Lingering Dream

“The presence of love brings with it the feeling of satisfaction : it’s absence is accompanied by excitement.” The Analytic Experience by Neville Symington

Held Gaze

Why limit yourself when you can have curves AND straight lines?

“The English don’t like originality very much in art.” Paule Vézelay 

This week I’ve discovered a new abstract artist. It’s always satisfying to discover a painter whom you hadn’t previously known about and when this happens I become just a little bit obsessed!

Let me introduce you…her name is Paule Vézelay.

Some would credit her as the first British painter in 1929 to paint in the abstract style, but if this is the case why isn’t she better known? Why can’t I find more information about her?

The main body of my knowledge has come from the Germaine Greer documentary which portrays her as a private, straightforward and somewhat stubborn woman who was driven to pursue art throughout her life. Greer tries to get a feminist response to the limits imposed upon her in a male dominated time but Vézelay comes across as matter of fact about the cultural constraints which shaped her life and work. The changing of her name from Marjorie Watson-Williams she attributes more to the result of her Francophile tendencies than a desire to disguise her femininity, the fact that she didn’t marry more the result of happenstance than a liberation.

Paule’s art contains an abundance of constrained movement and space, reminiscent of music and dance. I find her thoughts on abstraction and her artistic influences fascinating, as is her insistence that art should be joyful.  I love it when Paule talks about the creative muse, good and bad work. She recognises that art it is a process which needs to be worked through.  There is a startling moment in the film when Germaine asks Paule how she values her work and the answer she gives is that she makes an informed guess. Despite the guess-work she is adamant that the price shouldn’t be reduced unless the artist is very hungry!

I can’t help but warm to this pragmatic, dryly droll and determined woman with her joyful work.

At the Edge of Vision

In Flowered Frocks They Shake

“In everyone there sleeps a sense of life lived according to love.” Philip Larkin

My attempt to counterbalance Larkin’s maudlin view of love with a mature portrayal of the force of love throughout the life-cycle. The bottom third of the painting conveys the jumbled intensity of young infatuations before layering up to a more stable set of feelings.  At the very top we finally reach a solid and exulted tranquil healing.

Sweeping Up the Heart

Albers Again or What Colour Does

 

 

“In science one plus one is always two, in art it can be three, or more.”

Formulation : Articulation is a lavishly big book published by Thames and Hudson in 2006 and is really worth savouring.  T.G. Rosenthal in the preface goes as far as to describe it as one of the great monuments of twentieth – century abstraction. It is the summation of Josef Albers’ life works, a body of work which included over 1000 of his famous square paintings. When asked about the technical method he had used for the Homage to the Square paintings he retold how his father had taught him to paint doors starting in the middle to avoid getting his cuffs dirty and be able to catch the drips! Here we can foresee the methodical, practical and craftsman-like nature of his practice and the connection to the Bauhaus ideals.

This extract taken from The Principles of the Bauhaus Manifesto shows the importance placed on training and systematic experimentation which illuminates the approach Albers’ takes in his exploration of colour:

“Art itself cannot be taught, but craft certainly can be. Architects, painters and sculptors are craftsmen in the original and true sense of the word.”

What Albers gives us is here is colour galore to compare and contrast, concordant and discordant, action, reaction and interaction. This captivating book provides a great deal of exercise for our eyes!

Swirl and Ache

When you run out of paint you just have to find other ways! The necessity of art.

Over, Again

Kefi And the Interaction of Colour

Which among the pinks is the pinkest pink? 

I’m re-reading Interaction of Colour by Josef Albers, a fascinating and instructive way of going deeper into my preoccupation with colour.

Below are some of the important points that he makes in this book:

* Our visual memory is poor when we try to remember distinct colours

* Vocabulary for colour is inadequate with only around 30 colour names

* Colour is the most relative medium in art with one colour evoking many readings

* Developing our sensitivity for colour will make us more sensitive period

* Developing an eye for colour involves seeing how one colour effects another and how form and placement effect perception

* Few people are able to distinguish higher and lower light intensity between different hues

* Colour proximity leads to optical effects and mixing such as the Bezold Effect

* Boundaries between colours can be made practically invisible by the choice of colour

* Everyone has preferences for certain colours and combinations as well as prejudices against others

His leaf studies, the playing around with tints and shades, modulations and shapes, are great to engage with at this time of the year.