a signature subject matter, as he started out to do, he worked more and more on a signature style, slowly eliminating the hand-made from the artistic process. Warhol frequently employed silk-screening; his later drawings were traced from slide projections. In other words, Warhol went from being a painter to being a designer of paintings. At the height of his fame as a painter, Warhol had several assistants who produced his silk-screen multiples, in different versions and variations following his directions.
Warhol produced both 'comic' (e.g., soup cans) and 'serious' (e.g., electric chairs) works. Warhol used the same techniques - silkscreens, reproduced serially, and often painted with bright colors- whether he painted celebrities, everyday objects, or images of suicide, car crashes, and disasters (as part of a 1962-1963 series called "Death and Disaster"). The "Death and Disaster" paintings (e.g. "Red Car Crash", "Purple Jumping Man", "Orange Disaster") transform personal tragedies into public spectacles, and signal the prominence of images of disaster in the media, indicating how we become numbed to such images through mass reproduction.
The unifying element in Warhol's work is his deadpan Keatonesque style - artistically and personally affectless. This was mirrored by Warhol's own demeanor, as he often played "dumb" to the media, and refused to explain his work. The artist was famous for having said, in fact, that all you need to know about him and his works is already there, "on the surface." Before this blankness, the lack of signifiers of sincerity, the viewer is tempted to read beyond the surface to try and discover what the 'real Andy' thinks. Is Andy horrifed by death or does he think it is funny? Are his soup can paintings a cynical joke about the cheapness of mass culture, or are they homages to the simple comforts of home? His refusal to speak to how his work ought to be read made it all the more interesting - he left its interpretation entirely up to his audience.
One might say that Warhol's work as a Pop Artist was always somewhat conceptual. His series of do it yourself paintings and Rorschach blots are intended as pop comments on art and what art could be. His cow wallpaper (literally, wallpaper with a cow motif) and his oxidation paintings (canvases prepared with copper paint that show oxidated urine stains) are also noteworthy in this context. Equally noteworthy is the way these works -- and their means of production -- mirrored the mores and atmosphere at Andy's New York "Factory." Biographer Bob Colacello provides some details on Andy's "piss paintings":
“ Victor... was Andy's ghost pisser on the Oxidations. He would come to the Factory to urinate on canvases that had already been primed with copper-based paint by Andy or Ronnie Cutrone, who was a second ghost pisser, much appreciated by Andy, who said that the vitamin B that Ronnie took made a prettier color when the acid in the urine turned the copper green. Did Andy ever use his own urine? My diary shows that when he first began the series, in December 1977, he did, and there were many others: boys who'd come to lunch and drink too much wine, and find it funny or even flattering to be asked to help Andy 'paint.' Andy always had a little extra bounce in his walk as he led them to his studio... ”
—Holy Terror - Andy Warhol Close Up, New York, Harper/Collins, 1990, p. 343
One could say that these "piss paintings" could be seen as a parody of Abstract Expressionism and Jackson Pollock (who was famous for pouring paint all over his canvases, often directly from the can). One could also find in them a reflection of some subsets of the gay underworld of New York of that era, including fascination with and sexual focus on urine and excretory matter in general. Demi-monde New York nightclubs of that period include "The Toilet," a spot featuring public urination acts (to include being doused by others, or drinking their urine) and others of a similar nature, such as "The Anvil." Andy visited these spots, although he was not recorded as a subject of undinistic practices, but rather, as so often, as an observer. In any case, he was wholly familiar with the undinistic, urolognic, and other "watersports" practices of the day.
[edit] Films
Warhol worked across a wide range of media — painting, photography, drawing, and sculpture. In addition, he was a highly prolific filmmaker. Between 1963 and 1968, he made more than sixty films. One of his most famous films, Sleep (1963), shows a man (John Giorno, with whom Warhol had a relationship) sleeping for six hours. The 41-minute film Blow Job (1963) is one continuous shot of the face of Tom Baker, receiving oral sex from Willard Maas. Another, Empire (1964), consists of eight hours of footage of the Empire State Building in New York City at dusk.
Batman Dracula is a 1964 film that was produced and directed by Warhol, without the permission of DC Comics. It was screened only at his art exibits. A fan of the Batman serials, Warhol's movie was a "homage" to the series, and is considered the first appearance of a blatantly campy Batman. No prints of the film are known to exist.
Warhol's 1965 film Vinyl is an adaptation of Anthony Burgess' popular dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange. Others record improvised encounters between Factory regulars such as Brigid Berlin, Viva, Edie Sedgwick, Candy Darling, Holly Woodlawn, Ondine, Nico, and Jackie Curtis. Legendary underground artist Jack Smith appears in the film Camp.
His most popular and critically successful film was Chelsea Girls (1966). The film was highly innovative in that it consisted of two 16 mm films being projected simultaneously, with two different stories being shown in tandem. From the projection booth, the sound would be raised for one film to elucidate that "story" while it was lowered for the other. Then it would be the other film's turn to bask in the glory of sound. The multiplication of images evoked Warhol's seminal silk-screen works of the early 1960s. The influence of the film's split-screen, multi-narrative style could be felt in such modern work as Mike Figgis' Timecode and, however indirectly, the early seasons of 24.
Other important films include Bike Boy (1967-1968), My Hustler (1965) and Lonesome Cowboys (1968), a raunchy pseudo-Western. These and other titles document gay underground and camp culture, and continue to feature prominently in scholarship about sexuality and art - see, for example, Mathew Tinkom's Working Like a Homosexual (Duke University Press, 2002) or Juan Suarez's Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (Indiana University Press, 1996). Blue Movie, a film in which Warhol superstar Viva makes love and fools around in bed with a man for 33 minutes of the film's playing-time, was Warhol's last film as director. The film was at the time scandalous for its frank approach to a sexual encounter. For many years Viva refused to allow it to be screened. It was publicly screened in New York in 2005 for the first time in over thirty years.
After his June 3, 1968 shooting, a reclusive Warhol relinquished his personal involvement in filmmaking. His acolyte and assistant director, Paul Morrissey, took over the film-making chores for the Factory collective, steering Warhol-branded cinema towards more mainstream, narrative-based, B-movie exploitation fare with Flesh, Trash, and Heat. All of these films, including the later Andy Warhol's Dracula and Andy Warhol's Frankenstein, were far more mainstream than anything Warhol as a director had attempted. These latter "Warhol" films starred Joe Dallesandro, who was more of a Morrissey star than a true Warhol superstar.
In order to facilitate the success of these Warhol-branded, Morrissey-directed movies in the marketplace, all of Warhol's earlier avant-garde films were removed from distribution and exhibition by 1972.
Another film, Bad, made significant impact as a "Warhol" film yet was directed by Jed Johnson. Bad starred the infamous Carroll Baker and a young Perry King.
The first volume of a catalogue raisonné for the Factory film archive, edited by Callie Angell, was published in the spring of 2006.
6/ PAUL KENTON
A pivotal moment in the young Paul Kenton's life was a move from his birth place in Derby to the West Country when he was eight years old. As a teenager he learnt to surf on the wild beaches of North Devon and as a keen surfer he has travelled the world realising inspiration for another passion; his art. Now settled in Ilfracombe with his Brazilian partner, Alexandra and two young daughters, Kenton still surfs when he's not in the studio or enjoying the hectic pandemonium of family life.
Paul showed an interest in painting from an early age; while others wanted to be doctors or pilots he clearly remembers telling a friend that he wanted to be an artist. This was cemented when, at the tender age of twelve, he won a national colouring competition - winning a prized set of paints. He continued to draw and paint all through school becoming proficient in watercolour but was disappointed not to be awarded a place at Art College due to his English grades. His disillusionment drove him in another direction and he studied the rigid disciplines of industry and was awarded a Bachelor in Engineering from Stafford University. After University he worked as a draughtsman for several years while still painting in his spare time.
In 1995, supported by a grant from the Prices Youth Business Trust, he took the plunge and started to paint full-time and began exhibiting. Working in acrylic and oils he took inspiration from his world wide travels; the cityscapes, cafes, harbours, bridges and seascapes. Kenton's style has evolved over the past ten years into a free-flowing fusion of various media, capturing the essence of the location rather than "the fiddly details of what something looks like" creating an atmosphere with free shapes, dripped lines and colour.
The younger 'Monet' has always been a hero of mine ever since I discovered art as a teenager. I love the way his paintings evoke a mood (in the same way a short film clip does) rather than simply being a physical representation of a scene. In the same way I see my paintings as a short film clip rather than a photographic still.
As I am a keen surfer I love the sea. The ocean has many moods; the way in which water and light interacts at the end of the day fascinates me. The recurring themes of reflection and movement frequently appear in my new work. Equally I love capturing scenes late in the day and into the early evening due to the last drops of warming light filling every available surface. My Cityscapes reflect the many moods of manmade landscapes; I find it exhilarating to express furious movement, artificial lights and the vibrancy of a busy City centre at night as well as the subtler moods of a misty dawn at the same venue.
I use my photographs and rough sketches to rekindle emotions and feelings of a particular scene; sometimes I even scribble odd words or phrases down to help this process. I like to paint my canvases flat and have them a couple of feet from the floor so I don't have to bend over too far. I feel quite energized by the blank canvas; it's a mixture of excitement and anticipation - similar to the feeling you get when you 'take off' on a blank canvas of a wave.
I don't sketch anything out; instead I simply dive in feet first with huge brushes dipped into large pots of paint and drip on an outline before throwing the paint on. I love the freedom and am so pleased with the effects of this technique. I build up each layer with broad brushstrokes and drip colour to create form until I can sense the atmosphere I want. To keep the piece fresh I try and stop before it gets too fussy. I value the opinion and feedback from my partner Alex as we have often been to the places together and our moods and views are often represented in the pieces.
My day starts early when my youngest wakes us up, usually around six o'clock; I need a cup of tea before anything else. I have an early swim two or three mornings a week clocking up a couple of miles in each session, so I either nip off to the pool or help with the girls' morning routine. After breakfast I like to do the school run to Woolacombe and then I usually take the dog for a walk on the beach, if there are waves I like to have a surf before the crowds arrive. I love the freshness of mornings, this is when I plan my day and start to think about the piece I'm working on or develop some fresh ideas. I have a small studio in what used to be a railway building, where I can escape and really concentrate on my latest piece.
I paint most days and try to discipline myself to regular hours but it doesn't always work out that way. The studio does have a music system but it doesn't seem to affect my paintings whether I listen to music, the news or a play on radio four; sometimes silence is nice. I try to finish on time so I can spend time with the girls as we always try to have a family dinner together. I'm not a late night person really but sometimes we watch a movie or have friends over in the evenings.
